by Dragon Lance
Catapult stones and tumbling log rams arced above the furious combat at the lower ramparts to smash into the dwarven guard towers. One of the human archers’ towers rolled into place, and volleys of arrows streamed from it, seeking the dwarves above on the ledge and those along the climbing ramparts. Most of the bolts caromed off dwarven shields, but here and there, a few buried themselves in dwarven flesh.
Vicious hand-darts, the favored weapon of Sackmen raiders, hissed through the turmoil like striking vipers, deadly in their accuracy. All along the front, human raiders pushed forward, driving the dwarves ever back, up the staging areas and onto the ramparts themselves, relentless human hordes following and pushing.
The second discobel, hastily repaired, rolled forth from behind a guard tower, dwarves falling from its timbers as arrows and darts found them. But as they fell, others climbed, and the tower was aligned, armed, and discharged, its crackling thunder echoing above the turmoil below. The great, toothed iron disk flashed in high sunlight for an instant, then collided with the human archers’ tower, cutting cleanly through half its timbers. The tower tilted, timbers groaning and cables singing as they broke, then collapsed straight down upon itself, carrying its human occupants with it.
Fresh marauders, coming up from behind, veered around the wreckage and its screaming, bleeding victims as they ran to strengthen the attacking forces.
For an hour the fighting raged unchecked, and then another hour, and Willen Ironmaul saw, bleakly, that the dwarves had lost fully half the frontal space they had set out to defend. The massive human army pressed forward relentlessly. Clearly now, Willen could see the wizards behind them, driving them on.
The humans fought like maniacs. They were obviously only mercenaries, but the way they threw themselves into battle was awesome. It was as though they were driven by devils, and Willen realized that what he was seeing was the power of magic on the human mind. Somehow, the wizards had altered their warriors so that each seemed to see himself as invincible and invulnerable. Without the wizards, these human marauders would have faltered long since. But the spells that had been put upon them drove them on relentlessly.
Suddenly the chief of chiefs saw something else and pointed.
Sweeping in from the Promontory, behind the human ranks, was a thundering arc of mounted dwarves, nearly a thousand in number.
“The Neidar!” Willen shouted. “Cale Greeneye has brought the Neidar!”
Scattering surprised wizards and stunned laggards, the Neidar charge hit the rear of the human assault and collapsed it inward. Like legions of death, the grim open-sky dwarves drove into the enemy, broad axes flashing steel-bright and blood-red, their war horses white-eyed and back-eared as they kicked humans aside and trampled the fallen.
It was only a quick slash-and-run attack and ended before most of the humans realized what had hit them, but it was enough to break the momentum of the assault. Humans withdrew everywhere, backing away warily. The dwarves in front of the fortress regained their formations and mounted new defenses at the very aprons of the stronghold’s mighty ramparts.
Out on the verge of the Promontory, the Neidar strikers wheeled their mounts in salute, and drums spoke above the noise of battle and withdrawal. Ignoring a hasty volley of arrows from below, Willen Ironmaul climbed to the top of the gate-ledge wall and raised an arm in salute. In the distance, Cale Greeneye responded, then wheeled his forces and headed eastward, down the Promontory toward the distant border of Ergoth.
Like Willen, he had heard the sentinel drums in the night and was on his way to repel the wandering marauders crossing Ergoth toward Kal-Thax in hope of gaining spoils from the fighting there.
Casually blocking a final arrow with his shield, Willen Ironmaul, chief of chiefs of Thorbardin, jumped from the wall to the protected ledge and told Barek Stone, “Cale has given us a few minutes to regroup. Make good use of the time. The humans will attack again as soon as they catch their breaths.” He turned, then, shading his eyes to look out across the bloody fields of battle. In the distance, beyond the masses of human invaders, something new was happening. Grabbing a far-seer, he set it to his eye and saw the red crests and gray cloaks of the members of the Roving Guard, moving fast, spreading into an assault line.
“It’s Damon,” the chief of chiefs muttered. “Damon has found the wizards.”
*
By old Theiwar trails and Daewar traders’ routes, the volunteers of the Roving Guard had bypassed the masses of human warriors pressing upon Thorbardin and come to its rearmost lines just as the Neidar horsemen plunged into the assault there.
Seeing what Cale was doing, Damon had held his volunteers back, then moved in swiftly behind the Neidar, cutting down a few dozen scattered defenders to concentrate on the wizards running about in confusion.
Ignoring their “magics,” the Roving Guard cut out, separated, and began rounding up the practitioners of high sorcery, herding and driving them, pushing them out onto the Promontory, farther and farther from the human forces they had been directing. Not all of the wizards fell into their sweep. Some – perhaps many – were still with the barbarian army, protected by its ranks. But Damon had not expected to get all of them. His hope was only to find and separate enough of the magic-users that their absence would soon be noticed. By the time Damon looked back, to estimate a half mile of distance from the nearest marauders, his trotting wedge of determined dwarves had nearly fifty motley, raging humans running ahead of them, spitting spells and shouting curses.
All around, fires erupted on the landscape. Lightning flared, and illusions tangled with illusions. The day went from day to night and back to day again; monsters grew from clumps of brush; rain pelted down through bright sunlight; and dwarf after dwarf seemed to turn into something else, but stubbornly kept moving.
At one point, Damon seemed to be flanked by a seething gargoyle and a porcupine, and at another point it seemed that he, himself, was sprouting doors and shingles. But the single-minded rejection of spells that he had drilled into the survivors of Mace Hammerstand’s proud legion held strong, and the mages scampered ahead of the determined line, at the mercy of blades, shield edges, and heavy hammers if they lagged.
Caught completely off-guard, the wizards fled in confusion, their spells interfering with one another far more than with the purposes of the determined dwarves. Some of them didn’t survive. Hammers and swords put an end to some spells before they were completed, and the fallen wizards lay forgotten on the ground like crumbs dropped by a busy cartman having lunch as he worked.
A mile out onto the Promontory, Damon and the Roving Guard herded the wizards up a knoll, within clear view of the besieged and the besiegers on the mountain slopes, and halted them there.
“What do you think you’re doing, dwarf?” an angry magic-user demanded. “You can’t get away with this, you know!”
“We have so far,” Damon pointed out.
Quickly, with a wave of his hand, the mage muttered a spell and smiled in satisfaction. “Now, before you all die, just out of curiosity, why did you bring us out here? What did you think to gain from us?”
“What did you do, just then?” Damon asked.
“The spell? I summoned Kistilan. He is the favored of the Scions, with powers beyond most. He will deal with you. But I asked you, what did you want of us?”
“I have what I wanted,” Damon assured him. “You just gave it to me.” With a raised hand, he signaled his guards. Grinning savagely, the gray-cloaked dwarves moved in on their captives, some of them pulling the men down, others wielding their hammers. Some of the wizards might eventually recover from the taps their skulls received that day; others would not. The power of a hammer is in the arm that swings it, and the purpose of the swing is in the mind behind that arm.
Within seconds, Damon Omenborn and his Roving Guard stood alone on the knoll, surrounded by dead and unconscious wizards. As one, then, they turned to look northward. A dot had appeared there, in the air above the lower slopes,
and was growing in size as it sped toward them.
Kistilan the Dark, Kistilan the Deadly, Kistilan the Would-be Conqueror, intended ruler of Thorbardin – Kistilan who was one of only a few given the favor of the Scions and the force of elemental magics – had heard the summons from the captured wizards. Kistilan was coming now, to strike down the arrogant dwarves who had dared to defy him.
Chapter 20
FAVORED OF THE POWERS
Within moments of the departure southward of the dark mage, Kistilan, the relentless, fanatical attack on the slopes below Southgate began to falter – at first only a little, but enough for the defending dwarves to notice a change in the intensity of the human marauders. It was as though, here and there, groups of them became confused and uncertain, pausing in their attacks, shifting to defense as they gaped at the strewn bodies of their own kind all around them.
