Miles Cameron - The Dread Wyrm

“Marcus is dead,” he said. “Father Arnaud’s still down on the road. Lord Wimarc’s standing over him.”

Toby got his horse around and reached behind his friend and drew his sword. He put it in Goldsmith’s hand. The artist was shaking like a beech tree in a wind.

“You got it, Adrian,” Toby said. “That was a preux stroke.”

Adrian gave him an uneven smile. “It was, wasn’t it? Christ-all the saints. Thanks.”

There was a flash of light so bright that both squires were stunned for a moment.

“Captain’s doing something,” Toby said, turning his horse to face the empty woods.

Adrian was looking at the ground. “Daemons, Toby.”

“I know!” The older boy looked around, completely at a loss. To the east, the captain was in some sort of sorcerous duel-there were pulses of power so rapid he couldn’t follow them.

To the north there was a flash of red, and then another.

“More daemons?” Adrian said. His voice was high and wild, but his sword was steady enough.

“Back to the road,” Toby decided.

“What about Marcus?” Adrian asked.

“He’s dead and we aren’t,” Toby said. “We’ll come back for him.”

He backed his horse to get clear of the brush and turned. Adrian followed him.

There was an explosion to the north, not far away. It was so great that both men and their horses were covered in gravel and sticks and a hurricane of leaf mould. The horses bolted.

Neither man was thrown. The company stressed riding skills for its squires, and they’d spent almost a year training with the steppe nomads of the Vardariotes.

Toby’s masterless horse burst onto the road a few horse-lengths from Nell, mounted on Ataelus. She was paper white. The horse half-reared then neighed at the familiar horses, who both slowed to see their herd leader so calm.

Something horrible was a tangled mass of blood and broken teeth between the huge war horse’s feet.

“There he is,” Toby said. Lord Wimarc was ten horse-lengths away, standing with a spear over the prone form of Father Arnaud. There was blood dripping from his spear. He was watching the ground south of the road. Francis Atcourt was just dismounting by his side and Phillipe de Beause was still mounted, watching the sky. Two hundred paces to the west, the sun was setting in splendour and a knot of archers could be seen, all drawing and loosing as fast as if repelling the charge of a thousand Morean knights. They had Ser Danved and Ser Bertran covering them. Both had swords well-bloodied.

Something passed overhead and darkened the sun. The shadow went on forever, and Toby raised his head in despair-

The great oak tree fell. Gravity was faster than the captain’s best reactions and stronger than all the daemons in the Wild and the oak tree’s top smashed him to the ground and he thought-

Cuddy drew and loosed, grunting as his shaft leapt into the air, and without pausing or following its flight he bent, took his next shaft, sliding the bow down over it and lifting it already nocked.

Needlepoint bodkin.

Needlepoint bodkin.

Broadhead.

Broadhead.

Beside him, Flarch’s elbow shot up in his exaggerated draw posture-he was a thin man and he pulled a heavy bow and his body contorted with every full draw, his back curved like a dancer’s.

As he released, he took his next arrow from his belt. “Two,” he spat.

He meant he had two shafts left.

Both wyverns had chosen to turn in place, gaining altitude and timing their strike so that they could envelop the desperate stand of the knights and archers, splitting the archers’ efforts and the knights’ attention.

But it had cost them. All the archers were hitting at this range.

Gavin stood in coda longa with his war hammer stretched out behind him, prepared to deliver an enormous blow. Di Laternum had his spiked axe up in front of him.

The wyverns finished their turn and their sinuous necks flashed as one as their heads locked on to their shared prey. Both monsters screeched together.

The wave fronts of their conjoined terror struck. Di Laternum fell to one knee. Gavin’s shoulder flared in icy pain and his mind seemed to go blank.

Flarch lost the arrow in his fingers.

Cuddy loosed and missed.

The smaller wyvern was the size of a small ship, its body forty feet long top to tail and its wingspan sixty feet or more. Its underside was oddly flecked with the fletchings of a dozen quarter-pound arrows.

Its mate-if the mighty monster had a mate-was bigger. Its wings seemed to block the sun, and its body was a mottled green and brown and white like old marble. Its wave of terror was far more subtle than its younger partner’s-its terror promised freedom through submission.

The children under the wagon all screamed together.

And then a taloned claw the size of the wagon took the greater of the two wyverns and ripped one of its wings from its still-living body.

Darkness blotted out the sun. Night fell.

The dragon was so huge that no mere human mind could encompass it. Its taloned feet were themselves almost as large as the wyvern’s body. The mortally-stricken wyvern wheeled into a catastrophic crash with a scream of rage and humiliation.

The younger monster turned on a wing tip. It was cunning enough to pass under its titanic adversary, rushing for open sky and rising on a lucky thermal even as the dragon turned in the sky, so close to the ground that the vortices at its sweeping wing tips a thousand feet apart launched small spouts of leaves and the rush of its passage knocked men flat.

The wyvern rose and turned, going north. The thermal lifted it-

Ser Gavin watched with savage satisfaction as the thing was chased down. The dragon-incredible as it was-was faster.

The wyvern made two attempts. Because of the altitude, both were visible. First it dived for speed, and then it tried to fly very low, turning under its mammoth adversary again.

The dragon pivoted in mid-air. It was too far away for its size to register-far enough that the whole of the incredible monster was visible, top to toe, a bowshot or more long, with a neck as long as a road and a noble head with nostrils as big as caves and teeth as tall as a man on a horse.

The great mouth opened, and all the men on the road gave a shout.

Silence fell.

And then all hell was given voice in the woods north of the road.

When the ambush was sprung, Count Zac’s first thought was to envelop the northern arm of the ambush. It was bred in him, not a conscious decision. He gathered every man on every pony, all the pages and his own survivors, and they rode into the deep woods north of the road, sweeping wide around his best guess of where the enemy might lie.

The great wardens were no aliens to the easterners. The lightning-fast carrion dogs were a terrible surprise, but he’d seen them now.

Like the veteran hunters they were, the Vardariotes spread as they rode, casting a net as wide as they could. The pages tended to clump up. Zac ignored them as amateurs.

His own boys and girls trotted-and then when his sweep turned in a neat buttonhook south, and he raised his arm, they reined in.

Every man and woman with him drew their sabre and placed it over their right arm, so that the gentle curve nestled in the archer’s elbow, sword drawn and ready.

In his own language, Zac called, “Ready, my children. Be the wind!”

The pages followed, screeching.

Zac was confident of his location and his array. He cantered back south, his skirmish line flashing red behind him.

And, as he expected, the enemy had forgotten him. They had formed up to converge on another target, perhaps never having noticed his envelopment. His satisfaction was marred by how many of them there were. Twenty daemons were not going to be swept away in a charge.