by T J Marquis
Now traditional siege equipment was feasible, and squad upon squad of ogres, some of them giants, barreled forth with ladders and hooked cables. They began to assault the redoubt.
All of this Dahm saw before he entered the gatehouse structure to head back down to ground level. The guards let him in off the parapet, seeing the Wizardess’s seal on his arm. He rushed down flights of stairs, hurrying to join the melee on the redoubt. Suddenly he thought he saw a spindly shadow down below and gave chase.
The control room for the gate was midway up the structure, right where Dahm thought he’d seen something moving. He bounded down the stairs four at a time and barreled toward the control room. Where were its guards? He drew his sword and crashed through the partially open door to find a half dozen gremlins ransacking the room. One of them was in the process of slitting a guard’s throat while three others held him down, covering up his mouth. The poor man saw Dahm and begged for help with wide, fearful eyes. It was too late. The gremlins let go of the guard and rushed Dahm.
They were not prepared to fight him. With one fell swoop of his hand-crafted blade, Dahm cut the four mad creatures in half. Before he could lunge and slay the remaining two gremlins, they completed their sabotage of the gate controls, and Dahm heard the rumbling of the gate beginning to open. Shouts echoed up from the soldiers outside as Dahm ran one gremlin through, and cleaved through the skull of the second.
He rushed to the gate controls, but they were beyond use. A crude bomb with a long fuse had been left behind in the pried-open panels full of wiring. Dahm bolted for the stairs, bounding down six at a time.
“Bomb!” he screamed. “Get out of the gatehouse!”
Confused guards on each level fled after him once they registered his warning.
The gatehouse shook when the bomb exploded, blowing out portions of the wall on the control room’s level. Dahm came to the bottom floor and dashed outside. The massive City gate had swung open, creating a gap of a few dozen yards, and now it ground to a halt, no longer receiving a signal from the control room.
Frantic horns announced the compromising of the gate.
The Nulian horde had been ready for it, already pressing forward despite heavy fire from the ramparts to the west. Here the undead were sent forth in droves, and the defenders on the redoubt’s extension were forced to turn their attention to the partially open gate. As with the breach in the wall, the opening was relatively narrow and was quickly choked by the ruined and twitching bodies of undead that had been torn apart by bullets and blue bolts. Their attention split, the defenders on the extension did not fare well, for the Nulians fired ceaselessly at them from the side of the breach.
Dahm strained his mind and body as he summoned rock from underneath the ground outside the gate, huge spikes of stone that impaled some of the undead and further choked the way in.
Still, the men and women all along the redoubt’s extension saw what was coming and were given orders to begin falling back. Firing at enemies on both sides, they began their retreat, and Dahm joined them.
He heard a low hum from up above and saw the huge shadow of the Throne moving over the Road in the distance. Rae brought it forward, and as soon as her targets were in range she fired, and the air above the battlefield shuddered. For a moment, all eyes rose toward the old ship and every strike halted mid-swing. A dozen thick tracers cut across the air and the earth shook as twelve massive hulks of metal bore into the enemy ranks. Shockwave and shrapnel exploded from craters at each point of impact. This massive ordnance left few remains of the bodies it hit. Dahm looked closer, and saw that huge hatches had slid open on the underside of the Throne to reveal three quad-barrelled cannons mounted on gimbals.
He stared at the cannons, large as boulders, as they fired another round of gut-rumbling fury.
Relieved of gremlin-dropping duty, several of the enemy’s dragons wheeled toward the Throne, attempting to tear at it with their talons. The ship’s shield did not repel the dragon claws, but their fire splashed across it and dissipated harmlessly. Unfortunately, they all were too close for the ship’s guns to target.
Now things were getting messy, and Dahm felt the bloodlust pumping through his veins. It had been a long time, but his body still knew what to do. He ran along the lesser redoubt with its retreating defenders, undead surging in lazy waves to the left, mixed Nulians approaching across a wide stretch of parkland from the breach on his right.
