Extermination (Daniel Black Book 3) Read online

  They fell back before me, and I triggered a plasma jet. The violet beam was hotter than the surface of the sun, and dense enough to sear through flesh in seconds. More ape men fell, their chests and faces burned away to expose the bones and organs beneath. The beam played across the leg of a war golem for a moment, leaving the iron surface glowing faintly with heat.

  Then a swarm of insects was swirling around me, finding their way in through the gaps in my force field. I crushed some of them with force magic, but a couple of the wasp-like creatures managed to sting me.

  “Ow! Fuck, that hurts. Ah, damn it, I think their venom is lethal.”

  Not that it would actually kill me, with my amulet constantly healing me. But it wasn’t a lot of fun, and too many stings in a short time period might knock me out. That would be bad. I sealed off most of the openings in my force field, and conjured fire to try to fend off the swarm.

  “I see him,” Cerise announced from behind me, and leaped.

  She was in full demon form now, with her whipcord tail and long horns fully visible as she drew on her stolen reserves of demonic power. Her foot came down on an ape man’s head, knocking him down as she pushed off to sail over the crowd. She landed somewhere in the middle of the enemy, and the insects suddenly lost interest in me.

  I resumed cutting my way through the andregi formation. If I could get to that fallen golem pilot I might still be able to save him before the venom killed him.

  That was our pattern for the next half hour. We encountered one enemy force after another, enough to make it clear that there must be a thousand or more inside the wall by now. Every group had at least one or two mages and several of the guys with blood weapons, and they often found some clever way to get a hit in on me despite my layers of magical defenses. But none of them could stand up to the sheer brute force of my magic, or stop Cerise when she went darting through the press after a target. A hit or two was all they ever got before they died, and that wasn’t nearly enough to overcome my magical healing.

  Leo’s command didn’t fare as well. The war wizard was actually in better shape than I was, his enchanted armor proving impervious to everything that the enemy threw at him. But the other golem pilots in his command weren’t nearly as well protected, and the golems themselves took steady damage. By the time we came within sight of the gate he was down to two heavily damaged golems, and we’d been forced to leave all of his men behind with the garrison troops.

  The situation at the gate didn’t look promising.

  A dome of crimson energy shielded the little plaza around the broken gate, deflecting arrows and the occasional bolt of lightning from the city’s defenders. What looked like a giant mutant tyrannosaurus covered in blood armor stood guard inside the dome, surrounded by dozens of ape men with blood weapons. They had mages there too, at least twenty of them, and a handful of especially big ape men who had armor made of blood in addition to their weapons. They had obviously secured the gatehouse, as the roof and wall overlooking the plaza were packed with archers.

  Oh, and a fresh troop of triceratops cavalry was pouring in through the gates.

  Experimentally, I tried lobbing a couple of explosive rounds at the dome. They didn’t even go off. As far as I could tell the projectiles just disintegrated when they struck the barrier.

  “Any ideas?” I asked my companions.

  Cerise leaned against my back, and I could feel her panting. “Dunno, but I can’t keep this up much longer. You were right, Daniel, I’m still weak from stabilizing myself. Your amulet keeps me from running out of mana, but my head’s getting too fuzzy for a serious fight.”

  I put my hand on hers, and sent some healing her way. It wasn’t perfect, but I could banish her fatigue well enough to get her through one more fight.

  “We need something big to crack the dome,” Leo analyzed. “Then a heavy assault spell for that large beast. It will probably take a dragon slayer to put it down, and we’ll need to lay down a heavy spell barrage on the rest of the enemy at the same time. I have one decent barrage prepared, but I’m afraid the rest of that is beyond me.”

  “I don’t have anything on me that will crack the dome,” I admitted. “I don’t think we want to try walking through it, either. I’m sure it would do something nasty to us. Any chance of reinforcements?”

  He shook his head. “The High Adepts are preparing to lay down a grand bombardment on the army, but they’re counting on us to seal the gate. The other golem squads will be driving back the enemy, and by now the nobles should have enough manpower mobilized to mount a counteroffensive. But we’re the heavy hitters here.”

