She appears above a bit of frozen wasteland. She falls, conscious but without making a peep, to the ground, and breaks a few more bones.
She lies there.
She appears above a bit of frozen wasteland. She falls, conscious but without making a peep, to the ground, and breaks a few more bones.
She lies there.
She holds the two. "I'm going to brute-force the third," she tells Leareth, and she starts running through syllables from the rest of the human soldiers.
It's pretty obvious who the third soldier is, he's the one looking around at his frozen companions in horror and trying to scramble around them. He's conveniently not a mage, so even once he gets past them, his sword does approximately nothing to the shields around them. He looks so incredibly confused.
Eventually the syllable 'Alk' clicks for him.
Now a couple hundred human soldiers are standing around, mostly in their initial formations, not moving at all.
"If you know the names of anyone in the nonhuman non-flying group raise your right hand straight up above your head."
The wind is picking up, whistling on the tundra, and the rows of humans furthest away from her are squinting and don't seem to have heard. Most of the rest raise their right hands. (Nearly everyone knows the names of the commanders of each nonhuman section.)
"If you know names of that description other than -" She lists what she's got after the first couple have disgorged their information. "- then keep your hand up; otherwise lower it."
About a quarter of the humans know at least some names of the nonhuman rank-and-file, and keep their hands raised.
Leareth is so impressed! Plausibly he should be scared, but there's too much amazement and awe to leave room for that. He keeps shielding them even though it's hopefully unnecessary at this point.
Promise collects names till she thinks she has all she's going to get, and then starts brute-forcing the rest of the bunch with names from their conspecifics, as long as she has time.
Leareth warns her when the nonhumans-and-cavalry section is getting near to the grounded gryphons.
Leareth scries them and lets Promise watch. "I am not sure if they can actually cause trouble when they reach the gryphons, they presumably cannot reverse your orders -"
"True. Everything has happened in such a hurry. Rude of Vkandis, really."
The cavalry catch up to the gryphons at the point when Promise has brute-forced half a dozen missing names but is still missing around a dozen of them, mostly the kyree wolf-creatures and dyheli deer-creatures, who seem to have a very wide space of name-syllables with fewer repeats. They appear to spend about thirty seconds attempting to talk to the gryphons.
Then a Gate goes up right next to the gryphon leader, who is immediately lifted - not an easy task, for nonhumans that mostly lack hands, and it looks unpleasant for the gryphon - and shoved through. It looks like more of the cavalry are going after the other gryphons to drag them over too.
"...Possibly we should move now," Leareth says.
Leareth frowns intently at the scry, picking a place to put his Gate. A couple of the dyheli seem to be harnessed to a sort of sledge, dragging it along the thin snow behind them - or maybe a litter, it's bundled up well enough that it's impossible to tell for sure if there's a person on it, but it seems plausible. A casualty sufficiently important to attempt an evacuation, maybe? They're currently dragging the sledge over to the Gate but not bringing it through.
They don't have time to, because Leareth gets his Gate up, ten yards from the line of soldiers attempting to carry unmoving gryphons without hands, and surges through, already reaching to shield -
As they sense the Gate-energies building, about five seconds before Leareth steps across, one of the mages snaps something in Mindspeech to the human currently bound to the sled-litter.
Nayoki tries to fight the compulsion, to twist it into literally anything else, but she can't.
"Do not speak!" she screams as they uncover her face and she senses a second shielded mind, presumably Promise, crossing the Gate. And, at the exact same time: :DO NOT SPEAK:
What.
Leareth has very fast reaction times, trained over millennia worth of mage-battles, and he gets a shield up and an attack out at the source of the shout and set-command within a fraction of a second, well before his mind registers what's happening - oh no gods it's Nayoki, what, how–
Nayoki's sledge is suddenly on fire, because fire is the shortest-preparation-time attack that Leareth can get off when startled, but this doesn't stop the compulsion from tightening on her mind, and she can't fight it, and -
:STOP. DO NOTHING: she set-commands Leareth.
Leareth's shield vanishes and he crumples to the ground.
His Gate, unfortunately, is still up, because taking a Gate down is an active motion and he's just been set-commanded not to do anything.
Every single soldier in the army is suddenly trying to attack both of them!
Promise is a harder target because she's in midair swooping toward Nayoki, and also they - can't? A dozen people are still capable of harming Promise, but they don't know which dozen they are, and are scattered around at random throughout the troop-formations, and so Promise's flight is unmolested.
Leareth, however, is now well separated from her and an easy, defenceless target, and most of the soldiers recognize his face from the emergency briefing.
Someone blasts his Gate.
His talisman-shields catch some of it, which is the only reason it doesn't kill him instantly, but it does send him thundering into unconsciousness.