So he supposed he'd better get to it. 'Archers!' he bellowed.
'Remember who you're supposed to kill, and shoot them!'
His bowmen stood upright. Some of them loosed at their counterparts on the other side of the battlefield. Jhesrhi, who had a particular knack for elemental magic, augmented their efforts with an explosion of flame that tore a dozen Aglarondans apart. The remaining Brotherhood archers shot at enemy knights and officers, equestrian figures armored from head to toe, wherever they spotted them. Gaedynn took aim at a chestnut destrier and drove an arrow into its neck. It fell, catching its rider's leg between its bulk and the ground and, with any luck, crippling him. Not a chivalrous tactic, Gaedynn reflected, but then, he wasn't a chivalrous fellow.
Nevron smiled, savoring the sight of thousands of warriors striving to spill one another's blood, the deafening racket of the bellowed war cries and the shrieks of agony. Unlike his fellow zulkirs, he relished the perilous tumult of the battlefield. Indeed, it was still his dream to abandon the dreary mortal plane and, unlike any living human being before him, conquer an empire in the higher worlds. Regrettably, the chaos of the past century, as magic and the very structure of the cosmos redefined themselves, had persuaded him to bide his time.
The demons and devils that accompanied him everywhere, caged in rings, amulets, or tattoos, shared his exhilaration. They roared and threatened, begged and wheedled, in voices only he could hear, urging him to unleash them to join the slaughter.
Although the zulkirs had arranged their formation with the Brotherhood of the Griffon at the center, the natural focus for the Aglarondans' greatest efforts, there were plenty of the enemy to go around, and they were making a creditable attempt to strike at every target within reach. Thunderclaps boomed in a ragged volley, and five flares of lightning leaped forth at the zulkirs' right wing, where Nevron stood amid a circle of lesser Red Wizards.
The thunderbolts winked out of existence short of their targets. Standing some distance away, Lallara gave a brusque, self-satisfied nod that flapped the loose flesh dangling under her chin. The old hag might be abrasive and disagreeable in every conceivable way, but Nevron had to concede that, despite the appearance of decrepitude she'd allowed to overtake her, her command of abjuration, the magic of protection, remained as formidable as ever.
Something similar might be said of Lauzoril. He looked like a priggish clerk or bloodless functionary someone had dressed in the scarlet robes of an archmage as a joke. But when he murmured a spell and swirled his hands, enchantment, the magic of the mind, plunged a cantering troop of enemy horse archers into terror, and they wheeled and galloped back the way they'd come.
Golden greatswords clasped in their fists, a dozen crimson-skinned angelic warriors abruptly appeared more or less in the same place from which the thunderbolts had stabbed. Nevron surmised that, invisible behind the spear-and-shield fighters assigned to protect them, the same wizards who'd evoked the lightning were trying a different tactic.
In so doing, they'd strayed into Nevron's area of expertise. He decided it was his turn to demonstrate that the wizardry of Aglarond, its vaunted elven secrets notwithstanding, was no match for the darker arts of Thay.
As the angels charged, he snapped his fingers. Three obese figures shimmered into material existence around him, each twice as tall as a man, with a pair of horns jutting from its head and anguished faces pressing out against the skin from inside its distended belly. Nevron heard the faces wailing even over the ambient din of the battlefield.
Careless of the humans they trampled or knocked aside, the solamiths lumbered forward to intercept the archons. The demons tore hunks of flesh from their own bodies and threw them. The missiles exploded when they struck the ground, engulfing the angels in blasts of dark, somehow filthy-looking flame.
Aoth, Bareris, and Mirror waited for the rest of the griffon riders to join them in the air. Then Aoth swept his spear forward, signaling the attack.
His men shot arrows from the saddle. He rained down fire, lightning, hail, and acid, the spells of destruction that were a warmage's stock-in-trade. For an instant he remembered how, ashamed of breaking his pledge to the simbarchs, he'd done his best to sneak away from Veltalar without shedding Aglarondan blood. Well, the time for such squeamishness was past.
A long javelin-cast across the sky, Bareris rode singing, his long white fingers plucking the strings of a black harp. He was high enough above the ground that, were his music not infused with magic, no one below would even have heard him. But as it was, a company of enemy crossbowmen clutched at their ears, reeled, and fell. A couple tried to stab quarrels into their ears, while another drew his dagger and slashed his own throat.
Then Bareris oriented on a dead elf knight, a wealthy lord or mighty champion judging from the gore-stained magnificence of his trappings. The bard's song brought the corpse scrambling to its feet to drive its slender gleaming sword into another elf's back.
Meanwhile, the Aglarondans shot arrows and flares of magic at the foes harrying them from overhead. Trained to veer and dodge, the griffons avoided many such attacks, and their boiled-leather armor and natural hardiness protected them from others. When none of those defenses sufficed, a steed and its rider plummeted to smash against the ground.
Jet swerved suddenly. Aoth knew his familiar was evading and, since he himself hadn't detected an imminent threat, looked into the griffon's mind to find out where it was.
Above and to the right. He jerked around to see a trio of wasps as big as Jet himself diving at them, their wings a buzzing blur.
Jet couldn't wheel in time to bring his beak and talons to bear. It was up to Aoth. He burned one wasp to ash with a fan-shaped blaze of flame, but by then the other two were right on top of him. He drove his spear into one creature's midsection, channeled lethal force through the weapon, and the impaled wasp began to smoke and char. It clung to life, however, and jabbed its stinger at him repeatedly. He blocked the strokes with his mithral targe- each one slammed his shield arm back against his torso-but that left him with no hands or gear to ward off the third wasp hurtling at his head.
The third insect convulsed and, patches of its body withering and rotting, dropped. Still swinging his shadow-sword, Mirror chased the dying wasp toward the ground.
Though she never would have admitted it to any of her fellow officers-particularly Gaedynn-Jhesrhi lacked the almost preternatural ability to predict the surge and ebb of combat that Aoth and certain others sometimes displayed. Thus, even though she and her allies were expecting a great charge, she had no idea it was about to begin until the enemy bellowed and all plunged forward at once. Their running footsteps and galloping hoofbeats shook the ground beneath her boots.
Up until now, although skirmisher had traded blows with skirmisher, and some eager warriors had forayed back and forth, it had mostly been archers, crossbowmen, and spellcasters fighting the battle. Throughout this preliminary phase, the zulkirs' forces had labored to degrade the Aglarondans' ability to attack at range, and to harass the knights and lords waiting idly on their mounts. The goal was to goad them into the charge they had just now launched.
From the enemy perspective, the move no doubt made sense. They outnumbered the zulkirs' troops by a comfortable margin, and they had considerably more horsemen. They should be able to smash the Thayan formation.
But they assumed that because they didn't know that Jhesrhi, fat Samas Kul, and some of his underlings had arrived at the field before them and prepared the ground. They didn't know what magic their foes intended to unleash.
Or else they do know, Jhesrhi thought wryly, and they think they have a trick that trumps ours. If she'd learned anything since Aoth delivered her from servitude and gave her a place in the Brotherhood, it was that in war, nothing was certain.
She peered through the gap between the shields two warriors held to protect her. When she judged that the enemy lancers, pounding along in advance of a horde of foot soldiers, had come far enough, she chanted words of power.
Elsewhere in the zulkirs' formation, Samas Kul and the Red Wizards he commanded did the same. She could tell because so much magic, discharged at the same time and to the same end, darkened the air and made it smell
