Page 90 of Elvenbred

The soldiers guarding the wall finally responded, as more flying things came in through the gap where the shield had gone down. Two guards ran to a locker and gathered up crossbows, while one armed himself with a solitary handlance and scanned the skies.

Three more flying things came into view. The handlance took out one, a bright blot of flame that launched from the tube and burned the monster to a cinder. Haldeen swore, said a quick incantation, then made a hand-pass, flipping his fingers up. The other two flying creatures, robbed of their wind, fell to the stone battlements. “Get them, you fools!” he yelled to the crossbowmen. One shot, killing the flailing creature. The other, a bit slower, but perhaps more resourceful, grabbed a pike in his free hand and rammed it into the remaining flier. A moment later, he shot a bolt at another in the air. It dodged, flying low and fast, then rose to sweep down into the city beyond.

The city’s wall guards quickly recovered from their surprise and began to respond to the alarms. Yawning, half-dressed elves came stumbling up the stairs from their barracks. Haldeen watched as expressions of resentment … not another drill! … turned to fear as they saw the protective shield had fallen.

Haldeen held his ground, and cast incantation after incantation, driving flying things back out of the air, or stealing their air so they fell to where the soldiers could dispatch them. A few got past him. Something with six iridescent wings launched itself straight towards him, the upper half of its body the size and shape of a drawn sword. Haldeen managed to get his spell off in time, pushing it to the right just enough to deflect it. Its blade-beak cut through his cloak and shirt, pinking his arm, and drawing blood.

He turned, covering up the wound with his hand, and feeling his spells fail as the pain flared and his blood spattered on the stone walkway. He wanted to flee, to run from the insanity. He looked back, and saw four guards, laden with the magic jars and copper shot, crouched down as more flying things swept past his fallen defense and into the city. He had no idea of what had happened to the fifth.

He gestured to the four, and pointed to the stairs. “Go! Get that to my lab!”

He had no time to see if they followed his orders. He heard a scream behind him and turned on his heel, crouching down as something else winged and lethal passed overhead. The distant, calculating part of his mind, the part that could still do the math while the rest of him froze in terror … that part told him that the monsters outside had no more been prepared for this than the defenders had.

He looked around, looking for one of the mages … the Manipulators who worked the firelances, and were trained for this sort of thing. None to be had. Probably still at breakfast.

The first crawler made its way up across the battlement, a thing with hundreds of legs … more like cilia … on which sat a very canine-looking head. Haldeen didn’t allow himself even a second. He called up the half-remembered spell, fumbled the incantation, and felt the magic leak away. It came towards him, covering the ground rapidly. The missing bit came to him, and he stuttered out the correct words, sending a gout of flame from his hands that burned it where it stood. A second crawler followed, this one with tentacles along its underside. He burned it as well, then a flying thing that rose above the battlements.

He felt confidence rise. He had not been trained as a war mage, but had tested high Blue, powerful enough to cast and kill all by himself. He stood up, the better to see, and then cast the incantation to raise a protective wall around him and the soldiers nearby, a miniature of the one that had guarded the city. He steadied his mind, calmed the fear, and summoned the magic, using his personal stores to guide and shape the much more powerful ambient around him. Only a fraction of the usual power came to his call, and the shield barely held, and felt weak. Something’s off. It shouldn’t have been that hard. He ducked as a flying thing hit the shield. It should have been stopped cold, as though flying into a wall. Instead, it slowly oozed through, then fell to the ground. The soldiers sprang into action, stabbing it with spears until it stopped moving.

The drain of the burning spells cost him, and he struggled to hold up his shield. He tried to draw in more ambient magic to keep the flickering going, but it wasn’t enough, and the shield failed. What in nineteen hells? There should have been plenty of power … a waterfall. Instead, the ambient magic felt like a trickle.

The distraction of the failed spell nearly killed him. Another flying thing, all teeth and wings, flared up over the battlement and straight towards him. He got the incantation out just in time to burn it down, but was spattered with fluids and burning embers. Another came for him, so another flame, then another crawler, also reduced to a scorched puddle. He took a quick glance around. He held his own for the present, but these things were insignificant, parasites when compared to the big Predators. Fear flared and he stumbled through an incantation, too late for the one that raked his shoulder as it passed. He heard a scream behind him, and glanced back to see an elf stumbling back and clutching at the creature as its razor talons tore into his face and shoulders.

Haldeen glanced frantically around, looking for someone … whose damned job this is … to take over before he got killed.

He burned another flier to a cinder. Then, he scorched a crawler, not enough to kill it, but enough to burn off two legs and slow it down long enough for the wall guards to impale it and send it tumbling back down the wall. He lost track of time for a while, burning monster after monster, until he felt weak and weary.

He looked away for a moment, looking for help. He saw a younger mage, a woman he didn’t even recognize, in military dress, casting her own spells, elegant hand-passes as she launched fine streams of fire and lightning into the flying things that increasingly swarmed through the gap in the city’s shield. She moved with a grace and efficiency he could never match. He went to call out to her, to yell encouragement, when something the size of his fist slipped past him, and past her guard. He saw the red ruin when it hit her, and the headless body falling to the stones.

He stood, shocked for a moment, then heard a yell and ducked. A similar thing … part life and part weapon … had only just missed his head, and buried itself into the wall-stones. He burned it, and turned back to where the attack continued. Another. And another. Haldeen cast as quickly as he could, learning to use the bare minimum needed to draw the fire, then release it, his flames growing more unfocused as he grew tired.

