With the snow slowing their pace, and even more the walking speed of the men on foot, the great army of Luukessia took the better part of the day to get to the flat lands that had been marked for the site of their battle. There were no tents set up when they arrived, but fires were set. The whole camp was a buzz of subdued activity; quiet in the gloom, the snow still coming down. There were whispers, rumors, flat-out lies, and all of them reached Cyrus’s ears as he walked through the encampment, alone, his feet crunching through the snow. Men were huddled near fires for warmth; and every once in a good while he saw a woman in armor or with a sword. There was thin stew cooking and not much else. A skin of ice was broken off a nearby creek for drinking water and for boiling, and latrines were set up over a hill to the rear. Coming back from them, Terian said, “I suggest we try and lead the scourge in that direction when they come; it’ll be certain to send them running back to the north.”
“Even on such a cold day as this?” Martaina had her bow out and was fletching, working on arrows, putting tips upon shafts she had carved while gathering wood earlier. The shafts had a wet look to them, and when she caught Cyrus looking she shrugged. “I work with what I have.”
The night came upon them early, and no sign of the aurora was to be had under the cloudy, still-snowing skies. It was quiet in the camp, though Cyrus wondered how many men were actually sleeping. The snows came down on them, and still no tents had been set up; the need for mobility and a quick retreat trumped comfort, and so tens of thousands of men and a few hundred women lay beneath a sky that wafted snow down upon them. Aisling lay next to him, of course, and as much as she had tried to take his mind off of all matters, it had not worked as it did before, and he lay awake again, unease hanging over him as he hoped sleep would claim him, yet knowing that it would not.
Dawn was a grim affair, and the snow went ever on, unhalting, now almost a foot deep. It flurried hard in spurts then reduced to a manageable few flakes before picking up again. The wind howled, sending icy slaps hard against the men who were standing around fires that were whipped with every gust. They kept their heads low, their cowls and collars up to get warmth by any means they could find.
The first messenger for the army came an hour after daybreak, when pickled eggs, hard cheese and bread were being eaten by the armies of Actaluere and Galbadien. The Sanctuary members ate conjured bread and water with their supplies. An uneasy quiet hung in the air until the messenger appeared, a half-elf, half-human warrior whom Cyrus knew only in passing. The man was exhausted, it was obvious, his eyes red with fatigue. He whispered a few words to Curatio and then stumbled into the nearest bedroll, not even bothering to care that it wasn’t his own.
“They’ll be here within hours,” Curatio said. “Perhaps two, perhaps a little more, depending on how well our efforts to hold them back go. The whole line is exhausted; which should not be surprising, as they’ve been performing a strategy of engaging and falling back for months now. When we left them a week ago,” he gave a quick nod to Terian, “I wondered if they’d be able to hold for as long as it would take. I suppose they have.”
“How is our force doing?” Cyrus asked.
“Faring well,” Curatio said, snow turning his hair white. “They’ve never once been the cause of a retreat. It’s become obvious, though, that these things are drawn to life, absolutely drawn to it. They doggedly come at us, ignore the possibility of pulling a wide flanking maneuver; we’ve seen them break off in numbers when we pass a village that still has occupants. They go, they slaughter, they return with bloodied faces. I honestly thought they’d take longer to get here, but it would appear the army is wearier than even I thought.”
Cyrus looked at the messenger, already well asleep. “We’ll give them as much rest as we can afford. Hopefully this fresh army pouring into the fight will allow us to push forward.”
Curatio smiled and nodded. “Let us hope.”
“They’ve changed,” came the muffled words of the man laying on the bedroll, the half-elf. “They’re more dogged now, trying to flank more.” He didn’t roll over, but turned his head slightly. “They come at our weaknesses, too; not that they didn’t before, but Odellan says it’s worse now, as though they can exploit them, sense their flaws and approaches. More strategy, less brutal anger. There’s something else, too.” The half elf rolled over and looked at Cyrus through half-lidded eyes. “There’s a master, we think. One that stays in the distance, but we see him. Tall as two men, a four-legged creature, and it bears a mark of sorts. It stands off, growls at the others, and they move almost like it tells them to. We’ve had archers try and kill it, but it stays out of range of spells and arrows.” He looked directly at Cyrus. “We think it’s their General, the thing that leads them.”
Cyrus felt the cold wind pick up in a gust just then, carrying the sounds around his ears like a howling of the wind. The snow fell on, down around them, and the quiet descended again, except for the wind, as he sat there near the fire-and derived no warmth from it at all.
Chapter 81
The snowfall was at a blessed slowdown as they stood all in a line, a quarter mile from the campsite. Cyrus’s nose hairs felt well frozen, and every breath just added to the searing pain behind his cheeks and eyes, as though someone had taken a frozen hammer and tapped behind them gently for quite some time. His sweat had frozen to his skin, and whatever breakfast he’d eaten-he could little recall now what it had been-was sitting poorly, and threatening to come back up. The cold had seeped to the bone and all was quiet save for the roar of the wind when it picked up. It ran with near continuousness now, driving the snow sideways at its worst and at a forty-five degree angle at best.
It was the sound that reached them first, the yells and battle cries of men weary and desperate. They saw them shortly thereafter, in the distance, through the haze made by the snow.
“This is an ill time and place for a fight,” Terian said, and Cyrus glanced over to realize that the dark knight was next to him.
“Because we can see little, our cavalry is unable to operate in the heavy snow and our infantry is slowed to being unable to advance?” Cyrus let the irony seep in as he said it.
“Also, it’s colder than your elven girlfriend’s touch and we’re relieving an army that’s likely to break from fatigue as soon as they realize we’re here to take up for them.” His eyes glittered in the bare light of a sun that none of them could see. “If they manage to let us take over as the front line without breaking, it will be a miracle of military discipline of the highest order.”
Cyrus looked forward to the line stretched in front of him, and saw others closer, the walking wounded, and a few carrying men on makeshift stretchers made of bedrolls and all manner of other things. “Would I be wrong in assuming there won’t be many wounded?”
“Most have been left behind,” Terian answered. “It became obvious after you left that our healers were not nearly enough to handle the entire army under sustained assault; they lacked the magical energy to come close to saving everyone. The Luukessians played it carefully after that; if a man fell and ended up behind the enemy’s line, he was given up lost so as not to cost five more trying to recover him.” The dark knight set his jaw. “It’s an ugly thing, what they do to those who fall. I wouldn’t wish it on anybody. Our rangers nearly ran out of arrows putting the poor bastards out of their misery.”
“We lose any of ours that way?” Cyrus asked, not really wanting to know the answer.
“Couple of disappearances,” Curatio said from behind Cyrus. The army of Galbadien and Actaluere sandwiched the small group of them on either side. “Likely fell in the night and we didn’t see or hear them, you know … in the heat of the battle.”