Up ahead, large sections of the greater redoubt were on fire, abandoned by both defenders and attackers, and a dragon was swooping back away from its scorching run. Dahm took a risk and bounded down ten feet to the ground below. He gauged his distance and timing, taking a number of steady, measured breaths, then swept his hands up in a violent gesture. A thick pillar of stone erupted out of the green turf of the park in front of the dragon, ripping and cracking the earth. Unable to check its momentum, the great beast crashed into it. The pillar cracked and toppled, and the dragon tumbled to the ground in a daze. Dahm sprinted to cover the distance before the dragon could recover its wits.
But the dragon shook off its disorientation and fixed sickly-looking eyes on the wizard below. It towered over Dam, easily forty feet from its haunches to the horns atop its head. Its bronze scales had a sheen like cold sweat, and wicked spikes marched up the backs of each limb. It rose into a crouch, as if to pounce, and smiled a beastly smile. Up close, Dahm could see an iron collar around its neck, inscribed with strange runes.
“A wizard!” the dragon snarled. “I could use a snack, my pet!”
“Death first!” Dahm bellowed. He lifted his sword high overhead with his right hand, letting loose his battle cry. With his left, he made a lifting motion and a long shelf of earth grew into a slope beneath his feet, rising up to the level of the dragon’s head.
Surprised but undaunted, the dragon awaited what it supposed would be a fine meal. As it sucked in a breath to feed its flames, Dahm leapt toward it and made a crushing motion with his hand. The shelf of stone beneath him was ripped out of the ground and whipped around in an instant, suddenly malleable. The stone whip coiled around the dragon’s head, stuck between its jaws, and cinched tight, cutting off the flow of its fire. Its serpent tongue flicked out and lolled as it began to choke, unable to relieve itself of the burning gases.
Dahm landed atop its huge, flailing head and grabbed a horn to steady himself. He thrust his sword down into the dragon’s skull, and the impossibly sharp blade cut through scale and bone like butter. The blade reached brain, and the dragon twitched under Dahm with its final impulses, its mouth open wide in a soundless shriek.
Immediately several other dragons took notice, and were headed Dam’s way before he’d finished riding the slain beast’s head back down to the ground. He panted from the effort of so much stonecraft, watching as nine of his prey’s brethren bore down on him.
“It was worth it,” he said aloud.
But the nine beasts never got to avenge their comrade.
The piercing cry of some great bird rang out over the City, and as all eyes lifted to find the source of the call, they saw the sun rising in the north. Dusk had only just fallen, yet here already was the fiery red of morning.
Rapidly the sunrise coalesced into seven forms like that of giant birds, with long tails stretching behind them. Not far behind was the roar of thousands of voices, and soon the streets beyond the greater redoubt were flooded with unruly columns of brightly colored people. The City’s defenders whooped and hollered in greeting, even as they continued to strive against the Nulians pressing toward the redoubt.
Immediately the seven fiery birds engaged with the dragons, peeling them off of Dam.
Having been delivered from flame and fang, at least for the moment, he ran for his life.
The plumage of the firebirds was mostly orange and yellow, with a few accents of royal blue along their tails and the edges of their wings. Each must have been over ten feet tall, with wingspans of twenty feet or more, and their mere
presence cast a warm glow like the embers of a fire.
Surely the dragons were intelligent enough to recognize the futility of spewing fire at these birds coursing with the energy of suns. Nevertheless in their fury and madness, they did so, rushing in to swarm them. The great firebirds only absorbed the flames of their attackers, unable to pierce dragon skin with their talons. Though smaller than the dragons, the intensity of their spirits made up for the difference in size. Battle was joined in the air, mythical beasts wreathed in flame and the haze of heat, fighting each other to a stalemate.
Dahm cleared the greater redoubt, sections of it now burnt and falling apart. Only the barrages of cannon fire from the Throne held the enemy back now. The fires on the ground were quickly growing out of control, spreading to any building built in recent times, climbing up the vines that had claimed the skyscrapers of Centrifuge as their own. The soldiers of Centrifuge retreated from the crumbling redoubt to form up with the newly arrived sarathi. Was Bahabe out there somewhere? Had they come because of her?
