Twixt Heaven And Hell (12 page)

“Don’t know,” the wizard managed. “The first one attacked. Killed him… human sacrifice! Don’t know,” he repeated. His attention was drawn by yet another fiery column. “Continue!” he attempted to shout.

Robert stopped him. “Sir, no. You’re in no shape to continue. We’ve lost so many men we may not be able to stand up to any other attacks, and the men are exhausted to boot. If we don’t go now you won’t make it back to Bastion to tell what you’ve learned.” He glanced uncertainly towards the fallen sorcerer. “And what about him?”

Eager as Robert was to get his captain out of there, he realized that taking a sorcerer prisoner would be momentous. Darius realized it too, and it was this thought that began to bring him out of his addled state. He began to nod slowly, then more certainly as his brain deigned to work again.

A plan struck him all at once. Leading the Gryphons over to the fallen form of the sorcerer, he winced a bit as he realized that tattered pieces of men had been strewn everywhere in the murderous fit.

“You and you,” he indicated two of his soldiers. “Take his robes off. And the circlet on his head.” Darius looked around. There had to be at least one whole corpse! Locating one at last, he told the soldiers to switch the corpse’s armor for the sorcerer’s robes.

As they began to strip the sorcerer, he groaned. One of the soldiers looked up in alarm. “Sir! He’s still alive!”

Darius looked at them, perplexed at the question. “Yes – and keep him that way!” When they just kept looking at him, he frantically waved. “The robes, hurry!”

Finally they had the clothing switched and their sorcerer looked like just like every other enemy warrior. Then Darius breathed deeply and raised his hand towards the corpse that now wore the robes and circlet. A gout of flame leapt from his fingers. Silver began to melt and run into the charred flesh and bone as Darius destroyed any hope of recognizing who the nameless soldier had once been.

“There. Follow, Gryphons!”

With two of the largest lads carrying the disguised sorcerer, the Gryphons struck out north as fast as their weary legs would take them.

Chapter Sixteen

It was moments before sunset when the deathly weary Gryphons stumbled into the camp. Many of them nursed wounds that would have to be tended by the herb-growers and surgeons, which was a poor patch on the attention of an Angel. Now that the Enemy was so close, if any Angel arrived a Demon would surely show. The ensuing clash of Aeonians would destroy the camp and kill many men, all for nothing.

The vast command known in Bastion as Fourth Army was centered around a spring that fed a sprightly creek. The camp sat at the very northern approach to the Shambles, where the ground was yet too soft and uneven to support a real fortification. When combined with the terrain, the sheer size of the camp afforded it ample safety.

Like the rest of the Gryphons, Darius was exhausted. He, however, was one of the few unwounded amongst them – Robert himself had his sword arm up in a sling, and the pallor of fatigue covered his face. Darius ordered the man to rest, and went to secure care for his wounded men and a supply of herbs for his prisoner. The sorcerer was kept wrapped in a cloak to hide the enemy armor he wore, and Darius intended to keep him dosed with stupefying potions until he was brought safely to Bastion.

Despite his fatigue, Darius could find no rest. He sat wrapped in his coverings deep into the night, until finally Robert emerged from the darkness and sat heavily next to him.

Neither man spoke for a time. Darius was worrying at something with both hands as he stared at the dirt before him, obviously deep in thought.

“I did a count,” the wizard said, eventually. He tried to keep his voice even, but a hoarseness betrayed the turmoil within him.

Robert waited for his captain to continue.

“We lost over half of our men today, Robert. There are one hundred and twenty-three Gryphons in the camp.”

A sudden convulsion gripped the old soldier's throat and his gaze twitched down to the dirt. When they had left Bastion only weeks before, the Gryphons had numbered two hundred and eighty-one of the toughest, most experienced soldiers in or out of the city.

“Not one of the new recruits made it,” Darius continued in a flat voice. Robert's head bowed further.

Finally Robert spoke. “The Gryphons have never been through a fight like this, sir. No soldier has. Even our veterans couldn't have been prepared for it, much less...”

Robert trailed off, and both men went back to sitting in silence. Darius returned to brooding.

“What's that, sir?”

Robert was looking at Darius's hands, and the tiny object the wizard was rolling between his fingers. At Robert's words Darius stopped worrying at it and held it up to the firelight. Squinting, Robert saw that his captain held a small piece of wood, oak or ash, worn smooth by years of handling. There was a small stylized heart carved into the side.

