Hansen noticed a phenomenon which had escaped him during the forest battle of the previous week: at the moment of contact, each battleline spread into two lines. The well-armored champions engaged one another in the front ranks, while lesser folk in scruffy, cobbled-together armor hung back a pace or two.
Malcolm snapped his arc at a warrior in black and white from four meters out. His opponent blocked the stroke and replied with a cut of his own. Armor of the quality of either suit was impervious at that distance, but neither man seemed inclined to close for the moment. Three other warriors flanked the Thrasey champion—from a step back.
Malcolm was missing the support of Shill and Maharg. Not that his juniors did anything, not really; but they were there. . . .
Hansen fell down. Shill put out a hand, but Hansen grabbed a tree root and jerked himself upright by it.
At the edge of Malcolm’s display, Hansen saw Lamullo being pressed hard by a warrior in red and white. Tooley, the one with a terrible temper but nobody you’d wish to see on the other side.
Lamullo was blocking his opponent’s strokes adequately, but he seemed unable to counterattack. After each parry he stepped backward.
Malcolm rushed his man with a shout. The Thrasey champion dodged back and collided with one of his own supporters. Malcolm’s arc crackled the length of his opponent’s outflung left arm, glancing but shearing also in a fountain of sparks.
The Thrasey warrior staggered in the opposite direction and fell. One of his retinue stepped over the champion to guard him. Malcolm cut vertically. The other warrior caught the arc on his own weapon, but he didn’t have the power to stop it from sizzling into and halfway through his helmet.
Malcolm slashed to his right, taking the second member of the retinue on the hip joint and crumpling him like a sheet of heated polyethylene.
The third low-status warrior turned to run. Malcolm’s arc sliced off his feet at the ankles.
Hansen swore. He’d seen in the swirling action what Malcolm didn’t have the time or inclination to notice.
“Hold up!” Hansen snarled to his men. He thrust his arm into the reeds to clear a sight line. The growth was too thick. His arc scythed down the reeds in a cloud of steam.
They hadn’t come as far as he’d intended, but the battle itself had moved toward them. Hansen was slightly behind the right flank of the Thrasey line. The nearest warrior was twenty meters away, watching his front, and the nearest actual fighting was ten meters beyond that.
Tooley jumped over the Lamullo’s body and bore down on Malcolm with a roar.
“All right,” said Hansen, cool again. “Let’s go.”
He gripped a willow trunk and started to drag himself up. The roots pulled out in a shower of dirt.
“Here,” said Maharg, making a stirrup of his hands. Hansen stepped into it and felt the other warrior’s battlesuit lift him. Shill followed by the same route, then bent and with Hansen jerked Maharg to the top of the bank.
A pair of Thrasey freemen watched with amazement as the three warriors appeared from the dense growth. They rode into the battleline, shouting a warning.
A warrior—it looked like one of the Thrasey side—cut them both down with as little hesitation as Hansen had shown when he cleared his sight line.
“Remember . . . ,” said Hansen. He didn’t feel the aches and battering he’d just given his body, but his forearms were quivering with adrenalin. “When the marker goes red, everybody hits ‘im together.”
But Hansen took the nearest Thrasey warrior himself, cutting the man so deeply through the shoulderblades that the arc crackled out through the flimsy plastron before Hansen shut it off.
They dropped three of their opponents before the fourth man even turned around. The warriors hanging back behind the real engagement weren’t well equipped anyway.
Maharg’s arc froze the fourth man. Hansen swatted away the fellow’s life with something near contempt, as though he were scraping cow manure from his glove.
They struck the front rank, unaware and from behind; three of the Thrasey champions went down under the multiple attacks as easily as the hirelings had.