Alara Unbroken - Doug Beyer [104]
Mutated ogre captains took up huge axes and chopped through chain restraints, setting free a flood of dreg reavers, the enormous undead beasts that served as Malfegor’s heavy infantry. The ground thundered below the armies of Bant as pachydermic behemoths charged toward them.
The moment that the squire handed Rafiq his helmet, the knight-general was off. The leotau felt none of his spurs, but struck vigorously at the ground with its hooves nevertheless. The battlefield flew past him, surging by like waves in a tide. He saw the bodies of friends and allies. He saw atrocities that would make the Blessed caste weep. But most of all he saw the realization of prophecy. The Prayer of Asha had been true all along. Mubin’s suspicions to the contrary were wrongheaded—it hadn’t been manipulated for the sake of sparking a war; it was divine instruction for victory in the time of war. And soon, per the prayer, the archangel Asha herself would appear, push Bant’s enemies back, and her blessing would end the war for good.
Overhead, the minor angels slashed into the vulture-like kathari. Embodiments of righteousness and glory, they swung their swords in movements that expressed grace as much as the warrior spirit. The sky drained of blackness as the few angels tore through Grixis’s flyers, and the sun shone through onto the battlefield again.
Rafiq circled around a confused tangle of Bant knights, and rallied them into formation once more. Together they lunged forward into the path of an onrushing dreg reaver. The reaver accelerated into them, threatening to crush them with its low-slung tusks or impale them with the razor-tipped spears that its riders had lashed to its flanks. At Rafiq’s signal the knights split into two groups, letting the reaver charge between them, and they slashed into its sides with their swords. They tore long gashes in the beast, carving masses of rotten flesh from it, but the razor spears also slashed into them and their mounts.
Rafiq circled back around to meet it again. The reaver skidded to a halt, its flanks heaving and rib bones showing through, and turned to face him as well. The two of them charged one another.
It would never end by using the proper wartime etiquette he had been raised on, Rafiq thought. The undead would never fall from mere tissue damage. He would need to do something more drastic.
As his leotau rode toward the monster, Rafiq unhooked his boots from the stirrups. With his sword in one hand, the horn of the saddle in the other, he crouched on the leotau’s back, compressed like a spring. Just as he saw into the hollow depths of the dreg reaver’s eye sockets, he leaped, pushing the leotau out of the path of the beast and himself up into the air. On impact with the creature’s face, he rammed the sword deep into its skull, and then somersaulted down its back. He crashed into the undead creature that rode the beast, and the two of them fell off onto the ground.
Rafiq recovered onto his feet, but so did the rider. Swordless, Rafiq was forced to dodge the zombie’s attacks as it slashed at him with a sawlike weapon of bone and metal. He glanced back to see that the dreg reaver had collapsed and skidded to a halt, its face crushed.
There was a chorus of unholy screams. Rafiq looked up to see that demons had taken wing to meet the angels. The sight so distracted him that Rafiq’s undead combatant almost landed a lethal blow, but just before it could, one of the other Bant knights came riding by and sliced the creature in half. Rafiq nodded in gratitude.
High above, two of the demons collided with one of the angels, consuming her in a mass of claws and batwings. There was a shriek, and as the demons parted, there was a burst of light and white feathers where the angel had been.
Asha, thought Rafiq, if you