Dahm waded through streets filled with smoke and dust and flame to join the rest of the defenders. Somewhere along the line, he’d lost track of Naphte, but he knew the Anekan commander had taken up a position among the snipers somewhere, after the meeting in the generals’ tent.
The sarathi were a widely varied people, in all shapes and sizes and combinations of colors. Dahm sensed great elemental power among them. Some wore clothes like humans, but most had donned only loin cloths, if anything at all. Generally, they seemed ill at ease among the City’s many artificial structures. Nevertheless they were putting their gifts to work.
Dryads and other forest dwellers teased dense growth out of every inch of bare ground to be found, forming crude walls of vegetation to give the defenders cover from incoming fire. Nyads wound their way among the companies of fighters, easing their pains with cool healing power. The ebensprites caught Dam’s attention the most though. They were not exactly like the spirits of stone he knew from Zhamann - indeed, these had taken on flesh - but the sense of their power felt very similar and left him a little homesick.
Wordlessly he fell in among these grey and brown folk and helped them to erect stone walls to block off various streets and provide more cover. He knew the defenders were being stretched thin, so every little bit of hindrance they could create for the enemy was worthwhile.
Finally, the Nulians cleared the charred redoubt as huge sections of it buckled and collapsed. The attackers converged on the defenders from every side. Beastmen broke rank with glee, having waited since the beginning of the battle for this moment. Cat and ape and wolf-men loped around and over the defenders’ cover, heedless of gunfire, bloodlust driving them in for intimate kills. Centrifuge’s soldiers were forced to draw their swords or side-arms to fight in the suddenly close quarters.
Ogres and a few of their giant kin laid about with massive clubs and maces, smashing away sarathi-built cover, and anything else that was in the way. Shaman fire blew into the streets from dark alleys while less talented gremlins simply scuttled into the fray to bite and claw and slice with their daggers at people’s ankles.
Dahm heard a sound that the chaos of the battle had driven from his memory, the wet ignition of the Nulian’s siege blasters. They must have brought them up into the City’s perimeter. He looked up and saw that the Throne was their target, several masses of purple fire arcing through the night sky toward the ship.
He saw that Rae tried to swing the Throne away, her cannons and turrets shifting their aim to return fire, but all of the blasts connected, splashing across the Throne’s shields like paint thrown at a canvas.
The light of the shields cycled through hues of red and flickered out like snuffed flames, and two more blasts hit the Throne’s naked hull, swiftly burning through its armor to hit vital components within. A deafening explosion rocked the ship, blowing the rear section apart, and its nose began to angle toward the ground. It lurched downward, then sank slowly, smashing into buildings as it fell.
“No!” Dahm cried, and rushed in the ship’s direction as if there was anything at all he could do to help. He thrust his hands forward, summoning earth to try and stop the ship’s fall, but it was too far away and the earth responded too slowly.
Even those well-built ancient skyscrapers could not support the weight of the huge command ship, and they bent, then gave way under it like warm wax. The Throne’s nose dug into the earth and plowed a furrow into the steel highway as it ground to a stop. It collided with one final structure, and the skyscraper buckled with shrieks of metal, leaning over slightly, its weight resting entirely on the hull of the ship.
The Nulians roared in triumph as the smoke rose from the Throne’s wreckage. Their mass of bodies continued to surge forward through gaps in the burnt redoubt, giving chase as the defenders again were forced to fall back. Men and women fell on every side of Dahm - he could only imagine what it was like on the furthest flanks of the defenders’ army, split up as it was by the structures of the very City they fought to protect.
The siege blasters now fired at will, hurling destruction at any building in sight, apparently with the sole purpose of causing chaos.
