At that moment, before the two armies had even met, Kyrtian spotted the Young Lords coming out of the gates of their fortress. He knew them by their colorful armor, riding out through the flood of their own fighters, their horses carried along like flotsam in a stream.
Ha!
He had been told not to hold back, and he didn't. As soon as the foremost of the riders got free of the human sea about him, Kyrtian aimed—gathered his power from the depths of his soul—clasped both hands above his head, and let loose a levin-bolt at the nearest.
The levin-bolt streaked from his clasped hands across the space between them, a fire-streaming comet, and those who saw it and had the time to react flung themselves screaming out of its path. Anyone with any experience of levin-bolts would see that this one was deadly—and strong.
It hit—it hit! Kyrtian's throat closed for a moment—what if Moth was wrong? But in the same moment, he knew, he knew that Moth had not been wrong, for his fatal levin-bolt in the moment of striking fragmented into a thousand shards of light, blinding his view of his target for just a moment. In the next moment, there was his target, unharmed—though the poor horse was frozen in place, all four hooves planted.
Yes! It works! Now sure that he would not kill someone, Kyrtian didn't hesitate, and at last he had a little of the thrill of battle, the exultation of success; bolt after bolt flew down the hill and into the chests of the Young Lords; bolt after bolt shattered on their defenses just as the first had.
By now the fighters of both sides had cleared out of the way of the bolts, which meant that aside from a few scattered pairs locked in combat, the main body of troops weren't actually fighting anyone. That, too, was part of the plan.
But instead of taking heart from the failure of his levin-bolts to kill—as any sane commander would have—the Young Lords apparently "panicked" when confronted by a mage of superior power.
They turned tail and fled; not in a body, but breaking from their army, sending fighters tumbling out of the way of the hooves of their bolting steeds, and scattering in every possible direction except towards the enemy, whipping their horses in a frenzy of feigned fear. And at the sight of their leaders in a rout (which was, of course, the signal to certain of the human fighters to move into the next phase of the plan), the rebel army itself suddenly broke off combat before it had even begun. Leaderless, it was every man for himself, and the humans were under no obligation to carry out the orders of masters who had abandoned them. Most surrendered or fled within moments. The lion's share of the ones who fled were Kyrtian's—brought to augment the Young Lords' troops and make the army look formidable enough to have been a real threat. Kyrtian's men, throwing down their weapons the better to flee unencumbered, were heading for a Gate that would take them home.
The rest dropped their weapons as well, but threw themselves on their faces to surrender—Kyrtian had counted on that, and he had the satisfaction of seeing that the surrendering fighters managed to impede those who might have followed the ones who fled.
Now there was some pleasure, the thrill of seeing a plan unfold perfectly, though there was and would not be any of the excitement and triumph of a real victory.
The Great Lords' fighters pursued—but the vanguard was composed of more of his own men, and they managed to obstruct the passage of the men behind them by getting tangled up with those who were surrendering. This managed to impede the rest of the fighters, slowing them and permitting the vanquished to get a head start. By the time real pursuit got underway, the enemy was already too far ahead to pursue effectively afoot. So, given that Kyrtian gave no orders to urge them on from his hilltop command-post, they began the easier task of taking charge of those who surrendered. Moth and Lady Virid-
ina had taken the precaution of tampering with every slave-collar to make it seem that the Young Lords had found a way to override the rightful owners' compulsions. Gladiatorial slaves—the only ones that were reasonable candidates for combat—weren't so plentiful these days that anyone would even consider killing or punishing these men for something they could not help; if their original owners couldn't be determined, they'd probably be allotted among the Great Lords as booty.
Further enrichening the coffers of those who don't need it. Kyrtian felt almost depressed, as he watched the chaos of the battlefield sort itself into tidy groups of prisoners and captors. There didn't seem to be many dead or seriously wounded; there were a few distant figures still on the ground, but they were moving in a way that suggested injury but not serious trauma.
I should be glad of that. And he was—but he also felt as if he'd been cheated, somehow; all of the preparation for a battle—more, far more, in the way of planning and organization— but none of the excitement. The most he felt was gratitude that it was done with and there were so few casualties.
The sun was only just cresting the eastern horizon, the merest fingernail-paring of hot rose, and the battle was over; so far as the Great Lords were concerned, the war with their rebel offspring was over, too. Now would come the hard part; hunting them down individually, or waiting for them to come crawling back, looking for forgiveness. That was what they would be thinking, anyway, and Kyrtian was not about to allow them to discover any part of the truth.
He signaled to his horse, and let it plod back down the hill to his tent. Time to prepare himself for Lord Kyndreth's congratulations, and pretend to an elation he didn't feel.
