Page a Day: Two Hundred Ten

            The alien horrors danced along the backs of the mastodons, weightless and lithe though their heads would have come up well on any mastodon’s shoulder. Their long scythe arms blurred with movement and then disappeared in strikes too fast to see, cutting riders apart. Then they themselves vanished, and reappeared in another place, driving blades down into the skulls of beasts or severing their spines at the neck.

            Jerem Cozak turned to look at me, our beasts still standing side by side on hind legs, his eyes wide in astonishment.

            “They were already here,” he said. “They lied to me.”

            Then a flaming darkness loomed behind him and my blood chilled and a great scythe split Jerem Cozak from his shoulder to his waist. Another cut sideways across his stomach and tore him entirely in two, splitting Profusionist armor utterly and with ease. I cried out. The pieces that were Jerem Cozak fell away in ruin just as my mastodon leaned down unto the pike that drove into her brain. It tore on into my soul. Pain shattered the core of me. My back arched in spasm, my vision blackened, my hands released their grip. My mind flashed, seared blank, stopped.

            As I tumbled I saw Marcus likewise unmounted, leaping backwards off his mastodon to avoid the strike of the demon that hounded him. And the creature flinched back, as from a wound. But when Marcus landed on his feet, the terror was somehow also there, twisting so that its blow fell vertically and cut down directly through Marcus’s skull, cleaving it in two. The next stroke came counter, and cut cleanly through his torso at the chest.

            Finally, my fall completed. My head slammed against the Profusionist metal even before my back did. It knocked the wind from my lungs. My vision swam and darkened even more. I could not move and did not want to. Auger pikemen stood all around me. One put his foot across my chest, and I could feel the motion as he reversed his weapon. The last blow would fall. The Neverborn wouldn't  reach me. I blinked. In the distance, between the legs of men and the outlines of the wreckage of the artillery, orange fire bloomed in the streets of Kasora.

            The nine khrall had come.

Page a Day: Two Hundred Nine

            The mastodons broke and charged into the wall of the orbs of Profusionist energy that were blossoming before us. I closed my eyes so that my mastodon could see later. If any of the orbs missed I did not know it. One hit my mastodon squarely in the chest as she charged forward, fury and momentum carrying her through even as her organs failed. I felt their collapse, though my energy shell protected me as the world vanished in a flash of gold. But by her bellow the matriarch was also hit and also kept going and I opened my eyes to see Marcus’s beast outpacing us both on the left, her right side scorched bare to the muscle by the strike. Other mastodons reared, and the right flank of the line lagged behind.

            We tore across the long broad courtyard that we had known awaited us inside the gate. There also waited the silhouettes of the artillery, the ten Auger disks remaining. And before them and around them and behind them stood ranks and ranks of infantry with long weapons like pikes that we had never seen. They were as long as our mastodons were tall, and I knew that they were Profusionist, and they had not come from this world. And from further behind them, still, came the first golden streaks of lightspear fire, from the buildings and the street.

            I swiped tusks once, twice, cradling the crushing agony that was my chest, sweeping Augers aside. Spearfire hit my mastodon, hit me. My armor weakened. But the pikemen fell away before the momentum of our charge and I felt her tusks hook just under the lip of a disk as the first pikes dug into her sides and neck and throat. I arched in agony and she flipped the artillery. As she did, I thought that these Augers had never actually fought mastodons before.

            Then a pike found her jaw and my beast reared away and from that greater height I saw through the grey of the nightwind the unending sea of pikes and men and spearmen that awaited us. We did not outnumber them at all. They lined the street to the limits of my vision and beyond, filling the alleys and the rooftops. And beside me the matriarch also reared, and Marcus’s beast also bellowed, as all along the line mastodons reached the artillery and flipped the other disks.

            And there appeared among them, flickering here and there, the demons of my vision.  