  “Damn.” I studied the enemy position for a moment, thinking furiously.

  “What about the attack you deployed at the docks?” Leo suggested.

  I shook my head. “That requires line of sight from my island. What if we back off and come at them underground? I can tunnel under that dome in a couple of minutes, and then we’ll be in among their mages.”

  “Just the three of us? We’d be overwhelmed. Maybe if we can round up some elite knights, and another adept or two.”

  Our planning was interrupted by a tremendous crash of thunder. The biggest bolt of lightning I’d ever seen struck down from the overcast sky to smash the dome, and for a moment all I could see was the afterimage. I blinked the spots away, glad that my amulet healed flash blindness just like anything else, and regained my vision just in time to see movement above the enemy position.

  The red dome was gone.

  A squadron of winged horses swooped low over the plaza, and dark shapes fell from them as they passed. Men. Big men in heavy armor, who didn’t seem bothered by a six-story fall. Most of them landed among the enemy mages, and began laying into them with axes and swords. The biggest of them held a long spear point-down as he fell, and drove it into the head of the giant tyrannosaurus as he landed.

  The monster roared in pain, and fell. This was our opening.

  “Follow me!” I shouted, and bounded down the road on a rush of force magic. Cerise followed at my heels, although Leo wasn’t quite fast enough to keep up. That was fine, these magical paratrooper guys were keeping the enemy plenty busy.

  I opened up on the triceratops cavalry with explosive rounds, and ignited Grinder again. Then I was in among them.

  I cut through a clump of spearmen, barely slowing my pace, and jumped onto the head of a dying triceratops. From there I had a clear shot to fire a couple of explosive rounds into the mass of troops that packed the gateway. Another force-boosted leap took me over a clump of enemies, and close enough to throw up a wall of force blocking the opening in the wall. The steady flow of enemy reinforcements immediately stumbled to a halt.

  I landed among another group of enemies, and laid into them with Grinder. Cerise appeared at my back with her silver blades flashing, and together we made short work of them. The moment we were no longer in melee I expanded my force shield into a dome around us both, and sent my earth talisman flying towards the gate. It sprouted into a thicket of iron spikes just behind the force wall, and began growing to block the gateway.

  All around us was a furious melee. Cries of “For Asgard!” filled the air, along with the shouts of the ape men and the roars of their beasts. Whoever these newcomers were, they were damned tough. But the ape men who’d been guarding the gates seemed to be the elite of their army, and they were deploying a lot of magic.

  I’d barely made that observation when a bolt of blue energy slammed into my shield, and it fell apart. Ape men with armor and weapons made of blood rushed Cerise and I from all directions, and then we were fighting back to back.

  I was unhappy to discover that their blood armor actually offered some resistance to Grinder’s blade, and my rather minimal swordsmanship was no match for professionals. I was stabbed twice in as many seconds, but fortunately the blows just bounced off my coat. I swept a plasma jet over my opponents, and smiled grimly. Their weapons and armor boiled away like butter under a blowtorch,
and they weren’t nimble enough to dodge the cone of destruction.

  The force barrier I’d thrown across the gateway collapsed, but the iron barricade was four feet high and growing quickly. A few bold troops scaled it to get into the city, but that was a lot slower than marching through in formation. I played Grinder’s beam across the iron bars briefly, making them too hot to touch, and then glanced back to check on Cerise.

  She’d finished off the enemies who’d tried to melee with her, but she’d picked up a nasty cut on her left arm and now she was trading spells with a group of mages. One of our allies was too close to them for anything big to be safe, so I switched my revolver to normal ammunition and started shooting them.

  That was quite effective. One of the fringe benefits of force sorcery was an instinctive understanding of movement that greatly improved my marksmanship, and at this range I didn’t miss very often. The spells these guys used to protect themselves from arrows weren’t strong enough to work against large-caliber bullets, and three of them dropped in short order. The fourth was being strangled by his own shadow while desperately trying to fend off the curses Cerise flung at him, so I left him to her tender mercy and went on to the next target.

