"Trollsss," the wyrm hissed to him. "Many trolls at the surface."
A few moments later, Cobalt spread his wings and sped back up the tunnel, only this time, he was followed closely by a white feathered falcon.
Chapter Thirteen
King Barden, reluctantly, and at the last possible moment, agreed to call back his men from the north. At least what was left of them. They arrived just in time to keep Camberly from falling, like undefended Antole had, before the gothican barbarians.
Lord Ulrich and his horde of gothicans and trolls would have already taken the kingdom's capital had Pharark’s necromancer not destroyed the bridge in Antole, costing them days. Instead of marching straight through while King Barden's men were gone, they were forced to build their own way across the Vasting River using debris from Antole's destruction. While the new crossing was being made, the gothicans who weren't busy with it spent those days destroying the city, raping, killing, and laying waste to anything and everything for no particular reason other than to stay busy and sate their battle lust. When they were finally able to cross the river and continue their march to Camberly, only a sparse bit of life remained behind. The survivors were few and far between and were left to scavenge the ruins of the once mighty metropolis.
Lord Ulrich didn't bother to leave the city occupied for it wasn't necessary. There was nothing left to occupy. Very few structures were left standing, especially when Pharark came and vented his rage over Reaton-Stav's idiocy. The one building that was spared was the palace which used to be the kingdom seat of Narvoza. Pharark gifted it to Lord Ulrich for his victory. The other half dozen buildings that had escaped the demon's wrath had done so only by accident.
The orphanage now lay under what remained of one of its neighboring temples.
The smaller dwellings fared better, at least the ones made of stone and mortar with tiled roofs. Anything with wooden walls roofed with thatch had been burned away. It was hard to tell, though, that such violence had taken place for all of it was now covered in a soft white blanket of snow that not only extinguished the fires left behind, it stopped the horrendous stench of decay coming from the tens of thousands of discarded bodies that littered the city.
Those who survived were now having to face another threat. Packs of kobls were following the gothicans to scavenge the refuse of their passing. They were now drifting into the city to feed on the corpses, and with each passing day, what humans remained were faced with setback after setback. A few groups were forming, finding places they could fortify, and sending out armed folks to search for food. Optimism was hard to come by for the gothican victory was so thorough that even hope had been destroyed. They had come from the east on an icy morning after the city spent two nights plagued by inextinguishable fires. The runners who would've normally warned everyone of such an attack had been busy fighting the flames. The gothicans met no resistance at the gates, and by the time warnings were sounded, and the reserves mustered, the gothicans had taken control. It probably wouldn't have mattered much because the number of trained Narvozian fighters left in the city was minimal due to King Barden's previous call to arms to fight in the north, but still a stand was made at the massive inner walls King Barden's great-grandfather had built so long ago.
The gothicans didn't use bows and arrows, or siege engines, nor battering rams or scaling ladders. They simply stood out of arrow range and waited patiently while a single human man, the necromancer, wearing a red and black high-collared robe walked slowly up to the wooden gates. The kingdom archers rained clouds of arrows down at him but they were deflected away by magic. The gates burst into flames, like so many buildings inside the city had, and the man disappeared, to do his own bidding. Soon, the iron-banded planks were nothing more than charred timbers dangling from twisted hinges, and the gothicans charged through as if the obstruction had never been there at all.
A few of the big warriors fell to kingdom arrows, but not enough. At least five thousand gothicans moved through Antole and destroyed it and its thousands of citizens. More than four and a half thousand gothicans left the city five days later on their way to Camberly. It would have only been two days had the fool not destroyed the bridge.
Oddly, no gothican that fell survived, because they killed their injured rather than waste time on them. It was said that to fall in battle was a disgrace for a gothican. If you were too wounded to fight, you were too wounded to live.
The Duke of Antole, King Barden's uncle, and his court of politicians and dignitaries, sought protection in the old palace behind its formidable walls. Detailed descriptions of how Antole fell and the gothican tactics had been written down and sent by a runner, as well as by messenger birds, but that was all they did to help the Narvozian cause, and Camberly.
The palace gates were also wooden, and less than one hundred men were left to guard the people within. No fire was needed to gain entry, only the booted kicks of a few larger warriors. Several of the giant gothican captains, and the massive battle lord himself, enjoyed ripping apart the people they found there. This they did slowly while they waited for the makeshift bridge to be built. Finally, after three days of torture and murder, Lord Ulrich summoned Pharark to the city to announce its fall. The demon punctuated the victory in a fit of rage over the delay caused by the ruined bridge. With elemental force, he tossed what remained of Antole like an earthquake, in a tornado, leaving little but wreckage behind.
Unbeknownst to any of them, though, King Barden's uncle, the Duke of Antole, managed to send out a final message letting his nephew know the sheer power of the demon and the might of his gothican army.
Lord Ulrich was approaching Camberly now, but he found he wasn't alone. Up ahead, but on the wrong side of the river, was an even larger horde than his own. Thousands of cold and angry wood trolls were gathered around a score of bonfires. Apparently, some of them had made it across the wide, slow-flowing river before the weather turned because a few hundred of the nasty brown forest vermin were on the city side, howling and barking back and forth at their peers.
