Hostiles (The Galactic Mage series) (36 page)

“He’s lying, just as she is,” said Captain Asad. “They’re a race of liars. We had a run-in with the orcs a few months ago. They’re savages with bows and pointy sticks. This is just another attempt to buy their War Queen time. For all we know, those orcs aren’t even real.”

“The demons are real,” said the colonel. “And faking the rest doesn’t make any sense. I think she’s got a real problem, and it popped up at a really bad time. We’d have been screwed if those orcs came at us, but they never have. They’ve been engaged with Her Majesty’s regulars the whole time. And since these black devils have started showing up, the total number of invaders has more than quadrupled. The only reason we haven’t been overrun is that trench. Well, that and the fact that half these bastards are too busy either eating the dead or eating each other to come at us properly. If you guys start helping out from up there, and we don’t run out of ammo down here, I think we can hold out for a while. But I don’t think it’s going to go as well for the Queen.”

Both the director and Captain Asad nodded at that. The captain spoke what the director clearly thought. “If that’s the case, then she will want our help at some point. Let’s just hope it is in time to save the Earth.”

“We need to get in touch with your daughter, Colonel,” said the director. “We need to tell her to let the Queen know we can help her clean up her mess. Tell her to call off the Hostiles.”

“Pretty goddamn ironic, isn’t it?” said the colonel. “You two jam her straight through the system, behind my back, and you send me here to do this at the same time. Me fighting your battles while you’re murdering my daughter. You’re like a couple of snakes, and you even fucked that up. And yet here you are, needing me and my girl to pull your ass out of the deep shit you got us in. I’m not impressed, gentlemen.”

“We didn’t get us in it, Colonel. We never asked to be at war with the Hostiles, or that queen. You can have your day in court when this is all over, but that day will only come if there is a court for you to come back to. So, secure the sour grapes for now, do your job and get your daughter into the feed.”

Hate warped the colonel’s features like heat coming off the hot barrels of a Gatling gun, but he seemed to relent some. “I’ll see what I can do.” His feed went dark.

Chapter 31

T
he line of Orli’s laser cut a clean gash along the ridge of spines running down the demon’s back, toppling several of the sharp protrusions, like severed stalactites, and sending them tumbling over the sides of its body toward the cobblestone streets. Two of the city guardsmen beneath it, pestering its lower hemisphere with the sharp points of their halberds, had to jump out of the way as the huge spines crashed to the ground.

Taot’s flight path took them low, and Orli spun her head around in time to see three other guards diving out from between the demon’s legs, just in time to avoid its vicious bite. But another was not so lucky. She watched in horror as the monster plucked a fourth guardsman up from the crumbling cobblestones in one of its claws, held him dangling by one ankle, thrashing and screaming for a moment, before passing him into the nasty shears of its awful visage where it mashed and masticated the man in its bloody mandibles. Orli turned and pressed her forehead against Altin’s back, trying to clear her mind of what she’d witnessed. She had to stay focused.

Taot swung back around, and once again Altin threw down an ice lance that was as thick as Taot’s tail and nearly half again as long. The huge frozen shaft crashed into the cut that Orli had made and split it wider, though, as before, the ice broke up more easily than it should. Altin had concluded early on that the creatures were resistant to magic in some way. Fire was useless and lightning almost as bad, but this strategy, working together, was garnering some results. The creatures were less resistant inside than out. Their hard outer shells made magic largely ineffectual, but his magic seemed to hold together almost half the time if he could get a shot through a break in that carapace.

They flew back hoping for a killing blow. Taot swooped down on silent wings as the air whistled through Orli’s ears. They came up level as they sped toward their quarry, then Taot stretched his neck out before them and blew his dragon’s breath into the hole that Altin and Orli had made, a long, roaring spew of infernal heat, so bright it made Orli shield her eyes. The fire blasted back, some of its heat bouncing off the demon’s shell, and Orli couldn’t help the reflex that had her pressing hard against Altin’s back as well. She could hear the fire crackle as they flew the length of the monster’s body, the sizzling noise of its fluids being brought to heat. Unlike Altin’s magic, dragon’s fire was real enough, and the demon had naught to do for it but boil and burn. The heat and gas from Taot’s expulsion filled the cavity the ice lance had opened, burning into the soft innards of the demon mercilessly, and as the momentum of Taot’s pass carried them by the demon, the dragon kept up the flames. He curled his long serpentine neck back and downward as they flew past, still blowing fire as they began to rise. When the yellow tongues of flame were no longer concentrated enough to inflate the beast effectively, the dragon cut off the spew, but it was enough, for in the moments after Taot’s terrible breath stopped, the demon burst apart. The explosion of superheated flesh and expanding gas blew fragments of its hard black armor everywhere, the shrapnel of its demise breaking windows and snapping balconies into twisted smiles of splintered wooden teeth on both sides of the street. It was messy, but it worked.

When it was dead, the remaining guardsmen stood up from where they’d been crouching behind their shields, shouting up at the dragon and his riders, their grateful expressions obvious even though their voices could not be heard over the triumph of Taot’s roar. The cry of the dragon had been reverberating across the city for hours, at first frightening the populace, but later the cause for cheers—cheers from all but the gryphon riders anyway, who now had to work twice as hard to stay in their saddles whenever Taot flew near.

Altin did his best to give the Queen’s men their space, but the fact of the matter was that Orli’s laser and the dragon’s fire were the best weapon the city had for fighting in the streets, picking up the demons here and there as somehow a few them continued to find ways into the city despite the tremendous effort at defense. Orli cut them open, and Taot steamed them to death from the inside. Altin’s ice lances were merely the lever to simplify things a bit.

“There’s another one coming over the wall. Look, over there.” Orli had to shout to be heard over the wind of Taot’s flight as she pointed to guide Altin’s eye. “See it? To the east, like a giant lobster.”

“A lobster that’s half melted and has a second head growing out of its back, maybe,” he said even as he directed Taot with the pressure of his knees toward the giant, misshapen oddity.

He sent a message to Taot not to get too low, pointing out through an image and sense of dread that the demon’s second head came with a second pair of claws that could grope up and snatch them out of the air. The dragon’s thoughts returned impatience, a mental growl, annoyed that Altin felt inclined to tell him, a natural born aerial killer, how to fight.

They swept across the cityscape then, just above the chimney tops, and came in range of the demon that had managed to get over the walls. Orli could see white robed medical mages busily casting healing spells on the men who had fallen where the lobster-demon had jumped up and landed atop the battlements. If the airborne trio could kill the thing, the soldiers and mages down there might be able to hold the expanse of wall again.

If there were anything good about fighting demons from Orli’s point of view, it was that they were almost impossible to miss with laser fire. She aimed down for the monster’s uppermost head, intent on trying to cut a line at the back of its neck, maybe even deeply enough that Altin’s ice lance could break it off. She missed badly, however, when Taot swerved around a four-story inn, and instead she cut a line down the creature’s side, just above the line of its several projecting legs.

Altin conjured an ice lance ten spans long and two spans thick as Taot swept past the monster and soared out over the wall, over the battlefield, in a long, banking arc that would ultimately bring them back round to confront the lobster-demon again. Orli still couldn’t believe how many of the monsters there were down there, so many throwing themselves against the wall now that it seemed impossible they could ever hold them off. There had to be hundreds of thousands of them. It was a miracle of the magical prowess of Crown City that the walls hadn’t yet been overrun. Only a few of them were occasionally able to breach the great height and powerful enchantments on the walls. At least for now. The city was still, all things considered, relatively safe, at least as long as the dragon and his two riders could keep up with the demons that did get through.

The tragic sight of Her Majesty’s armies in the field was less encouraging. The orcs and humans, strangely isolated on the field beyond, continued to fight, the combatants now climbing over the dead, orc and human alike, knee deep in gore as they battled on. She knew that someday, if she lived through this, she would never forget the carnage that she had witnessed on this awful day.

