Miles Cameron - The Dread Wyrm

These were surface thoughts, because the caution her outriders were showing was infectious, and because she had enough experience of the Wild to know that something was wrong.

She cantered up behind a pair of her men, Spiro and Stavros, both watching the woods across a glade to the south. Both had their bows in their hands.

Sauce reined in. “Stavros, back to the wagons, tell Mag we have something-not an alarm, but time to be careful. Then up the column, find the captain and get his arse out here. With my compliments.”

The man snapped a crisp salute, turned his horse on its hindquarters and raced away.

Spiro frowned. “Could be a deer,” he admitted.

Sauce nodded. She was still on her riding horse and sorry for it. “No self-respecting deer would be this close to a moving column,” she said.

She felt foolish, having ridden out of the column without a heavy lance or her fighting helmet. She loosened her sword in its sheath.

Something moved across the clearing.

And the mist was rising. The sun was just on the point of going down to the west-they were late on the road.

About another hour of light.

“We’re too exposed here,” she said calmly. “Back away.”

Spiro was delighted to concur, and they backed their horses among the trees-from copse to copse, one turning and then the other, covering each other.

Her opinion of Spiro went up and up. She’d barely met him, but he was solid and dependable and his head was everywhere. He was clearly shit-scared, and equally clearly good at dealing with it.

She saw movement to the west, and then a flash of reassuring scarlet. At the same time she saw her next pair of outriders waving, and she and Spiro bore west and north through a tangled thicket and emerged into another glade. Count Zac was there with four of his men.

She was so glad to see him that she felt a moment’s disorientation, and then she realized how much terror she’d felt-

“Ware!” she shouted. Its approach had been gradual, but now she knew the feeling. She’d felt it at Lissen Carak. Some of the creatures of the Wild exuded terror.

Spiro looked over his shoulder-raised his bow-

Sauce dragged her sword clear and cut-

The thing leapt. Sauce smelled the burned soap smell and saw the bright red crest. Her blow was parried with the bronze haft of a heavy stone axe-a magnificent weapon of polished lapis that came back at her like a nightmare.

The daemon sprouted a feathered shaft. She got her sword on the haft and let the weight of the blow slide off her like water off a roof as her riding horse panicked between her legs-and bolted.

The daemon-twelve feet of muscled armour and blood-red webbed crest and gills-slammed his lapis axe into Spiro, killing him instantly, crushing his ribs into his heart. Then it rotated its hips, pointed the elegant bronze staff of his axe and a beam of coherent light blew Count Zac out of his saddle. The little man landed like a sack of wheat.

Sauce was wrestling with her reins. When her palfrey stopped and reared, Sauce rolled over the horse’s rump-in armour-and landed on her feet. She turned.

The adversarius was forty feet away, twice her height, and glowed with arcane power.

Sauce had a fortune in wards on her harness-one from Mag and one from the Red Knight himself.

His blue-white fire struck her in the chest.

And dispersed.

“Fuck me,” Sauce said, and charged.

The daemon shaman hesitated, obviously disconcerted by her attack and the failure of his sorcery. It gathered power-Sauce saw that much.

A gob of white fire travelled across the shaded glade like a ball thrown by a grown man. It struck the daemon low, on the hip, and the daemon’s belt of what appeared to be emeralds burst into fire.

The thing stumbled, looked wildly around, and another ball of white fire struck it in the torso just as Sauce’s sword cut at the thing’s outthrust, scaled leg. Blood and fire sprayed in every direction, the axe flashed at Sauce and she slipped her lead foot and made a two-handed cover. The axe slammed into her blade and snapped it, and the point of her own sword cut into her left hand right through a heavy gauntlet.

But she was otherwise uninjured, and when a third gout of fire struck the daemon, it shuddered and said one word, and was-

– gone.

Count Zac was not badly hurt. Spiro, on the other hand, was messily dead. The captain’s post-mortem that night was highly complimentary to Sauce. He ended by saying, “Let’s try not to lose any more.” He shook his head and looked at Mag.

“I hit the damned thing three times,” Mag said. “It had a layered protection and some serious skills.”

The captain had a cup of watered wine in his fist and he was sitting in a camp chair with most of his officers. Zac was still in Father Arnaud’s hands.

“What was it doing out there, alone?” the captain asked. He looked around. “We’re still in the circle.”

Tom, who was grumpy because he’d missed a fight and grumpier because everyone was praising Sauce, spat. “Wild’s got to have young fools as much as folk,” he said.

“You’d know,” Sauce said.

The captain laughed. “I thought you two were sick, or something. I suspect that we are watched. My sense of the arcane in the air is that our daemon came the way he went. That’s why it was so clever of Sauce to understand.” He looked at Mag.

Mag nodded. “That’s consistent with what I felt-pulses of potentia. If it was powerful enough, it came-and then went.”

“The outriders surprised it,” Sauce said. “It didn’t expect resistance so far out from the column.”

Ser George rolled his eyes. “Once again, the omnipotent captain reads the enemy perfectly.”

Ser Danved laughed and pounded his saddle. “He does posture on and on…” He looked around.

Ser Francis Atcourt slapped him on the back. “Don’t worry, he loves being told when he’s posturing,” he said.

Instead of rising to the quip, Ser Gabriel smiled. “In fact, Master Smythe warned me pretty carefully. I cannot claim this one, and thus I’ll try not to be insufferably glad that a powerful mage-warrior couldn’t even get a view of our column.” He was silent a moment. “We’ll bury Spiro in the morning, and then, I’m afraid, we’ll march the whole company over his grave.”

Ser Bescanon had fought the Wild most of his youth, but he was shocked. “That’s desecration!” he said.

The captain shrugged. “Less a desecration than having something dig his corpse up and eat it,” he said. “We’re in the Wild. Let’s keep that in mind.”

“I miss Morea already,” Ser Michael said. “Everyone remember how we said fighting in Morea was dull? We were fools.”

The next morning arrived earlier than anyone wanted. And Sauce began to see that Ser Bescanon might have talents in Bad Tom’s direction after all. He had the entire quarter guard out and moving through camp, waking everyone. The captain’s trumpeter sounded the call every minute for ten minutes, and the woods rang with his trumpet. It was freezing cold; wooden buckets had a rime of frost, and the horse lines were horse-huddles.

It was not their first day on the road, but it was the earliest start with all the new recruits. Tents were slow coming down. Ser Gavin, temporarily in charge of his brother’s household, had trouble finding enough spare bodies to get his brother’s great pavilion packed, and Mag had to shriek like a hen wife to get her wagons packed. The sun climbed in the sky, and Count Zac emerged from Father Arnaud’s tent pale and shaken.

Sauce threw her arms around him. “I thought you were fucking dead ,” she said.

“Me, too,” Zac admitted. “I owe Kostas the shaman. Big time.”