Sovereign of the Seven Isles 7: Reishi Adept (25 page)

His tent was ready when he arrived.
He wasn’t much for all of the formality of high office, but he had to admit it was nice to have a hot meal and a warm bed waiting for him. He knew that such luxuries wouldn’t last.

The following morning, the cavalry set out at daybreak.
Corina caught up to them midmorning, floating overhead with nearly seventy wyverns under her command.

“Keep the men moving,” Anatoly said, clicking to his horse.

“Yes, Regent,” Iker said.

Anatoly went to a little hill and dismounted, holding his horse
’s reins firmly. Corina landed gently some distance off, but still close enough to spook the horses a bit. Anatoly handed his reins to Liam.

“Stay with the horses. Oliver, you’re with me.”

They met Corina halfway between her wyvern and their horses.

“Regent, I’ve seen the enemy and they are vast.”

“I know. How much time do we have?”

“Ten raiding legions are three days
’ march from here and headed this way. They were just leaving Breden when we flew over yesterday evening.”

“How was the army when you left them?”

“Running for their lives,” Corina said. “They were afraid, but with good reason. I left Conner a dozen Sky Knights for scouts and message riders.”

“Good, he’ll need them to get past
the barbarian encampment at the Gate. Bianca is sending another wing and I have a squad with me. I need day-and-night scouting plus message riders. Use the rest of your Sky Knights to harass the enemy.”

Corina smiled without humor. “After assigning scouts and messengers, I’ll have a strike force of about seventy-five. However, while I relish the idea of killing these barbarians, we won’t be able to do any meaningful damage.
Their numbers are just too great.”

“What damage you do will be meaningful to those you do it to.”

She smiled more genuinely.

“Don’t waste any weapons, just get baskets of rocks and drop them from high enough to kill.”

“Excuse me,” Oliver said, looking back and forth between them. “Can a wyvern carry a wagon filled with rocks?”

“Of course,” Corina said.
“But I doubt we want to waste our wagons.”

“No, but I have an idea,” Oliver said. “We could make
a large box like the back of a wagon, attach a beam on the center axis for the wyvern to hold, then make one end open by the pull of a rope and the other end tilt up by the pull of another rope. We fill it with rocks, fly over, pull the first rope, then the second … and dump the entire box of rocks on them all at once.”

“Ambitious,” Corina said. “I like it in principle, though I’m not certain we have the means to construct such a device on the road.”

“Give me a few men, and I’ll build you one,” Oliver said, turning to Anatoly.

“Couldn’t hurt,” Anatoly said. “
You can have six men. If it works, it could be a powerful addition to the Sky Knights’ arsenal.”

“Build it and I’
ll test it,” Corina said.

Oliver nodded, suddenly looking a bit out of his depth.

“For the time being, we’ll start gathering rocks—we’ll wait till the enemy gets a bit closer before we attack,” Anatoly said. “Also, Alexander tells me the witch Peti has charmed Zuhl’s commanders … she’s the one running this army now, so fly high enough to avoid her magic.”

“I see,” Corina said, looking off at the horizon. “Any word of Abigail and Magda?”

“They’re at the Reishi Keep preparing to attack Zuhl. Apparently, the dragon that paid us a visit is involved. When they’re done there, Bianca and a fleet out of Southport will be headed our way. Until then, we’re on our own.”

“Understood,” she said,
returning to her wyvern.

Anatoly held his horse until
Corina had launched and gained a bit of altitude. The Sky Knights would make a huge difference, just in scouting alone, but no matter how he did the calculations, the numbers just didn’t work out. The barbarians always came out on top, and that was just against the ten legions coming for him, never mind the sixty legions camped at the Gate.

With a sigh, he decided that that particular problem was beyond him
, so he turned his mind to the work at hand. Within an hour, his entire regiment was scouring the countryside for rocks between the size of a man’s fist and a man’s head. All of the empty spaces in their wagons were soon filled.

By evening, Oliver had found a small abandoned farm and taken a wagon along with a load of l
umber he found inside the barn.

He put his men to work the moment the regiment stopped for the night. When
daylight failed, Corina cast a spell, calling forth a dozen glowing orbs of light to illuminate his work area.

