by Dragon Lance
“The Army of Ergoth!” he gasped, stumbling into the small house that served as the general’s headquarters. “It approaches from the south!”
“Damn!” Kith-Kanan instantly saw the terrible vulnerability of his army, stretched as it was into a long column marching east to west. Wherever the humans hit him, he would be vulnerable.
“How far?” he asked quickly.
“Five miles, maybe less. I saw a company of horsemen – a thousand or so. I don’t know how many other units are there.”
“You did well to bring me the news immediately.” Kith’s mind whirled. “If Giarna is attacking us, he must have something in mind. Still, I can’t believe he can execute an attack very well – not in this weather.”
“Attack them, uncle.”
Kith turned to look at Vanesti. His fresh-faced nephew’s eyes lit with enthusiasm. His first battle loomed.
“Your suggestion has merit,” he said, pausing for a moment. “It’s one thing that the enemy would never suspect. His grasp of the battle won’t be much greater than mine, if I’m on the offensive. And furthermore, I have no way to organize any kind of defense in this weather. Better to have the troops moving forward and catch the enemy off balance.”
“I’ll dispatch the scouts,” Parnigar noted. “We’ll inform every company that we can. It won’t be the whole army, you realize. There isn’t enough time, and the weather is too treacherous.”
“I know,” Kith agreed. “The Windriders, for one, will have to stay on the ground.” He looked at Arcuballis. The great creature rested nearby, his head tucked under one wing to protect himself from the rain.
“I’ll take Kijo and leave Arcuballis here.” The prospect made him feel somehow crippled, but as the storm increased around him, he knew that flight would be too dangerous a tactic.
He could only hope that his enemy’s attack would be equally haphazard. In this wish, he was rewarded, for even as the fight began, it moved out of the control of its commanders.
*
The two armies blundered through the rain. Each stretched along a front of several dozen miles, and great gaps existed in their formations. The Army of Ergoth lumbered north, and where its companies met elves, they fought them in confusing skirmishes. As often as not, they passed right through the widely spaced formations of the Wildrunner Army, continuing into the nameless distance of the plains. The Wildrunners and their allies struck south. Like the humans, they encountered their enemy occasionally, and at other times met no resistance.
Skirmishes raged along the entire distance, between whatever units happened to meet each other in the chaos. Human horsemen rode against elven swords. Dwarven battle-axes chopped at Ergothian archers. Because of the noise and the darkness, a company might not know that its sister battalion fought for its life three hundred yards away, or that a band of enemy warriors had passed across their front a bare five minutes earlier.
But it didn’t matter. The real battle took shape in the clouds themselves.
Chapter 33
NIGHTFALL, MIDSUMMER,
YEAR OF THE CLOUD GIANT
Hail thundered through the woods, pounding trees into splinters and bruising exposed flesh. The balls of ice, as big across as steel pieces, quickly blanketed the ground. The roar of their impact drowned all attempts at communication.
Kith-Kanan, Vanesti, and Parnigar halted their plodding horses, seeking the minimal shelter provided by the overhanging boughs of a small grove of elms.
They were grateful that the storm hadn’t caught them on the open plains. Such a deluge could be extremely dangerous without shelter. Their two dozen bodyguards, all veterans of the House Protectorate, took shelter under neighboring trees. All the elves were silent, wet, and miserable.
They hadn’t seen another company of Wildrunners in several hours, nor had they encountered any sign of the enemy. They had blundered through the storms for the whole day, lashed by wind and rain, soaked and chilled, fruitlessly seeking sign of friend or foe.
“Do you know where we are?” Kith asked Parnigar. Around them, the pebbly residue of the storm had covered the earth with round, white balls of ice.
“I’m afraid not,” the veteran scout replied. “I think we’ve maintained a southerly heading, but it’s hard to tell when you can’t see more than two dozen feet ahead of you!”
All of a sudden Kith held up a hand. The hailstorm, with unsettling abruptness, had ceased.
“What is it?” hissed Vanesti, looking around them, his eyes wide.
