Miles Cameron - The Dread Wyrm

He had two calm heartbeats to take it in-three great wardens struggling with the branches of a downed tree. Another raising a stone axe and striking-what, the tree?

Perhaps Zac caught a glimpse of red and gold surcoat. Perhaps he did indeed have a spirit to advise him. Perhaps his instincts for war were so finely honed that he guessed.

“Through them!” he called. He loosed his first arrow, leaned over his horse’s mane, and began to kill.

Gabriel lay, trapped in the weight of his armour, pinned to the ground by an oak branch that lay across his torso and had crumpled his left greave and broken the leg inside it.

He tried to use potentia to move the tree. The pain from his leg was so distracting that he hadn’t even managed to open his visor when the first daemon appeared, sprinting in heavy-footed majesty, leaping through the branches.

Gabriel watched it come. He stretched out his right hand for his ghiavarina.

It was too far.

He worked to summon it. He couldn’t even get into his palace. He reached for Prudentia and a wave of pain thrust him back into bloody reality.

The daemon’s stone axe swept up. He saw its open beak, heard its scream of triumph.

He thought quite a few things-about Amicia, and Irene, and Master Smythe.

And then, despite the last efforts of his straining right hand to grab the ghiavarina , the axe fell.

The daemon’s weapon seemed to slide around his head. It missed .

Gabriel didn’t pause to consider the ramifications, although he was fully aware that he should be dead. He got his right hand on his baselard and drew it. Its effect was tonic-he steadied. The baselard itself held power-

The daemon-so close as to be like a lover and smelling of burned soap and flowers and spring hay-cursed. Even in the alien language, his curse was obvious-the great axe flew up again-

Gabriel dived into his place of power. He leaped onto the bronze disc set in the floor and pulled the lever. This simple symbol governed a nested set of pre-prepared workings, each cascading into the next.

Gold and white and green light flared in a set of nested hemispheres over his prone body.

Zac saw the fireworks and drew the correct conclusion-loosed a shaft with the daemon nearly at the point of his arrow, whirled and loosed again over his shoulder even as his magnificent pony leapt the downed tree and then he was turning.

But the wardens were running. One of their number lay with his feet drumming in the final dance and one of his best warriors, Lonox, was down, cut from the saddle for being too daring, but the wardens wanted no more of the fight.

Kriax, a woman with a face so tanned it seemed made of leather, reined up. “We have them!” she shouted and gave a whoop of pure delight.

Zac pursed his lips. “If I set this ambush…” he said, and waved.

She turned and looked at him. Her eyes were slightly mad with unexpressed violence.

“… I’d have a covering force,” he said. “Back to the road and break contact.”

She saluted with her sabre as her left hand flicked her bow back into the case at her hip. She gave a specific scream-an ululating yell.

Like a flock of starlings, the whole line of Vardariotes turned all together and rode away, leaving the pages-exhilarated and terrified-to follow. Zac bellowed for them in his version of Morean.

He rode over to the tree. The Megas Dukas was no doubt under the brightly coloured shields. Another warden lay there, too, his body sliced neatly in half by sorcery and both sides cauterized. A third lay pinned, badly wounded, under the branches of the trees. Some sand and a gilded beak suggested the ruin of a fourth.

“Hey! Captain!” Zac called. “Hey! We’re here!” He edged closer to the tree.

Eerily, like something really bad on the steppes, the voice came straight into his head.

Be sure, Zac. When I drop these wards, I’m going to have nothing left.

Zac didn’t like the voice in his head at all. “Can we leave you? To make sure? No fucking idea what happened to the east.”

Hurry , said the voice.

Ser Gavin had scarcely been engaged in the fighting, but he was sorely tested in the aftermath. Aware-as they were all aware-that the captain was down and so was the chaplain, Ser Gavin had to comprehend the scale of the fight, covering as it had, three different venues spread over almost half a league of ground, and then isolate and secure his three widely spread parties.

He insisted that they be secured first, before any acts of mercy or rescue began. The downed captain, surrounded in his aethereal shells, he left to Count Zac. The chaplain’s body-dead or dying-he put in the charge of Ser Francis Atcourt and the squires, and the drowned wagon and the family he left to young di Laternum, who was suddenly thrust into command, with the sun setting in the west and children sinking in the mud and an unknown enemy moving in the woods to the west. Cully stepped up to the young man-at-arm’s shoulder and whispered in his ear.

Ser Gavin rode briskly up and down the road in the fading light. His second time past the squires, he took Toby off the watch and ordered him to take his riding horse, ride his charger, and try to fetch help.

Toby glanced west, gulped, and nodded.

No questions were asked. Every man and woman present knew how dangerous their situation was.

Ser Gavin knew what his brother would do next. The immediate crisis was past. It was time to plan.

He ticked off the points on his armoured gauntlets.

First, gather all his people in one place. Nothing along the road was particularly defensible. But in one place, with a couple of fires and a deception or two, they’d have a chance.

Horses. The horses would have to be picketed. There was no forage and none closer than the swamp.

He rode back to di Laternum, who had the goodwife out of the water and had, himself, waded into the mud and retrieved the mangled corpse of one of her children. The other was, of course, gone. Cully had an arrow on every string-and had the wagon out of the water, for which incredible engineering feat No Head received Gavin’s terse and hurried thanks. Two horses from the wagon team were coyote food, and two were exhausted but alive.

The goodwife, a solid woman who had seen many defeats, was sunk in her grief. Ser Gavin rode up to her-at a loss. She knelt in the road next to the appallingly small bundle that was her dead second daughter.

“I made her,” she said. “I made ’em all, and I sweated blood, and I love ’em. Oh, blessed Virgin, why?” She looked up at the knight. “You came to rescue us?”

Ser Gavin had seen enough grief to know the anger was a part of it.

“Into the wagon,” he said gruffly. “We’ll mourn tomorrow. Tonight, we live.”

“I’m not-” the woman said, but whatever she was not, her eldest daughter took her elbow and moved her to the wagon.

“But Jenna! We can’t leave Jenna to get ate!” she wailed.

Her eldest son, without even a flirtation with hesitation, scooped up the bloody linen shawl that held his sister’s corporeal remains and carried it-tenderly-to the wagon.

Cuddy had the heads of both horses. They were weak and twitchy and deeply scared.

Ser Gavin reined in.

Cuddy waved him off. “I’m gonna walk with ’em.”

“We’re going back,” Ser Gavin said. “For the captain.”

“Course we are,” Cuddy said.

“Amen to that,” No Head agreed.

Gavin wanted to gallop down the road. There were ten minutes of useful light left, and something was making noise north of the marsh.

It made him want to cry, deep inside, that he was learning to lead men from his brother-the brother whose effeminacy he’d mocked throughout his youth. But he took the time to turn his horse and clap a hand on di Laternum’s arm as the wagon began to move. “Well done,” he said.