pace. Ekhaas stepped after him, chopping down with her sword. It screeched off of armor beneath the red robes, but the elf cried out and retreated.
Another took his place, swinging backhand as he whirled past. Ekhaas twisted her sword and the scimitar caught among the heavy teeth on the back of the blade. Biiri struck past her in a blow that sheared through metal and flesh. One elf down.
Two-Uukam cut through the torso of another, leaving her grasping at a terrible wound. Three-the drummer’s opponent didn’t rise as the hobgoblin straightened, drumsticks red with blood, chest heaving with exhilaration.
“Call for aid!” Ekhaas shouted at him. He dashed for his drum, but jerked and spun around between one step and the next. Two arrows sprouted from his back.
Where eight Valenar could go, more could surely follow.
Clenching her teeth, Ekhaas threw herself across the hilltop. Uukam and Biiri shifted instantly to protect their own backs. Four elves still faced them. One went after Ekhaas and hooked her foot with his. Ekhaas sprawled face first into grass and dirt. The impact knocked the wind out of her, but she forced herself to roll.
A scimitar gouged the soil a handspan behind her. She kicked blindly and felt her boot connect. The elf staggered back. Ekhaas got up on her hands and knees and scuttled to look over the back edge of the hill.
Six more of the Valaes Tairn were climbing the slope, two covering the ascent with arrows nocked. One swung his bow toward her. Ekhaas sucked air into her lungs, swept her free hand through the air, and forced out a thin, liquid song. The ground beneath and around the elves turned dark and shiny as greased leather. Their feet slipped out from under them, and they went tumbling back down the hill in a flurry of robes, scimitars, and wildly- loosed arrows. Ekhaas grinned — and pain like fire seared down her back with a force that knocked her to the ground. Gasping, she twisted. The Valenar she had kicked stood over her, raising his scimitar for another strike. Ekhaas kicked again, but he avoided her easily this time and shifted to get a better blow.
His foot came down on the pipes dropped by the slain piper. The sagging leopard skin bag collapsed under his heel and the pipes released one final startling bleat of sound. The elf leaped in surprise. Ekhaas pushed herself away from the edge of the hill and back to her feet. She could feel blood running down her back underneath the leather armor. Her back burned with every movement, but she could still raise her sword. The elf moved around her, picking the moment of his next attack.
“Ekhaas! With us!” shouted Biiri. From the corner of her eye, she saw him cut down one of the Valenar who menaced him and Uukam, just as Uukam struck out with his shield, forcing back the other two elves. The two soldiers turned as one, offering her a chance to reach their side.
Ekhaas took it. She feinted at the elf, then dodged past him to join Biiri and Uukam. Three hobgoblins fighting together now-but four elves circling them, death in the eyes that shone above red veils.
“We’ll force an opening,” Uukam rasped, his voice thick with exertion. “You run. Get to the woods.”
Fierce determination rose from Ekhaas’s gut up into her throat. Her ears stiffened. There would be no escape through the woods, but she also felt no desire to flee. Eight Valenar had taken them by surprise and they had still brought half of them down. They could take the other four. They would take the other four. “No!” she spat. “No running. We fight! We fight as the Dhakaani fought! We fight and win!”
Her voice rose in a song, harsh and martial, a song she’d heard Dagii’s soldiers chanting as they marched to the devastated clanhold of Tii’ator. It was no spell, but she wove magic into it, invoking the ferocity and discipline of an entire army prepared for battle. Biiri and Uukam stood straight as the song caught them up. New strength seemed to enter their arms, and Ekhaas’s as well. Her grip on her sword grew steady; the throbbing pain of her wounded back grew distant.
The Valaes Tairn appeared to feel the song, too. They glanced at each other, scimitars wavering slightly. Then one of them cried out in Elven, “For the glory of Kaelan!” and leaped forward.
Biiri’s shield snapped up to catch the falling scimitar-and Uukam’s sword cut beneath to tear open the elf’s belly. Without even a pause, he swung himself over the falling body, slicing with the lower lip of his shield at the next Valenar. The elf ducked under the sudden blow, only to meet Biiri’s rising sword. Ekhaas stayed with them, her back to theirs. The two remaining elves shouted and plunged at her as if to end the song. She dropped down and struck back in a low, wide arc. They moved like dancers, evading her sweep with ease.