Anatoly watched with a bit of admiration as
young Wizard Oliver directed the efforts of six soldiers as if he were a general officer. By midnight, he’d finished his creation, a sturdy cart with a hinged crossbeam handle that swung only one way. With the handle up, it looked like a giant picnic basket. One end had a hinged door that opened downward when the pins holding it were pulled free. The other end had a stout rope attached to it that the Sky Knight could pull to tilt the cart toward the open end during flight. The whole thing sat on the back of a wagon frame.

The following morning,
Corina’s wyvern lighted on the handle of the cart, then easily snatched it from the wagon frame, gaining altitude with each wing beat. As she lifted off, a few rocks fell from the wagon, but the only soldier in danger of being hit was able to raise his shield in time.

Oliver
fidgeted nervously. Dozens of Sky Knights and thousands of soldiers watched Corina circle higher and higher. She wanted to test the weapon at the altitude her strike force would attack from, which was high enough to avoid any but the most powerful magical attacks.

She
leveled out and came around to target the test field where a few bales of hay had been set on end to simulate enemy soldiers. The rocks began to spill out slowly at first, but then all at once the cart tipped and the entire load fell into the sky. Most of the stones missed the hay bales, but the two that hit blasted them to pieces. The area where the bulk of the stones hit was crushed, cratered, and pockmarked.

The Sky Knights
and soldiers cheered as Corina’s wyvern roared.

“Well done, Oliver,” Anatoly said, patting him on the shoulder.
“I’ll assign another platoon to you to gather the necessary materials to assemble more. Also, I want you to train one of your men to build the entire thing so we can send him to Fool’s Gap and get him started making them there.”

Oliver nodded, looking at the pattern of destruction his device had inflicted on the empty field.

“I just killed a lot of people, didn’t I?”

Anatoly looked at him seriously, nodding slowly. “
A weapon designer can have a lasting impact on warfare. Your device may well be used a thousand years from now to kill people we’ll never know.”

“I’m not sure how I feel about that.”

“I am. I don’t care one wit about a battle a thousand years from now. I want to know if your invention can put a dent in this enemy right now.”

Oliver was silent for a long time, staring at the target field. Anatoly
took a breath to say something when Oliver nodded to himself as if coming out of a trance.

“In that case, I think I can improve
the design to make it deadlier, but I should talk to Corina before I make any changes. She might have a few suggestions.”

Anatoly chuckled, patting Oliver on the shoulder
as he turned for his horse.

Chapter
19

“How many?” Anatoly asked, a hint of alarm in his voice.

“Just under a legion,” Corina said. “I suspect they’ve been running to catch us. At this rate they’ll be on our heels by
midday.”

Anatoly thought the enemy wa
s far enough behind that he’d be able to get the people through the gap before they caught up. He hadn’t considered that they would send an advance force to give chase. Know your enemy, he thought.

“How many rock carts do we have?”

“Just the one we tested yesterday and the two we built last night,” Oliver said. “I changed the design to expand the area of effect, but we haven’t tested those boxes yet.”

“Well, we’re going to test them now,” Anatoly
said, looking down at the map and frowning. As quickly as the advance legion was traveling, they would catch up to his trailing regiment well before the people made it to the gap.

“How far ahead of us is the main force?”

“Less than a day’s march,” Captain Iker said.

“Doesn’t leave us much choice,” Anatoly said, rubbing the stubble on his chin and frowning at the map again. “We’re going to have to
stand and fight—the question is where?”

“About a half a league
from here, the road begins winding through a series of hills,” Corina said, tapping the spot on the map. “It would offer high ground, but it’s not so steep that the horses couldn’t charge down into the enemy.”

“I guess that’s as good a place as any,” Anatoly said. “There are a few spots that look more promising, but they’re well out of our way. Corina, send word to Blake and start putting those rock carts to use.
Maybe we can slow the enemy down a bit. Iker, pass the word along to your men and send a company ahead to scout and prepare the battlefield.”

As they rode
toward the hills, Anatoly felt like a wolf was nipping at his heels. He looked back frequently, half expecting to see the telltale plume of dust that accompanies an army on the march, even though he knew they were still too far away.

He smiled humorlessly as four wyverns passed overhead, three
of them carrying rock carts. This was their third run of the day and the reports had been promising.

Oliver had entirely redesigned his
rock cart overnight. The bed was now separated into six sections. Six square holes were cut in the cart floor, with a sturdy trapdoor over each, locked in place with a heavy bolt attached to a rope. When the Sky Knight pulled the rope, the trapdoor opened and all of the rocks in that section fell free.

