“You’re really quite the inspiration,” Cyrus said, and turned back to the northern horizon.
“I don’t see you sticking your neck out here under the axeman’s blade any longer than you have to,” the dwarf replied. “Or am I wrong and you’ll just hang around here being jolly in the hinterlands with these tribes of squabbling men and children who sit around the campfires at night trying to engineer up new ways to fornicate with their animals.”
“I don’t see them fornicating with animals,” Cyrus said, “but perhaps I spend my time in different places than you do.”
“This whole land reeks of backwardness,” Partus went on, undeterred by Cyrus’s jibe. “Their women are like property, they’ve got no magical ability at all, not enough to cast a light in early evening, and their finest hovels don’t even possess running water.” Another gob of spit made the same squirting noise, though this time Cyrus didn’t watch it. “This was a good lesson, thinking that things couldn’t get any worse than they had for me in Arkaria before I left; they can. They did. And I can’t bloody wait to get back.”
“You’re a charming fellow, Partus, don’t let anyone tell you differently,” Cyrus said and strode off down the front line, away from the dwarf. He didn’t say anything until he reached Odellan, who stood at ease but still more at attention than most of the men around him. “What do you say, Odellan? Are we ready?”
“Having not seen what you’ve seen about these enemies,” Odellan said, a little stiffly at first, “I don’t quite know what to expect. That said, I’m confident that we’re more up to the challenge than our companions from Syloreas and Actaluere.”
“You mean battle discipline?” Cyrus asked.
“Compared to the men who compose more than half of Syloreas’s fighting force, yes, I speak of discipline,” Odellan said. “But when comparing us to Actaluere, I mean belief. I think the men of Syloreas who came here of their own volition will fight harder than the professional army of Actaluere,” he said with a nod to the left. “I’ve looked in the eyes of some of those men dressed in skins and furs, with their swords and wooden shields handed down through generations. They’re here to fight for their homeland, for revenge in some cases if they made it out of the towns that fell. They won’t break for lack of courage and will fight so long as someone keeps leading them. Actaluere’s army, on the other hand, seems to know which way the wind is blowing. They’ve done this before-not this, specifically, but they’ve been in battles. Their men will keep an awareness, and if things turn unfavorable, I suspect their officers will be the first to order a careful retreat.”
“You think we’ll have a concern with our left flank?” Cyrus asked.
“I think I’d have a care with both flanks, if I were you, General,” Odellan said lightly. “But I wouldn’t concern myself overly much with the left. Theirs will be an orderly retreat if it comes, and they’ll warn us first so we can compensate. If the right breaks it will be quite a different story. They’ve got the volunteers sandwiched between us and the army regulars, so we may need to work harder to relieve the press on them if things get rough, may need to alter our line to cover their ground as the Syloreans fold toward us.”
Cyrus let a smile show, one he did not remotely feel but knew was necessary. “You’ve given this a great deal of thought.”
“As I should, General,” Odellan said. “As well I should.”
“Enemy on the horizon!” The shout came over them from the left, and Cyrus instinctively looked ahead, toward the mountains in the distance, trying to find the place where the fields met the lines of the mountains. There was movement there, to be sure, something too small to quite make out. If I had elven eyes, I might be able to see. His mind wandered. If I had elven … She flashed through his mind so quickly and subtly that he didn’t even know from whence she came. Dammit. Not now.
They waited in a tense formation as the movement went on, miles away, but edging closer. Cyrus had no spyglass like the kind he had seen in use on the top of the wall at Sanctuary from time to time. There was tension in the air, and the scent of the makeshift latrines blew from behind him, not so heavily it was overwhelming but enough to distract. I would hope that it shifts directions, but coming from the north might not be any better than the present option, given the smell of death that these things carry with them …
The wait was long, an hour or more before they were fully in sight, a few hundred feet away now. They became clearer as they got closer, and by the time that clarity was obvious, it was also clear that there were more of them than he had seen at any time previous. The ground crawled, a solid mass of grey flesh as far as his human eye could see, all the way back to the horizon and coming along the plains in a wedge that pointed directly at him, at his army.
There was no fear to be had for Cyrus. It was a cool sort of uncaring that filled him. Those around him made little enough noise, a few prayers offered up from some of the men as the enemy closed on them. There were shouts down the line in the ragged army of Sylorean volunteers, and little else but battle orders and invocations for calm coming from the officers at the front of Actaluere’s forces. In the distance, Briyce Unger was giving a speech to the Sylorean army, but Cyrus was too far away to catch any of it. Milos Tiernan quietly disappeared into the ranks of his force just moments before the first of the scourge closed the distance with them. Cyrus watched them draw nearer, shuffling across the plains in a loping run, their four-legged gait unlike that of any animal he had seen before.
Their flesh was still pallid, the nearest thing to the rotting dead he could imagine without taking a trip to a graveyard with a shovel. In a flash, he recalled the wendigos of Mortus’s realm and realized that these were just a touch like those horrors but different somehow. Wendigos could speak, he knew, possessed some measure of conscious thought, though it was buried below the battle frenzy almost every time he had encountered them. These things were as dead inside as the worst criminal offenders he had ever encountered.
Their bleak eyes stared at him, black holes in their grey-skinned visages, their teeth pointed fangs. And how they ran: faster than a man, but slower than a horse, their gait akin to a three-legged animal but faster than one would expect of such a creature. They kept coming, Cyrus knew, and they would bunch up at the front line as the first of them started to fall. They were close now, only fifty feet away … thirty … ten …
He swung Praelior with brutal force in a short stab as the first of them leapt at him. All along the line he saw similar movement, heard the cries of battle joined, and he killed the first of them with a solid impalement that it ran headlong into. He kicked the body from his sword and brought it up just in time to catch the next one, his speed enhanced by the weapon’s enchantments enough that he could counter them faster than they could attack. He dodged out of the way of the next to come at him, letting the man behind him strike his first blow; he heard the sound of an axe driving home but was too busy dealing a killing blow of his own to shout congratulations. It was irrelevant, anyway; the front line was already beginning to muddle as the fight turned into a melee within seconds of contact with the enemy.
Cyrus waded through them, trying to keep his back to the men in the line behind him and letting through only what he could not stop personally, which was little. His sword moved in a flash of light, a dance of elegance. There was a bellow to his right and Partus unleashed a blast of force that tunneled through their foes and sent several hundred skyward as it flung them in its wake. The line of power cut through them for several hundred feet before it reached its end, but all along that line it appeared as though the earth had been shredded, all the grass cleared, the dirt upturned and every one of the scourge within that space had been tossed clear. That empty ground refilled only moments later, however, as the grey-skinned enemy flooded back into it, still surging forward toward the waiting armies.