“I don’t know Kith admitted. “Something doesn’t feel right.”
The black horse exploded from the bushes with shocking speed, its dark rider leaning forward along the steed’s lathered neck. Sharp hooves pounded the ice-coated earth, sending slivers of crushed hailstones flying with each step. The attacker charged past two guards, and Parnigar saw the glint of a sword. The blade moved with stunning speed, slaying both elven bodyguards with quick chops.
“We’re attacked!” Parnigar shouted. The veteran scout seized his sword and leaped into his saddle, spurring the steed forward.
Kith-Kanan, followed by Vanesti, ducked around the broad tree trunk just in time to see Parnigar collide with the attacker. The brutal impact sent the elf’s mare reeling side-ways and then tumbling to the ground. The horse screamed as the elven warrior sprang free, crouching to face the black-cloaked human on his dark war-horse.
“Giarna!” hissed Kith-Kanan, instantly recognizing the foe.
“Really?” gasped Vanesti, inching forward for a better look.
“Stay back!” growled the elven general.
The black steed abruptly reared, lashing out with its forehooves. One of them caught Parnigar on the skull, and the elf fell heavily to the ground.
Frantically Kith looked toward his bow, tied securely to his saddlebags on the other side of the broad tree. Cursing, he drew his sword and darted toward the fight.
With savage glee, the human rider leaped from his saddle, straddling Parnigar as the stunned elf struggled to move. As Kith ran toward them, the human thrust his sword through the scout’s chest, pinning him to the ground with the keen blade.
Parnigar flopped on his back, stuck to the earth. Blood welled around the steel blade, and the icy pebbles of hail beneath him quickly took on a garish shade of red. In moments, his struggles faded to weak twitching, and then to nothing.
By that time, Kith had lunged at the black swordsman. The elf slashed with his sword but gaped in surprise as the quick blow darted past Giarna. The man’s fist hammered into Kith-Kanan’s belly, and the elf grunted in pain as he staggered backward, gasping for air.
With a sneer, the human pulled out his blade, turning to face two more Wildrunners, Kith’s bodyguards, who charged recklessly forward. His sword flashed once, twice, and the two elves dropped, fatally slashed across their throats.
“Fight me, you bastard!” growled Kith-Kanan.
“That is a pleasure I have long anticipated!” General Giarna’s face broke into a savage grin. His teeth appeared to gleam as he threw his head back and laughed maniacally.
A quartet of veteran Wildrunners, all loyal and competent warriors of the House Protectorate, rushed General Giarna from behind. But the man whirled, his bloody sword cutting an arc through the air. Two of the guards fell, gutted, while the other two stumbled backward, horrified by their opponent’s quickness. Kith-Kanan could only stare in shock. Never had he seen a weapon wielded with such deadly precision.
The retreating elves moved backward too slowly. Giarna sprang after them, leaping like a cat and stabbing one of them through the heart. The other elf rushed in wildly. His head sailed from his body following a swathlike cut that the human made with a casual flick of his wrist.
“You monster!” The youthful scream caught Kith-Kanan’s attention. Vanesti had seized a sword from somewhere. Now he charged out from behind the elm trunk, lunging toward the murderous human general.
“No!” Kith-Kanan cried out in al
arm, rushing forward to try to reach his nephew. His boot caught on a treacherous vine and he sprawled headlong, looking up to see Vanesti swinging his sword wildly.
Kith scrambled to his feet. Each of his movements seemed grotesquely slow, exaggerated beyond all reason. He opened his mouth to shout again, but he could only watch in horror.
Vanesti lost his balance following his wild attack, stumbling to the side. He tried to deflect the human’s straight-on stab, but the tip of General Giarna’s blade struck Vanesti at the base of his rib cage, penetrating his gut and slicing through his spine as it emerged from his back. The youth gagged and choked, sliding backward off the blade. He lay on his back, his hands clutching at the air.
