Kagur kept shooting. Long and wide as it was, the tower shield didn't quite cover Eovath completely. She should be able to drive an arrow into the top of the head.
Except that every time she would have hit him, he stepped or lifted the shield a little higher, and the shaft streaked harmlessly by or broke against his protection. No one could strike him with a javelin, either. Considering that he must be devoting as much of his attention to magic as to protecting himself, his impenetrable defense had something uncanny about it, like the Rough Beast truly was watching over him.
Kagur scowled that demoralizing notion away. Eovath was lucky, that was all, and nobody's luck lasted forever.
But the giant's good fortune lasted long enough for him to finish the prayer. The disobedient longstrider straightened up from its kill, its gory jaws still chewing a final mouthful of flesh. The other huge beasts quieted.
And their renewed docility steadied the xulgaths. The slackening of the harassment from above likely helped, too. Kagur's companions had assailed the front ranks of their foes to lethal effect, but now they were running out of javelins.
Eovath pivoted and glared back up the hill. He shouted something in the hissing language of the xulgaths, then brandished his axe at the orcs and humans. The reptiles charged.
"Go!" Kagur bellowed, and she and her comrades ran.
The reptiles had a steep slope immediately before them, while the first section of hill the humans and orcs had to traverse was considerably less so. In addition, the xulgaths didn't know the ground the way the folk of the highlands did. Slim advantages, but Kagur hoped that together, they'd be enough to keep her comrades and herself ahead of their pursuers.
She dashed through a stand of ferns, the smallest waist-high, the largest taller than a mammoth. Fronds rustled behind her. Hoping Passamax or one of her other allies was following in her tracks, she glanced back.
It wasn't Passamax. It was a redstripe. The xulgaths had sent the fast, nimble creatures racing ahead of them.
Kagur turned and reached for her longsword but only had it halfway out of the scabbard when the man-sized creature sprang high, the talons on its hind feet poised to catch and rip. She threw herself sideways, avoiding the attack, but ended up with fronds the length of her forearm dangling and flopping all around her, impeding her vision and hampering her movements.
She simultaneously finished drawing her blade and floundered clear of the vegetation. But by then, the redstripe had already spun around and leaped back into the air.
It was too late to dodge or duck. Kagur lunged with the point of her sword extended.
She and the reptile slammed together. The impact broke her grip on the hilt of her weapon and knocked her backward.
But the redstripe's claws didn't tear her flesh. The snatching, rending attacks passed to either side of her, whereas her sword punched into the base of the reptile's throat and out the other side. The creature fell down thrashing.
She hovered just beyond the reach of its flailing, whipping limbs, awaiting the moment when she could retrieve the sword safely. She was still waiting when a second redstripe charged her.
Retreating, she grabbed for Eovath's knife. Then Passamax rushed in on the redstripe's flank and plunged his spear into its body. His momentum bowled the beast off its feet, and he leaned on the weapon, pinning the reptile in place and sinking the point deeper until his foe expired in a final screeching convulsion.
Passamax pointed up the hill and jabbered. Without the benefit of Holg's speaking magic, Kagur only caught one of the words, but she was certain she grasped the gist: "Keep going!" She recovered her sword and ran on.
Someone screamed. Off to the left, just visible in the foliage and the dark, a longstrider held a writhing figure in its gnashing jaws. The shrieking stopped abruptly, and then the gigantic reptile gulped what was left of the warrior down.
Elsewhere, a female voice roared, "Dragonflies! Dragonflies!" as the xulgaths or their war beasts caught up with her. Kagur wanted to rush to her warrior's aid, but couldn't see where the woman was and didn't have time to go searching. Dozens of advancing foes would overtake and overwhelm her if she tried. So, hating the necessity, she kept fleeing toward the Skulltaker village.
The hillside steepened again into the final arduous climb that helped make the orc habitation defensible. She felt winded by the time she scrambled to the top and squirmed through a narrow gap between barricades woven of branches and briar. Flimsy defenses, in her judgment, maybe not worth the labor that had gone into them. But Holg, whose idea they were, claimed they could hold back foes for at least a moment or two.
Somehow, the old man himself was waiting for her at the exact spot where she finished her ascent. "How many others made it back?" she panted.
He shrugged. "Maybe half? My hope is there are others still coming behind you."
"Mine too. But we can't wait for them." She took a deep breath to calm her pounding heart and restore the strength of her voice. Then she shouted. "They're coming! You know what to do! On my order!"
The men and women in charge of handling the cross sections of log rolled them to the point where the hillside dropped sharply away. Another of Holg's ideas, laboriously cut with axes, mallets, and wedges, the barrel-shaped weapons were as tall as Kagur. It remained to be seen whether they'd travel far enough to accomplish their purpose, but Nesteruk had at least identified relatively clear, straight paths through the trees and tree-ferns.
Two more warriors clambered up onto into the flat space in front of the Skulltakers' cave. Kagur was glad to see that one of them was Dalk. Blood flowed from a gash below his knee, and more of it dripped from the hatchet in his right hand and the knife in his left. But he gave her a gap-toothed grin like running and fighting for his life was good sport.
