Crusader

one not wearing the leather and seal of the Sovereign, but a hood and cloak that denoted a ranger, one dressed like a member of Sanctuary. “Sorry,” she muttered in apology upon seeing his face. “I didn’t mean to … sorry.” She looked around from the Sanctuary rangers on foot, their knives and short blades glistening with the dark blood of their enemies, then back to the warriors who had ridden into their enemies ranks on horseback; there was no sign of injury, though plenty enough of them had blood on their horses and selves. There was no crying left, no sobbing of the wounded or wailing of the dying. She looked to Vaste, but he merely shrugged, as if to say, We’re done.

“Secure the convoy,” she said loudly to one of the warriors nearest her, a capable human named Jet Tindar. “Don’t kill them unless you have to.” With a nod, Jet rode on, the warriors on horseback following him as the flames that blocked the gulch diminished at their approach. “The rest of you-let us try to clear the signs of our attack as best we can, and take the bodies with us so as to not give away our tactics.” She felt the dull clack of her jaw. “Perhaps we can do this very same maneuver again in a week or two, to the same effect.”

She pulled the reins and guided her horse away as the rangers moved into action, pulling the bodies together for transport. She didn’t watch, unworried that the job would be done correctly, the blood would be covered over by a second group after the first had teleported out with the wagons, the corpses and the majority of their force. Would you have done it this way, Cyrus? How would it have been different if you were here, instead of fighting over there? She felt an involuntary twinge in her cheek; as small as even it was, it was more emotion than she would have preferred to be displayed on her face. … and how would it be different for me … if you were here …?

Chapter 64

Cyrus

Nightfall came upon the steppes-as Cyrus had heard the locals call the plains they fought upon-and still, the enemy came. The scourge filled the horizon as far as Cyrus could see, but as the light drained out of the day and the crescent moon cast its luminescence, there was no end in sight to the enemies that came upon them, filling the battlefield with their dead. His line of sight diminished to only thirty feet or so in front of him, Cyrus watched for the flashes of spells to give him guidance. The sounds of battle still rang around him, and the height of war was taking place on three sides. The smells that filled the air were all of the scourge, the decaying scent of dead flesh and nothing else.

They were overwhelming, so much so that Cyrus knew the army had been falling back all day, not out of a genuine pressure put upon them by the enemy but from a general weight of numbers pressing against the armies. The bodies piled up, too, and while it didn’t seem to bother their enemy, as the creatures merely crawled over and avoided their own dead, for Cyrus they became a hazard after a short time, stacking three and four deep and providing an excellent ambush point for a live enemy to jump from behind their own dead and attack. He had seen a few of his guildmates attacked that way.

“It’s nice to know we’re at least running free of casualties,” Odellan said between the clashes of weapons cutting into flesh.

A bellow sounded to Cyrus’s right and another shockwave burst forth from Partus, blasting aside a line of the scourge, sending bodies into the air once more. “We’re taking them out in great numbers, no doubt,” Cyrus said. “But we’ve been swapping out people along the line all day as though this was some sort of sporting event where you can bow out any time you please. Our people are exhausted and there’s still no sign that the enemy is coming close to running low on more bodies to throw at us. It makes me wonder just how many souls Mortus kept in his lands, if it’s all of them, all the way back to the beginning of time, or if somewhere we’ll eventually reach the end.

A cry and hue came from farther down the line, to the right. “Not a good sound,” Cyrus said under his breath. “Do you think that means …?”

There was no need for him to finish, as Martaina appeared out of the darkness to his right, firing two arrows in rapid succession, both hitting one of their foes in the face and causing them to cease all motion. She slid to a stop in front of Cyrus, slung her bow over her shoulder and drew blades, slipping into the formation next to him. “Bad news from the Sylorean lines, sir.”

“Let me guess,” Cyrus said, cleaving another head as one of their enemy slid past him in a foiled attack, “the Syloreans broke in the middle.”

“Solid guess.” She buried a dagger in a grey face and another in a stout, four-legged body. “Our healers did their best, but they ran short of magical energy about ten minutes ago. Mendicant is about to try something to drive them back, but we’re running low on things we can throw into the breach.”

“What about the cavalry reserve?” Cyrus asked. “Longwell was waiting for the right moment to turn them loose, and this sounds like it.”

“He moved into action to shore up the left flank and give some relief to the army of Actaluere about two hours ago,” she said, and her smooth motions with the blade prompted him to wonder how long she had been using them, she did it with such fluid grace. “They’re still committed over there; I guess the enemy moved fast and doggedly, because from what I can see from here, it looks like they’re barely holding, even with the cavalry reinforcement.”

“Okay,” Cyrus said, and motioned for two warriors in the line behind him to move up. “Let’s you and I head over there, see if we can help. What’s Mendicant planning to-”

There was a blast of fire that lit the night sky, a circle of flame that turned the whole field of battle orange with fury then red with its intensity as it burned brighter still. Cyrus watched as it slid around a widening hole in the line that he hadn’t even been able to see without the fire. It pushed back, back toward the scourge, and Cyrus watched the four-legged creatures run from it in a way they hadn’t run from anything he’d seen thus far.

“It would appear they’re afraid of fire,” Cyrus said, pushing through the line and making for the place where the flame glowed. “Nice to know; kinda wonder why we haven’t figured that out before.”

“You’re the one who wanted the spellcasters kept in reserve in case we had to fall back,” she said, leading him. Her bow was unslung now, and she fired it three times as she ran, picking off targets as she brushed by Sanctuary members locked in combat along the front. “Not such a bad strategy, actually, because we’d been doing well enough before now that they didn’t need to intervene.”

“We may yet need them to cover our retreat,” Cyrus said as they reached the end of the Sanctuary line; he passed a few men of Syloreas who were in battle with the scourge, and Cyrus aided them with a few well-placed slashes as he did so. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we’ve easily killed ten thousand of these things and they’ve yet to blink at throwing another ten thousand at us.”

“Being not quite as blind as you in the dark, I have noticed,” she said. “I have also noticed that their number continues to extend beyond the horizon, which is a mite worrisome seeing as we’re supposed to kill them all and then continue north to destroy the portal. I believe we may have the order wrong on that; we may need to destroy the portal before we can go north.”

“A fine contradiction, isn’t it?” Cyrus brought his sword around and slashed a foe that charged hard at him, killing it with one well-placed stroke. “I, for one, wish there were another way to do it, but as I don’t possess a single flying mount with which to carry myself over these enemies, let alone a bevy of them to carry an entire army to the portal without fighting them, I’m afraid we may just have to do it the hard way.”

“I don’t know that you could define this as the hard way, sir,” Martaina said, and her short blade was out again, working in a flash of metal against two of the scourge at once, “I believe this may in fact be the impossible way.”

“I don’t believe in the impossible,” Cyrus said, greeting a jumping enemy with a kick that knocked it back to its fellows.

“Then I’d like to see you try and give birth to a child yourself, sir.”

Cyrus shot her a sideways look and got one in return, only a hint of a smile as Martaina stabbed into another one of the beasts as it jumped at her. The fire of Mendicant’s spell had died out, finally, and Cyrus wondered idly if the goblin had sacrificed any life energy to make it last as long as it did. The two of them were