“Something my father gave my mother, before he left on his first deployment to the border,” Darius said. “He told her to kiss it when she missed him. Every time he returned, the first thing he would do is kiss it as well. 'To collect what I missed,' he told her.”

Robert gave a tired smile. “Your father was a poet.”

Darius shook his head. “He was a herder. As was I, until the wizards discovered the talent in me when I was six. That was the last day I saw him. I heard from him twice a year, when he drove some of the herd to Bastion. He would carry a letter from my mother and he. I was always too busy to greet him.

“He was a sergeant with the Scouts. He had already done his service by the time I was born, but then came the debacle at Firthwinter. Bastion lost so many soldiers there, he was asked to return to service.”

“I was at that battle,” Robert said. “One of my first. Demons and Angels all about, men screaming... it still haunts me.”

Darius nodded absently. “I was still an acolyte. I got word from my mother that father had returned to the army. Four months later he was dead.”

Robert bowed his head in sympathy.

“He had given Bastion his years. He had a wife, children. He could have refused without shame.”

“You think he should have?” Robert asked.

Darius looked startled. “No. No, not at all. He was a man of great experience and skill – who knows how many men he kept safe with his return? His sense of duty told him to go, and so he left his family when Bastion called, never hesitating to give more.”

“Then you
are
like him, Captain.”

Darius smiled a sad, strange little smile.”As are you,” he said. “And every one of the Gryphons – and that is just the thing.”

He leaned close to Robert. “We are fighting, and getting these men killed, so that we can end the War for the sake of men like
them
.” Darius gave a sound that was somewhere between laughter and sob. “It is – daft. Or entirely sensible. I cannot decide which.”

Darius went back to worrying at the little piece of wood.

“I wonder what my father would say about it.”

Before they both lay down for rest, Darius mentioned that he would take any unwounded soldiers back south a distance to check for stragglers. If any of their men had fallen behind, he wanted to gather them up. Robert nodded, knowing that attempting to argue now would be useless. Both men were too weary, and in any case Robert thought that it was worth a try. They had lost so very many men.

Despite an entire day spent searching – and nearly brushing with the Enemy on several occasions, narrowly avoided due to Darius’s vigilance – no stragglers were found. As darkness fell, they returned to the camp.

The wizard in charge of the camp had been asleep when the Gryphons had arrived the night prior, and on Darius’s advice had not been disturbed. Darius had been too fatigued to speak with the man. Now, as the surviving members of the Gryphons entered his domain again, he came to meet them.

Wizard Robehr was an amiable sort, young for such a high post. One of the very few wizards whose father had also been magically talented, he had gotten a head start on his indoctrination into Council-sponsored traditional thinking. For all that, Darius did not dislike him. Robehr's willingness to listen to opposing points of view – before strongly disagreeing with them – softened his image as another pet of the Council.

“Darius!” he called as his peer came into sight. “You ran off this morning before I could get to you. Tell me everything.”

Shaking his head, Darius declined. “I need to report in to Bastion, Robehr, and I am weary. Listen in while I globe the Crown. You’ll learn everything you need to know.”

He was taken to the camp headquarters, a large tent with leather coverings on the ground and map tables taking up most of the room. There were several other wizards there, but Darius recognized none of them.

In the center was the globe. Darius activated it with a thought and a tiny flow of power. Immediately Wizard Geralt's face appeared in the crystal. Both Darius and Robehr could see him, but only Darius could hear Geralt's words.

“Darius, is that you? Handel’s beard, man! What are you doing with the Fourth?”

“There is no time,” Darius told the wizard whose name he could not recall. Spending so much time out of Bastion left him less familiar with his peers than he might wish, but it was a small price. “I must speak to a member of the High Council at once.”

The face disappeared, and Darius had to increase the flow of power to keep the connection open, now burdened with both ends. Some moments passed, and then Lazarus’s face appeared. Darius breathed a sigh of relief at the friendly visage.

“Darius!” Lazarus exclaimed. “What are you doing with the Fourth?” he echoed the previous man's question.

“I was in the Shambles when the attack came, Lazarus. I was not half a mile from the first spell.”

“Fort Andreth is taken, then?”

“No, Lazarus. Not Andreth – they took Fist.”

The old wizard looked thoughtful. “Strange. Andreth is the mightier of the two... Tell me what happened.”

Darius recounted the battle quickly. The sparse nature of his account helped when he decided to skip the fact that he had been ambushed, saved by a sorcerer, and had subsequently captured the man. An inner voice told him to hold that information close – even from Lazarus.

