‘Sandre! Ducas!’ Alessan said sharply, snapping Devin out of reverie. ‘Look now, and tell me.’
‘I was about to,’ Sandre said with an emerging note of excitement in his voice. ‘It is as we guessed: with his own presence on the hill Brandin is not outnumbered after all. His power is ‘too much stronger than Alberico’s. More so than I guessed, even. If you are asking my reading right now, I would say that the Ygrathen is on the edge of breaking through in the centre before the hour is out.’
‘Sooner than that,’ Ducas said in his deep voice. ‘When such things begin they happen very fast.’
Devin moved forward to see more clearly. The seething centre of the valley was as choked with men and horses as before, many of them dead and fallen. But if he used the banners as his frame of reference, it seemed, even to his untutored eye, that Brandin’s men were pushing their front lines forward now, though the Barbadians were still more numerous by far.
‘How?’ he muttered, almost to himself.
‘He weakens them with his sorcery,’ a voice to his right said. He looked over at Erlein. ‘The same way they conquered us years ago. I can feel Alberico trying to defend them, but I think Sandre has it right: the Barbadian is weakening as we speak.’
Baerd and Rovigo came quickly up from where they too had been looking down.
‘Alessan?’ Baerd said. Only the name, no more.
The Prince turned and looked at him. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘We were just thinking the same thing. I think it is time. I think it has come.’ He held Baerd’s gaze for another moment; neither of them spoke. Then Alessan looked away, past the friend of his life, to the three wizards.
‘Erlein,’ he said softly. ‘You know what must be done.’
‘I do,’ said the Senzian. He hesitated. ‘Pray for the Triad’s blessing upon the three of us. Upon all of us.’
‘Whatever you’re going to do, you had better hurry,’ Ducas said bluntly. ‘The Barbadian centre is starting to give.’
‘We are in your hands,’ Alessan said to Erlein. He seemed about to say something more, but did not. Erlein turned to Sandre and Sertino who had moved nearer to him. All of the others stepped back a little, to leave the three of them alone.
‘Link!’ said Erlein di Senzio.
On the plain at the back of his army, but near to them and in their midst—because distance mattered in magic—Alberico of Barbadior had spent the morning wondering if the gods of the Empire had abandoned him at last. Even the dark-horned god of sorcerers and the night-riding Queen on her Mare. His thoughts, such thoughts as he could manage to coherently form under the ceaseless, mind-pounding onslaught of the Ygrathen, were black with awareness of ruin; it seemed to him as if there were ashes in his heart choking his throat.
It had seemed so simple once. All that would be needed were planning and patience and discipline, and if he had any qualities, any virtues at all, they were those. Twenty years’ worth of each of them here in the service of his long ambition.
But now, as the merciless bronze sun reached its zenith and slipped past and began its descent towards the sea, Alberico knew with finality that he had been right at the first and wrong at the last. Winning the whole of the Palm had never mattered, but losing it meant losing everything. Including his life. For there was nowhere to run, or hide.
The Ygrathen was brutally, stupefyingly strong. He had known it, he had always known it. Had feared the man not as a coward does, but as one who has taken the measure of something and knows exactly what it is.
At dawn, after that crimson beacon had flamed from Brandin’s hand on his hill in the west, Alberico had allowed himself to hope, even briefly to exult. He had only to defend his men. His armies were almost three times as strong and they were facing only a small number of the trained soldiers of Ygrath. The rest of the army of the Western Palm was a flung-together mélange of artisans and traders, fishermen and farmers and scarcely bearded boys from the provinces.
He had only to blunt the thrust of Brandin’s sorcery from the hill and let his soldiers do their work. He had no need to push his own powers outward against his foe. Only to resist. Only defend.
If only he could. For as the morning wore on and gathered heat to itself like a smothering cloak, Alberico felt his mind-wall begin, by grudging, agonizing degrees, to flatten and bend under the passionate, steady, numbing insistence of Brandin’s attack. Endlessly the Ygrathen’s waves of fatigue and weakness flowed down from his hill upon the Barbadian army. Wave after wave after wave, tireless as the surf.
And Alberico had to block them, to absorb and screen those waves, so his soldiers could fight on, unafraid, unsapped in their courage and strength save by the sweltering heat of the sun—which was blazing down upon the enemy too.
Well before noon some of the Ygrathen’s spell began to leak through. Alberico couldn’t hold it all. It just kept coming and coming, monotonous as rain or surf, without alteration in rhythm or degree. Simple power, hugely pouring forth.
Soon—far too soon, too early in the day—the Barbadians began to feel as if they were fighting uphill, even on a level plain, as if the sun actually was fiercer above their heads than on the men they fought, as if their confidence and courage were seeping away with the sweat that poured from them, soaking through their clothing and armour.
Only the sheer weight of numbers kept them level, kept that Senzian plain in balance all morning long. His eyes closed, sitting in the great, canopied