  The fight wound down pretty quickly after that. The enemy still couldn’t find an attack that would penetrate Leo’s enchanted plate armor, and his glowing blade disintegrated everything it touched. Whenever a group of enemies tried to get organized I’d break them up with explosive rounds, and Cerise cut down anyone who tried to get close to me.

  But it was the big guy leading the paratroopers who really made the outcome inevitable. He had to be seven feet tall, built like an Olympic weightlifter and swinging a four-foot bar of steel like it weighed nothing. He cut his way through the ranks of the enemy with supernatural skill, killing one leader after another while laughing at their efforts to stop him. His blade lopped off heads and arms with ease, shattering blood weapons into clouds of fragments whenever it struck them. Even the best of the enemy champions could barely slow him down, and I think that was what broke their morale in the end.

  Finally a troop of mounted knights arrived to reinforce our position, and the garrison began to recapture the wall above us. Then the giant strode across the plaza to offer his hand with a huge grin.

  “Well met, sir wizard!” He boomed. “I am Brand, son of Vali, and I commend your fighting spirit!”

  “Daniel Black, wandering adept,” I replied, taking his hand reluctantly. Damn, this guy had a grip like a steel vice.

  “The foreign wizard?” He replied knowingly. “Good, you can introduce me around. I need to speak to Prince Caspar at once.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. Fear not, heroes, for the Allfather has sent me here to save this city.”

  Chapter 3

  Well, crap.

  I frantically wracked my memory, trying to remember why the name Vali sounded vaguely familiar. From the look of his magic I was pretty sure Brand was a demigod, like Mara. If that was the case knowing his parentage could tell me a lot about him, but I’d never been an expert on mythology. I knew the big names in the Norse pantheon, but not the obscure ones. Damn it, times like this really made me miss the internet.

  Brand’s gaze fell on Cerise, and he frowned. “What is that doing here?”

  Cerise sheathed her daggers, which had to take guts considering that the Aesir were her mortal enemies. “I am bound to Master Black,” she said evenly.

  He looked her up and down, taking in the sleek curves that her tight costume showed off. “Hah! Well, I can’t blame a man for taking risks over a prize like you. Riven Covenant?”

  She smiled slyly. “My master is smarter than that. Only he can command me, and I can’t be claimed or traded away.”

  I put an arm around her shoulders, which incidentally allowed me to reform my force shield around us both. “Yeah, you’ve probably noticed my magic is a little different from what the wizards around here use. But don’t worry, my little badass bitch isn’t going to wiggle free of her bindings. Are you, Cerise?”

  “Fuck no, Master,” she purred. “Being bound to you is the best thing that ever happened to me. I don’t ever want it undone.”

  Brand chuckled. “It sounds like your magic is getting the job done. Alright, just don’t let her cause trouble.”

  “No killing Aesir worshippers,” Cerise recited plaintively. “Only steal power from monsters. Don’t desecrate temples, don’t curse people and don’t summon anything without specific permission.”

  I patted her on the head. “It’s for your own good, Cerise. So, what were you saying about saving the city?”

  Leo came over about then, which made for another round of introductions. I gave a mental sigh of relief at the distraction. Brand seemed to be buying the act, but I made a note to keep Cerise away from him in the future. There was no telling how good his arcane senses might be, and if he realized that the magic between Cerise and I was a coven bond rather than a slavery binding there would be hell to pay.

  Brand took charge of the situation as easily as breathing, and the garrison troops never thought to question his orders. He led a quick clearing action to retake the gatehouse while I set up a more permanent barrier to replace the destroyed gate. Since there was an army just outside the walls I settled for blocking the opening with a thick wall of stone, rather than trying to build a new set of gates while under enemy fire.

  “So, any idea who this guy is?” I asked Cerise as I worked.

