Walsharno’s fierce whistle came with it, and the mounted Sothoii armsmen between them and Anshakar obeyed that double command without even thinking about it. It wouldn’t have mattered if they’d wanted to hesitate, not with Walsharno’s will fastened upon their warhorses with all the ruthless authority of a courser herd stallion and a champion of Tomanak. Those horses scattered to either side, and Walsharno, son of Mathygan and Yorthandro, chosen companion of Bahzell Bahnakson of the Horse Stealer hradani, came through that gap like thunder.
Anshakar’s eyes widened in surprise as the mounted troops in front of him scattered rather than advancing to meet the ghouls. He hadn’t expected them to break that quickly, that easily, and the ghouls who’d broken past the still resisting knots of infantry howled their own astonished victory-and vast relief-as the armsmen in their path dispersed.
But then a single horseman erupted from that opening, and the ghouls’ relief vanished in wailing panic as they saw him.
He came at them in an earthshaking, rolling, mud-spattering thunder and a dreadful corona of blue fire. It crackled about him, streaming on the wind of his passage, running down the mighty stallion’s legs, pooling around his hooves and splashing outward with every booming stride. It reached out to either side, that fire, and stretched out before him, and wails of panic turned into shrieks of agony at its touch.
The ghouls enveloped in that glittering wave of power twisted and contorted, writhing and burning like grass in a furnace. It consumed their flesh, seared their bones, dropped their scorched skeletons into the mud and the blood and the grass. Bone crunched under the surviving infantry’s boots as that same glaring tide pushed them none too gently out of the horseman’s path, as well, and a mighty sword appeared in his hands.
“ Tomanak! ”
Bahzell Bahnakson and Walsharno thundered toward Anshakar, and that blazing blue bow wave came with them.
Anshakar was taken aback by the fury of his puny foes’ charge. He would have expected even one of Tomanak’s champions to have played for time, tried to stay away from him long enough to recover the strength to face him. Yet it seemed this Bahzell, this Walsharno, were even more foolish than their fellows, and he spread his arms and loped to meet them with a hideous smile. That blue stormfront might terrify ghouls-might even be deadly to such contemptible creatures-but it held no terror for Anshakar. It was far too weak to so much as injure one such as him, far less destroy him.
Bahzell felt Anshakar’s searing power rise higher and fiercer as he and Walsharno hurtled towards it. He’d known this enemy was stronger than the devil he’d already vanquished, yet its sheer, stunning potency was even greater than he’d feared. He and Walsharno were no fit match for it, not in their present state, and both of them knew it.
Few of my champions die in bed.
The warning Tomanak had given him so long ago, the night he explained why he wanted a barbarian hradani as a champion, echoed in some deeply buried corner of Bahzell’s mind. He couldn’t pretend he’d ever known or thought differently. Yet all men died-even men as good as Vaijon-and it was given only to a few of them to choose their deaths. To know beyond shadow or doubt that that which they died to save was worth the saving, the evil worth the fighting…the death worth the dying. That was what drew a champion to Tomanak-that knowledge, that understanding — and neither Bahzell Bahnakson nor Walsharno could see this evil and refuse to fight it, even knowing they must die in the doing.
There were no words from Tomanak. Not this time. There was only his hand at their back, his warcry in the thunder of their hooves, and his bright, fierce determination welded to their own wills like steel.
“ Tomanak! ” Bahzell bellowed yet again, and the sword in his hands turned into a glorious cascade of azure flame.
Anshakar flinched from that hated name, but he sneered at the hradani who’d dared to utter it.
“ Krashnark! ” he bellowed back in a voice fit to break the heavens themselves, and the ghouls cowered down, covering their ears’ with their talons. “Come to me, Bahzell! Come and die! ”
Bahzell heard Anshakar’s challenge, heard the hunger and the confidence in it, and knew that confidence was justified. He could sense the vast tide of Tomanak’s presence and power, feel his deity’s willingness to offer all of himself that he and Walsharno might channel, but they were still too spent. They couldn’t reach deep enough, channel enough of it, to defeat this enemy. Yet perhaps they might at least wound it badly enough to drive it back from whence it had come, badly enough for the remainder of Trianal’s army to survive. It was a threadbare hope, but all they could give their companions.
Anshakar was a towering inferno of sick emerald fire, consuming the world, straddling the horizon, and they arrowed straight for the heart of it with one heart, one mind…one soul.
And then, suddenly, there was another soul, another presence. It flared deep within them, like a sudden streamer of golden flame, part of them and yet apart, and they recognized it.
Sir Vaijon Almerhas, commander of the Hurgrum Chapter of the Order of Tomanak, touched them. It was fleeting, that touch across the wall of death, impossible for anyone to sustain, but in that instant, it opened another conduit to Tomanak, and fresh strength-more strength than any mortal could ever have channeled-scorched through them.
“Tomanak! Tomanak and Vaijon! ”
Sudden fear stabbed through Anshakar’s confidence as he heard the terrible joy in that thundering voice. The presence and power coming at him doubled, then re doubled, roaring up with all the roiling fury of the sun itself. His taloned feet skidded in the Ghoul Moor’s mud and bodies, but it was far too late for that.
Bahzell and Walsharno struck him like a typhoon.
That bubble of blinding blue brilliance was a battering ram. It bowled him off his feet, hurled him backward for a dozen yards. Nothing had ever done that before, and the sodden ground erupted in a spray of steaming mud as he landed on his back and the impact blasted an enormous crater. He reached out to either side, like a man fallen into deep snow, claws scrabbling as he tried to thrust himself back upright, but there was no time for that, either.
Wind rider and courser, champions both, souls linked, Bahzell and Walsharno loomed up, impossibly vast, impossibly huge, enormous enough to dwarf even Anshakar the Great. A flaming hoof, vaster than a boulder, crashed down on Anshakar’s chest, and he screamed as flesh burned, ribs crumpled in crushed ruin, and an agony he’d never imagined tore through him. He reached up, clawing desperately, talons raking through Walsharno’s chain barding, but the stallion only brought his other forehoof down like Tomanak’s mace, and Bahzell leaned from the saddle. That flaming sword sheared one treetrunk arm at the elbow, and Anshakar screamed again as the stump of his arm gouted blood. His other arm rose, almost feebly now, batting at Bahzell’s blade in futile self-defense, and Bahzell lopped it off as well even as Walsharno rose high on his back legs.
The stallion towered there, an immense, fiery sapphire sculpture, looming against the heavens, and then both forehooves came down as one. They landed in a holocaust of blue fury, and Anshakar the Great’s head exploded in a fountain of flame.
“ No! ”
Varnaythus of Kontovar brought both fists crashing down on either side of his gramerhain.
“Fiendark fly away with their souls! Krahana lick their bones!” he snarled.
So close-they’d come so close! First the failure against Markhos, and now this!
Trianal’s army had hovered on the brink of defeat. A quarter of the supporting barges had fallen to the ghouls. The riverbank had been littered with the bodies of Sothoii and hradani, and the ghouls’ unrelenting pressure had been driving the remaining defenders back from the water’s edge step by step, despite the barges. That interfering busybody Vaijon of Almerhas had been crushed- crushed! — and Bahzell and Walsharno had been too weak, far too weak, to stop Anshakar by themselves! He’d seen it, been able to taste it himself through the gramerhain, and yet, somehow, at the last moment, that bastard hradani had slipped aside and avoided destruction