Uukam and Biiri whirled, closed in on either side of Ekhaas, and brought their heavy swords around with a speed and force that turned elven grace into bloody tatters. Biiri’s blade cut the head from one elf. Uukam’s shattered the scimitar of the other and drove on into his chest. Red robes fluttered to the ground and torn flesh thumped down on top of them. Ekhaas’s song rose then faded away. For a moment, it seemed that the only sound was her and her companions’ breathing, the sound of triumph more certain and primal than any cheer.
Then the sound of the battle that still raged below the hill burst over them. The clash of metal. The shrieks of horses, the roars of great cats, the screams of the dying. Biiri’s sword, still raised, dropped. “Now we run, Ekhaas duur’kala,” he said. “Dagii commands it. You carry our muut.”
He moved to the earthworks at the brow of the hill to seize the crimson banner of the Riis Shaarii’mal, but when he reached it, he froze, staring down. Ekhaas rose from her crouch. Both she and Uukam went to stand beside him. Her ears flicked then went flat.
While they had fought atop the hill, the battle had shifted and surrounded them.
The reserve company that protected the bottom of the hill was a thin wall fighting raging opponents. The squares of the five companies that had first marched into battle were like sputtering flames, clinging to life. Even as she watched, two were extinguished completely as the elves surged and overwhelmed them. Bursts of lightning and fire flared here and there, wiping out more dar. What remained of the Darguul cavalry fought either with the reserve company or with the loose formation of the final company to enter battle, the Iron Fox. Maybe half of the Valaes Tairn warclan lay dead-but so did more than three-quarters of the Darguuls.
Along the seething border between dar and elves, Dagii fought Seach Torainar. The tall tribex horns mounted to the shoulders of Dagii’s armor marked the lhevk’rhu as surely as the flashing crystal in the high warleader’s helm did him. Bounding tiger leaped around wheeling horse. Hobgoblin sword and shield met deadly Valenar double- scimitar-two curved blades joined end to end through a single long hilt. Keraal fought close by, his whirling chain warding off any of the Valaes Tairn who tried to take Dagii from behind.
“Paatcha!” said Uukam in awe. “This is a battle worth dying in!”
“It’s a battle one of us must survive,” Biiri said. “Ekhaas duur’kala, if we don’t leave we’ll be caught.” He grabbed her arm and tried to pull her away.
She shook him off. “We’re already caught. There are elves at the back of the hill.”
Uukam cursed and raced across the hilltop to the back edge, then cursed again. “A squad of our cavalry fight them, but more come. Our riders won’t hold for long.”
“We could fight our way through,” said Biiri, baring his teeth.
“And be struck down by Valenar arrows while we ran.” Trembling eagerness ran through Ekhaas. “Dagii makes a stand. The battle isn’t over.” She spun and thrust her finger at Biiri. “Bring the drum! Play!”
“I can’t!”
Uukam snatched the bloody brass rods from the hands of the dead drummer. “I can.”
“Then do it. Beat a pace like a loping tiger. Biiri, watch our backs.”
Ekhaas stepped up onto the earthworks so that she stood beside the Riis Shaarii’mal. She took three deep, slow breaths, then one that was very deep. She reached down inside herself, drew up the power of the song that twined around her soul, and sang as she never had before.
There had been words to the song she had sung for Biiri and Uukam. The tune had been familiar to them. What she sang now had no words, and the tune was ancient. Another duur’kala or one of the dedicated lorekeepers of the vaults of the Kech Volaar might know it. Ekhaas was certain that no one on the battlefield below had ever heard it, yet she was equally certain that it would fire the spirit of every dar, every true child of ancient Dhakaan, who did. The greatest glories of the past could never truly be forgotten.
Song rolled out of her belly and her chest as it had rolled out of duur’kala of old, but freshly infused with her magic-and from the first note, it seemed that what she sang was even older than Dhakaan, that it grew out of a primal need to fight for life and to triumph over death. The sensation was dizzying, but Ekhaas poured everything she felt into the song. Long hours of training in Volaar Draal had taught her how to project her voice, but even a duur’kala’s voice couldn’t carry unaided over the battlefield. A slim thread of magic stolen from the magnificent whole amplified and tied it to the rhythm Uukam beat out on the great drum. Both song and drumbeat rose into the sky and echoed across the plain, pure as sunlight and as powerful as a storm.