Corina seemed pleased with the redesign as it allowed her Sky Knights to spread the damage across a much larger area.
The problem that Anatoly now faced was a lack of rocks. While Iker’s soldiers had been gathering them diligently, there were only so many to be had and the Sky Knights were using them up as quickly as they could be gathered.

By evening, they
’d reached the series of hills in the wide valley where Anatoly had chosen to make his stand. He picked the largest of the hills and ordered Iker to make camp on top of it. Odds were, the barbarians would get close, then wait for dawn to attack. Still, he instructed his soldiers to dig in and set a perimeter guard in case they sent scouts or assassins in the night.

The light was just falling,
casting shadows from the western mountains that reached across the entire valley when Corina strode up, still wind-worn from flying all day.

“My compliments to young Wizard Oliver,” sh
e said. “His second design is quite deadly against a large force.”

“I just wish
we had more rocks,” Anatoly said.

“I’m told that Fool’s Gap is quite rocky.”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t help us now. How much damage do you think you did today?”

“We killed several hundred and wounded many more,” Corina said. “They made some effort to defend with shields, but to little effect.”

Anatoly nodded. “Tomorrow’s going to be ugly. They outnumber us by almost two to one.”

“True, but we’re defending from the high ground. I suspect that
tomorrow will be far worse for them than for us.”

“I hope you’re right. We have to hold them here. If they get through us, there’s nothing between them and our people. Blake would ha
ve to fall back to defend them and then he wouldn’t have the time he needs to prepare the gap.”

***

“What do you mean, they’re not there?” Anatoly asked. The sky was just beginning to show a hint of light on the eastern horizon. He’d spent most of the night alternately fretting about the battle to be fought today and walking the perimeter. He’d slept for only about two hours and then only at Liam’s urging.

The breathless Sky Knight shrugged, shaking his head helplessly. “They’re just not there. It’s still too dark to see their trail, but I don’t think they made camp last night.”

“Dear Maker,” Anatoly whispered to himself, staring vacantly at the map on his field table for a moment, considering his options. They could only have traveled so far overnight.

“Get me Corina,” Anatoly said to the Sky Knight.

“Right away, Regent Grace.”

“Where do you think they went?” Liam asked.

“Hopefully, they fell back to regroup with their main force, but I doubt it. More likely, they slipped past us in the night. Go find Iker and tell him to get his men ready to ride immediately.”

Liam nodded, trotting away into the rising morning light.

Corina strode up a few moments later. “I’m told the enemy has disappeared,” she said.

Anatoly nodded grimly.

“I’ll send up a wing of scouts to find them. They can’t have gotten far.”

Anatoly looked back to his map
with a growing sense of unease. He had a sinking feeling that things had just gone from bad to worse. Less than an hour later, his fears were confirmed when one of the scouts returned.

“
They’re about a league south of us at a point where the terrain is rough and rocky, and they’re digging in,” he said.

“Can we skirt them?”

“I doubt it,” the scout said. “It looks like they’re trying to build hasty defenses across the entire valley. By the time we get there, we’ll have to fight to get through.”

Anatoly frowned, nodding to himself. “Their strategy is tactically sound, I’ll give them that. If they can hold us here until their main force arrives
, we’re done.”

“We could try to go around to the west,” Liam offered.

“It would take too long and they could easily get ahead of us again,” Anatoly said. “No, they’ve boxed us in nicely. They’ve picked a spot where our cavalry can’t operate effectively and now they’re defending and we’re attacking.

“Corina, send message riders to Blake and prepare the rest of your flight to attack. Once the light comes up, I’ll need more detailed scouting reports about the terrain and enemy fortifications.
We need to either find or make a soft spot and punch through. Then we can run south and pick a battlefield more suited to our strengths.”

***

Sitting atop his horse looking out over the rocky and treacherous terrain where the barbarians had chosen to fight, Anatoly shook his head. The ground was uneven, littered with small boulders and scarred with deep trenches cut by seasonal streams flowing from the mountains to the east. It was nearly devoid of topsoil, hence there was little vegetation, leaving a barren and windswept landscape. In short, it was the perfect place for infantry to make a stand against cavalry.

They had heavily fortified the valley
, concentrating on those places where horses could ride easily, while leaving the more rugged parts sparsely manned.

