Scorio stared with mute helplessness. It wasn’t a question of mana; Plassus seemed to have inexhaustible reserves. It was simply that the man was keeping in abeyance hundreds of fiends and forcing his path through an army while shepherding almost a hundred Great Souls at once.
“I need to help,” said Scorio, forcing himself to stand straight.
“What?” Naomi’s outrage was sharp. “How? Let Plassus do what he does best!”
The air was devoid of mana. Scorio could dimly sense Plassus draining everything within a wide radius before it came anywhere close for the others to use. But his reservoir was still mostly full, and though it hurt, he knew he had to do something.
So Scorio ignited his Heart, earning surprised stares from dozens gathered around them, and surged up into his scaled form. He repressed a wince as he did so; his Heart felt raw, tender, but he put the pain aside and before Naomi could protest he leaped and extended his wings.
Shouts of alarm and surprise came from the Great Souls around them, but he ignored them. Up he flew, a half-dozen powerful wing beats, and when he drew close to the inward facing fiends suspended all around the surface of Plassus’ sphere, he got to work.
The quickest way to slaughter them was to turn into his flame form. Though it caused the fabric of his soul to shudder, Scorio summoned the black fire and became a wraith of destruction, then set to flying as rapidly as he could through the frozen ranks.
Fiends blackened, charred, and died.
And as they died Plassus’ power released them so that they began to fall upon the upturned faces below.
It felt akin to holding his breath. Scorio fought to remain in his flame form for as long as possible, passing through futile strikes and hate-burning eyes like a swimmer fighting to reach a distant hole in the ice. Only when he felt his mind reeling and his vision crowding with dancing motes of light did he inhale the flames into his chest, turn around so that he flew on his back, and unleashed his fiery plume across a dozen more fiends.
They howled and screamed and burned and died.
Scorio gasped and allowed himself to fall, twisting about to spread his wings and catch himself moments before hitting the floor. Allowing his Heart to gutter, he dropped the last few yards beside Naomi and slumped hard.
But the change was noticeable. Plassus raised his head, grinned a wolfish grin, and with the tendons sticking out in his neck increased their pace.
They climbed over dunes. Faster and faster, till again the protective sphere filled with trapped fiends and again Scorio rose to butcher them where they hung.
In such manner they progressed the last few miles till the great boulder wall rose above them, blotting out half the sky. Carelessly stacked rocks the size of houses, boulders the size of the war camp, rose hundreds of yards into the sky. Some were so large that they’d have choked the entrance to Bastion, yet all were uniformly the same dismal gray, rounded and smoothed as if by the passage of a titanic river. The cracks and crevice’s between them were pitch dark, and it was toward a single, solitary boulder that stood alone out in the last stretch of desert that Plassus plowed, his whole body shaking with effort, hunched and straining once more.
One of the boulder’s sides sloped steeply down to the sand, and up this Plassus drove them all, his power giving them one final push so that they rushed higher and higher up the smooth, firm surface. Thirty, forty yards they climbed, and then they reached the top, flat as a mesa, gently whorled with dust and sand filling the cracks. The other three sides were sheer, dropping precipitously to the ground, and with a groan Plassus released his power at last and crashed to one knee.
Fiends rained down upon them all, but the others in their company had recovered. Fyrona, Nyrix, and others unleashed their attacks on the falling Okozs, torching and butchering them in midair.
For the first time in what felt like a lifetime, Scorio could see the sky. The sun was descending behind the titanic wall, so that huge shadows stretched out over the Bone Plains, bathing everything in velvet shadow.
Taron moved to the head of the broad ramp that led down to the desert and stretched forth his arms. Scorio rushed up beside him just in time to see scores of fiends lose purchase on the slope and slide down, tumbling atop each other to pile up upon the sand.
But the winged fiends cared nothing for the Pyre Lord’s power. They dove in great swoops upon their company, drawing blasts and attacks but never allowing them to relax.
Scorio stepped up alongside Taron. “How are you holding up?”
The pale man’s face was dusty, with a streak of blood from a scalp wound running down his cheek. His shoulders rose and fell as his Heart blazed, but he kept his hands extended, and the fiends failed to climb up to them.
“I’m doing quite well,” said Taron. “A lovely day. You?”
Scorio laughed and raked his hand through his sticky hair. “How long can you keep that ramp smooth?”
“A little while longer.” Taron flexed his fingers, widened his stance, and lowered his chin. “Long enough.”
Scorio turned and scanned the survivors. There was no sign of Juna, but to his delight he saw Kelona sitting with her arms wrapped around her knees, head hanging low. So many dead. Rharvyn, Penaela, Ursan, Wesanin, almost all the Tomb Sparks, most of the Flame Vaults. The Shadow Petal had moved to one side of the mesa to gaze out and up at the huge wall, Naomi beside her. A small knot of ranking Great Souls had gathered around Plassus who was drinking powerfully from a metal bottle, and Scorio jogged over just in time for the Charnel Duke to toss the bottle aside, the last droplets of what looked like coalesced Sapphire mana flying through the air.
“The fiends are moving north,” snarled Eorox, one of Plassus’ Blood Barons. “They weren’t after us. We simply got in their way.”
“We could sit tight here,” said Voxoth, another Pyre Lord, as tall and cadaverous as Eorox was short and bullish. “Let the bulk of the army pass us, then break south to rejoin with the LastRock contingent.”
“Pah,” said Plassus. “Run to Charoth and Aezryna with our tails between our legs? Never. We’re here in the thick of it, and we might as well be of use. The gods know we’ve sacrificed enough fighters for nothing. It’s on us to redeem those deaths.”
“How?” Eorox again, his square face darkening. “By running around like headless chickens?”
Plassus chuckled. “The Blood Ox pulled his fiends from all their holes and sent them north. They’ll flood what’s left of our war camp and devour anyone that gets in their way. But this -” and he waved his hand at the desert beyond, “all this is but a distraction. He must have known he was poised to lose his fiends. Better to throw them away like this than have Jova bloody Spike steal them out from under him.”
“So?” Eorox threw up his arms. “How does that help us?”
“That means the Blood Ox has abandoned the Bone Plains.” Plassus raked his sweat-soaked locks back. “Either he’s quit and is beating a retreat for the Silver Unfathom, or he’s going all out for Bastion.”
Scorio felt a surety suffuse him. “North.”
“Aye,” said Plassus, glancing Scorio up and down. “The Blood Ox I know will never quit. He’s mad for blood and victory.”
Voxoth grimaced and sighted along the massive wall. “His elites are starved and weak. He’d not drive them heedlessly into the Iron Weald. The Bronze here barely sustains them. Iron will be their starvation.”