[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Amara made sure the fighting men had water before taking a tankard of it herself, and watched the battle.Second squad lost a man when a stray blow from an axe split his foot like a stick of cordwood and he had to be hauled back to what passed for their hospital.A second man hesitated when a taken holder who looked like a middle-aged woman came at him, and it cost him his life when she threw him out of the shieldwall and into the midst of the taken attackers.Moments later, another man was struck senseless by a blow to his helmet, but before his companions could haul him back, the taken holders seized his wrist, and in the ensuing tug-of-war ripped his arm from the socket.The plan called for second squad to last at least another four or five minutes.Amara didn't see how they could possibly do it without losing more men.The taken holders had no interest in self-preservation, and they were willing to die to cripple or kill a legionare—and there were three or four times as many of them as there were Alerans.They could absorb the losses, and there was very little that the Alerans could do about it.The sun had fully risen by then, and no Aleran relief force had come roaring down from the skies or across the fields.Nor, she thought, was it likely that any was coming.The rain began to fall more heavily, the wind to gust and howl, and crows haunted every tree in sight, settling down in the frigid wind to wait for corpses to fall.Their fight was a hopeless one.If the rate of casualties remained steady—and it wouldn't, as the legionares grew more winded and wounded, and as Bernard's archers ran entirely out of arrows—then half of the combat-capable legionares would be out of action by late morning.And when the decline came, it would come swiftly, a sudden collapse of discipline and will under the relentless violence of the taken holders' assault.They were unlikely to live until midday.Amara forced that cold judgment from her thoughts and attempted to focus on something more hopeful.The most stable factor in the engagement was, surprisingly, Doroga and his companion.Walker proved a dominating, even overwhelming presence in the battle, his immense power in the confines of the tunnel unmatched by anything the vord had to throw at them.The Gargant seemed to operate under a very simple set of ground rules: He crouched more or less at his ease on his side of the cavern.Anything that walked within reach of his vast sledgehammer paws and stone-gouging claws got crushed or torn apart in swift order.Doroga, meanwhile, crouched between Walker's front paws with his war cudgel, knocking weapons from the hands of the taken and dispatching foes crippled to immobility by Walker's claws.The taken never slacked in their assault, but they began to show more caution about approaching Walker, attempting to draw the gargant out with short, false rushes that did not manage to lure him into the open.Amara watched in awe as the gargant's paw batted a taken legionare through the air to land thirty feet from the mouth of the cave, and thought that even though they could not furycraft the cave's entrance into a narrower, more defensible position, Doroga and Walker, savagely defending half the cave's mouth on their own, were in fact more effective than a wall of stone.A stone wall would only have stopped the taken holders.Doroga and Walker were doing that and additionally dispatching enemies very nearly as swiftly as the Alerans.It had never occurred to Amara how the confined space of the cave would magnify the gargant's combat ability.Gargants in an open field of combat were largely unstoppable, but not generally difficult to avoid or to flank.But in the cave's confines, that changed.There was simply nowhere to run to get out of the beast's way, no way to encircle it, and the gargant's raw, crushing power made Walker much more dangerous than Amara had assumed he would be.Amara had barely finished her water when Bernard ordered her into the fray again, moments short of the time that had been allotted to second squad to hold.She and the Knights Terra once again bought the legionares time to switch fresh bodies for winded ones.Third squad did better than either second or first, but the fourth simply ran into a patch of horribly bad luck and lost their entire front rank in the space of a few seconds, necessitating an early advance from the fifth squad, and Amara and her Knights had to enter the battle again before they'd had a chance to breathe properly.Doroga took note of the situation and guided Walker into a short rush forward in time with Amara's Knights, and the gargant's bellowing challenges shook dust from the cave's roof.It was only with Walker's help that they managed to successfully press the enemy back to the cave mouth again, giving the legionares behind them a chance to change out with fresh fighters.There was a quivering quality to the fight now, an uncertainty in the movements of her Knights.They were tiring, their movement hampered by the remains of fallen foes and legionares alike, making it more difficult to move and fight together.Worse, each drive forward only showed them how many of the enemy yet remained outside.For all their efforts, there were still too many of the taken to count easily, and no sign at all of the queen.They reached the mouth of the cave, and Amara called a halt.They began their steady, ordered withdrawal back to their original positions.An abrupt blur of grey cloak streaked into the cave along the ceiling, crawling like some unthinkably huge and swift spider.The vord queen.Amara had seen it the instant it appeared, but before she could draw a breath to shout a warning, the shape flung itself from the ceiling of the cave and hammered into the Knight on the left end of their line, a large and good-natured young man with red hair bleached to straw by hours in the sun.He was in the middle of a backswing, warding off a taken legionare with his blade, and never saw the queen coming.The vord hit him in a tangle of whipping limbs.There was a sound like a small cloud of whip cracks, and the queen flung itself to the opposite wall, behind Walker, only to bound off it like a coiled spring and pounce upon the rightmost Knight in the same fashion, while blood blossomed up in a sudden shower from the redheaded Knight.The second Knight was an older man, a career soldier, and he had enough experience to dodge away from the queen and whip the crown of his heavy mace in an overhand, shattering blow.The vord caught the mace in one hand, and stopped it cold.The queen's skin was a shade of deep green-black, shining and rigid-looking, and with a twist of its body it threw the Knight off-balance and sent him staggering into the waiting taken.Before the Knight could regain his balance, they seized him and mobbed him as slives did a wounded deer, while the queen bounced to the left-hand wall again, barely avoiding a crushing kick from Walker's left hind leg.More taken, this time moving with some kind of horrible excitement, began to press recklessly into the cave.The creature was so fast, Amara thought in a panic, and called upon Cirrus, borrowing of the fury's fluid speed.Time did not slow—not precisely.But she suddenly became aware of every detail of her surroundings.She could see the gleam of light and the stains of blood upon the vord queen's claws.She could see and smell the pulsing fountain of blood pouring from the first Knight's throat, slashed open to the bone.She saw individual raindrops as they fell outside, and the sway of the vord queen's rain-soaked cloak [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]