The demon was fortunate as it unwisely rose to face him- Delatour's fifth ball skipped off its thick, horned skull leaving a crease of burning electric blue across its bald scalp. And still fortunate, perhaps, by some standards, when the sixth and last stopped against the bone of its brow, rather than hammering its way through. It did not die instantly, its brain was not destroyed, but ravening balefire spilled across its eyes, and ate halfway through the dense skull before Xazonar's arm reached up and clawed it away, the ball flying away along with the char and ruins it had left behind.
Blind and crippled, Xazonar collapsed into a shuddering heap, rolling to the foot of the hill on which it had stood.
Northern Marches, Michigan
Below Guillory's Tower
An Hour Past Dawn
Frostbringer 20, 224
(December 11)
Recommended Listening:
The Zaporozhian March
Deeper and more robust than an Ohioan bugle, the horns of the Kaskaskians sounded as Shoots-Across-Canyon called the orders that reflected the temper of his men. The prairie hosts could be a savage lot. The honor of their arms was an equally savage, and profoundly demanding, mistress.
The, hulking, crippled monstrosity across the field had raised against them swarms of monsters, and bombarded the River Men's infantry with such a massive rain of stones and magic. Who could know what it might be capable of, even wounded so terribly?
They were mortal men. Therefore, they were still frightened of this fiend.
They were mortal men of the Kaskaskian Host. Therefore, they would attack it.
The light horse of the Illinois plains rode scrubby-looking ponies of great endurance and speed. The Kaskaskian Host might have made its peace with the empire of King Louis, others of the plainsmen might serve the Turks. But their cousins, no more valiant and no better equipped, still rode wild and
fully free, challenging the River Man empires, challenging any others who sought to squeeze them off the land. That bold and warlike spirit was the inheritance of the Kaskaskian Host, for all that they had chosen a less lonely path for their own folk.
Whooping and screaming, the plains horsemen lowered their lances and advanced at the trot, building up momentum for the charge.
And ahead, many yards ahead, galloping with all the speed of his horse, Shoots-Across-Canyon led his cavalry alone, in the spirit of the mad recklessness which had won him a warrior's reputation. It was in service of a goal, but he'd have made the attempt anyway. This monster frightened him, as much as any man- he would test himself against it!
The dead grass, the knots of dead hell-hounds, passed the chief by. He saw the heaving mass of the dark creature, at the foot of the hill among the stones of the fallen tower. It quivered, struggled, tried to rise on one leg. It grew large,
large ahead of him, he who had now left his men behind. He gritted his teeth and drew his sabre.
The fire-demon was very possibly blind, and obviously in great pain. But somehow, it was sensing Shoots-Across-Canyon's approach, or hearing his horse, or for all he knew smelling his soul. This, the chief knew, with alarm, as the shadow-lord raised its arm high into the air for a sweeping stroke that could easily send a rider- or his horse- tumbling. Gathered its bulk over its one good leg for a lunge.
The Kaskaskian’s blade had been dismissed by so many as an affectation of one with more money than sense. Men sometimes questioned Shoots-Across-Canyon's wisdom. Did he spend his money sensibly, paying for a blade decorated with gleaming, lovely metal? What of it? For no one doubted his swordsmanship, nor his horsemanship.
The shadow-lord
moved, its remaining strength still enough to give its ton or more of bulk nearly the speed a normal man might enjoy in the prime of health. The blade slashed through the air, hissing softly under the demon’s pained bellows, as Shoots-Across-Canyon twisted
so, his horse moving as responsively as though man and beast were a single creature. No clumsiness here,
none. Horse and rider danced aside as the flailing arm of the shadow-lord clawed the turf... with a line of bright blue fire across its thumb from the tip of the cavalryman’s silvery sabre.
Flailing its hand, the creature spoke to its human enemies for the third time that day, but now gasping, more weakly, the great rumble diminished to a steaming, burbling hiss like a half-doused bonfire. The sound alone was horrific, enough that man and horse alike felt a terrible compulsion to pause.
“I wi- will suck the marrow from your bones!” the shadow-lord hissed as Shoots-Across-Canyon wheeled his horse.