The subcommanders milled about in the background, not daring to approach such exalted personages as Lords of the Council without being summoned, but clearly hoping to be noticed.
Kyrtian, on the other hand, was very much the center of attention, and not feeling particularly comfortable in that position.
"Brilliant!" Kyndreth boomed, as Kyrtian ducked his head
modestly. "Brilliant! Clearly they never guessed you would force a march after dark to get into place before sunrise."
"I had made a point of always bivouacking before sunset until I knew where they had made their headquarters, my lord," Kyrtian said, as Lord Kyndreth accepted a glass of wine from one of the slaves. "I wanted them to see a pattern and become used to it."
Kyrtian's tent had been cleared of everything except tables and chairs borrowed from those of his underlings who insisted on traveling with suites of furniture; with carpets on the floor and slaves holding trays of refreshments, it could not have looked less like his campaign headquarters. But Lord Kyndreth had insisted on Gating here ("with a select few of the Council, nothing to trouble yourself about") to tender his congratulations in person. "Nothing to trouble yourself about" had entailed non-stop, frantic work on the part of his staff up until the very moment that the temporary Gate opened and Kyndreth and entourage marched through.
"Ha—of course, you'd never done such a thing before, so they lacked the imagination to suppose that you would do it now," Kyndreth laughed, as the other three Great Lords he had brought with him nodded wisely. "Of course, old Levelis never did such a thing either."
"Levelis," said one long-faced Lord sourly, "never exerted himself to travel more than a league or two at a time."
"Levelis is an old fool," Lady Moth snapped, joining the discussion, wineglass in hand, "and if it had been left up to him, I'd still be penned up on my estate next Midwinter."
Moth rode over, escorted by her bodyguards, soon enough to welcome the Councilors along with Kyrtian and to serve as his hostess. This was not the first time in the conversation that she had made a point of mentioning that Kyrtian had rescued her from the rebels, and it probably would not be the last.
"Entirely possible, my lady," the sour-face Councilor said, with a slight bow. "And now what do you plan, young commander?" he continued, turning to Kyrtian.
Kyrtian sighed. "Now, my lord, comes the most tedious, most time-consuming, and least-rewarding part of this cam-
paign," he replied. "We hunt down the fugitives one at a time and bring them back to the Council for judgment. I'd calculated that something like this would occur, and planned for it from the beginning; this is a task for smaller parties of men, and if you will permit me, my lords, I would prefer to use my own men if possible. I can count on them not to damage the fugitives when they are caught. As for the rest of the force—well, if it were my decision to make, I would disband it. An army is essentially a great beast that is all mouth and stomach out of which no useful work can be gotten when it is not engaged in a campaign."
"We will—take that under consideration," Lord Kyndreth replied, with a glance at his fellow Council members. "It does make sense, however."
He's thinking about the Wizards. Kyrtian took a sip of wine and tried to look unconcerned.
"Oh, come now, Kyndreth, the boy's right," said the sour one, appropriating a tidbit from one of the trays and examining it as if he expected to find a bug on it before putting it cautiously in his mouth. "There's no point in keeping these men sitting about doing nothing more useful than military maneuvers when we could have them all back on our estates doing some meaningful work, even if it's only in the breeding pens."
He's not. And he might not be in favor of another Wizard War if the subject were broached at the moment.
"And Levelis," pointed out a Council member in midnight blue and deep green, who was making steady inroads on the wine without showing the least sign of intoxication, "would immediately advise to keep these men out here under his command."
"And you know how I feel about" Levelis," Kyndreth acknowledged with a faint smile. "Another salient point, but one that is better discussed in Council, don't you think?"
"Hmmm," said the fellow in blue, but didn't add anything more.
How is he drinking so much and staying sober?
Kyndreth immediately changed the subject back to the current victory, but Kyrtian couldn't help but notice that there was
an aspect of it that he did not touch on—the rebels' ability to counteract his own levin-bolts. It was the fourth member of Kyndreth's party who brought it up.
"I had no notion that you had so much magic of your own— and how were those brats managing to dodge your levin-bolts, Kyrtian?" he asked, incredulously. "I thought they hadn't but driblets of magic of their own!"
He shrugged. "I never saw anything like it," he admitted. "Even if they had been using shields as I know them, the levin-bolts wouldn't have acted in that way when contacting a shield. I'm baffled."
"Huh. I wonder if they found anything in my library.. .." Moth mused, as if thinking aloud—but her sly glance at Kyrtian alerted him that she was about to present him with an opportunity for something.
But what?