The ranks of the guards thinned, trading their lives for time … time for wizards to come to the city’s defense, and time for the Machina Manipulators to bring their machines into operation. Where the hell are they? They should be here by now! He burned two, panting now as the spells came harder. He glanced up to where the female wizard had fallen …. That was the Manipulator. She never made it to her station.

A larger creature, some kind of bounding thing with arms and tentacles, came up the wall, and smashed through the thin screen of guards. This was bigger than the others, twice the size of a farm horse, and all teeth and tentacles. He focused on burning it … hitting it with spell after spell. Fresh, it would have taken him a number of solid hits to bring it down. Wearied and depleted, he struck it a dozen times before it faltered. Time slowed, and his world shrank to killing the thing even as it sawed into what remained of the wall guards. He had trouble following the speed of the action, and caught only individual moments. A red puddle of blood. A single hand, neatly severed at the wrist. A cut tentacle landing between two guards, the stump on fire from his spell. A scream and thrust as one cast his spear into an eye. A shriek. Its right side lit up a lurid red as a guard launched a carefully hoarded handlance into its spell-burned side. He stepped back then, to let the soldiers finish the creature. Two died before it stopped moving. They bought him time to catch his breath.

It felt like a hundred years had passed since the battle started. He felt exhausted … far wearier than he should have. He’d mastered simple fire spells years ago. The world wavered a bit, and got dark around the edges. He felt dizzy, and bent forward at the knees trying to catch his breath. His ears rang. Someone shoved him out to the side, and he felt a thud as something struck close to where he stood. He looked up.

Wizards came up the stairs and onto the battlement, stepping over the bodies of the fallen. More guards as well, trooping along the wall … from other sectors? Then, the whole wall hadn’t fallen. Just this portion. That was important. He roused himself and turned to thank the elf who’d pushed him. That one stared at him, lifeless, slumped against the battlement’s back wall, with a foot of some kind of projectile sticking out of his chest.

Haldeen turned. Firelances came into action as the battle grew to close quarters. A dozen things, elf-sized with a thick carapace, some kind of horn or antler, and … six legs … eight legs … swarmed over the outer wall. Haldeen roused himself, called his flagging reserves, and tried to burn them, focusing his wrath on the closest. The carapace resisted his fury, and in the time it took him to burn one, the others managed a foothold.

He saw the wizards’ first efforts … initially confident, then faltering as their spells failed. One died, killed when his defensive magic failed to bite, and a crawler launched itself, engulfing his head and throat. The others went to smaller magics, the close-in spells that only sipped the ambient, if they touched it at all.

Haldeen, nearly spent, turned and focused on the next creature. A city guardsman dove, tackling him as metal shafts pierced the stone wall where he stood. Haldeen, knocked to the ground and winded, twisted under the guard who had knocked him out of the spears’ path. He looked up and saw the elf, blood on his hair and very blonde beard, pierced in a half dozen places by the spikes that would have hit him. Haldeen tried to frame words, a response to the sacrifice, but the light in the guardsman’s eyes faded before he could speak.

He shifted out from underneath the elf’s body, seeing the metal shafts that had pieced the stoneworks and his rescuer. He tried to stand, before being knocked to his knees again, Three Skydancers blasted through the gap in the city’s defenses, their iridescent wings howling as they passed overhead, barely more than an adult’s height over the walls. Haldeen saw lines of crystalline darts emerge from the belly of the closest ’Dancer, slicing into the carapaces of the monsters and cutting them down where they stood. It was gone in an instant, crossing the wall, and diving down the front. Haldeen could still hear the howl of its wings, below him and outside the city … low enough to have to dodge tree stumps.

He stumbled forward, through the blood, the monsters’ ichor, and the fallen bodies to see out over the southern fields, twenty times his own height to the ground. The Skydancers flew low enough he could see down into the Manipulator’s seats. He watched as one Manipulator gripped a handle on the inside of the narrow control cabin. The seat was barely wide enough to make a decent coffin. The Manipulator’s hair blew out behind as he? she? gripped a handle tightly as they swept the Skydancer up into the steep turn and sprayed crystalline darts out ahead. A second Skydancer swept low before looping up and tilting to one side to engage the creatures that had yet to reach the city. A long stream of darts sprang from its side, looking like a stream of silver as it caught the sun. Where the stream touched the creatures on the ground, it left carnage. The second ’Dancer made another steep turn, nearly brushing the distant tree line and clawed upward, seeking altitude. Haldeen could see a half dozen specks pursuing it, with more emerging from the tree line that marked the end of the effective range of the city’s weapons.

He opened his mouth to swear, but nothing came out. The ground from the distant tree line to the city had come alive … the ground from the wall to the distant trees swarmed with bizarre creatures, from knee-high to things half the height of the walls.

The first Skydancer made methodical passes, cutting great swaths across the lifeforms that pressed towards the city walls. A third Skydancer cut across the sky. Haldeen shaded his eyes to better follow it. He wasn’t used to the brightness of unfiltered sunlight. The third flew differently than the other two. Where they had gone low, this one corkscrewed upwards, heading upwards for the morning clouds. His eyes locked on its belly as it spun upwards, graceful and lethal. So very lethal. A single silver cylinder nestled underneath, between the lower pair of buzzing, iridescent wings.

Haldeen felt his blood run cold. Actinics. The last line of defense. With the city’s shield down and the city itself at risk, the king would order the star’s light to be brought to this place and set free. There would be a vast brightness, then wind and heat, and all the Creatures near the wall would die.

With the city shield down, there would be nothing to protect the city when the star arrived, and many would die. Including everyone on this wall.

Haldeen looked around. His hearing didn’t seem to be working, but he saw the city guard fighting desperately against the things that crawled, flew, and slithered over the battlement walls. The defenders still held, but they were weakening.