Brightly Burning

outnumbered the Valdemarans by three or even four to one.

It terrified Pol. It took all of his willpower to sit calmly on Satiran and relay the Lord Marshal's orders.

They couldn't count on Lan. The boy was surely exhausted by now, and unable to do anything but watch.

Before more than the first rank of Karsites had poured across the blackened line marking where the flame- curtain had been, fires flared again—but this time, in tall candles of fire that erupted violently out of the snow, then died to nothing, only to flare up somewhere else. They sprang up right in the path of the Karsites—they didn't do much damage, if anything, but they did break up the Karsite charge. Although a few fighters caught fire, rolling in the snow quickly put out their flaming clothing—but no man, having seen his fellow go up in flames, was quite as enthusiastic about running at the Valdemarans full-tilt, at the risk of plunging into one of those fire-fountains.

Then, as the push from behind forced the front ranks onward, Lan changed his tactics.

He brought up the curtain again, farther in toward the Valdemaran lines, but this time it was for a very different purpose.

He caught a full line of a hundred Karsites or more square in his fire-line, and he held the flames on them. Even over the din of battle, Pol heard the dying screams of those men as they tried to escape the inferno and failed, and his stomach lurched as the smell of burned flesh came to his nose.

'Oh, dear gods—' Pol breathed. Lan had not deliberately called fire down on Karsites and burned them until this moment. What had made him do it now?

The wall of flame died, leaving behind not only a blackened strip of land, but charred and twisted corpses lining it. The fire-curtain was gone, but this time the Karsites held back, despite the threats of their priests. They seemed to have figured out that if they were within the stretch where the curtain had already burned, they were safe.

For a moment, it looked as if the Karsites were at an impasse. They couldn't retreat, but they were not going to charge, either. Then a trumpet sounded an unfamiliar call, the priests screamed an order, and they started coming on again. But now, they charged forward in small groups of twenty or thirty, too many groups and too widely separated for Lan to stop with his flame-wall.

Lan wasn't going to give in. He sent up fire-fountains again, intercepting as many of the little groups as he could, and once again shrill and terrified screams rang out above the general mayhem. No one but Pol seemed disturbed by this change in Lan's tactics; in fact, from the Lord Marshal's muttered comments, and the shouts of encouragement out on the field, there were plenty who were cheering him on.

What's happening up there?

Satiran, prompted by Pol's unease, looked up to the place where Lan and Kalira perched. It was only the sense that something was wrong with Lan that prompted him to look up there, nothing more.

But he saw—or thought he saw—something.

He wasn't certain what it was—a movement among the rocks where nothing should have been, perhaps, a man-shaped shadow behind them. He might not have seen anything—he did have a touch of Foresight along with everything else, and it might only have been that Foresight that warned him.

All he knew was that suddenly his unease turned to horror, he knew that tragedy was a heartbeat away. Terror closed his throat, tasting bitter, and he tried, desperately, to project a warning into Lan's impervious mind.

:Lan! Lan! Hide! RUN!:

*

LAN was the dragon.

Driven by hunger that only increased with every new victim, he hunted the battlefield, pouncing on target after target, reveling in the screams of the hurt and dying, then going on to new prey. Flame filled his mind and soul, burning with unholy joy, insatiable rage. He had but one thought now—he would burn the world, if that was what it took, until the last of the enemy was ashes.

*

ALTHOUGH Satiran's eyes were fixed on the pair above, Pol wasn't the only Herald to know, suddenly, that catastrophe was about to strike.

The battlefield was disordered; now relative disorder became absolute chaos.

'The hell!' the Lord Marshal exclaimed.

All over the field, Valdemaran trumpeters called retreat, though no orders had been given for retreat. A dozen Mind-speakers bombarded Pol with panic-stricken calls to flee, then broadcast their warnings at full strength to anyone who could hear. Valdemaran fighters across the battlefield broke off their engagements and fled in no order at all, while beside Pol the Lord Marshal sputtered.

Pol stretched out his arm to Lan and Kalira, in a futile effort to stop what was coming.

A dark speck flitted across the distance from a shadow that might have been man-shaped, to the young Herald. Only a speck, insignificant—

*

—WHAT?

Something grabbed Lan and shook him. Distracted he glanced aside—

Just as a heavy crossbow bolt thudded into Kalira's chest.

All breath driven out of her, she could only gasp and throw up her head in pain, but her mind screamed.

:LAN!: