He straightened slowly, glaring around at the cowering ghouls who surrounded him. They quailed before his flaming eyes and turned away, surging towards their enemies once more under the lash of his will, and he scowled, feeling the empty place where Kimazh had once dwelt.
He’d never liked Kimazh. The horned devil had believed brute strength on the physical plane was all that really mattered, and while he’d possessed that in abundance, he’d never been noted for his intelligence or any other sort of strength. Of all the trio Anshakar’s Master had sent into this world to serve his purposes, Kimazh had been the stupidest and-physical strength aside-the weakest. Anshakar would shed no tears for Kimazh, and when he returned to his own place, he would cheerfully seize all the power and all the slaves which had once been Kimazh’s. Yet his companion’s obliteration suggested that perhaps he himself had underestimated the opposition of this Bahzell Bahnakson.
Kimazh’s destruction carried the taste of Bahzell, the scent Anshakar had been given to hunt him down if he’d been wise enough to decline to come to Anshakar. No doubt Kimazh had scented it as well. He’d seen Bahzell within reach and thought to take him now, as his own prey, devouring the champion’s power and claiming Krashnark’s reward for himself alone. Well, greed and overconfidence had earned their just reward, yet the nature of his fate was sobering. Nothing Anshakar had ever seen suggested the power and ability to simply wipe away a greater devil as if he’d never even existed. Slay one’s physical avatar, even banish one’s essence back to the universe from whence it had come in tatters that might take centuries to heal, yes; that he’d seen before, although never a foe who could have done it to him. But the power to simply…extinguish Kimazh? Blot him out like a candle flame? No. No, that was something new, something neither Anshakar nor any other devil, so far as he knew, had ever seen or experienced.
Yet a blow of that devastating power could not have come cheaply. Tomanak’s champions were but mortal. To channel that much power, release that much destruction, had to have drained any mortal conduit to the point of self — destruction, as well. And not even the greatest of mortal champions was proof against more mundane means of death.
The idiot Kimazh had been supposed to feed his ghouls into the furnace, break the mortals’ line, draw Bahzell into the melee. No champion of Tomanak could resist that situation! Their simpering sense of “honor” would compel them forward, lending their aid to those in need, and when it did they would expose themselves to the edged, blood-hungry flint and obsidian of the ghouls’ weapons. Let them be struck down, wounded-weakened, or even slain-and even the mightiest champion’s soul would be easy to take. And if these worthless, terrified ghouls proved incapable of even that much, the champion would still be distracted, forced to defend himself against purely physical threats, when their true foes finally struck. It was a strategy which would see thousands upon thousands of ghouls slaughtered in the doing, but what were they to Anshakar and his fellows? They existed only to be used, and he bellowed his own rage and hatred as he sent them crashing against the shield wall of Trianal Bowmaster’s army like hurricane-driven surf.
“What was that?” Prince Yurokhas demanded, staring southwest to where a boil of light reared itself above the confused battle.
“ That, Your Highness,” Vaijon Almerhas replied dryly, “was Bahzell and Walsharno.” He shook his head like a man trying to throw off the effects of a hard, straight punch. He’d felt Kimazh’s destruction and the enormous surge of Bahzell and Walsharno’s combined attack just as clearly as Anshakar. Indeed, the echoes rolling out and reverberating from that eruption of power could have been felt by any champion of Tomanak within a thousand leagues. “Whatever we’ve been sensing may have been, there’s only two of them now.”
“Are they all right?” Prince Arsham asked urgently from where he sat his horse beside Yurokhas’ Vahrchanak.
Even the burly, powerfully built Prince of Navahk looked like a youngster perched on his first pony beside the towering courser, but he and Yurokhas had taken to one another more strongly than anyone would have cared to predict before they’d met. More to the point at the moment, the concern for Bahzell and Walsharno in his voice was completely genuine, and Sharkah Bahnaksdaughter looked up quickly from where she stood in the ranks of the Order’s foot troops.
“So far,” Vaijon said a bit more grimly. “Whatever they did, though, it took a lot out of them. They’re going to need time to recover before they can do it again.”
“Lovely.”
At that moment, Arsham sounded a great deal like his countryman Brandark, Vaijon reflected. The Navahkan shook his head and grimaced.
“I don’t suppose you happen to know just what ‘whatever they did’ was, would you?” he continued, and Vaijon shook his head.
“We each have our own technique,” Vaijon said almost absently, looking away from the prince to where the tempo of screams, warcries, and the ululating howls of ghouls had just redoubled. The Sothoii horse archers between the Order and the long, southern front of the army’s formation were beginning to move slowly forward, and those in the front two or three ranks were casing their bows and drawing lances from their saddle boots. “None of us come at it quite the same way. And Bahzell is more…improvisational than most of us.”
“Somehow I can believe that,” Arsham said.
“So can I,” Yurokhas added, readying his own heavier, longer lance. “I think it might be a good idea for you to begin thinking about an approach of your own, though, Vaijon.”
Vaijon nodded, his eyes hardening and his jaw muscles tightening as he saw the huge four-armed, spike- skinned, cat-headed shape looming up beyond the crossing showers of javelins and flights of Sothoii arrows. He leaned from the saddle to take his own lance from one of the Order’s Horse Stealers and then looked at Hurthang.
“Get ready to clear me a path,” he said quietly, and Hurthang nodded.
“Aye,” he promised grimly. “We’ll just be doing that.”
He slapped Vaijon’s armored thigh, then turned away and began bellowing orders of his own.
“You’ll oblige me please, Your Highness- both Your Highnesses-by staying alive, if you please,” Vaijon said, never looking away from that cat-headed monstrosity. “If I thought it would do any good, I’d have some of Hurthang’s lads drag the pair of you out to one of the barges.”
“It’s a little late for that now, Vaijon,” Yurokhas pointed out with a thin smile.
“Besides,” Arsham added, looking over his shoulder at the combat raging along the riverbank just as another flaming charge of banefire flew overhead, “it looks like at least half the barges are under attack, as well.”
The devil named Zurak squalled like the universe’s largest panther as twenty gallons of banefire hit him squarely in the belly. The impact alone was enough to stagger even something his size, and he found himself wishing he’d brought along at least one shield instead of the swords and battle axes clutched in all four of his hands. The banefire ignited instantly, running down his iron-plated hide, clinging and burning with enough purely physical pain to make him howl in anguish. His seared scales replaced themselves almost as quickly as they were consumed, but that did little to slake his flaming torment or the devastation dripping from him to lick over and consume the tight packed ghouls about him.
He glared furiously at the barges anchored in mid-river, at the catapult crews and arbalesteers continuing to pour fire into the bleeding ranks of ghouls even as others of the creatures hurled themselves upon the vessels. Three of those barges had been swamped, their defenders butchered, but the others still held out and continued to sweep the western face of the defending army with their murderous darts. And the catapult barges, farther out, rained fire and destruction far into the ranks of his own terrified force.
He, too, had felt Kimazh’s destruction, but he’d been even closer than Anshakar. He knew it hadn’t been Bahzell alone; the deed had required Bahzell and Walsharno both. And he could sense the other champion, the one called Vaijon, before him on the far side of the infantry line which had finally begun to crumble. Vaijon…who had no courser champion to aid him.
“On!” he shrieked from his cocoon of flame, screaming the command at the desperately drumming shamans.
