The Power Of Ten: Sama Rantha
Chapter 90 : It was a windswept high tor of stone grades and broken ridge lines…Then, a winding froz

Then, a winding frozen landscape of snow and ice and ancient hills beaten down by the cold…

A steaming desert, dunes and dry riverbanks forming a place to shed blood upon…

A winding forest clearing, trees and copses breaking up the battlefield and providing places to hide and ambush from…

A picturesque river valley, a stream cutting through old hills that would be host to slaughter…

A mountain pa.s.s, narrow and old, to be defended against overwhelming numbers…

An ancient city, long abandoned, a hundred places to hide and ambush from among the tumbled stones…

A broken moor, cold and lonely, fogs sweeping across and hiding our foes from us…

A low stretch of wall crossing fields gone fallow, now waiting to be watered by those coming for us.

Cities in many cultural forms, to be defended.

Villages and towns in all sizes and styles, to be attacked.

An invading force, landing from the cold and cras.h.i.+ng sea.

A land blasted by magical fire, barren and bleak, and lava seething in the distance…

A great plaza, statues of t.i.tans from ancient eras looming broken above us as the battles of ant-like armies played out beneath them…

A great army of hors.e.m.e.n sweeping across endless golden plains, coming right for us…

Disjointed combat swirling through ancient trees, golden leaves falling and growing scarlet with blood…

An ancient bridge across a yawning chasm, clas.h.i.+ng to see who would be the ones to cross…

An oasis of palms to attack, and then another of high gra.s.ses to defend…

An ambush on a vastly superior force along a great road, requiring it to be crippled or we would be overwhelmed…

Barbarian hordes, screaming down from the hills…

A dark temple, lightning cras.h.i.+ng in dark clouds above, spilling forth horrors…

A gibbering chorus of enslaved things charging at the whim of their floating, flying masters above, tentacles waving and proclaiming the will of the Old Ones…

Horrors sp.a.w.ned by things from Outside Creation, rampaging across the land and having to be brought down…

A fanatic crusade, charging with righteous appearance and hearts of uncaring hate, across the open ground…

An orchard of flesh-eating trees, and the demons and horrors that waited for us there…

Endless ma.s.ses of the undead, marching without care or fear to add us to their numbers…

Defending cities, time after time, each different, some mundane, some magical, some very strange, as their enemies whelmed upon them, and we were there to defy them…

Beneath a natural arch of stone in ancient mountains, scribed with Runes too old to have meaning…

A nonesuch realm consisting solely of endless walkways over emptiness, simply hanging out there, a maze of stairs and catwalks and occasional small lifts, endless small unit strife…

A crystalline plane, the ground smooth as gla.s.s…

Jungles primitive and modern, ruins ancient and recent, beasts from an age ago, and horrors or savages of the day…

Sometimes the sky had two moons, three, five, a dozen. The stars we could not recognize, if it bore stars at all. Sometimes there were two suns, or three, or the sky was covered in clouds, and there was no sun at all, only endless gloom…

Sometimes the ground glowed, and threw shadows into the sky. Sometimes the ground was like paste or flesh, or endless shallows that we could almost feel rotting away at our feet…

----------

It was never the same place twice anymore.

Today's fight was a plateau, a lonely moor in a hot land, where the sun was already beating down upon us.

From the wood of crushed s.h.i.+elds and broken spears, I had rendered pulp and made paper. Why, here in a dream, I didn't know. But I folded them, and bound them in a book, and even as I scribed into them with alchemical ink made from carbon and blood, I memorized all the words, that I not forget them. I sketched the faces of my soldiers, and those we fought, and sometimes the wounded would take The Book and thumb through the pages to find their pictures, and laugh and sign the pages of themselves and their friends.

Even in Nightmare, they wanted to be remembered.

The grey mists fell back as our lines advanced into them, opening out into this new world of a red sky and sands and heat.

We weren't equipped for all-weather fighting. I had cranked out Amulets by the hundreds, and the wealth of our enemies made them Amulets, exactly 1 point of fire and cold resistance each, enough to endure temperatures from -50 C to +80 without difficulty.

They called them Ironblood Amulets, giving them the strength to fight on in all conditions. They only thing they didn't protect the lads from was the wet.

I set foot on air, and walked up into the sky. My Mask glowed, and 25x vision leapt out in all directions, looking for our foes this time.

To the north and west of us, I saw a rolling plain of sand, dominated by hundreds of conical mounds. They were uniform in shape, if differing in size, and I slid through my memory, looking for comparisons.

Termite mounds were the most similar thing I could remember.

Centaur ants. Insect folk would be a new one.

-We're going up against bugs,- I /informed everyone, and cheerful groans came back, as they always did. We could hope to not fight, but it wasn't going to happen. The History was right there, recording every battle since we had been Marked, and those from before they could remember, too. They forgot how many fights they'd been in, so they went back and looked, and remembered again.