*
The lord-major-chieftain supreme of Hillrock pressed forward, trudging resolutely through weather the like of which he had never experienced before. Hailstones pummeled him, rain lashed his face, and the wind roared and growled in its futile efforts to penetrate the hill giant’s heavy wolfskin cloak, a cloak he had worn proudly for forty years.
Yet One-Tooth plodded on, grimly determined to follow the compulsion that had drawn him here. He would see this trek through to its end. The burning drive that had led him this far seemed to grow more intense with each passing hour, until the giant broke into a lumbering trot, so anxious was his feeling that he neared his goal.
As he moved across the plains, a strange haze seemed to settle over his mind. He began to forget Hillrock, to forget the giantesses who were his wives, the small community that had always been his home. Instead, his mind drifted to the heights of his mountain range, to one snow-blanketed winter valley long age and a small, fire-warmed cave.
*
Later, elves who had lived for six hundred years swore that they had never before seen such a storm. The weather erupted across the plains with a violence that dwarfed the petty squabbles of the mortals on the ground. The thunderheads grew in frenzy, an explosive, seething mass of power that transcended anything in human or elven memory. The storms lashed the plains, striking with wind and fire and hail.
At nightfall, when darkness gathered across the already sodden plains on the night of the summer solstice, Solinari gleamed full and bright, high above the clouds, but no one on Krynn could see her.
Lightning erupted, hurling crackling bolts to the ground. Great cyclones of wind, miles across, whirled and roared. They spiraled and burst, a hundred angry funnel clouds that shrieked over the flat plains, leveling everything in their path.
The great battle of armies never occurred. Instead, a howling dervish of tornadoes formed in the west and roared across the plains, scattering the two forces before them, leaving tens of thousands of dead in their wake.
The most savage of the tornadoes swirled through the Army of Ergoth, scattering food wagons, killing horses and men, and sending the remnants fleeing in all directions.
But if the human army suffered the bulk of the death toll, the Wildrunners suffered the greatest destruction. Huge columns of black clouds, mushrooming into the heights of the distant sky, gathered around the great stone block of Sithelbec. Dark and foreboding, they collected in an awful ring about the city.
For hours, a dull stillness pervaded the air. Those who had sought shelter in Sithelbec fled, fearing the unnatural calm.
Then the lightning began anew. Bolts of energy lashed the city. They crackled into the stone towers of the fortress, exploding masonry and leaving the smell of scorched dust in the air. They seared the blocks of wooden buildings around the wall, and soon sheets of flame added to the destruction.
Like a cosmic bombardment, crackling spears of explosive electricity thundered into the stone walls and wooden roofs. Crushing and pounding, pummeling and bruising, the storm maintained its pressure as the city slowly collapsed into ruin.
*
Kith realized that he was screaming, spitting his hatred and rage at this monstrous human who had dogged his life for forty years. He threw caution aside in a desperate series of slashes and attacks, but each lunge found Giarna’s sword ready with a parry – and each moment of battle threatened to open a fatal gap in the elf’s defenses. Their blades clanged together with a force that matched the thunder. The two opponents hacked and chopped at each other, scrambling over deadfalls, pushing through soaking thorn bushes, driving forward in savage attacks or careful retreats. The rest of the House Protectorate bodyguards rushed, in a group, to their leader’s defense. The human’s blade was a deadly scythe, and soon the elves bled the last of their lives into the icy, hail-strewn ground.
It became apparent to Kith that Giarna toyed with him. The man was unbeatable. He could have ended the fight at virtually any moment, and he seemed completely impervious to Kith’s blows. Even when, in a lucky moment, the elf’s blade slashed against the human’s skin, no wound opened.
The man continued to allow Kith to rush forward, to expend himself on these desperate attacks, and then to stumble back, seemingly inches ahead of a mortal blow.
Finally he laughed, his voice a sharp, animal bark.
“You see now that, for all your arrogance, you cannot live forever. Even elven lives must come to an end!”
Kith-Kanan stepped back, gasping for breath and staring at the hated enemy before him. He said nothing as his throat expanded, gulping air.