Page a Day: Two Hundred Eight

            The sixty fourth tower of Kasora fell at dawn. Four watches later, and with twelve artillery disks remaining, we broke the main gate. Jerem Cozak completed the realignment of the infantry, interspersing it among the squads of mastodons bearing spearmen. We were to divide by column and section the city after charging through the breach, though we could not see beyond it because of the presence of the nightwind. Yet the day was bright and cold and clear. The sun shone golden in the  cerulean sky above, and there hung, absurdly, a rainbow in Kasora’s overhead mist, which streamed south in a strong north wind.

            We formed the first few groups of mastodons into charging formation. We were pitifully few, our herd of thirty. As with the rest of the army. Our artillery had essentially been eliminated. Less than half our infantry remained, and I could count the five thousand mastodons that we were taking in. I pondered the silence of the Auger artillery since the last tower fell. Had it been defeat?

            Jerem Cozak made no speech. In all our march together, not once had he inspired men in the traditional way, though I believe he had somehow spoken alone with nearly everyone.

            “Today, all his fulfilled!” he shouted at noon, his sharp baritone ringing through the valley, magnified by the Swarm. And he gave the command to march.

            We went, a wedge fifteen mastodons across and two deep, the first thirty beasts we had taken, and five hundred Neverborn marching double speed behind us, another wedge of mastodons behind them. Still another thousand men followed these, and on and on and on, a long column of men and beasts meant to split inside the city and take buildings one by one amidst spearfire and whatever else awaited us. The river splashed and shone gold in the noonday light. It seemed impossible somehow that we could just walk across it now, though it only came to the waists of the Neverborn and did not even touch the knees of the mastodons.

            Then my eyes were only for the long rising ramp and the crumbled jade metal of the breach and the blackness beyond it, nightwind swirling as it ever had.  When we hit the lip of the ramp we picked up to double speed, and the Neverborn ran full out behind us. The gate drew near, and I thought I saw beyond it a long line of the shades of men, forms in rank and file amidst the darkness.

            I had already taken my mastodon’s senses, so I heard the hiss and gave the cry just as we cleared the breach: “Artillery!”

Page a Day: Two Hundred Seven

            The Auger artillery barrage, when it came, was fierce. They couldn’t have had more remaining disks than we did, but they could now concentrate all their fire upon the encampment. The first wave of strikes came so densely I could have mistaken it for a wave of Light. I willed my mastodon to close its eyes, though the bursts fell some ways away.  

            When it cleared I found myself looking into the eyes of Marcus, who had ridden a mastodon between the blasts and Jerem Cozak. The furor in them challenged anyone to deny him his position. I did not. The only way I had been able to get him to go defend the crossing had been to say that if he did not, Jerem Cozak would never leave, but would stand alone in the middle of everything because the White Swarm would not let him. How Marcus in turn had gotten Jerem Cozak to go back to commanding the artillery field I do not know. But I knew that he would not be parted from Jerem Cozak again.

            I was glad of it. I was glad to have the Neverborn line up as the first infantry behind our squad. I was glad to have the other mastodons pressed up against me in a herd beyond the limits of the artillery. Because in the darkness I could not see the encampment and the trenches and the impact craters. But I could smell them. The coppery stench of blood and the hot torn earth and the scent that comes when men void bowels and bladder in their fear. The bitter reek of the dread of the mastodons and the men and now of Marcus himself as he rode beside Jerem Cozak.

            “What’s wrong?” I asked him, bracing as I heard the hiss of incoming orbs again. “You don’t like what’s happening. Why?”

            He shook his head. “It is not right, this place. It is too easy.”

            I felt my eyes widen. “Too easy! What – ”

            He scowled as the impacts hit. “No infantry,” he said. “We face no infantry or spearmen here.”

            When the second wave of flashes fell I saw through the flying mud and spray and golden Profusionist metal that the wreckage of our artillery was nearly complete. Piles of twisted machinery now littered the muddy craters and the abandoned trenches or squatted on the mud torn loose by the boots of tens of thousands of men. And our remaining disks held their position and prepared their counterstrike as they sighted back at the unseen Auger disks or at the towers through the now rapidly clearing mist.