Dust of Dreams (The Malazan Book of the Fallen #9)

Dust of Dreams (The Malazan Book of the Fallen #9) Page 208

No one would escape.

Thunder, flashes of lightning, a terrible growing roar-yet her eyes held frozen on the charging Barghast.

They hammered into the Akryn ranks, and Inthalas shouted in shock as the first line seemed to simply vanish beneath a crazed flurry of huge Barghast warriors, swords slashing down. Shield edges crumpled. Fragments of shattered helms spat into the air. The three front rows were driven back by the concussion. The chop and clash rose amidst screams of pain and rage, and she saw the Akryn legion bow inward as the remainder of the Barghast pushed their own front ranks ever deeper into the formation. It was moments from being driven apart, split in half.

Sagant must have seen the same from where he waited with the lancers. In actual numbers, the Barghast almost matched the foot-soldiers, and their ferocity was appalling. Darkness was swallowing the day, and the flashes of lightning from the west provided moments of frozen clarity as the battle was joined now on all sides-arrows lashing into the Barghast flanks in wave after wave. The plunging descent of Sagant and his lancers closed fast on the rearmost enemy warriors-who seemed indifferent to the threat at their backs as they pushed their comrades in front of them, clawing forward in a frenzy.

But that made sense-carve apart the Akryn legion and a way would be suddenly open before the Barghast, and in the ensuing chaos of the breakout the lancers would end up snarled with the foot-soldiers, and the archers would hunt uselessly in the gloom to make out foe from friend. All order, and with it command, would be lost.

She stared, still half-disbelieving, as the legion buckled. The Barghast had now formed a wedge, and it drove ever deeper.

Should the enemy push through and come clear, momentarily uncontested, they could wheel round and set weapons-they could even counter-attack, slaughtering disordered foot-soldiers and tangled lancers.

Inthalas turned to her thirty-odd scouts. ‘Ride with me!’ And she led them down the back slope of the ridge, cantering and then galloping, to bring her troop round opposite the likely fissure in the legion.

‘When the Barghast fight clear-we charge, do you understand? Arrows and then sabres-into the tip of the wedge. We tumble them, we slow them, we bind them-if with our own dead horses and our own dying bodies, we bind them!’

She could see a third of a wing of horse-archers pulling clear to the east-they were responding to the threat, but they might not be ready in time.

Damn these barbarians!

Inthalas, third daughter of the Sceptre, rose on her stirrups, gaze fixed on the writhing ranks of the legion. My children, your mother will not be returning home. Never again to see your faces. Never-

A sudden impact sent the horses staggering. The ground erupted-and she saw figures wheeling through the air, flung to one side as the storm struck the flank of the hills to the west, struck and tumbled over those hills, swallowing them whole. Inthalas, struggling to stay on her mount, stared in horror as a seething crest of enormous boulders and jagged rocks lifted over the nearest ridge-

Something huge and solid loomed within the nearest cloud-towering to fill half the sky. And its base was carving a bow-wave before it, as if tearing up the earth itself. The avalanche poured over the crest and down the slope of the basin in a roaring wave.

An entire wing of horse-archers was simply engulfed beneath the onslaught, and then the first of the broken boulders-many bigger than a trader’s wagon-crashed into the milling mass of Barghast and Akryn. As the rocks rolled and bounced through the press, pieces of crushed, smeared bodies spun into the air.

At that moment the lightning struck. Lashing, actinic blades ripping out from the dark, heaving cloud, cutting blackened paths through Sagant’s lancers and the clumps of reeling foot-soldiers. The air was filled with burning fragments-bodies lit like torches-men, women, horses-lightning danced from iron to iron in a crazed, terrifying web of charred destruction. Flesh burst in explosions of boiling fluid. Hair ignited like rushes-

Someone was shrieking in her ear. Inthalas turned, and then gestured-they had to get away. Away from the storm, away from the slaughter-they had to-

Deafening white light. Agony, and then-

As if a god’s sword had slashed across the hills on the other side of the valley, not a single ridge remained. Something vast and inexorable had pushed those summits down into the valley, burying the Snakehunter camp in a mass of deadly rubble. Here and there, Tool could see, remnants were visible among the shattered boulders-torn sections of canvas and hide, snarled shreds of clothing, guy-rope fetishes and feather-bundles, splintered shafts of ridge-poles-and there had been mangled flesh once, too, although now only bleached bones remained, broken, crushed, jutting-yet worse, to Tool’s mind, was the black hair, torn loose from flaps of scalp by the beaks of crows, and now wind-blown over the entire slope before them.