Domes of Fire

The methodical charges continued as the Trolls doggedly pushed through the mud into the killing zone. The strategy was going well, but it had not been without casualties. Several horses were down, felled by club strokes from wounded and enraged Trolls, and a few armoured knights lay motionless on the rain-swept ground.

Then the wind suddenly dropped, and the rain slackened as the calm at the centre of the storm passed over them.

‘What’s that?’ Tynian shouted, pointing beyond the howling Trolls.

It was a single, incandescent spark, brighter than the sun, and it hung just over the edge of the forest. It began to grow ominously, swelling, surging, surrounded by a blazing halo of purplish light.

‘There’s something inside it!’ Kalten yelled.

Sparhawk strained to see, squinting in the brilliant purple light that illuminated the battle-ground. ‘It’s alive,’ he said tersely. ‘It’s moving.’

The ball of purple light swelled faster and faster, and blazing orange flames shot out from the edges of it.

There was someone standing in the centre of that fiery ball – someone robed and hooded and burning green. The figure raised one hand, opened it wide, and a searing bolt of lightning shot from that open palm. A charging Cyrinic Knight and his horse were blasted into charred fragments by the bolt.

And then, from behind that searing light, an enormous shape reared up out of the forest. It was impossible that anything alive could be so huge. The head left no doubt that the creature was reptilian. The huge head was earlessly sleek, scaly and had a protruding, lipless muzzle filled with row after row of back-curving teeth. It had a short neck, narrow shoulders and tiny forepaws. The rest of the body was mercifully concealed by the trees.

‘We can’t fight that thing!’ Kalten cried.

The hooded figure within the ball of purple and orange fire raised its arm again. It seemed to clench itself, and then again the lightning shot from its open palm – and stopped, exploding in midair in a dazzling shower of sparks.

‘Did you do that?’ Vanion shouted at Sparhawk.

‘Not me, Vanion. I’m not that fast.’

Then they heard the deep, resonant voice chanting in Styric. Sparhawk wheeled Faran to look.

It was Zalasta. The silvery-haired Styric stood partway up the steep slope on the north side of the canyon, his white robe gleaming in the storm’s half-light. He had both arms extended over his head, and his staff, which Sparhawk had thought to be no more than an affectation, blazed with energy. He swung the staff downward, pointing it at the hooded figure standing in its fiery nimbus. A brilliant spark shot from the tip of the staff and sizzled as it passed over the heads of the Peloi and the armoured knights to explode against the ball of fire.

The figure in the fire flinched, and once more lightning shot from its open palm, directed at Zalasta this time. The Styric brushed it disdainfully aside with his staff and immediately responded with another of those brilliant sparks of light which shattered like the last on the surface of the ball of fire.

Again the hooded one inside its protecting fire flinched, more violently this time. The gigantic creature behind it screamed and drew back into the darkness.

The Church Knights, dumbfounded by the dreadful confrontation, had frozen in their tracks.

‘We have our own work to attend to, gentlemen!’ Vanion roared his reminder. ‘Charge!’

Sparhawk shook his head to clear his mind. ‘Thanks, Vanion,’ he said to his friend. ‘I got distracted there for a moment.’

‘Pay attention, Sparhawk,’ Vanion said crisply in precisely the same tone he had always used on the practice-field years before when Sparhawk and Kalten had been novices.

‘Yes, my Lord Preceptor,’ Sparhawk replied automatically in the self-same embarrassed tone he had used as a stripling. The two looked at each other, and then they both laughed.

‘Just like old times,’ Kalten said gaily. ‘Well then, why don’t we go Troll-hunting and leave the incidentals to Zalasta?’

The knights continued their endless charge and the two magicians continued their fiery duel overhead. The Trolls were no less savage now, but their numbers were diminished and the huge pile of their dead impeded their attack.

The bloody work on the ground went on and on while the air above the battleground sizzled and crackled with awful fire.

‘Is it my imagination, or is our purple friend up there getting a little pale and wan?’ Tynian suggested as they took up fresh lances once more.

‘His fire’s beginning to fade just a bit,’ Kalten agreed. ‘And he’s taking longer and longer to work himself up to another thunderbolt.’

‘Don’t grow over-confident, gentlemen,’ Vanion admonished them. ‘We still have Trolls to deal with, and that oversized lizard’s still out there in the forest.’

‘I was trying very hard not to think about that,’ Kalten replied.

Then, very suddenly, as suddenly as it had expanded, the ball of purple-orange fire began to contract. Zalasta stepped up his attack, the fiery sparks shooting from his staff in rapid succession to burst against the outer surface of that rapidly constricting nimbus like fiery hail.

Then the blazing orb vanished.

A cheer went up from the Peloi, and the Trolls faltered.

Khalad, his face strangely numb, set another javelin on his improvised engine and cut the rope to unleash his missile. The javelin sprang from the huge bow, and as it sped forward it seemed to ignite, and it blazed with light as it arced out higher and farther than any of the young man’s previous shots had done.

The great lizard rearing up out of the forest roared, its awful mouth gaping. And then the burning javelin took it full in the chest. It sank deep, and the hideous creature shrieked a great cry of agony and rage, its tiny forepaws clutching futilely at the burning shaft. And then there was a heavy, muffled thud within the monster’s body, a confined explosion that shook the very ground. The vast lizard burst open in a spray of bloody fire, and its ripped remains sank twitching back into the forest.

A nebulous kind of wavering appeared at the edge of the trees, a wavering very much like the shimmer of heat on a hot summer day, and then they all saw something emerging from that shimmer. It was a face only, brutish, ugly and filled with rage and frustration. The shaggy face sloped sharply back from its fang-filled muzzle, and the pig-like eyes burned in their sockets.

It howled – a vast howl that tore at the very air. It howled again, and Sparhawk recoiled. The wavering apparition was bellowing in Troll! Again it howled, its thunderous voice bending the trees around it like a vast wind.