“Perhaps you will die with as much dignity as your wife,” suggested Giarna, musing.
Kith froze. “What do you mean?”
“Merely that the whore thought she could do what all of your armies have been unable to do. She tried to kill me!”
The elf could only stare in shock. Suzine! By the gods, why would she attempt something so mad, so impossible?
“Of course, she paid the price for her stupidity, as you will do as well! My only regret was that she took her own life before I could draw the information I needed from her.”
Kith-Kanan felt a sense of horror and guilt. Of course she had done this. He had left her no other way in which to aid him.
“She was braver and finer than we will ever be,” he said, his voice firm despite his grief.
“Words!” Giarna snorted. “Use them wisely, elf. You have precious few left!”
Vanesti lay on the ground, so still and cold that he might have been a pale patch of mud. Near him, Parnigar lay equally still, his eyes staring sightlessly upward, his fingers curled reflexively into fists. His warm blood had melted the hailstones around him, so that he lay in an icy crimson pool.
Marshaling his determination, Kith charged, recklessly slashing at his opponent in a desperate bid to break his icy control. But Giarna stepped to the side, and Kith found himself on his back, looking up into gaping black holes, the deadened eyes of the man who would be his killer. The elf tried to scramble away, to spring to his feet, but his cloak snagged on a twisted limb beside him.
Kith kicked out, then fell back, helpless.
Trapped between two logs, Kith-Kanan couldn’t move. Desperately, feeling a rage that was nonetheless overpowering for its helplessness, he glared at the blade that was about to end his life. Giarna stood over him, slowly raising the bloodstained weapon, as if the steel intended to savor the final, fatal thrust.
The crushing blow of a club knocked Giarna to the side before the killing blow could fall. Stuck behind the deadfall, Kith couldn’t see where the blow had come from, but he saw the human stumble, watched the great weapon swing through his field of vision.
Snarling with rage, Giarna whirled, ready to slay whatever impertinent foe distracted him from his quarry. He felt no fear. Was he not impervious to the attack of elf, dwarf, or human?
But this was no elf. Instead, he stared upward at a creature that towered over his head. The last thing Giarna saw before the club crushed his skull and scattered his brains across the muddy ground was a lone white tooth, jutting proudly from the attacker’s jaw.
*
“He’s alive,” whispered Kith-Kanan, scarcely daring to breathe. He kneeled beside Vanesti, noting th
e slow rise and fall of his nephew’s chest. Steam wisped from his nostrils at terrifyingly long intervals.
“Help little guy?” inquired One-Tooth.
“Yes.” Kith smiled through his tears, looking with affection at the huge creature who must have marched hundreds of miles to find him. He had asked him why, and the giant had merely shrugged.
One-Tooth reached down and grasped the bundle that was Vanesti. They wrapped him in a cloak, and now Kith rigged a small lean-to beneath the shelter of some leafy branches.
“I’ll light a fire,” said the elf. “Maybe that will draw some of the Wildrunners.”
But the soaked wood refused to burn, and so the trio huddled and shivered through the long night. Then in the morning, they heard the sound of horses pushing along a forest trail.
Kith wormed his way through the bushes, discovering a column of Wildrunner scouts. Several veterans, recognizing their leader, quickly approached him, but they had to overcome their fear of the hill giant when they came upon the scene of the savage fight.
Gingerly they rigged a sling for the youth and prepared to make the grueling ride to Sithelbec.
“This time you’ll come home with me,” Kith told the giant. In the thinning mist, they started toward the east. Not for several days, until they met more survivors of his army – some who had had word from the fortress – did they learn that the home they marched to had been reduced to a smoldering pile of rubble.
Epilogue
AUTUMN
(2177 PC)
Shapeless blocks of stone jutted into the sky, framed by the burned-out timbers that outlined walls, gates, and other structures of wood. Sithelbec lay in ruins. The tornadoes and lightning had razed the fortress more effectively than any human attack could have done. The surviving Wildrunners collected on the plains around the wreckage, nursing their wounded and trying to piece together the legacy of the disaster.