[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
Page 202
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
cloth.
Then the caroming breaker of irock and soil smashed down from the middle, and
on both flanks. The companies in the vanguard were sprayed aside, then
harrowed under like shell soldiers abandoned to the muddied teeth of flood
tide.
The rear guard array became chewed, then engulfed mashed under the surge in
the moment they wheeled in hopes flight. If any screamed, their cries were
drowned out. If prayed, none were answered. Where an army had marched like
steel-studded velvet over grass, within a heartbeat and a breath, of living
soldiers, there were none.
The peaks channeled between them a racked furrow of turned stone and puffed
dirt. The titanic, roiling thunder of debris milled on in a mindless torrent
that dwarfed human works and consumed all things in its path.
Minutes passed, while the mountains shook to their roots from raw noise.
Then, in slowed force, the barrage dragged thin and slackened, spent into a
last, dying tumble of stray boulders. Fanned like a rucked, brown train in
its wake, a flayed span of ground wide enough to stun reason was left to
settle into dust and racked stillness. Stabbed through by the distress of
displaced birds, the thinner walls of human survivors offered up ragged
refrain: those few set by luck on the unfaulted rise where the hills were too
mild to slide, and one isolate group in the swale, protected where the
shoulder of the knoll had parted the riven marrow of the earth.
Separate from the advance, the company of the prince's personal guard was also
untouched. Spared only by distance, the men in their immaculate surcoats
stared in dumb shock at the site where their comrades had marched. The
demarcation was a cruel one. Like a ripped edge in cloth, the scar ended and
whole grass flicked in breezes silted with grit churned up by the mass of
downed stone.
Strewn at Lysaer's very feet, in disemboweled earth and crushed hope, a mass
grave site: plowed into irretrievable oblivion the pulped bits of tissue,
wood, and dented steel of what once had been twenty-eight thousand dedicated
men.
The howl of the Prince of the West clove the morning, shrill with grief and
wild pain. The light of his gift left his fist.
A flashfire bolt of distilled energy shrieked across distance and slammed
against the summit of the knoll. Impact carved up a flying gout of rocks, an
eruption of dead matter that yielded his rage no balm of satisfaction.
Lysaer wept for his impotent strength. The Shadow Master's spelled decoy of
banners and empty helmets flamed and melted under impact of his grief, leaving
the site razed bare.
Thrown off his berserk mount when the slide boomed past, then knocked flat a
second time by the light bolt's raw thud into the hillcrest above, Diegan,
Lord Commander of the royal war host struggled up from his knees. Around him,
spent thunder cracked and slammed in flat echoes against the changed face of
Dier Kenton. His hip and one shoulder flamed protest, the joints wrenched and
bruised from his falls.
Since the knoll had blocked his view as the cataclysm struck, he cast a dazed
glance at his surroundings. On all sides, he saw harrowed earth.
The day hung dimmed with dust, the sky itself stained gray-brown. Limned in
murk, the headwall of the vale on three sides lay cloven into a barrier of raw
cliffs, floored over in acres of rubble. Where scant minutes before his brave
army had marched under order and flocking standards, there remained only
knife-point shards of splintered shale, struck and jumbled and stirred by mad
forces across a valley dismembered into waste.
The vista was one to numb the mind.
Diegan heaved in a strangled breath, half-mad from shock and disbelief.
He felt delirious; light-headed. As if through the ordinary course of an eye
blink, firm rock had exploded and rearranged itself into some diabolical
Page 203
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
landscape out of Sithaer.
Sick white, shaking, he scrubbed grit from a skinned forearm, then resettled
the tucked weight of his mail and adjusted his sword from blind habit.
Through air hazed with pulverized rock, he sensed other movement and belatedly
found he was not alone.
The handful of survivors sheltered by the knoll were regaining their feet,
coughing dust. Some, crazed beyond reason, had drawn swords.
A
few were unmanned by fear. One lay moaning in misery, trampled or
kicked by someone's panicked horse. The blue-purple pulp of his gutted
abdomen established at a glance that he would not be rising, nor would
another, apparently thrown onto the impaling point of a pole weapon.
Nearby, someone's squire crawled on his hands and knees, sobbing the name of
his mother.
The first flame of rage licked through Diegan's horror. His throat was too
dry to swallow, and his tongue, too thick to curse the name of s'Ffalenn.
Avenor's Lord Commander choked on the tainted taste of soil and shrank in
guilt for the warning a band of condemned men had entrusted to his hearing one
dismal night in falling rain.
"Dharkaron avenge!" he strangled through a seizure that hooked like a sob in
his throat. For the gut-wrenching horror of his straits all but felled him.
The diabolical threat sent by Arithon, that he had brushed aside from
expediency had been, every word, meant in earnest.
Unknowing, the Prince of the West had marched his forty thousand into
jeopardy.
Thrown headlong into wholesale ruin, Lord Diegan beheld the Master of
Shadow's promised vengeance. The scope of the disaster saw every
justification to silence the testimony of twenty-five men remade into a fool's
play. A brother's self-serving passion for retribution for his sister had
cost Lysaer's allies tens upon thousands of lives.
The full toll remained yet to tally. Diegan forced himself to think beyond
blinding self-pity. Twelve thousand men in the flanking divisions dispatched
by Lysaer's signal to spearhead the assault beyond the ridges might already
suffer as dire a fate. Fear spurred his nerve to face downslope, to see
whether his sovereign prince's company had been spared at the mouth of the
vale. His first sweeping search caught the flash of moving metal. Faint
through the haze, the last company under Lysaer's direct command could be
seen, still standing, and enraged in a steady advance.
Some trap would be waiting. That ripping, stark certainty shocked back
Diegan's stumbling wits.
He took swift stock, did his best to confront the inconceivable extent of his
losses: scarcely a handful from the center ranks of his company were alive.
Forty-two solid veterans, one of them a wiry, tough sergeant bent already on
what he could salvage. When his frustrated effort to unclog the turf lodged
in the mouthpiece of his horn met with failure, he snapped off a curse, then
raised a gritted shout to rally.
Bruised, dirtied, a scarecrow pack of men responded.
More stragglers picked themselves up off the grade of the only unscoured
hillside about, the remains of the foray dispatched at the whim of black rage
to quarter the knoll for hidden enemies.
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]