Guardians Of The Coral Throne

Then he looked toward the rear of the column. The last troop of the last regiment was now a good half-mile up into the pass. Beyond it, at the very mouth of the pass, two thick columns of blue smoke coiled up from the trees.

Blade knew suddenly that the Scadori were watching the Guardians climb the pass. That was not too much of a surprise. It would be only common sense on their part. What bothered Blade was something else. Was watching all the Scadori were doing?

Blade's question was answered almost before he finished asking it. The familiar sounds of the marching column vanished in a sudden, terrible uproar. Scadori trumpets blared, Scadori drums thundered, Scadori warcries rose shrill and harsh all up and down the pass. Bushes and branches crashed and crackled as the warriors of Scador swarmed down from the forest to the attack.

Blade knew that he would never see a better ambush carried out on any battlefield in any Dimension.

In a few moments Blade realized that he might not ever be seeing much of anything more. A quick glance up and down the column told him the whole grim story. He could see several thousand Scadori already in action. Hundreds more were swarming out of the trees at every moment, slashing, stabbing, and yelling like fiends. Where the warriors hadn't yet closed in, they were sending volleys of arrows and spears into the ranks of the Guardians.

The noise doubled as the Guardians recovered from their shock and started defending themselves. Their warcries and the frantic screams and whi

But Blade knew that the battle was lost the moment the jaws of the ambush closed on the column. There were too many Scadori. Too many of them were getting in too close. Time after time a Scadori warrior ran in under a Guardian's sword and thrust a spear or a knife upward into his enemy's horse. Time after time the horse went down, a scream bubbling in the blood from its gaping throat or its intestines tangled around its hooves. Some Guardians went down with their horses and never rose again. Some by luck or skill stayed on their feet. But the Scadori swarmed around them, so the best they could usually do was to take an enemy with them. Guardian and Scadori would go down together, stabbing and clawing and even biting at each other in a last murderous death-grapple.

Once more Blade found himself obeying his reflexes as a fighting man. Never mind what he thought of the Karani, the Guardians, or the idiotic generalship that had led to this disaster! The Scadori coming at him out of the woods were going to kill him if he didn't kill them first. He didn't have it in him to die without a fight.

So as the first of the Scadori ran at him, Blade made his horse rear. Iron-shod hooves lashed out, smashing the warrior's head to a pulp and bowling him head over heels. A second warrior hesitated for a moment. That moment was long enough for Blade to sink a dart into the man's skull exactly between the eyes. Then the ground seemed to sprout Scadori warriors. Blade downed another with a second dart, then unslung his shield, drew the long cavalry broadsword, and went to work.

He had the advantage in height, he had the advantage in reach, he had the advantage in striking power. He slashed through necks and hacked off arms that reached out toward him. Blood splashed unwounded Scadori and the flanks and neck of Blade's horse. The horse squealed and whi

Blade was a magnificent archery target. But the Scadori archers were afraid to shoot when their comrades were so thickly clustered around Blade. Their arrows found other targets up and down the Guardians' crumbling column.

Eventually the Scadori pulled back from around Blade. Fifteen or twenty of them lay still or writhed and moaned on ground now soaked and slippery with blood and mangled human flesh. Blade knew that would be the moment when the archers opened fire. He sprang down from his horse, snatched up his own bow and quiver, and began searching for targets for his own arrows.

Blade's tremendous fight had cleared away the Scadori from immediately around him. Those who weren't dead had fled into the woods. Under cover of the pines they were slipping up and down the pass in search of easier prey elsewhere along the column.

Even in the fading light Blade could see that half the Guardians were already dead or at least no longer fighting back. He knew they would all be dead before long. The Scadori seldom took male prisoners, and never from the hated Riders of Death.

The Scadori archers seemed to have stopped shooting. But they had brought down practically all the Guardians' horses. Now the surviving Guardians were holding barricades of their dead horses and their dead comrades. They were holding them with desperate courage, and they were killing a good many Scadori. But it was a doomed last stand. Any Guardian who was not clear of the pass before darkness would be dead before sunrise. Darkness was less than an hour away, so there were not going to be many survivors from the Guardians of the Coral Throne.

The Emperor's ba

A moment later Blade saw a particularly solid mass of Guardians moving toward him along the edge of the woods. Then he noticed that their armor glinted silver. At least the Emperor's bodyguard was trying to make its retreat in some sort of order.

A few yards at a time, the bodyguard crept down the pass toward Blade, making its way past the dead and the dying, skirting the stray horses wandering about. Blade took cover behind a dead horse, restocked his quiver from the dead bodies sprawled all around him, and waited. He wasn't at all sure he was going to get out of the pass alive. But his chances would be better if he went with the bodyguard.

Slowly but surely, the bodyguard approached. But the Scadori were getting bolder. Every few yards another Guardian was left sprawled or writhing on the ground. The Scadori closed in behind, cutting the throats of the wounded. Sometimes they ran off holding the blood-dripping genitals of the dead men on the points of their swords and spears. The bodyguard closed ranks to fill in the gaps left by the fallen and moved on.

They were only fifty yards away when Blade saw a tall, lanky figure in torn and filthy robes moving among the soldiers. About the last thing he had expected to see was Jores VII alive and on his feet. A thought flashed into Blade's mind. He would be doing the rest of his day's fighting under the eye of the Emperor himself. If they both survived to return to Karan, the Emperor would have cause to remember. Perhaps he would even be grateful, although Blade didn't have much faith in the gratitude of princes and potentates.

The leading rank of the bodyguards was only a stone's throw away when Blade slung his bow, drew his sword, and rose from cover. He took a few steps toward the safety of the square around the Emperor. Then the woods erupted in Scadori war-cries and Scadori warriors swarmed out from behind every tree.