Miles Cameron - The Dread Wyrm

“You’re coming, then?” asked the captain.

She looked down. “Children need me,” she said. “The priest says… he says-” She put her head down.

Father Arnaud looked hurt.

“War horses,” the captain called. “Three leagues to go and three hours of good light. Let’s move.”

Cully shook his head. He took a heavy horse-dropper out of his quiver and tucked it through his belt. He exchanged a long look with flap-eared Cuddy, his best mate.

“Fuck me,” Cuddy said.

The captain rode with his head down, concentrating. He was nearly sure he’d caught something, or someone, breaking cover-a hermetical power trying to conceal itself.

Count Zac’s horsemen moved back and forth at the forest edge, winnowing the ground like a team of hayers with scythes. They now rode with arrows on their bows, and once, when a deer broke cover, they all shot before they fully identified the threat, or lack thereof. The deer was butchered on the spot-intestines removed, and the rest hung between two of the spare horses.

“That will attract anything we haven’t already attracted,” Gavin muttered. He scratched his shoulder. Then he reached back under his harness to scratch.

The captain looked up into the branches and saw the edge of a wing-a flash of a talon.

“Wyvern!” he called.

In an instant, every weapon was drawn. Eyes strained towards the sky.

The Red Knight backed his horse a few steps. “I think it wanted to be seen. And we’re still in the Wyrm’s circle. Someone’s either cocky or insane.”

Gavin frowned. “Or trying to make our friend show his hand.” His voice was muffled by the pig snout on his bascinet.

“Move!” called the captain. “Eyes on the woods. Only men on the road watch the sky. Keep moving. Let’s not be out here after dark, eh?”

“Didn’t Alcaeus get ambushed right here?” Gavin asked.

“Further east-four hours’ ride from Albinkirk,” Ser Gabriel said. “Drat.”

“Drat?”

“I have a flickering contact. There’s something out there, trying not to be seen, but using power. Only a little. It has some sort of ward.” He frowned.

Ser Gavin rose in his stirrups and looked around.

Ser Gabriel’s horse plunged forward. “Faster,” he said.

The wagon team began to canter, and the wagon jolted along the ancient stone road. The horses began to go faster.

“No bird song,” Ser Gabriel shouted. “Ware!”

Off to their right, one of Count Zac’s men drew to his cheek, his body arched in his light saddle, and loosed as he rose in his stirrups. He loosed down as if shooting at the ground, and his horse sprang away.

Something as fast as a rabbit and ten times as large appeared and struck the archer’s horse.

He loosed his second arrow, point blank, into the thing’s back from above.

His mare stumbled, and four more of the things hit her, tearing chunks off her haunches. She screamed but lacked the muscles to kick or even stand, and she slumped, and her rider somersaulted clear, drew his sabre and died valiantly, ripped to pieces by a wave of the things-ten or more, as fast as greyhounds but ten times as ferocious.

Zac’s other horsemen were already raining arrows on the pack, and it took hits.

“Hold!” called the captain. “On me,” he said to the knights. “Squires-charge.”

Behind him, Toby led the squires in a charge at the rest of the pack. The war horses were a different proposition from the riding horses, and whatever the things were, they died under the big steel-shod hooves. Bone cracked and chipped.

Shrill eerie screams ripped across the road to echo off the far trees.

Cully had all the archers together around the wagon. Francis Atcourt’s young page, Bobby, had all the archers’ horses in his fist and looked ready to cry.

The horses began to panic, and the boy lost them, the reins ripped from his hands.

“Wyvern!” Cully said.

In fact, there were two wyverns-or even three. One scooped up a horse-Count Zac’s much beloved spare pony-and with one enormous beat of its sixty-foot wingspan was gone.

The other went for the wagon. It took Cully’s horse-dropper in the neck and flinched, but a flailing fore-talon ripped a small boy in two, covering his siblings with his gore. Ricard Lantorn put a needlepoint bodkin deep into the thing’s left haunch and Cuddy’s horse-dropper, released from a range of twelve feet, went in high on the thing’s sinuous neck just below its skull.

The wagon was an organ playing a discordant wail of terror. Its team bolted down the road.

The wyvern baulked, turned on the archers.

Father Arnaud’s heavy lance struck it under its great, taloned left arm and went in almost as far as his hand and the great thing reared back, took two more arrows and failed to land a claw before Chris Foliak’s lance spitted it.

Ser Francis Atcourt’s lance was the coup de grâce , striking it in the head as its neck began to sink and its eyes filmed. It fell.

The archers whooped.

Atcourt put up his visor. “Well,” he said to Father Arnaud, “I-”

A gout of blue-white fire struck Father Arnaud. It lifted him from the saddle and slammed him to the ground.

Atcourt pulled his visor down.

Ser Gavin galloped by. “Save the children,” he roared. The first wyvern was coasting along, skimming the trees above the runaway wagon.

The captain rose in his stirrups and pointed a gauntleted fist. A beam of red light travelled an arrow’s flight into the woods and something there was briefly outlined in red.

“Damn,” the captain said.

His attack and the counter-spell were almost simultaneous. There was a detonation in front of him and his horse shied-and subsided.

He backed the horse. He had a great many tricks since the last time he’d been in a fight like this, and he cast, and cast, and cast.

A bowshot away, his opponent was silhouetted against the foliage by a matt-black wall. The creature itself-a daemon-was lit from beneath by a simple light spell cast at the ground before it and thus not susceptible to a counter.

The tree beside it exploded, wicked shards of oak as sharp as spears whipping through the air.

The adversary struck him with a gout of white fire and then another. He took both on his shields and lost both shields in the process.

“ Fiat lux ,” he said aloud, and loosed his own bolt of lightning.

But the adversary was gone, skipping across reality.

Down the road, the second wyvern stooped, trading altitude for airspeed and calculating nicely with the ease born of long and predatory success, passing just over the last overhanging tree branches before a long stretch with no cover on either side of the road for half a bowshot-a short causeway over a marsh. It plucked one of the goodwife’s children from the wagon, decapitated one of her daughters with a talon flick, took a raking blow from the oldest daughter with a scythe and banked hard, skimming low over the reeds and the beaver house and rising neatly over the trees on the north side of the road.

The panicked horses took the wagon off the causeway, and the wagon stopped, the horse team mired immediately and screaming and neighing their panic as the wave-front of the wyvern’s terror passed over them again.

Ser Gavin and young Angelo di Laternum cantered up. The run along the road was already tiring their war horses.

The wyvern consumed its prey-a simple flip of the child into the air and a spray of blood visible two hundred yards away. Cully’s long shot from the end of the causeway fell away short.

“Under the wagon!” Gavin shouted at the goodwife and her brood. “Into the water. Under the wagon!”

The goodwife understood, or had the same notion herself. Grabbing her youngest, she leaped into the icy water. It was only thigh deep.