Fallowblade by Cecilia Dart-Thornton Page A

disarray that was thwarting his strategies, Mac Brádaigh decided to employ fresh tactics. He had been eagerly looking forward to the moment when Marauders would begin pouring into the battlefield like flies to a carcass, in response to the messages carried to them by his own officers. The enemy, he knew, would be dismayed when confronted unexpectedly by the vicious swarmsmen. When he began receiving reports that confirmed the first of the cave dwellers were, at last, converging on the scene of action, he judged that the time was right for an added surprise.
    King Uabhar had entrusted Mac Brádaigh with the strange artefact discovered amongst the ruins of the Dome of Strang, the Sylvan Comb, along with the secret that governed it. Spurring his steed through the front lines into the very heart of the fighting, the high commander hurled the goblin artefact to the ground, articulating the Word.
    The Comb’s nineteen teeth bit into the dust.
    His own men and their allies were prepared for what happened next. The raising of certain flags and the sounding of drums and trumpets had signalled the alert: Ware the enchantment! The southerners fell back, having been instructed as to what would occur, but even they were astonished. As for the opposing troops, they were taken by surprise and thrown into confusion.
    A sudden wood of silvery trees, most wonderful and uncanny, sprang up around and amongst the fighting men. Their bark seemed etched with spirals and flowing designs, their leaves shimmered and sighed in a nonexistent breeze. Dark vapours coiled between the trees, as if sentient. Eerie shiftings and blinkings in the forest’s shadowy depths gave suggestion that unguessable creatures lurked there. The skulls of the soldiers who found themselves in this wood of weirdness became flooded with a subdued oceanic roar, and a dry rattling like dead leaves shaking in an Autumn wind. They felt dizzy and dislocated, as if transported to some eldritch realm in which nothing they had ever known made sense. A feeling of impending doom and tragedy tainted their awe.
    If the Comb’s illusions cast the defenders into turmoil, the incoming Marauders augmented their disorder. At their first appearance, both invaders and defenders were astounded. Mac Brádaigh had issued no forewarning of this to his own troops or Ashqalêth’s. Uabhar’s bizarre alliance had never been openly acknowledged; it had been a secret guarded as closely as possible—given men’s fondness for gossip—until the last moment, for if the southern troops had known, the knowledge would soon have been gleaned by the northerners, one way or another. Soldiers in all camps reacted sharply to the intrusion of their traditional antagonists, until commands rippled through the ranks of the southern allies—‘Stand unafraid, for the swarmsmen are on our side.’
    Huge and powerful as oxen, the swarmsmen ploughed havoc amongst the Narngalish. Amongst the fighting men astonishment dawned as they comprehended that the hearsay had been true, and Uabhar had indeed struck some bargain with the monsters. Outrage and disgust flamed, even as they continued to do battle against each other, but when men in the uniforms of Slievmordhu and Ashqalêth remained unscathed by the monsters, and the southerners witnessed the carnage the swarmsmen wrought on their behalf, they took heart, and many began to approve of the unusual manoeuvre.
    Outnumbered, demoralised and unable to shield themselves from the debilitating effects of the Comb’s supernatural visions, the northern forces were eventually driven back. King Warwick’s officers endeavoured to beat an orderly retreat so that they might rally the troops, carry the injured with them and review their tactics. The invaders pursued, skirmishing and picking off the few stragglers, until Mac Brádaigh summoned them to fall back and regroup. Both sides had sustained substantial casualties, but the southerners successfully took control of