The dwarf vanguard ground closer. The tumult from the drums and war-horns became all-consuming, forcing the captains on the walls to shout at their own troops just to be heard. Infantry squares spread out across the northern face of the city, extending in either direction as far as Liandra could make out through the swirling dust. The air became thick with it, surging up over the ramparts and coating the stone.
‘Perhaps he was right,’ said Liandra softly to herself, thinking of Imladrik. Now that she saw the scale of the dawi host in the full glare of daylight, the sheer immensity of just one of their many armies, she found herself wondering whether anything could prevail against them for long.
Then the long grind would begin. Athel Maraya would burn. Athel Toralien, Sith Rionnasc, Oeragor – they would all burn.
‘Did you say something?’ asked Kelemar.
Liandra shook her head. ‘Just preparing myself.’
The dwarfs marched to within bowshot. The orders went out, and Liandra watched the archers loose their arrows, angling the shafts high so they plummeted down hard in a solid curtain. It was an impressive enough show, and some dwarfs in the front ranks stumbled.
Not nearly enough, though. The army kept coming through the onslaught, its pace hardly dented. Bolt throwers opened up, sending heavy quarrels whistling directly into the front ranks. Wherever they hit they tore furrows in the infantry formations, scattering dwarfs and throwing up fresh plumes of dust.
They kept coming. The hammer of the drums became almost unbearable. The heat, the dust, the blare of the war-horns – it was like being thrust into the maw of insanity.
Kelemar took up his helm, fixed it in place and drew his longsword. He held the blade up to the obscured sun.
‘For Asuryan, Ulthuan and Tor Caled,’ he said, his voice steady. All around him his retinue did the same, raising their blades through the murk.
He turned to Liandra, a resigned expression on his face.
‘I’ll take my place at the gatehouse now,’ he said. As he spoke the stonework around him trembled – the front rank of dwarfs had made it to the foundations. ‘You have all you need?’
Liandra raised her staff, the one she’d been given after her rescue from the Blight. ‘It will do.’
‘Then Isha be with you, lady.’
Liandra inclined her head. The first shouts and screams of combat drifted over from the walls.
‘And with you, lord.’
As Kelemar left she turned, raised her staff, and kindled the first stirrings of aethyr-fire along its length. Ahead of her rose a sheer wall of rage, a heat-drenched surge of focused violence, repeated in rank after rank of implacable dawi warriors, all now surging towards the walls like jackals crowding a carcass.
She ignored the tight kernel of fear in her breast, ignored the avian scream of the griffons as they swooped into the fray, ignored the murmured spells of the mages around her, and prepared her first summoning.
It was about survival now.
‘For Ulthuan!’ she cried aloud, and her staff blazed with light.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Imladrik rode east. Below him the forest passed in a smear of speed. The endless trees looked like waves on the ocean, infinite and without permanent form, a swathe of dirty grey-green under a cloud-pocked sky.
Draukhain had sung little since their departure from Tor Alessi. The dragon seemed in contemplative mood.
So you will leave, then? the creature sang eventually.
I need more troops, I need more dragon riders. Only the King can grant me those.
He will not do so willingly.
No, he doesn’t grant anything willingly.
In the far distance the mountains rose up, their vast peaks little more than claw-shaped marks on the edge of the world. Draukhain exhaled a gobbet of black smoke from his nostrils. He was flying fast, though comfortably within his capability.
You know, of course, that Ulthuan is in the west? he sang, sounding amused with himself.
Imladrik sighed. Like everything he had done since arriving in Elthin Arvan, his current course felt far from wise. It was driven by necessity, though; by loyalty, and by a hope he hardly dared entertain.
Oeragor is my city. I should have gone there at the start of this.
What can you do there now? Too far to help.
Not for you, great one. Imladrik peered ahead of him, as if he could see out across the Arluii and into the great Blight, the semi-desert that separated the temperate northern lands from the lush and mysterious south. It should be abandoned, its people escorted to the coast. I will oversee this, then go to Ulthuan. To Tor Vael, then to Lothern. The arguments will begin again.
Draukhain’s head dipped, his shoulders powering smoothly. The ivory-skinned wings worked harder, scything through the air.
Always arguments with you.
So it seems. Imladrik shook his head. I need to breathe the air of the Dragonspine again, if only for a short time. I need to think.
Draukhain discharged a growling fireball in approval. Good. Good. I will breathe it with you.
Imladrik watched the forest slide underneath him, mile after mile of featureless foliage. The dream of taming it, of turning it into a fragranced land of beauty, now seemed worse than foolish.
This has nothing to do with the fire-child, then? asked Draukhain, impishly.
Nothing.
You mean that?
Imladrik did not reply. It was impossible to lie, almost impossible to dissemble. In truth he didn’t know what he would do if Liandra were still alive. The reports of a druchii abomination might have been true, they might have been false. He had tried to persuade himself, and Caradryel, that he didn’t care and that his first duty was now to the war, but the arguments were weak. Possibilities wore away at him, eating into what little sleep he could muster.
This flight was a final act of duty, a last display of responsibility before the war would consume him utterly. Yethanial