It was Quill Runebrand, the lorekeeper, who suggested a reason. Quill had come to Southgate carrying an armload of scrolls in which he had recorded all that Damon Omenborn had earlier reported about the nature of magic. He was hoping to question the big Hylar about the strange “double vision” which illusionary sorcery seemed to create. Quill had missed Damon, though he arrived in time to see the Neidar attack on the humans’ rear forces and to get a glimpse through a lens tube of the Roving Guard rounding up wizards.
The little he saw, before a burly Daewar took the lens tube away from him, answered his questions. He saw one of the Roving Guard change abruptly into a tusked ogre and realized that he could see both the “ogre” illusion and the reality of the guard as he actually was, simultaneously. He scribbled furiously at a scroll, jotting down his observation, then looked up again in time to see the floating magician – or magician on the floating chair – soar off to the south.
Occupied with such thoughts, it seemed obvious to the scrollster what it meant when – as Willen Ironmaul noted – the human horde seemed to lose its momentum.
“Some of those companies are without their wizards,” Quill said. “They are seeing the field now as it really is, rather than as they have been made to believe, and they don’t like it. There are a lot of dead humans down there.”
Barek Stone turned to gaze curiously at him, then nodded. “He may have something there,” he told Willen. “There aren’t many wizards left among them, and they must have their hands full.”
“Worry about the reasons later,” the chief of chiefs rumbled. “Drummers! Sound general advance!”
The drums sang a fast tattoo, and all along the slope dwarven companies pushed forward, beating and slashing at the hordes of humans before them. With their short, sturdy statures, and the downhill slope in their favor, the dwarves pushed the human assault backward down the hill, and at several points the human defenders turned and ran in panic.
“Locate the wizards,” Willen told his spotters. “Damon didn’t get them all. Where are the rest?”
As though in answer to his question, human heads appeared suddenly, directly before him across the ledge wall, and a long arm drove a flashing blade toward his neck. Barely in time, the chief of chiefs got his shield up to deflect the killing cut. The sword clanged on steel, flashed above his head, and Willen continued the shield motion, hurling himself forward, half across the low wall of the ledge, to drive the corner of his shield into the man’s face. Blood spurted, the man screamed and toppled backward … and disappeared.
In a glance, Willen saw that the man had been standing on a flat stone, levitated upward by sorcery. And there were three others still on the stone. Willen rolled aside as a spiked cudgel smashed down upon the wall where he had been and saw Barek Stone’s sword flick past him to skewer the second attacker. The third was raising a sword when a heavy lens tube bounced off the side of his head, hurling him from the stone. Then Willen was face-to-face with the one man remaining on the floating stone, and his eyes narrowed. The man was unarmed, but by his stance and his look of concentration, the chief of chiefs knew him. A wizard. The man started to mutter a spell, and suddenly someone dashed past Willen, over the wall and onto the flying stone.
Quill Runebrand, babbling in his excitement, grabbed the wizard’s beard, pulled his head down, and thrust the small end of a lens tube roughly into his mouth. The spell was never completed, and the man’s levitation-hold was broken. The stone plunged downward, and Willen grabbed wildly. A hundred and fifty feet below, stone and wizard thudded onto the downward slope as Willen Ironmaul, belly-down on the ledge wall, clung to the wrist of a flailing, kicking lorekeeper.
With a heave, the big Hylar pulled Quill to safety and stared at him in disbelief. “Are you a complete fool?” he demanded. “Jumping out onto the floating stone was …”
“Stones don’t float.” Quill glared at his chief. “It’s just as Damon said. Magic exists, but it isn’t real.”
“And that stone wasn’t up here, floating in the air with people riding on it?”
“Of course not. Stones don’t do that.”
“Then what kind of imbecile jumps onto a stone that doesn’t float, a hundred and fifty feet up in the air?”