“It looks like we have three options,” Corina said. “The main road is the clearest and easiest path to travel
, so they’ve fortified it the most heavily, building a small wall of stones across that section. The other two gaps,” she pointed to the map, “contain large numbers of soldiers busy digging trenches and building berm walls, but they aren’t done yet and will probably need the better part of the day to finish. I recommend we attack the gap on the west end of the valley.”

Anatoly nodded. “Is there a clear path back to the road and level ground once we’re through?”

Corina nodded. “It’ll only take a few minutes to get past this barren patch and back onto the grasslands.”

“All right, that’s our target. Iker, once we punch through, I’ll need a defensive line along the eastern flank to hold against their reinforcements until the rest of the regiment can get through.
Corina, I want your flight to pound them with everything you’ve got where we’ll punch through. Once we get close, shift east to their main force. As soon as we commit, they’ll probably start moving troops toward us. Slow them down as much as possible.”

“Understood,”
Corina said.

The barbarians continued to work on their hasty fortifications even as Anatoly’s forces
prepared to attack. His regiment was assembled not a thousand feet from the enemy line with his heaviest horses carrying the most well-armed men in the van. Orders had been given; everything was in place.

W
hen shadows began to flash past across the landscape, he looked up at the clear blue sky. The Sky Knights would be the first to attack, dropping rocks, hurling javelins and, in Corina’s case, throwing magic into the enemy ranks. When the first column of wyverns began their attack, Anatoly looked over to Iker and nodded. A whistler arrow screamed into the air, signaling the charge.

A thousand soldiers spurred their horses toward the enemy line. Shouts of alarm wafted on the early morning air as the barbarians shifted from building their fo
rtifications to defending them.

The first Sky Knights,
three armed with rock carts and many more armed with bags of rocks, made their run, concentrating on the point in the line where the initial charge would hit, softening the enemy and distracting them to ensure the cavalry could get through in the first push. The last thing Anatoly wanted was for his soldiers to lose momentum and get caught in a melee surrounded by barbarians. His plan hinged on the first charge breaking through and opening a hole for the rest of his force to ride through.

Shouts and battle cries turned to wails of pain and fear as rocks slammed into the
enemy line, crushing and shattering bodies where they hit. The rest of the barbarians began to shift to meet the attack. Another column of wyverns shot by overhead, this one diving quickly, gaining speed as they lost altitude, hitting the enemy line with tail strikes that cleared a swath with each hit.

One by one, the
Sky Knights hit the same spot, some with rocks, others with their wyverns, still others with javelins until the final column floated overhead. Corina was the last to attack, sending a small sphere of blue force into the enemy that exploded on impact, tossing men through the air and leaving a gaping hole in their shield line.

Anatoly nodded in satisfaction when his cavalry charge arrived less than a minute later, hitting the
ir soft spot and trampling over those without the good sense to get out of the way. He nodded to Iker and another whistler went up, signaling for the rest of the regiment to charge.

Four thousand horse, ten abreast, began to rumble across the battlefield. The Sky Knights had turned, one squad at a time, and were making attack runs at the barbarians moving toward the
breach. They killed many, but not nearly enough. Thousands of hardened soldiers were now moving with all possible speed toward the line.

Iker’s
initial charge broke through. The latter half of the charging unit stopped and turned toward the enemy advancing from the east, forming a line of heavy horse. The few barbarians to the west had been killed or wounded, leaving only a steeply rising series of rocky hills on their western flank, just as Anatoly had planned.

He was starting to worry t
hat his plan was working too well when a unit of barbarians advanced on the defensive line guarding the eastern flank. The hundred men moved quickly with their shields raised, lowering them only when they got close enough to hurl a volley of javelins. Dozens of Iker’s men fell in the attack. Several horses were wounded, causing them to run wildly into the enemy where their riders were easily pulled down and killed.

The barbarians quickly re
-formed into a wedge, again protected by raised shields, and rushed the cavalry line, attacking the horses with their spears. The attack broke through and a stream of barbarians began to flood into the gap that only moments ago had been clear. Anatoly signaled to pick up the pace. He had no interest in fighting on this field.

The barbarians
’ simple strategy of attacking the horses was quite successful. Some of the horses ran wildly away from the battlefield; others threw their riders into the chaos; still others fell from their wounds, taking their riders to the ground with them. By the time Anatoly reached the gap, hundreds of horses and men littered the eastern flank and the barbarians were pressing in against the frantically defending cavalry while still more enemy soldiers flowed through the breach in the line.