“I will... dry them- and work them cunningly... into instruments of music! Whenever I play upon them, your spirit will writhe in bodiless agony!”
Shoots-Across-Canyon laughed with a boldness he did not feel, laughed, for it was that or scream, and his nerve returned to him in the face of horror. “You burn prettily!”
He spurred his mount around for another pass. The Kaskaskian stallion, a horse of the finest breeding and training to be had between the Wabash and the Illinois, didn’t hesitate. Plunging into the attack, the chief avoided another poorly-timed swipe of the demon's left claws- however the monstrosity sensed his passing, it wasn't doing so very accurately.
This time, the blade slashed across the dense quadricep of Xazonar's good leg. No mundane blade, even a silver one, would cut very deep against its flesh this way- but it
hurt, it slowed the monster further, even as its right arm lashed out- and seized the horse as Shoots-Across-Canyon spurred it away. The fine stallion tumbled, crashing to the ground. Shoots-Across-Canyon barely threw himself clear. The poor beast whinnied pitifully, its hip dislocated, its lower leg crushed in the demon's grip.
The Kaskaskian chieftain laughed again, laughed to keep despair at bay, leaping back, bright blade in hand. The shadow-lord, twisting around, kept its arms in position to defend against a rash assault by the dismounted plainsman, with the blade it liked not at all, which even this immense monster now knew
could hurt it, and which it could not truly see save through the shimmer of magic, sensed reflecting off the silvery blade. Lurching on its good leg and trying to move toward him... Even reduced like this, lurching, one-legged and blind, the demon was an overpowering threat for an ordinary- or extraordinary- swordsman on foot.
But what of that? The Kaskaskian chief had achieved the goal he'd set out for.
Shoots-Across-Canyon had distracted the creature long enough. He had drawn the beast further from the hill onto proper level ground. His men had lined up their first orderly charge, and a file of plains lancers’ hoofs rose to a crescendo as they approached, the devil realizing what the agile man with the blade that burned had truly been doing.
Lancer of the Kaskaskian Host.
The first Kaskaskian's lance smashed against invisible wards a full inch from the shadow-lord's skin. Its immunity and repulsion to base metals held after a fashion, even so wounded, even riddled by silver bullets and sliced with a silver blade. The steel spearhead flattened and twisted as though it had struck the side of a mountain, smashing a full yard of the lance's tip behind it as weight of horse and rider carried it to
thump against Xazonar's dark, flaming hide, as sheer momentum had carried cannonballs through before.
The tip of the lance struck Xazonar as a blackjack might strike a man. The shower of splintered wood behind it, from the shaft of the lance, struck... differently. It was no metal, base or otherwise. And while a shadow-lord's tough flesh could resist most things made from living matter... it was not
immune. Xazonar grunted as a shower of splinters, some the size of daggers, buried themselves in its shoulder. None pierced deeply enough to be a true threat to its life, but it rocked the demon as the Kaskaskian horseman galloped past... and the next lancer came in, and the next.
Shoots-Across-Canyon was laughing more genuinely as one of his file leaders, coming in on a white horse, reached down out of the saddle to clasp his chief's outstretched arm and jerked him up to ride behind.
Now his band had done something worth remembering twice on this field,
now they could have a proper song for this day!
Recommended Listening:
Himno de los Tercios
Xazonar, crippled, found itself hardly able to resist even the relatively puny attacks of the mortal cavalry. Their lances stung only-
that was an offense it had encountered before in war against men. And the sweeps of its mighty arms were slaying horses or riders... but only one, every other time or so, when half a dozen horsemen came against it on each pass!
By twisting and scurrying on its remaining limbs, Xazonar believed it could have protected itself well enough to at least
survive the attack of so many lancers, to kill enough that the remaining ones would stop their dangerous game. Or at least run out of lances to break against its skin. Painful and degrading though that prospect was, it would at least be physical survival, allowing Xazonar to muster the energies to limp to some other plane and recover. Arduous recovery, painful recovery, but recovery.
Then, over the clatter of hooves and the whooping of impudent mortal horsemen, Xazonar heard the human infantry's drums again- that sound it recognized from a more confident, arrogant time of half an hour before...
Attack!
Immortal physiology was not made to shut down; Xazonar remained conscious despite pain and wounds. Though it could feel... damaged,
lessened in its mind, the silver-wracked, splinter-pained remnant of its conscious awareness still knew the pikes were coming for it. The lancers were veering off now, clustering behind it, in case it tried to flee at a greater turn of speed than it had shown so far. Xazonar, agonized, rallied its energies to fight with what little of its power and vitality remained, still able to sense the mortals' harmonized, grimly determined wills even if it could no longer see them.
Squirming crabwise backward with limbs that barely answered its intellect, Xazonar snarled, that avalanche voice left with a burbling overtone by its ruined, riddled chest, and thought
fire into the advancing soldiers. The shield wall of ghosts rippled and blocked the demon's pain-rattled will.
Singing, the pikes marched closer.
Writhing with pain and despair, Xazonar hissed, willing all it had, the remnants of a lordly being's power, into its gasped curses- curses of panic, of disease and death and ill-luck.
Praying, the pikes marched closer.
The humans' barrier flickered this time! It could not see, but
feel a ghost dissolve into curls of ether under the stress, two more, a fourth, seven, more. A dozen soldiers stumbled, cried out rather than keeping up their verses. A score more, and a few of those had fallen to the ground, their fellows trying to keep formation without marching over their prostrate forms. That only left, what, a hundred, a thousand, more? So hard to concentrate...
Praying more fervently now, the star-priestesses chanting counterpoint with a
click of ceremonial beads, the pikes marched closer.
Xazonar could feel a swarm of angry ghosts, weak and numerous like insects, swarming around its crippled body, hemming in its power, damping the energies of its supernatural protections as the insects were given strength of their own,
stinging insects, empowered and fed by the mortal women in the starburst robes.
No more soldiers fell. The pikes marched closer.
Fifty feet... thirty... twenty.
Its wards diminished, Xazonar could nonetheless conjure up with the last of its desperate power a barrier of force, a reinforcement of its own natural wardings, that twisted with pastel whorls of light. Mesmerizing, strong like plates of iron, the magic stopped the pressure of the first rank of pikemen driving their blades against its ruined body... and the second... Then the third and fourth ranks got behind their comrades and pushed their spears against the barrier, along with the weight of their bodies. And there was a fifth, and a sixth- more... All things have some limit, including a demon's immunity to base metals and the durability of its magic. Straining every muscle, the massed ranks of humans weighing in the tons, delivered to this supernatural creature the supremely mundane engine of war known only as "push of pike." Spearheads dimpled that swirling chaos of solidified light, the pikestaffs groaning, the
men groaning...
Its shield failed. Of the thousands of years of its existence, Xazonar the shadow-lord had time left only for a final scream.
Recommended Listening:
Veteran of the Psychic Wars
Northern Marches, Michigan
Below Guillory's Tower
Two Hours Past Dawn
Frostbringer 20, 224
Colonel Adrien Blanchard looked at the approaching captain of his eighth company, feeling his breath and pulse lose some of the level coolness they'd regained since the strange, the disturbing, the violent and horrible and evilly magical events of this winter dawn.
The necromancer was dead. The zombie host was gone. Even the demon summoned by the rogue wizard had been slain. His tercio had prevailed- after a fashion.
Out of every thirty of the Regiment of Fayette's men, cavalry and infantry alike, four or five lay dead or too wounded to serve the regiment's colors again for a long time, if ever. Many others bore lesser injuries. He himself had only a bandage around one arm where a far-flying splinter of wood from the bursting gun-carriage had struck him. But it seemed as though every other man he saw had as bad, or worse. And that cannon the demon had destroyed, killing and wounding too many of his artillerymen, was not merely dismounted- it was a ruin, fit only for scrap iron. Ordinarily he would think that was a disaster, for he had no idea how or when or even
if he could lay his hands on a replacement gun. But today, he could hardly even bring himself to care.
Packs of wild hell-hounds were beginning to recover from the confusion, in the places they'd scattered to after breaking in the battle. They had been brought into this world by the devil's malignant sorcery, but its death did not mean they would
leave. About three hundred had been accounted for, mostly during the pitched battle, and a few were being hunted down by those of his cavalry not busy tending to their own wounded. That left, oh, somewhere between four and six hundreds of the things to wander the wilderness in the depth of winter. They would be like packs of starving wolves only bigger, fiercer, and of course, with the power to breathe flame, along with who knew what other unnatural abilities. At least that would be as much the Detroiters' problem as the Empire's.
He had heard one of his aides tell him this was a victory. He supposed that was true. Before him was... frankly, the man who had made it possible.
The Kaskaskians had upheld the honor of their arms, had done the duty of a cavalry escort against a beaten enemy. With the courage of their chief and the points of their lances, they had harried the devil. Perhaps stopped it from somehow escaping- with magic if not with its wounded body.
And it had been Gérard's pikemen who had put an end to the fiend once and for all- the body bursting into a torrent of flame that the pikemen had stumbled awkwardly back from,
too slowly for a few of the men in the front rank. Even in death, such monsters could maim and kill. There was a crater in the ground at the foot of the hill, now, reeking of sulfur, and somehow Blanchard knew that no grass would grow there for a long time to come.
But though Blanchard did not care for heretics, he felt not even the slightest urge to downplay what young Delatour had done. There were stories, published and witnessed, of such feats of arms... but to the colonel they were just that,
stories. Things he had never truly expected to see, even in a frontier posting where battles against wizards and demons were very much a possibility.
As ever, one was courteous to a the son of a viscount- and today, more than courteous. There were no words for the proper way to address a man who'd just singlehandedly charged and crippled a devil, armed with no more than native valor and a few pistols.
"Captain Delatour! It is good to see you... my compliments, and the regiment owes you a debt."
The day-worshipper shrugged, spreading his hands. "Thank you sir, though... I know dozens of men who, in the same position, with the same means at their disposal, would have done the same."
"Mm. The same means... I've heard of silver bullets... but in old wives' tales, not military manuals. They're hardly a common thing. How did you happen to be carrying them?"
"I had them made, some months ago... because Grandfather told me to. In a dream. And I brought them, today- the same."
Blanchard nodded. "I see..." In his forty-seven years, it wasn't the first, nor the fiftieth, time he'd heard stories of prophetic dreams and ancestral guidance. Privately he had his doubts, especially since Delatour
was a heretic. Nonetheless... "Captain, those were some very well timed instructions; your grandfather’s ghost gives good advice. Perhaps we should invest in a modest stockpile of the things, for more of our men."
Delatour shrugged. "You would have to ask a wizard, or a priestess, or perhaps a gunsmith or an accountant, sir. I... am a captain of musketeers."
Northern Marches, Michigan
Several Miles Southeast of Guillory's Tower
Evening
Frostbringer 20, 224
The return march had been delayed, as Shoots-Across-Canyon's plainsmen had taken time to sweep through the countryside and try to thin out the packs of hellhounds which scattered after the battle. The chief had slain two, one with the rifle as they drank from a pool of water, another with the lance along with a file of his men. Some of his men had been lucky as well. But there were too many of the dogs for one warband to hunt down, especially after the losses in the battle. He had too many empty saddles, and too many wounded men lashed to the saddles that were full.
But the Ohioans had their own dead to think of. The march had been slow for everyone. And as always plainsmen, ahorse could run the legs off River Men ahorse, let alone afoot, under any possible condition of things. Thus, the chief had ample time to pursue his wish to seek out the Ohioan musket captain. It was a matter of respect, and some curiosity, for Shoots-Across-Canyon to seek out Delatour after the day they'd had.
He knew the man, of course, had spoken and worked with him before. Even drunk and diced with him- he'd won a small pile of silver, but good old Two-Dogs had lost a pair of pistols later that night. Come to think of it, the very same pistols the musketeer captain had borne today. Delatour was pretty good at dice, though he seldom played. Maybe it was a number thing.
Still, though, the chief had never thought of Delatour as the stuff of a saga. Too much a thinker, too much of his heart and guts given over to the cold, passionless
things an Ohioan called 'education.' Head full of schoolbooks. The Kaskaskian chief was literate, as were his troop leaders- at least, literate enough to read a guard roster or a list of supplies. But there was such a thing as taking it too far.
So it would be curious, to see how a feat of arms might change such a man. Perhaps there was more fighting heart in Delatour than he'd given the River Man credit for.