“That’s the point,” Quill started, then went pale above his whiskers. “Oh. Uh, well …” He stood on tiptoes to look over the wall at the slope below. There, straight down, were the fragments of the fallen stone and the crushed bodies of three human mercenaries and a wizard. “Gods!” Quill muttered.
All along the ramparts, guards were watching for more floating stones, but no others appeared.
“We count at least two dozen unarmed humans down there,” a spotter reported. “We assume they’re wizards. But they are scattered all over. The only group we see is down past the bluff. Six of them … no, seven now … have gotten together. They are arguing or something. They … Uh-oh!”
“What?” Willen turned.
“That group of wizards.” A dwarf with a lens tube pointed. “They were right down there. Then they all said something together, and they just disappeared.”
Above the heads of the dwarves, the air seemed to crackle for an instant, and a Theiwar guard turned toward the gate. “They’ve gotten inside,” he said. “Somehow, they’ve transported themselves past us. They are in Thorbardin.”
Behind the ledge, beyond the huge gate, there were shouts and the sounds of pounding feet, then the unmistakable rattle of missiles flying from murder holes within the great chamber of Anvil’s Echo. Moments passed, and dwarves ran from the open gate, waving excitedly. “There are humans in the main tunnel!” the first one reported. “We don’t know how they got there. They just … just suddenly appeared.”
“How many?” Barek Stone demanded.
“Ah …” The new arrivals glanced at one another, whispered together, and the first one said, “Seven, we think. At least there were. Three of them appeared on the catwalk. The other four were just beyond. The three on the catwalk are dead now, but the other four vanished again, and we don’t know where they are.”
“Inside,” Willen muttered.
More dwarves were pouring out from Southgate now – hundreds of them, as though fleeing for their lives.
“What are you people doing?” Barek Stone demanded. “Where are you going?”
“Out here,” a Daewar said. “Gem Bluesleeve’s orders. He said if any humans got in, past the gate and the catwalk, then everybody in the gatehouse was to get outside.”
From the great, gaping gateway came an ominous rumbling sound, like the turning of a gigantic screw within sockets. A last few dwarves scampered from the opening, and the massive gate-plug drove itself into place just behind them, sealing the gate with a solid wall of steel-clad stone. The chunk of its closing had a hollow, final sound.
“Well, that does it,” Willen muttered. “Damon said to trust Gem Bluesleeve. I guess now we have no choice.”
The sight of the great gate closing drew stares all along the upper and lower slopes, and the fighting there renewed itself as howling gangs of humans surged forward against the a
dvancing dwarves. Within a minute, fierce hand-to-hand conflict raged all along the swale below the ramparts and out onto the slopes on either side.
On the eastern embankments, a battalion of masked Daergar massed a charge at a rank of human fighters, hitting them so fiercely that they went all the way through the line, then found themselves cut off from retreat as the humans closed in behind them. For long moments it was a standoff – the humans battered and bloody, hesitating to subject themselves again to such ferocity, while the steel-masked dwarves formed a tight ring and waited for the attack. Then from the ring a square, burly dwarf with massive wrists stepped forward, holding a bloody miner’s pick.
Pyrr Steelpick, boss of the shafts, was thoroughly exasperated with the entire situation. Pointing a blunt finger at the nearest humans, he shouted, “What do you people think you’re doing here? Why don’t you go home where you belong?”
The challenge was so unexpected that the humans just stared at him, and some started laughing.
“Well,” the irritated miner demanded, “why are you here?”
“For money, dink,” a tall warrior shouted back. “We fight for hire.”
“What kind of money?” Pyrr goaded the man. “Rocks?”
“Good coin, dink!” the man said. He pulled forth a shiny coin and held it high. “This kind of money!”
“That’s nothing but a pebble!” the Daergar jeered.
“Pebble?” The man looked at his coin, frowning. “This is no pebble! This is a bronze hundred-point coin!”
“Do you all have them?”
“Of course we all have them! We don’t fight for free!”
Scowling behind his mask, Pyrr pointed his pick toward a dead human lying almost at the man’s feet. “Does he have coins like that? Take a look at them!”