"Air doesn't weigh anything," Ce'Nedra protested.
"Really?" Beldin replied with heavy sarcasm. "I'm so glad you told me. Would the two of you shut up and let me get my breath?"
"But how is it that she collapsed and you didn't?" Ce'Nedra protested.
"I'm stronger than she is," Beldin replied, "and more vicious. Pol throws her whole heart into things when she gets excited. She always did. She pushed beyond her strength, and it exhausted her." The twisted little man straightened, shook himself like a dog coming out of water and looked around, his face bleak. "I've got work to do," he said. "I think we've pretty much worn out the Mallorean Grolims, but I'd better keep an eye on them, just to be safe. You two stay here with Pol - and keep an eye on that child." He pointed at Errand, who stood on the sandy beach with his small face very serious.
Then Beldin crouched, shimmering already into the form of a hawk, and launched himself into the air almost before his feathers were fully formed.
Ce'Nedra stared after him as he spiraled upward over the battlefield and then turned her attention back to the unconscious Polgara.
The charge of Korodullin's Mimbrate knights came at the last possible moment. Like two great scythes, the armored men on their massive chargers sliced in at a thundering gallop from the flanks with their lances leveled and cut through the horde of Murgos rushing toward the waiting pikemen and legionnaires. The results were devastating. The air was filled with screams and the sounds of steel striking steel with stunning impact. In the wake of the charge lay a path of slaughtered Murgos, a trail of human wreckage a hundred yards wide.
King Cho-Hag, sitting on his horse on a hilltop some distance to the west, nodded his approval as he watched the carnage. "Good," he said finally. He looked around at the eager faces of the Algar clansmen clustered around him. "All right, my children," he said calmly, "let's go cut up the Murgo reserves." And he led them at a gallop as they poured down off the hill, smoothly swung around the outer flanks of the tightly packed assault forces and then slashed into the unprepared Murgo units bringing up the rear.
The slash-and-run tactics of the clans of the Algars left heaps of sabred dead in their wake as they darted in and out of the milling confusion of terrified Murgos. King Cho-Hag himself led several charges, and his skill with the sabre, which was legendary in Algaria, filled his followers with an awed pride as they watched his whiplike blows raining down on Murgo heads and shoulders. The whole thrust of Algar strategy was based on speed - a sudden dash on a fast horse and a series of lightninglike sabre slashes, and then out before the enemy could gather his wits. King Cho-Hag's sabre arm was the fastest in Algaria.
"My King!" one of his men shouted, pointing toward the center of several close-packed Murgo regiments milling about in a shallow valley a few hundred yards away. "There's the black banner!"
King Cho-Hag's eyes suddenly gleamed as a wild hope surged through him. "Bring my banner to the front!" he roared, and the clansman who carried the burgundy-and-white banner of the Chief of the Clan-Chiefs galloped forward with the standard streaming above his head. "Let's go, my children!" Cho-Hag shouted and drove his horse directly at the Murgos in the valley. With sabre raised, the crippled King of the Algars led his men down into the Murgo horde. His warriors slashed to the right and to the left, but Cho-Hag plunged directly at the center, his eyes feed on the black banner of Taur Urgas, King of the Murgos.
And then, in the midst of the household guard, Cho-Hag saw the blood-red mail of Taur Urgas himself. Cho-Hag raised his bloody sabre and shouted a ringing challenge.
"Stand and fight, you Murgo dog!" he roared.
Startled by that shout, Taur Urgas wheeled his horse to stare incredulously at the charging King of Algaria. His eyes suddenly bulged with the fervid light of insanity, and his lips, foam-flacked, drew back in a snarl of hatred. "Let him come!" he grated. "Clear the way for himl"
The startled members of his personal guard stared at him.
"Make way for the King of Algaria!" Taur Urgas shrieked. "He is mine!"
And the Murgo troops melted out of Cho-Hag's path.
The Algar King reined in his horse. "And so it's finally come, Taur Urgas," he said coldly.
"It has indeed, Cho-Hag," Taur Urgas replied. "I've waited for this moment for years."
"If I'd known you were waiting, I'd have come sooner."
"Today is your last day, Cho-Hag." The Murgo King's eyes were completely mad now, and foam drooled from the corners of his mouth.
"Do you plan to fight with threats and hollow words, Taur Urgas? Or have you forgotten how to draw your sword?"
With an insane shriek, Taur Urgas ripped his broad-bladed sword from its scabbard and drove his black horse toward the Algar King.
"Die!" he howled, slashing at the air even as he charged. "Die, ChoHag!"
It was not a duel, for there were proprieties in a duel. The two kings hacked at each other with an elemental brutality, thousands of years of pent-up hatred boiling in their blood. Taur Urgas, totally mad now, sobbed and gibbered as he swung his heavy sword at his enemy. ChoHag, cold as ice and with an arm as fast as the flickering tongue of a snake, slid the crushing Murgo blows aside, catching them on his sliding sabre and flicking his blade like a whip, its edge biting again and again into the shoulders and face of the King of the Murgos.
The two armies, stunned by the savagery of the encounter, recoiled and gave the mounted kings room for their deadly struggle.
Frothing obscenities, Taur Urgas hacked insanely at the elusive form of his foe, but Cho-Hag, colder yet, feinted and parried and flicked his whistling sabre at the Murgo's bleeding face.
Finally, driven past even what few traces of reason were left to him, Taur Urgas hurled his horse directly at Cho-Hag with a wild animal scream. Standing in his stirrups, he grasped his sword hilt in both hands, raising it like an axe to smash his enemy forever. But Cho-Hag danced his horse to one side and thrust with all his strength, even as Taur Urgas began his massive blow. With a steely rasp, his sabre ran through the Murgo's blood-red mail and through the tensed body, to emerge dripping from his back.
Unaware in his madness that he had just received a mortal wound, Taur Urgas raised his sword again, but the strength drained from his arms and the sword fell from his grasp. With stunned disbelief, he gaped at the sabre emerging from his chest, and a bloody froth burst from his mouth. He lifted his hands like claws as if to tear away the face of his enemy, but Cho-Hag contemptuously slapped his hands away, even as he pulled his slender, curved blade out of the Murgo's body with a slithering whistle.