  She shrugged. “Vaguely. Vali has six sons, and I think he’s somewhere in the middle. Only a couple hundred years old, but he’s dangerous. Vali is basically a divine assassin. The kind of guy who works out what your powers are and sets the perfect ambush to kill you, instead of just walking up and punching you in the face like Thor would. There’s a story that Vali’s sons were being trained as generals, to lead humanity against Loki’s monsters when Ragnarok comes.”

  “So he may be sticking around? Great. The thing with the prince was bad enough.”

  “Hey, you knew what you were getting into when you hooked up with us,” she replied.

  “I suppose. Well, with any luck he’ll focus on killing the enemy instead of hassling us.”

  We might be able to take him, if push came to shove. But him and his band of heroes? Doubtful, and that wasn't even considering that he’d have the rest of the city at his back if it came to that. So I’d better make damn sure it didn’t.

  “How about his men? They don’t exactly look like normal people.”

  “Einherjar. Most of the warriors in Valhalla just stagnate, farting around on the training fields during the day and fucking their way through the serving wenches at night. But some of them get pretty scary with hundreds of years of daily practice, and start turning into something more than just skilled warriors. The young Aesir choose the best of them for their personal war bands.”

  Right. Note to self, if I have to fight one of those guys use lots of firepower.

  Once the gatehouse was cleared Brand left one of his men in command to make sure the enemy didn’t break in again, and we set off in search of the local authorities. Things still seemed to be pretty confused, but we eventually found Prince Caspar on the roof of a tower just a few blocks away.

  He was up there with a group of nobles observing the enemy with his own eyes, instead of sitting back in a command post where messengers could actually find him. Considering the size of the city that seemed like poor planning to me, but then again I’m not exactly a general. Maybe there was a reason they didn’t do things like that in this era?

  It was interesting to watch people’s reactions when Brand announced himself. I’d expected a bit of skepticism, but everyone in the prince’s command group bought his story immediately. They mostly seemed in awe of him, although the prince was a little annoyed at his announcement of his mission.

  “I believe we have the defense of the city well in hand, Exalted One,” he said stiffly. “These savages caugh
t us off guard with their weather tricks, but I’m informed that the Conclave is preparing to unleash a grand working on them.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” Brand said easily. “But take a good look at what we’re facing.”

  He stepped to the parapet, and looked out over the forces assembling outside the wall. It was an intimidating sight, to be honest. There were several thousand andregi forming up just outside of bowshot, and more of them stretched out along the road all the way to the horizon. There had to be tens of thousands of them, enough that they outnumbered Kozalin’s defenders by a comfortable margin.

  I picked out a formation of triceratops cavalry, and a trio of tyrannosauruses surrounded by a swarm of handlers. None of the dinosaurs were going to be a threat to the wall, but the gates were another story. The ones I’d seen were all made of wood, and an animal that big could easily smash its way through. I could probably keep them away from one gate, but if they attacked several locations at once that would be a problem.

  Companies of infantry were lining up between the cavalry. Burly ape men in leather armor, with big shields and bundles of javelins on their backs. Most of them carried axes as their main weapon, but about one in ten seemed to have one of those blood weapons. They were obviously organizing for an assault, although not a conventional one. The ones with blood weapons were turning them into something like a pair of giant claws, while the rest prepared long lengths of knotted rope. Were they planning to just scale the wall, and drop ropes for their buddies to climb?

  A dozen enemies trying that would be laughable, but a thousand was another story. Bows aren’t nearly as good at killing people as guns, and as far as I knew the city garrison didn’t have anything impressive in the way of magical weapons. So most of the enemy would survive a charge to the base of the wall, and I’d seen how easily they scaled normal buildings.

  If the enemy got in among the garrison that would go badly for us. They were substantially bigger and stronger than humans, and that’s a big advantage in melee combat. A group of them was probably worth two or three times their number of regular troops, although the superior equipment of our knights would probably tip the balance the other way where they got involved.