Altin loosed his ice lance and two more slightly smaller ones, sending them streaking down and smashing into the seething mass of darkness pressing against the walls. The first burst against the humped back of one monster, shattering uselessly and flying in all directions like so many thousand bits of hail. The second had even less effect on another demon, but the third managed to find a purchase between two sliding plates of boney hide near what might have been the neck of a smallish demon that had been trying to climb the wall. The shaft of ice didn’t kill it, but it did knock it off the wall. It fell at first onto the heads and backs of those beneath it, and for a moment it lay atop them, bobbing and surging with the movement of the invaders, its legs upward and thrashing like a great upturned beetle floating on a stormy sea, but then it slipped sideways, sunk down into a momentary space between its fellows, where it ended up trapped beneath their tromping feet and unable to rise. Orli hoped that would be the end of it, but she had no way to tell. It seemed unlikely, given what she’d witnessed thus far that day. And it was worse for Altin. All his great power, and yet that was the best he could muster, one shot out of three, and that barely enough to flick one small demon off the wall.

They passed back over the fray and into the city’s air space. Altin’s next ice lance formed quickly as Taot dove down toward the lobster-like creature again. He guided the dragon’s angle with the press of his heel, causing Taot to tip his right wing. The massive ice spear flew true again—Orli had noticed that they seldom missed—and once again a large rent opened in the demon where her laser had cut through its armored outer shell.

As before, Taot’s long, sinewy neck curved down and stretched for the opening, but the creature saw them coming and shot out one of its thick pinchers, which snapped at the dragon’s head. Taot jerked his head out of the way, a powerful reflex, which sent a surge of energy up his spine like a wave running up a rope, and the force of it nearly flung Orli off. It would have, too, had Altin’s arm not wound around behind him, whipped back in anticipation and reflex of his own as he caught her and kept her pressed firmly to himself. She clutched him tightly about the waist with her left arm, her fingernails nearly digging through his robes as terror chilled her thoroughly.

Meanwhile, the S-curve that had formed itself in Taot’s long neck with his defensive retraction now worked like a wound-up spring for his counterattack, and in the instant following the demon’s defensive move—almost the same moment Orli heard the loud snap of the demon’s closing claw—Taot’s open maw darted forward again and nipped that claw off right where it formed at the end of the demon’s leg, removing it as easily as if he’d clipped a rose bud off its stem. The warm spray of the demon’s reeking fluids spewed out from the severed opening, splashing across Orli’s leg and down the dragon’s flanks as they flew past and then up and out of range.

The dragon, with two powerful flaps of his wings, drove them even higher than at first it seemed he needed to, much higher, almost straight up and yet angling sideways some. Orli continued to clutch Altin about the waist and craned her neck to see around him, looking for a reason for the sudden and precipitous quest for altitude. Then she saw it, a rising spire, the dragon’s efforts meant to avoid collision with a needle-sharp minaret. Still they struck it, though they missed most of the stonework from which it emerged. They ran up against it at an angle, and the dragon’s huge talons reached out to absorb the shock, though in doing so, he squeezed Altin and Orli together in the curve of his back. The impact was jarring, and both Altin and Orli gasped as the breath was knocked almost entirely from their lungs. The minaret snapped off, breaking clean and sending down a jumble of large stones. They gasped, the three of them sounding off together, but the break in the minaret and the dragon’s noble efforts took enough off of the collision to avoid calamity for them all.

Taot pushed off against the stump of the spire with his powerful back legs, sending more bits of broken stone down into the courtyard below, and in four more mighty strokes of his wings the climb was done. He let the upward momentum die off—at the peak of it they were all weightless for that one half heartbeat—and then he folded his wings and let gravity call them back toward the ground. His broad head, with its long curving teeth shaping the very grin of death, was at one moment high above his riders, seeming to lead them up, but then, in that moment of weightlessness, he curled it down from the apex of the ascent and let it fall past his riders, its downward arc shaping the turn that would lead them back down and back into the fight.