Cold Steel

Page 211

Rory was pacing back and forth along the length of one of the fallen pines like a caged lion at the prowl. A crow sat on a branch, watching him. I hurried over and chased it off. He offered me an uncorked bottle from which he had been drinking.
I took a swig of a harsh sack, winced, and handed the bottle back to him. “This is awful.”
Had he been in cat shape, his ears would have been flattened to his head. “This is awful! This isn’t hunting. You creatures ought to settle your arguments in a better way. Couldn’t one general challenge another for the right to stand with the pride? Who can possibly eat all that torn meat? If it were even tasty, which man-flesh is decidedly not!”
“How do you know what man-flesh tastes like?”
He stiffened, and for an instant I was sure he was going to snarl at me.
“Rory! Answer me!”
He took a step toward me, so threatening I raised my cane. Catching himself, he took a step back, but by the way his lips gapped to show a hint of teeth, I could see he was on the edge of biting or perhaps of telling me the truth. And I was suddenly very sure that I did not want to know the answer after all.
Artillery fire boomed over us. I ducked instinctively. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter.”
“There! Look!” a staff officer shouted to be heard above the deafening rattle and shot.
I ran back to the command group just in time to see yet another cavalry charge from out of the Coalition lines. Smoke rose from the guns in billows. The churn of ground between the two armies was speckled with fallen men, injured horses, and the detritus of lost weaponry. This time, as Coalition cavalry closed with the Iberians, fire broke out in the trampled grass around them. One rider in the middle ranks collapsed as if shot. A second rider toppled from his horse. As more men fell and horses tumbled, the cavalry sheared off and raced back toward their lines. A storm of bullets rained after their retreating backs.
The fire mages had gotten their range.
Yet even in the face of these devastating casualties, still another Coalition troop galloped down toward the artillery. Riders and horses fell before the barrage, but this time where fire broke out it was quenched. The artillery went dead. With shouts, the Coalition troops closed. Grass fires sparked up and died. Men fought hand to hand, swords and bayonets flashing.
A young officer wearing the white sash of the Kena’ani Sacred Band rode up on a lathered horse, pushing in front of another messenger. “General! Captain Barca sends his compliments and this message: The first outriders of the Roman column have been engaged about five miles south.”
Camjiata glanced overhead to where the sun had almost reached the zenith. “We should have broken the Coalition army before now. Drake, why have your fire mages not crushed every cold mage on the field? You assured me that fire would easily defeat ice.”
“There are so many cold mages, and they’re working in concert in a way they did not before, not even at Lemovis.”
“No doubt they can learn from experience as well as we can,” remarked Camjiata as he took a spyglass from an orderly. “Matters grow urgent. Lord Marius need only hold his ground and not retreat until the Romans arrive, and then we will be crushed between anvil and hammer. Our frontal attacks are hurting them, but not fast enough.”
He examined the sprawling field of battle in all its churning confusion, so many thousands of men that it seemed the earth crawled. “There. See how the Invictus Legion holds its ground. We have to turn their flank, for a frontal attack will not break them.”
He angled the spyglass to the north. About half a mile away a fortified estate stood amid the green crowns of an orchard. I remembered passing the house and gardens with Lord Gwyn’s skirmishers, who had told me it was called Red Mount. The compound had two walls, an outer wall that ringed the orchard and gardens and an inner wall that fortified the stone house. The flag of the Tarrant infantry, Lord Marius’s own crack troops, flew from the main house.
A column of Iberian infantry had laid siege to the estate an hour earlier. As we watched, a skirmish raged. Fire scorched across the orchard. Defenders hiding in the trees raced for the inner wall to escape the flames, but even as they were running the flames were sucked right out, killed by cold magic. Crossbow bolts rained over the wall, pummeling the Iberian infantry as it tried to advance. The struggle within the walled orchard was not visible, nor from this distance could I hear the sounds of whatever desperate melee was taking place beneath the trees.
“How can it be we have not yet taken that estate?” demanded Camjiata of his staff. His temper flashed, as dark as storm clouds. “Can you not see that it anchors the western flank of the Coalition army? No wonder Lord Marius holds the field. He need not worry about this flank, and thus can keep his center strong and take heavy losses against our superior weaponry but smaller numbers. Drake, why have the fire mages you brag of been defeated yet again by cold magic?”