Eona - Alison Goodman [193]
I stood swaying on the edge. Below us, about fifty soldiers stood in formation, their leather armor dull gray, as if they had emerged from the shadows.
“I call them my hunters. Every one of them knows what Lord Ido looks like. And every one of them knows how to disrupt a man’s Hua and render him senseless. They are here to capture Lord Ido and deliver him to me, safely contained by the shadow world. And you and I will keep Ido’s power focused on other matters while they do it.”
The strategy was simple and clever. Sethon did not need twelve years of dragon training; just fifty hunters who knew how to fight their way through a melee, and a distraction that would pull Lord Ido’s attention away from his earthly body. It was well worthy of Xsu-Ree.
“Begin the attack,” Sethon said to the flagmen.
Red, green, and yellow flags arced in a graceful sequence. A roar rose from the thousands of men below as the yellow division marched toward the ridge. I prayed to the gods that Kygo and Ido were ready.
Deep within my core I felt the rush of Ido’s union with the blue dragon. The sensation was muted by the black folio, but it still held the dark, crisp flavor of the man and his spirit beast. The taste of hope.
Around us, the air suddenly compressed. The clouds above the battlefield contracted as if they were a huge flexing muscle. Three jagged spears of lightning ripped the sky, their crackling power slamming into the yellow battalion. Gouged earth sprayed upward, the pale flash of bodies visible in the dark churn. The impact surged across the battlefield, reaching us in a wave of sound that held the force of a punch. Sethon and I both staggered back a step, the flagmen below us crouching for cover. I turned to hide my exultation.
“Continue the advance,” Sethon ordered.
The flags sent the order across the battlefield.
A thick rain of arrows flew from a line of archers across the ridge. The dark slivers momentarily filled the silver sky then were lost against the dull background of the ridge as they fell to earth. Only the sudden dips and gaps in the rush of men below showed their final destinations.
A low rumbling vibrated through my feet. To the left of the escarpment, a crack opened in the earth. On either side, the grassland collapsed inward, the chasm deepening and lengthening along the battlefield. It headed straight for us, as if two huge hands tore the earth apart. Screaming men fell into the heaving channel; half of the blue battalion was lost under convulsing earth and huge plumes of dust. I ducked as dirt and gravel pelted down in a stinging shower. Sethon was wrong: Ido was going to destroy the platform. Three of the flagmen dropped their pennants and scrambled down the steps.
“Hold your positions,” Sethon yelled.
They froze as the roaring progress of the chasm shook the structure. A wave of heat swept over us. I gagged, dirt and fear caught in my throat.
It stopped. There was only the patter of falling dirt, and Sethon’s harsh breathing, then screaming, from below.
I blinked away the grit and tears. The chasm had sliced past the platform and run the length of the plain, splitting a third of Sethon’s forces from the rest of the army.
“My nephew knows his Xsu-Ree,” Sethon snarled. He closed his hand around the pearls binding my wrists. “Show me the dragons!” he said, his face so close I could smell the metallic power of the folio on his breath.
The blood compulsion propelled me into the energy world, the transparent shape of Sethon’s features streaming with thick black Hua, the pathways along my arms riddled with dark veins. Sethon gasped at the sudden shift.
Below us, the battlefield whirled in violent iridescent reds and oranges—thousands and thousands of soldiers reduced to pulsing points of Hua, caught in the shock of the double attack from earth and air. The resonance of the lightning strikes lit the mangled earth in a fading white afterglow, and the dark scar of the chasm held