The defenders fled among flames and falling debris. The ancient buildings of Centrifuge succumbed to the hot purple masses. Their walls and supports melted away, whole portions of facades and upper floors raining down into the City streets, disorienting and sometimes killing the panicked defenders.
Valiantly Dahm and the sarathi around him tried to summon new fortifications to cover the army’s retreat, but there were too many streets to close off, and not enough time. Dahm kept having to leave his ebensprite comrades to defend them against beastmen and ogres.
He desperately wanted to go and find Rae, but knew she would rather him help her people survive.
Up above, the firebirds and dragons still strove for dominance, but the birds were tireless by nature, and the dragons were growing sluggish. Dahm was distracted by a flare of dragon fire uncomfortably close, just a dozen yards above, and he had a thought that should have occurred to him much sooner. The collar with the runes. Was it some kind of spell?
He hollered up to the firebird wrestling to pull the dragon away from the people below, though he wasn’t sure if it would understand.
“Break the collar!”
The firebird betrayed no reaction, but deftly swooped around to the dragon’s back and clamped its beak down on the iron ring. Dahm heard the screech of twisting metal, and the collar popped off.
The dragon shuddered, and its eyes shone with a light that hadn’t been there before. It opened its jaws in a strange barking sound, uncharacteristically full of fear, and its brethren seemed to respond. The firebird called out to its kin, and they redoubled their efforts to stop the dragons, following Dam’s advice to swiftly destroy the strange collars. Within moments, all the dragons were free, barking at each other in confusion, and retreating away to the southwest.
Rough Nulian voices shouted in dismay or anger, “Traitors! Cowards!” But the dragons heeded no such insults, and soon had disappeared into the night.
There was no time to celebrate the dragons’ retreat. Attackers spilled down every open street and accosted the elemental fortifications of the sarathi. The sturdy masses of gnarled roots, sometimes even combined with sheets or pillars of rock, were still not enough. Ogre clubs crushed stone. Axes and swords tore into the wood. Fire raged all around, obscuring both approach and retreat on all sides of the battle.
During a lull, Dahm summoned a pillar of stone beneath his feet to get a better vantage on the area around him. He knew if the defenders were stretched any thinner along this arc of ingress, their lines would break entirely and the flood of Nulians would surge through the City streets to engulf the Keep, with no one left to defend it.
There arose a whine in the air, like a high-pitched whistle mixed with the sizzle of boiling water. The sound was so odd that nearly every combatant paused mid-stride to
see what it was. A streak of white light tore through the southern skies toward Centrifuge. A bright point of red shone at the white streak’s tip, and around it pulsed a faint aura of blue.
Neither army had much time to react as the sound of the bolide rose in pitch, coming closer. It arced over the rear of the Nulian army and plummeted toward the earth. Dahm was able to discern the form of a man within the streak of white fire.
With an earth-shaking impact and the boom of displaced air, the human meteor smashed into the enemy forces where the siege blasters were firing from. Everything within a hundred yards must have been incinerated by its fire. A shockwave rippled outward from the impact, flattening countless Nulians. The smoke of burnt matter and creatures rose up in a twisted mushroom cloud.
As a gentle breeze pushed aside the fog of destruction, a white-wreathed form came into view, trudging up the long slope of a shallow crater. Over his head he lifted a blade, glowing with red fire. The blue bubble that enveloped him pulsed outward, pushing swirls of smoke aside.
Enkannites, sarathi, and Anekans all cheered, even those without a clear view of the impact site, and word of the Jon’s arrival spread quickly.
Nulians near the man rushed to swarm him, but a horn signal sounded, and they turned reluctantly to push deeper into the City. A large form was strode forth to confront Jon.
Dahm recognized him, the blower of the horn, the ogre giant Jon had fought once before.
“The little man is mine!” Malok roared. “Press the attack! Do not give way! My Command shall sustain you!”
Jon braced himself. Something was different about Malok this time. Jon had spent so much energy on the slaying of necrosaurs and the frantic flight home. He didn’t know if he had the strength for an empowered ogre general.