Mounting up on his riding horse-
not a warhorse, he'd have to find another- and finding the Eighth Company was no great chore. Finding its captain proved a bit more difficult, as he'd gone out riding after leaving one of his lieutenants in charge of preparing their part of the Ohioan camp. Even so, tracking down one River Man officer didn't take long. Shoots-Across-Canyon was not merely a captain of scouts but a highly capable scout and huntsman in his own right.
Shoots-Across-Canyon got off his horse quietly, and approached on foot. He made noise on purpose, calling out so that the musketeer would not think that an enemy crept up on him. But at first, the Ohioan captain paid no mind. Delatour seemed... worryingly unaware of his surroundings, given that they weren't
that far from the site of the battle. The chief expected that they'd be troubled again by hellhounds, more than once, on the return march.
The man had climbed off his horse on the western slope of a small hill, looking at the setting sun, and glancing down unhappily at the broken springs of the wheellock pistol he'd thrown aside in his duel with the fiend. He muttered "It was a dream..."
Shoots-Across-Canyon’s brows narrowed. Had some curse assaulted the man's wits? "A... dream?"
Delatour seemed to jerk a little, then rose to his feet, as though only now consciously aware of the chief's approach. "My mother- she died in childbirth thirteen years ago, you know..." Delatour stared into space. "Grandfather, a few years after that. And yet... I dreamt I was in a corner of- somehow
was, and
was not, the regimental mess hall... no place I've seen, but it had a certain... I don't know what. Him, and a few other men, friends of his speaking around a table. As they used to do when I was a boy."
Always these River Men babbled on about their ancestors. A load of nonsense. Anyone with sense knew that the spirits of the dead
stayed dead, or perhaps, with luck, were carried away by the wind spirits to the grazing lands beyond the moon. But this River Man had done what only two men of a thousand had dared to do, ridden against a demon in single combat. And of those two worthies, the other was himself, the bravest and mightiest blade of the Great Elms clan of the Kaskaskian Host. And, the plainsman grudgingly admitted, the River Man had done it first, arguably at greater hazard of his life. Shoots-Across-Canyon listened, without interrupting.
"I think I would rather have walked through fire than seen them like that, seeming so...
alive, when they are dead. But... thinking back, I... do you know, had I not listened to them in every particular, either I would be dead, or we all would be dead.
"Eh?" More ancestor-babble, but this talk of death sounded oddly certain, even for a man who had just gone through such a murderous battle as this.
"Grandfather told me to get a silversmith to make me six silver pistol-balls. Exactly six. No more, no less. And I asked why, and... my mother, she said... 'because you're a brave boy and I want you to be safe.' " And I had
no idea what that was supposed to mean. But thinking about it... if I'd had a seventh ball, I'd have ridden in closer to use it. Much closer. And knowing what happened to you, I'd have gotten my head torn off trying."
"Maybe so, maybe not. You ride like... a pretty good River Man."
Delatour chuckled grimly. "I know what you mean by that, plainsman. In any event- without question, this was not just a dream. I was told things that were far too specific, learned things that no one could have known naturally. And... if I hadn't done as they told me, would any of us be alive? Are we all living on borrowed time, now?" He looked down at his hands.
The chief of horsemen nodded slowly, thinking. Perhaps his bluff demeanor had encouraged the River Man to open up. Or perhaps the musketeer's wits
were scrambled, enough to think that a dream could guide a man in battle, especially a man who knew nothing of the wind spirits and their shamanry. Ohioans were usually more reserved than this, at least with plainsmen.
Shoots-Across-Canyon decided to treat Delatour with a high compliment- to treat him like a man of the Host. He'd earned it. Maybe it would liven him up, get some juice into him, put him back into balance. He reached out, clapped the musketeer across the shoulder.
“Don’t worry, captain. For me, mine, we’ll be fine. Borrowed time, stolen, whatever. And so will you, yours! We're too crazy to die! You’re
bad, like us!” He waved in the direction of his horsemen and their separate camp, laughing. Delatour gave a tired smile, and nodded. Kaskaskian and musketeer alike returned to their horses, and rode back to the River Men’s camp.
[finis]