Hands blazing with power, the Shaman lunged for him; there was no time to move out of the way, so Darian used the oldest of all of his defenses.
The Shaman’s right foot caught on the earth for a critical moment; he stumbled and fell, catching himself with his outstretched hands. The power he had meant to use to blast Darian discharged into the ground, creating nothing worse than a blackened spot and the smell of scorched dirt.
As he fell, Darian ran out of the way again; the Shaman picked himself up with red rage burning in his eyes. Darian reacted to the immediate drop in power just in time by strengthening his shields; this time the weapon he used was anything but subtle. He lashed at Darian with levin-bolts, whips of power that looked and hit like lightning.
The levin-bolts arced into his shields with a crack that hurt his ears and an eye-burning light that made his eyes water. He held his shields against the bolts as the Shaman poured power into them and the air around him tasted of a thunderstorm at its peak.
Abruptly, the Shaman released the bolts; Darian could barely see. Blinking tears out of his eyes, he used Mage-Sight to watch the Shaman instead, seeing him as a form laced with little threads of red and yellow.
Those threads blazed up as the ley-line ebbed, but this time Darian reacted before the Shaman could; he made the Shaman’s foot stick again as the man moved sideways before his attack. The Shaman hadn’t expected an offensive move after so much defense; this time he fell hard, and while he was down, Darian lashed him with eye-burning levin-bolts.
He held the bolts on his still-prone enemy until his own eyes had time to recover, then leaped sideways just as he released them, and just in time, for the moment he did so, the Shaman hit him with the conjured weapon he’d been planning to use.
A massive sphere of energy rolled toward him, looking like fire with teeth, threatening to engulf him. He made a quick guess and assumed that the Shaman would expect him to run; he stood his ground instead, and held his shields. The sphere rolled right over him; it was dangerous in itself, for it immediately began to suck power from his shields, but it wasn’t as dangerous as the jagged spikes of energy that blasted out a pit right where Darian would have been if he’d run.
That made another obstacle to avoid. He solved the problem of the sphere by puncturing its outer wall; it deflated like a punctured bladder, and vanished as if it were a flame out of fuel.
The Shaman was furious. He was about to have his temper cooled. Darian detachedly reasoned out his primary advantage against this Shaman. The Shaman’s use of power was formidable, and his endurance considerable, but it was all oriented toward obvious, surface-visible effects - which was only logical considering he was a Shaman who also sought power among his people - when you want to discourage challenges and impress your followers, why not use the most awe- and fear-inspiring magics?
Darian, however, was able to work beneath the surface. There were springs everywhere underground here; they accounted for part of the verdancy, part of the humidity, and were doubtless under pressure thanks to the large body of water nearby. Darian found the nearest underground reservoir, and with a few deft hand motions to help in the mental process of sculpting the channel underneath, brought it powerfully to the surface, right beneath the Shaman.
Water blasted upward in a cold geyser, knocking the other to the ground, and soaking him in moments.
Two can play at making holes in the earth.
And while he was at it - in the next breath, he aerated the ground around the Shaman, creating an ear-numbing protracted thunderclap, then super-saturated the ground beneath the Shaman with water from that same geyser, turning it into a sinkhole. The Shaman predictably began to struggle, miring himself up to the waist - at which time Darian cut off the geyser’s feeding-channel, leaving the pressure to build below the surface. Another twist of the magic and Darian chased all the water out of the mud pit, leaving the Shaman embedded in rock-hard ground.
Raven kept the Blood Bear warriors at the barricade; none got past the hedge of thorns backed by heavier pieces of tree trunk. Keisha pulled ten or twelve of Raven’s wounded to safety, mostly struck by arrows. After the first three, she got into a rhythm; wait for a lull, dash out, seize the victim by the shirt, haul him to protection. Then break off the arrowhead, pull the shaft out, stop the bleeding. Once that was done, most of her patients went grimly right back into the fray without pausing for more than a drink of water. She could hardly believe it - they must have been in terrible pain! But they didn’t seem to feel anything; as soon as she had them reasonably patched up with rough bandages and supportive bindings they grabbed another weapon and went for the barricade.
The noise and stench were awful; metal clanging against metal, arrows piercing leather and skin, men and women screaming and shouting, punctuated with Kel’s war shrieks and the cries of the raptors - old and new sweat, blood, rancid grease, churned mud. It all overwhelmed the senses, impossible to block out. She couldn’t ignore the chaos, so she endured it, and after the tenth (or twelfth) man ran back to the lines as she finished tying off the bandages on his upper arm, she looked around for another patient and discovered to her surprise that there weren’t any.
There were no more arrows flying into their lines; the fighting on this side of the barricade was all hand-to-hand, but now the advantage was with the defenders. They could continue to rain arrows down on the back rank of the enemy without even taking combatants from the line - the women and young boys stood off at a distance, lobbing their arrows in a high arc over the Raven lines and into the back ranks of Blood Bear. Blood Bear hadn’t managed to breach the barricade, as the thorns still held them at bay, and as bundles of thorns were broken and trampled by the sheer press of bodies, grimly determined children came dragging new ones to be shoved into place with boar-spears.
Boar-spears - strangely enough, those were proving to give Raven a real edge. They were long enough to reach over the barricade and stab at the enemy without exposing their wielder to the thorns. The blade, long and sharp to piece a boar’s tough hide, was about the same size as the short-swords all of the fighters were using, and the iron cross-bar designed to keep the boar from coming up the shaft at the hunter made effective quillons. Anyone could use it to stab; really good fighters could use it to slash as well. Although the only fatal wounds to Blood Bear so far had been caused by arrows the spearmen were holding the line.
But where was Wolverine?
Keisha stood on her toes behind the shelter of her carved pole, and craned her neck to look over the embattled defenders.
Wolverine had not moved a single pace forward. In fact, some of them looked embarrassed!
They broke the Shaman’s promise, that’s why, she thought, astonished. Blood Bear has broken the promise the Shaman made not to attack while he and Darian were fighting. This wasn’t a case of Northerner against out-land Southerner, where anything was fair and promises didn’t matter - this was tribe against tribe, where strict rules held.
And Blood Bear had broken the rules. No matter who survived this fight, Blood Bear had blackened the name of their tribe. Even their own totemic spirit might choose to desert them, and no tribe or individual would ever trust the word of a member of Blood Bear again. That meant no alliances, no intermarriages, no trade agreements, no intercourse of any kind. Essentially, it meant the death of the tribe. The only way a member of Blood Bear could survive the shunning would be if he somehow convinced the Chief of another tribe that he had not participated in the oathbreaking; then he could be adopted into a new tribe.