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There was no time to mourn.
He gave them all a quick pat, and they licked him vigorously. Who was reassuring whom? As he straightened, he tried to make sense of the field.
The east and north lines were gone and those ramparts given up to the Eika advance. For the moment only flurries of fighting raged to the south and west, where the Eika had had little luck up to now. Here, down off the top of the hill, Alain and his company waited and watched as Eika looted Lavastine’s camp. Where the night before the commanders had discussed strategy, the enemy now reveled. Alain could pick out individuals, Eika somewhat larger than the rest and clad in glittering gold and silver mail girdles that draped from hip to knee, flashing and glinting in the sunlight. Each of these—and there were not many—walked through the carnage with an easy lilting step. Each had a standard beside him, a grotesque pole festooned with feathers and bones and skins and other unknowable things. These were princelings like Fifth Son: Bloodheart’s many sons.
They howled and the slow roll of the drums quickened. The Eika gave up their looting, the dogs were kicked and slapped into obedience, and they formed up again.
With a howl, they attacked. A huge Eika princeling hefted his obsidian-edged club and sprang forward at their head. Lavastine’s captain bolted forward to brace the line for the impact, but it was no use. The line of men split asunder as two shieldmen were bowled over by the massive Eika. The captain thrust with the banner pole and stuck the Eika princeling in the brow, the point lodging in the scaly forehead. The creature flailed and smashed its club into the banner pole, breaking it, then grasped the splintered end, tugged, and heaved the captain bodily forward and struck him to the ground. With the point of the pole still thrust out from its forehead and the Lavas banner drapped over its shoulders like a cloak, the Eika plunged on, roaring.
Men screamed and retreated and the line dissolved into chaos. But Alain stepped up to meet him with a blow swung with all of his strength. The Eika caught it with his bare hand, the sword’s point splitting the skin but doing no more damage than that, and then wrenched Alain forward, and down, and lifted his club for the death blow.
Alain tried to shift his shield, but it was too late. It was too little. More Eika swarmed past toward the crumbling troops. The hounds had vanished into the maelstrom.
I am with you Alain. You have kept your promise to me.
The club arced down, but he was a shadow and she the life that lived within the light. She was there, a thing of effortless and terrible beauty as she wielded the sword that is both war and death.
She rolled and the princeling’s killing blow struck earth, spitting clods into the air, into Alain’s teeth. She cut to the back of the Eika’s leg, hamstringing it, and the Eika fell. It seemed no more than a dance as she rolled up to her feet, and with a second blow, as fast as the lightning strikes to herald the coming of thunder, she beheaded the savage.
With her, Alain retreated, but only to form up the line around him—around her. Where the shields parted, where the line buckled or men’s spirits wavered, he had only to go, the shadow to her light, and she would go there as well. In her wake men’s spirits lifted, and they fought with renewed ferocity, shouting his name: “Lord Alain! Lord Alain!”
For where she stood, where Alain was, no charge could succeed. But even the Lady of Battles could not succeed against the thousands, the endless onslaught of savage Eika and their ravening dogs.
The Eika surged forward. Drums pounded until he could hear nothing above them, not even the clash of shield and sword, not even the screams of the wounded or the howling of dogs. He could not be everywhere at once, and where he was not, the line gave way.
The Eika came on and on up the hill from all sides, and soon all sides were hard-pressed. The drums boomed. With a sudden shift of rhythm, the force of their reverberation deafened him, and the very hill beneath trembled as the shield wall failed in a dozen places and the battle no longer had order.
It became a melee as men clumped together fighting desperately just to stay alive. Eika flowed in from all sides. Fear clutched at Alain’s throat as he realized how few were still afoot—and those who fell had no chance against the dogs.
Even the Lady stilled, staring. The hounds boiled up to him then, yipping. Sorrow took his tattered tabard in his teeth and dragged him westward and in this way, with the Lady at the point and Alain right behind her, they drove westward step by agonizing step down the hill toward the distant shelter of the western forest. Men fell in beside him and behind him, seeking shelter, seeking safety in what numbers they had left to them, a wedge of men thrusting through the Eika onslaught. With each step they struggled as Eika raged forward. They had no choice but to escape to the woods, for their hill and their camp—and the day—was lost.
All was lost.
He could no longer see the plain, only the horde of Eika surrounding them.
At the point of their wedge, the Lady cut a path westward until they were at the west “gate,” its wagons smashed and dead bodies littering the gap. The drumbeat increased, and with each beat the determination of the Eika to stop them from retreat grew. There, at the ruined gate, their wedge ground to a halt. The sun beat down with the hammer blow of heat.
With a great breath, like a beast so immense that its voice was that of a thousand and more mouths, the Eika shifted, steadied, and howled until the roar of it drove men to their knees under the merciless bright eye of the sun.
Only the Lady blazed bright in answer. And only Alain could see her as, behind her, he lifted his sword in desperation.
“Hold fast!” he cried. “God is with us!”
But no one could hear him.
6
SHE did not count the stairs, only cursed each clank and rustle and whisper from the men behind her. But no Eika waited for them where the stone steps curved upward and opened into the crypt. She stumbled on a gravestone and fell to one knee as the rest came up behind her, emerging one by one into black silence.
Erkanwulf helped her up.
Each least movement or murmured comment fell heavily, weighted by the dampening earth and magnified by the stillness of the waiting dead.
“Hush,” said Lavastine. “Listen.”
They listened but heard nothing but their own breathing.
“Now.” He did not need to speak loudly. In the dim light afforded by torches, ears became keen of hearing. “We must open the gates of Gent. And we must kill Bloodheart, if we are able. My experience of the Eika tells me that they follow a war chief and will fight like dogs among themselves if that leader is dead.”