I gave them the image of the man-sized desert centaur ants, somewhat smaller and more stream-lined then their temperate dwelling kin. They were still hiveminds, so there was no way we were marching out into the sands to fight them, where they might be digging up through the sands to get at us. Let them try the chittering horde thing through solid rock, yessir.

-Headquarters there.- Eyes moved, men began to trot. They knew they didn't have much time before there was action, which meant minutes to set up the base for healing and final fallback.

Rolled-up bundles of sharpened spear hafts salvaged from our enemies and bound with rope were hammered into the ground to form a crude fence, backed up by actual stakes. The wagons that held these floated along with us, Renewed and waiting to be set up again at each battlefield as we acc.u.mulated them.

Other wagons held arrows and bolts, raw materials for smithing, other rough supplies we'd managed to scrounge during these many, many days of doing battle.

The centaur ant warriors weren't weak, but now they were fighting some of the most hardened human troops to ever exist. Their only advantage was numbers, and they were going to exploit it, but it was still going to be a tough fight for them.

I saw the darkness surge out of the closest of the bug towers, and dust rising as they scuttled across the sands in our direction. The smaller ones were probably decent climbers, but the weight would make it hard for anything above the size of a dog, so the force was heading for a sharp but pa.s.sable incline at the far side of the mesa.

Eh?

I turned my head towards a flash of silver in the distance.

A third force?

I was immediately wary, as this was a new variation in the whole skirmis.h.i.+ng warbands thing.

It looked to be a force of mounted riders, looked like horses, sweeping towards the ant mounds further on. In response, thousands of centaur ants boiled out to meet them.

Hmmm. Another free agent from outside Dream, who wasn't the primary antagonist?

Interesting…

-------------

Insect carapaces crunched strategically under my feet, even if I didn't touch them. Mounds of small to man-sized centaur ants were heaped up in swathes, burning down as vivus took them. I walked right through them like I was a half-ton plow, not under a hundred pounds of Hagchild.

The larger, cow-sized b.a.s.t.a.r.ds were the only ones who had much that was usable, wielding spears or crude sabers instead of just mandibles, claws, and tail stings, so it was easy to focus on them and Take Their Stuff, what little there was.

Now, these thousand or so remaining horseman gathered over there, they might have stuff…

The leader of the cavalry was riding out casually, looking down on me as he matched my pace. I watched his eyes flicker over the mounds of ants burning, the trail of carnage we'd left behind as we slowly fought our way off the mesa, despite multiple waves of ants streaming up to kill us, all the while he fought a tireless cavalry battle against the skittering hordes.

He reined up before me, and we sized one another up.

He was fair of skin, and a bit sickly and wasted-looking at that, with dark eyes that were a little feverish and bright. Still, he had managed to keep in shape somehow, moving correctly and wearing his armor like a pro. He had poise and arrogance in measure, and he was indeed looking down on me.

But I certainly wasn't scared of him. I had a very secure path of retreat and more then enough spears to render his cavalry threat moot… and some very good archers. He couldn't threaten me with the force he had here.

"Join me!" His voice had an accent I identified with some of the imperial-esque troops I'd had to fight on other battlefields, although the armor style was slightly different. It also had a lot of expectations of instant obedience.

"You're in the wrong place," I answered calmly.

He blinked at me. That certainly hadn't been what he was expecting.

"What are you speaking about, girl?" he demanded, glaring down at me. "Submit to me and follow my commands! We will finish the destruction of these things, and meet in battle with greater foes!"

I tilted my head. "You know you're in a dream, right?" His eyes widened a fraction. "Specifically, you're in the Dream of a Hag Curse. That's a really, really bad place for you to be. It's quite possible that if you go through Renewal here, you're never going to get out, and your body's going to waste away wherever it's at. You need to wake up and leave as soon as possible."

His jaw worked for a moment, looking down at me, then around at this alien place, with its bug-hives the size of office buildings, the red sun and sands, even the riders waiting calmly behind him.

"Who are you?" he demanded abruptly.

"Sama Rantha. This Nightmare is my prison. I'm working towards getting out, but it's going to take a while. I don't think you'll survive coming out with me, so you need to leave."

"You're not… a creation of my dream?" He seemed terribly uncertain about that.

"No. What's your name?"

"Korvus!" He seemed to think I should find that important.

"I've been trapped in here basically since I was born, so if that's supposed to mean something, it doesn't here. This is just a dream, after all."

"I…" He trailed off.

I waved him down off his horse. "Two things. Pa.s.s me your cavalry, and I'll try to Mark as many as I can before Renewal comes and they discorporate. Then we can have a fight, I'll kill you, and send you out of this dream before it all resets."

He seemed a little in disbelief. "You… think you can best me?" he asked archly, fairly radiating arrogant confidence.

"Come on down and find out, Mr. Korvus."