Kusyl looks blankly at his captain.
“Discharge firelances! Now!” Lorn snaps at Kusyl.
“All firelances! Now!” echoes the junior squad leader.
“Aim at the head!” Lorn commands.
“The head!” Olisenn’s and Kusyl’s orders merge.
Firelance beams play across the thrashing lizard, winking out of existence as lance after lance is depleted.
The long tail lashes sideways and high.
Lorn cannot even yell before it smashes through a lancer from the first squad who has ridden too close. Then that tail,like a serpent, or an independent being, thumps up and down in slow beats, pounding itself into the ground, and pulping both dead lancer and mount.
Mmmnnnn …. The last mental scream rocks Lorn, both with its dying force, and the sense of despair.
Lorn takes a deep breath.
The lizard twitches … and keeps twitching ….
“Hold your discharges! Hold discharges!” Lorn orders.
The lancers watch the dying lizard.
The squad leaders watch the lizard, the crushed mound of the tree’s crown, and the trunk that leads back to the Accursed Forest.
Lorn watches the lizard, the crown, trunk, and the senior squad leader.
There is a sigh, like a dying wind, and a,last twitch, and the monster lies inert.
Lorn and the two squad leaders still study both the crushed vegetation of the crown and the lizard’s corpse for a time before any speak.
Finally, Lorn clears his throat. He has to do it twice before he can speak. “We need to check the far side as well.”
Both squad leaders nod slowly, reluctantly.
“Form up!”
While Second Company forms up, Lorn rides toward the dead lizard, looking for his sabre, but there is no sign of the weapon. The lancer captain nods and eases the gelding away from the dead beast.
Second Company rides slowly around the crown of the fallen tree. While there are rustles from the crown, and the acrid odor of crushed leaves comes and goes, nothing emerges from the twisted and splintered vegetation.
The company reins up on the southeastern side of the gray-brown trunk.
Lorn beckons to Olisenn, who edges his mount closer to the captain.
“We still need to send a messenger to the Engineers.”
“Ah … yes … ser.” Olisenn blots a face drenched in sweat.
Kusyl does not speak, but nods.
“We’ll have to keep watch here until the Engineers arrive.”
“Yes, ser.” Both squad leaders reply, neither with great enthusiasm.
Lorn takes out the grease stick and begins to jot down the particulars of where the trunk fell, and the ward locations, on the blank message scroll. Finally he hands it to Olisenn. “Warn the messenger to ride well clear of anything else that may have fallen.” Lorn pauses, then adds, “Have a half-score escort him around the trunk.”
“Yes, ser.” Olisenn eases his mount away from Lorn and toward the first squad.
Kusyl’s eyes stray to the enormous bulk of the dead stun lizard. “Never … never seen anything that big ….”
Neither has Lorn, and he nods, slowly. “You wonder how many more there might be waiting on the other side of the wall.”
“Rather not think on that, ser.” Kusyl glances from Lorn to where Olisenn briefs the lancer acting as messenger.
It will be a long afternoon and a longer night, Lorn suspects.
LXXIII
LORN DOES NOT sleep well, or long, and is up even before dawn, as worried by the comparative silence as by the bulk of the trunk and the section of ward-wall that does not function. He ignores the griminess he feels because the little water they have has to be carried from three kays to the north and does not even try to shave or wash, but merely takes a long swallow from his water bottle.
In the gray that will precede a clear dawn, with only a hint of mist rising from the Accursed Forest, he walks past the duty sentry toward the granite of the ward-wall. While he carries both a sabre that had belonged to one of the deadlancers, and his firelance, he knows he will need neither, and doubts that knowledge as well.
As he faces the wall, dry and smooth in the dawn despite the dew that coats the wall road and the ground, he can sense where the chaos flows end, perhaps a hundred and fifty cubits to his left, at the last functioning ward. Without the flaring webs of the chaos net, Lorn can sense the order-chaos depth of the Accursed Forest, and the solid granite wall by itself seems a frail barrier to the height and power of that intertwined order and chaos.
Lorn cocks his head, trying to recall words from his days as a student magus. “Always called the Forest order-death … never mentioned twined order and chaos,” he murmurs to himself. He looks up again, both with chaos-order senses and eyes, but he is not mistaken. The Forest has a depth of order wrapped in chaos, or chaos wrapped in order.
Despite the breach in the chaos net, as he continues to study the Accursed Forest, Lorn senses no probes of either order or chaos, and no creatures massing beyond the granite. He studies the Forest for a time longer, until the sun begins to rise above the deadland and fields to his left, but the silent presence and lack of overt threat does not change. When the sun falls on his shoulder and side, he turns and walks silently back toward the bivouac area.
By the time he reaches the tielines where the mounts are tethered, Olisenn is waiting, looking as bedraggled as Lorn feels. “You were at the wall, and it is not warded there. Was that wise, captain?”
“Probably not.” Lorn laughs. “I’ll learn, I’m sure.” He pauses as Kusyl walks toward them. “Good morning, Kusyl.”
“Good morning, ser.”
“I checked with all the sentries before I left.” Lorn’s eyes fall on Kusyl. “I was inspecting the ward-wall this morning. It’s been quiet all night.”
“Might be more creatures this morning,” hazards the junior squad leader.
“There might be,” Lorn agrees, looking at Olisenn. “How long before the Engineers arrive?”
“They have firewagons that can make good speed on the perimeter roads, and I would judge that they might arrive by midday-if they left last evening or early this morning.”
Lorn nods. “Both of you set some pickets, say, four from each squad. Just use the firelances to keep anything away. We’re not going to try to destroy anything else right now.” His smile is wry. “We don’t have the charges for that.”
“No, ser, we don’t,” Kusyl says strongly.
Olisenn frowns, but nods.
“I’m going to take a few men and ride back around the crown.” Lorn unties the gelding from the tieline. “Does it matter who I ask?”
“No, ser.”
After picking four men, nearly at random, Lorn checks the girths and the bridle and mounts the gelding. He and the four lancers slowly ride around the mass of tangled branches and crushed and uncrushed leaves that had formed the crown of the enormous tree. They circle the tangled mound at a distance of well over two hundred cubits from the nearest greenery. While there are occasional rustlings, and more than a few birds, including two enormous vulcrows that burst from the branches, they see no other creatures.
On the northwest side, a dozen vulcrows are tearing at the carcass of the stun lizard, but the birds scarcely raise their sharp hooked beaks. Two night leopards slink back to the branches as the riders near the dead creature.
After studying the area of the struggle with the lizard, and determining, again, that there is no sign of his lancer sabre, and no other creatures visible, at least, Lorn turns the gelding. “We’ll ride back now.”
As the five riders return to the main body of Second Company, Lorn watches the deadland and the battered crown, but while the rustlings continue, nothing emerges except occasional birds that he does not recognize, not that he has ever spent much effort in studying avians.
Olisenn and Kusyl are waiting, eyes expectant, as Lorn and his lancers reins up.