“How well were you able to study the spell? Can you counter it?”

“I think so, Lazarus. I know much, but it is still just memory and somewhat jumbled as well. We moved fast and fought often.”

Seeing the tiredness in Darius's face, Lazarus graciously asked no more questions, save inquiring if Darius would return to Bastion.

“Yes, immediately. I can’t say how long we’ll be – many of my men are hurt.”

“Good speed to you, Darius. I will relay this information to the council.”

“Thank you, Lazarus.”

As the magical link faded, Robehr spoke.

“Why don’t you leave some of your more seriously wounded men here? We can tend them well enough here. One at least looks like he couldn’t travel without many more days of rest.”

Darius knew he was referring to the captive sorcerer, drugged and disguised. He shook his head. “No, my men would never stand for it. We’ve lost too many comrades already. An Angel is sure to come to us once we’ve moved far enough away from the Enemy.”

Robehr relented. “I’ll have you freshly provisioned, then. You’ll leave in the morning?”

A curt nod. “With the dawn.”

True to his word, when the first faint glow broke against the clouds in the sky, Darius woke his men. They ate in silence. Morale was dreadfully low. The mad dash two days before had been strange and distasteful. They had slaughtered literally hundreds of enemy soldiers, usually in disorganized clumps. Each engagement left a few more comrades dead or hurt.

In an unwise glance at the men behind him, Darius had caught sight of a badly wounded soldier – who had been limping along with them valiantly for ten minutes, bleeding heavily from a gash in his left thigh – suddenly surrender to pain and inevitability. The man had not called out, nor drawn his comrades' attention. He had simply fallen to his knees, and lay down, vanishing amongst the tall grass.

Fighting back tears and forcing his mind back to studying the spells, Darius had run on.

The scene played again in the wizard’s head. It must have happened more than once, but he was thankful he had not seen it. That one vision was sure to haunt him for a long time to come.

With two unwounded soldiers carrying the drugged sorcerer on a litter, the Gryphons left the army camp. They would swing west around Fortress Nebeth and rejoin the Bastion road on the far side, keeping much further from the fortress than before.

With no further consumption of the herbs he’d been given, the sorcerer was lucid enough to trudge next to them through the endless, treeless grassland by midway through the first day. When they camped each night,  he was dosed back into senselessness. Darius would take no chances with the man, not after what he’d seen him do in the Shambles. Traitor to his own people or no, the man was as brutal and cruel as any sorcerer. Darius was the only wizard with the Gryphons, and even he needed to sleep sometime – which he would only consent to do once the prisoner was dosed into absolute oblivion.

By the third day they had gotten the trick of giving the prisoner enough of the herbs to keep him unconscious during the night, but able to walk come morning. The man moved in a daze, not quickly – but none of them did. Darius knew that the scramble to enter and to leave the Shambles had been a complete success. The soldiers knew this because he’d told them, but it was just empty words to them. The hundred and more missing faces were more powerful than some arcane knowledge their captain had gained.

At times, Darius nearly agreed.

The Gryphons moved in slow silence, their very pace a way of mourning the fallen. Darius did not hurry them, because that would have been disrespectful to the wounded and weary living. Darius did not try to cheer them, for that would have been disrespectful to the dead.

In the wizard’s head, he constantly went over what he had learned. He had studied the Enemy’s spell thoroughly and repeatedly, and once been close enough to catch the very beginning. He now knew that the spell was targeted not for a simple spot on a map, but for a certain point in the world, a place that was marked out somehow.

Going on the locations that had been attacked so far – regions that had been often held by the Enemy – Darius imagined that the spells were targeted by memory. All places held a unique mix of magics, and just as a man might notice a particularly large or gnarled tree Darius remembered many locations by their peculiar feel.

This information, at least, was comforting. The Enemy could not just pick a point and attack it. Preparations had to be made, sorcerers found and chosen who had been to the target. Bastion, Riverside, and the majority of Bastion’s lands were safe. The Enemy was not threatening anything new – they had just found new ways to threaten.

Darius now knew how the spell managed to leave no trace of itself, as well. The spell created a vortex that drew magic towards it. The origin of the spell remained with the caster – once the sorcerer moved through the portal, the spell shifted direction, devouring the energies of the new location. When the spell ended, the local magic was free to resume its natural pattern as if the intervening period had never occurred.