Farther ahead, like a field of boulders on a white sheet, was another group of trolls, easily a few thousand strong. Lord Ulrich immediately recognized them as the larger, more formidable rock trolls. A few bands of his gothicans who had been fighting with them in the north were scattered through their ranks. Already a group of six gothican runners were approaching him from that direction.
The city of Camberly was buttoned up and locked down as tightly as a chastity belt. Lord Ulrich, having been born in the city into slavery, knew the areas beyond the big primary defensive walls well. The smaller outer walls were more for aesthetics than for holding off an attack. He knew they could take the area between them soon and quick, and use the dwellings between for protection from the winter. Lord Ulrich had thought about all of this while idling away in Antole.
Pharark liked the idea of holding the city hostage and terrorizing those within until spring. He had told Lord Ulrich to take Camberly slowly. Ulrich only wanted King Barden's head and hoped he could convince those within the walls they should surrender their king in exchange for their lives. Making such a demand, and the expression on King Barden's face when he learned that all he had to do to be a good king and a hero to his people and save them from certain death, was to turn himself over to those he hated more than anything. The idea of it made Ulrich chuckle.
When he looked at the towering statue, he felt it like a thorn in his side, and his mirth quickly died away. It was a bold statement directed at his people, he knew. That is why it faced north toward the mountains they'd been forced to live in when the humans pushed them out of their homeland. It was there to intimidate the uneducated gothicans and remind them of the many defeats they had been dealt over the years. To remind them of the might of the Narvozian Kingdom. Lord Ulrich vowed to destroy the monstrosity just as soon as he removed King Barden's head from his body.
The times had changed, and the tables had turned. No longer were the gothicans uno
rganized, ignorant slaves with crude spears and clubs. Years of fighting the kingdom in the mountains had trained them of sword, axe, and spear. There was a whole generation of gothicans now who had known nothing but battle, be it with the kingdom or the hated rock trolls with whom they were now allied.
Unknowingly, the kingdom had trained and educated the gothicans while they were slaves. A people who were little more than hunters and scavengers before, were now capable of farming, masonry, and blacksmithing. The gothicans had perfected these arts, and now the pride and vanity of the kingdom was about to come full circle. Every gothican on the field had pledged to fight to the death, man and woman alike. They knew that a large but foolish faction of their race didn't want to fight this war, along with the children of those here to fight it, they still huddled far to the north in the mountains. Even though they didn't agree with what was about to happen, at least their children would be free to roam the rich, fertile land that was theirs before humanity came and stole it from them.
The coming of the warrior god who promised to help them take it all back, and the educated battle lord, Lord Ulrich, who led them was all that was needed to turn a spark into a blaze and organize them to make this stand.
If any of them had a doubt as to the might of the god they followed, it was erased in Antole when they watched him tear apart the city as if it were built from sand.
A command tent was set up, a human-sized one that made both the gothican captains, and their battle lord along with Craggon, the king of the rock trolls, and his escort, look foolishly out of place. Several other tents that had been looted from Antole had also been distributed and set up. This caused some trouble between them and the rock trolls, who had no tents, demanded a share of them since they were allies. Reluctantly, Lord Ulrich agreed, but only to prevent a wasteful outbreak of violence between them. The wood trolls that were on this side of the river had yet to muster the courage to get near the rock trolls or the gothicans. King Bloodthorn, their ruler, was said to be among those stranded on the other side of the river.
Lord Ulrich explained to one of his captains how to make a barge raft from logs and float it across. He told them if they strung a heavy rope all the way over the span, they could use it to pull the barge back and forth and ferry over the wood trolls.
Some of his men and a few of the foul-smelling rock trolls who could interpret directions to their kind and the wood trolls did so, to get the project underway. Like Lord Ulrich, Craggon was eager to get beyond the smaller outer wall so they could shelter themselves from the weather, but their plan was hindered when Ulrich learned that as many as four thousand kingdom soldiers had retreated into the city and another group, estimated to be easily a thousand strong, were holed up in the Uppervale Valley to the east.
"So there will be a battle for the bailey between the two walls, after all," Ulrich said to Craggon, who understood him well enough to get the gist of what he was saying. "I think this will be a perfect job for the wood trolls to start, once we get them over. If they cannot finish it, we will." Craggon understood, but his crude vocal cords wouldn't allow him to answer with much more than a few grunted words.
It was clear, though, he liked the idea of using the wood trolls for such a mission.
"Good," Craggon managed, pointing at his head. "I make message for trolls."
Lord Ulrich understood that Craggon meant good thinking.
Lord Ulrich decided that the memory of watching the humans butchered in the snow from the top of the inner wall would be terrifying. The Narvozian’s who spent the winter huddled in fear and trapped, would tell the tale over and again, and this would go far toward his cause. They would probably fight amongst themselves, many wanting to revolt and feed him their king.
"Make good message," Lord Ulrich said back to the stinking rock troll king, trying to get his mind back on track.
Later, after filling their bellies and getting warm by the fires, it was decided that three hundred rock trolls and eight hundred gothicans would go take Uppervale. No time was to be wasted, and the group would leave at dawn after previsioning and preparing this evening.
Lord Ulrich didn't care that winter was almost fully upon them. He didn't want an army, even a small one, sneaking up on him from behind while he was trying to take the bailey. Everyone understood that, if they failed to take the valley or the area between the walls before the full brunt of winter fell from the sky, it could result in them spending months freezing in the open, or at best, huddled in the Gothful Forest, which would be only slightly less inhospitable.
More gothicans were sent to help get the wood trolls across. Ulrich, eager to begin the battle, decided to forego sacrificing the wood trolls and sent a few hundred of his gothicans to destroy each of the four gates built into Camberly's outer wall. He knew full well they had little or no defense against the kingdom archers, but he did warn them of this threat and allow them time to construct makeshift shields out of whatever they could find.
There was a lot of extra wood leftover from the construction of the river barge, and Lord Ulrich showed them how to tie a thin sapling into a circle, stretch canvas, or pieces of blanket over that and use sticky pieces of pine sap to cover the cloth with thick pieces of pine and wood chips. The results were far from perfect, and would be nowhere near as effective as a shield made from hardened skin, hammered metal, or a slab of wood, but it was what they had. Most of the gothicans didn't care. After the way the men in Antole fled, they were pretty sure whatever resistance they met would be minimal, at least until they marched headlong into clouds of treacherous kingdom arrows.
Other gothicans carried crude ladders and fat chunks of logs to step up on. The outer walls were only about twelve feet tall, and the gothicans and rock trolls both could reach their tops flat-footed. With the help of such things as ladders and steps, they could get their shoulders over the edge, pull themselves up, and wreak havoc with their giant swords and knotted clubs.
And so it went, the battle for Camberly's outer bailey was underway before the barge and ferry system was even complete.
The gothicans Lord Ulrich sent to the walls took a fair number of casualties that first day, but they breached the barrier in half a dozen places, and those who made it over did great damage and killed many before they fell. It became clear that the Narvozian fighters couldn't hold them back at the outer wall, and by the end of the second day, while the snow fell steadily all around them, the kingdom men used the cover of night to retreat to safety behind the primary walls.
Lord Ulrich knew these thirty-foot-tall barriers were at least ten paces thick at the base and would not be breached so easily, if at all. Already, he was thinking about the limited supplies they had. The disadvantage of Pharark's raging fit of destruction in Antole was that vast amounts of stores had been destroyed. With what the wood trolls might bring in from the rich farmland, in the form of herd animals and stored crops, and what his gothicans had salvaged from Antole, added to what the humans left behind in their retreat from the vast bailey, but he figured they still might not have enough to wait out the whole of winter. Just to be safe, he sent three hundred of his gothicans to the small port city of Sonly with instructions to bring back every bit of food they could find, and slaves to prepare it. Ulrich wasn't as worried about feeding the trolls yet. Already, they were eating the dead humans that littered the muddy crimson slush of the bailey and piling up others in the snow for later.
The first attempt at getting the wood trolls across the river by barge was a total failure that cost the lives of twenty-two of them and a handful of gothicans. They were all left watching helplessly as their creation floated down the river. A second barge was almost finished, and soon they would try again.
Disgusted by the outcome of the plan, and tired of waiting, Krookin Bloodthorn barked his intentions across the river. He left his son in charge of the crossing, and with a few hundred of his freezing trolls, started back east toward Uppervale, where they could circle the lake and help Lord Ulri
ch's group destroy the stubborn valley dwellers with a surprise attack from behind. Then he could come back on the right side of the river with all the food and flesh they could gather in the small, human-infested valley.
Chapter Fourteen
The men and women in Uppervale were busy. At dawn, a blue dragon carrying a young human girl, wearing oversized dwarven armor, landed in the middle of town asking to see Captain Murdle or Davvy Flamus. Davvy was on hand and was mortified by the news she carried. He was also amazed that he stood before a child on a dragon and was having a conversation with both. Soon, Captain Murdle, a man called Captain Trant, and the infamous mercenary, Trenka Shawl, along with Dendle, the half-blood, and a few of his full-blooded gothican friends, joined them and were equally as amazed by the sight, and no less horrified by the story.
Chureal told them that, while tunneling to the Riverbend, they, an elf, and Lord Braxton had found a vent hole and witnessed the taking of Camberly's outer wall only the day before. They'd seen a thousand or more gothicans and trolls set off marching toward Uppervale, too. The enemy was now only two days away. She and her dragon had snuck out of the hole in the middle of the night and come to warn them.
Immediately, orders were given and several hundred men, dwarves, and gothicans went to work, preparing for what was to come.
Braxton hadn't wanted Chureal to go, but could find no alternative that would give the people of the valley enough time to prepare. It would've taken days to get word to them through the tunnel system, and there was no way he could speak to them while he was in his hawk form, much less find a way to get someone to listen through the void, because he had tried. Reluctantly, and after much fussing, he sent Chureal, but only after Cobalt convinced him she would be safe and he would resume his normal size to protect her once they were clear of the troll encampment.
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