Orcs shouted to one another, and after another moment, Kagur could just make out the stirring and churning in the darkness that was the xulgath horde coming up the slope. The sight reminded her of the numberless, implacable black ants from the pinecone-shaped nests. But that comparison was no more encouraging or otherwise useful than the idea that Rovagug was personally shepherding Eovath through the battle, so she pushed it out of her head as well.
Wanting the foe to climb just a little higher, she silently counted to five. Then she shouted, "Now!"
Along the drop-off, humans and orcs heaved the wooden rounds forward.
Some performed as poorly as Kagur had thought they might, bouncing and tumbling off course, crashing into tree trunks and thickets, and hanging up short of the foe. But others rolled on, faster and faster, until they slammed into one xulgath, and, often, rolled right on to crush other reptiles behind it.
Even the enormous war beasts weren't entirely impervious to the onslaught. One piece of log bounced high and smashed down on a spiketail's tiny-looking head. The beast didn't fall down afterward, but something was plainly wrong with it. It simply stood and shuffled in place no matter how its handler urged it onward.
But, brutally effective as they were turning out to be, the sections of log weren't only weapons. Their banging, thudding, crunching progress, and the xulgaths' rasping cries of alarm, signaled Unlak and the warriors who'd arrived with him to make a different sort of attack.
Javelins flew from the vegetation to either side of the reptile horde. Some of them finished their arcing flights as they began, as shafts of wood terminating in points of flint, and pierced the bodies of xulgaths. But others dissolved into lengths of dazzling, crackling glare, and the latter burned into the forms of the gigantic war beasts. The creatures staggered, convulsed, and bellowed in rage and pain. Blasted by three bolts of lightning simultaneously, a longstrider fell and squashed a dozen xulgaths beneath it.
Lightning blazed down from the Skulltaker village, too, as Vom and Rho threw metal javelins. Other warriors sent more log sections rolling and bouncing down the hillside. Holg and an orc wisewoman chanted prayers, and the latter gashed her forearm with a knife, possibly spilling he
r blood as an offering to her patron spirits.
Kagur and her companions on the slope had met the xulgath horde with some approximation of the strength two allied tribes might reasonably be expected to field. After a show of resistance, they'd fled from the reptiles' manifestly superior might, and the bloodthirsty creatures had given chase.
As a result, she now had the enemy surrounded on three sides by a war band that, while still smaller than the horde of reptiles, was much larger than they could have expected. The warriors in front of the xulgaths had the advantage of high ground, those on their flanks had cover, and everyone was attacking with potent weapons unlike any the creatures had ever seen. Taken altogether, it was as deadly and daunting a trap as she and her comrades had been able to devise.
Down on the slope, Eovath laughed.
"Well done, sister!" he called. "Very well done! You're dying the way a great warrior should!"
He bellowed commands, and some of his allies turned to confront the warriors assailing their flanks. The rest charged uphill.
Chapter Thirty-Four
The Battle
Kagur spotted Eovath on the hillside. She aimed an arrow, and then a spiketail lumbered in front of the giant and blocked her view. Cursing, she shot an oncoming xulgath instead.
She dropped two more after that, then glimpsed or perhaps merely sensed motion overhead. She looked up and saw a gliding shadow, visible chiefly when it occluded one star and then another. It could only be a spearbeak.
"Watch the sky!" she shouted, pointing upward. She then realized that with so many folk yelling, xulgaths hissing, longstriders roaring, lightning bolts crackling, and log sections thumping and banging, it was likely no one had noticed. She loosed two shafts at the spearbeak, and it thudded to earth in front of one of the branch and briar barricades. Presumably, someone noticed that.
Kagur looked back down the hillside just in time to see xulgaths that had charged high enough to hurl javelins. She ducked, and two such missiles arced over her head. Off to her right, someone less fortunate cried out in pain.
The first wave of xulgaths raced onward. Kagur drew her sword.
As Holg had promised, the barrier in front of her hindered the foe. One xulgath tried to scramble over, its feet tangled in the mesh, and she slashed its throat as it floundered. A second darted for the gap between her barricade and the next one, but as it squeezed through, a tribesman smashed its skull with a club. A third had a spear long enough to reach across the top of the obstruction, and it thrust the point at Kagur's torso. She sidestepped, grabbed the weapon, yanked the reptile forward, and hacked into its spine.
Then a redstripe sprang high enough to clear the barricade and rip her head off, too. She sidestepped, cut, and caught the beast in the leg. When it landed, the wounded limb made it stagger, and an orc speared it in the guts before it could catch its balance.
After that, the pressure on Kagur's position let up, although she could see it would resume as soon as more xulgaths completed the scramble up the slope. She used the momentary respite to try to survey the battle as a whole.
But that was difficult. The flares of lightning reduced the lower reaches of the hillside to dazzling confusion. She could tell that a couple of the gigantic war beasts were down, but not what kind or how many were still on their feet. About all she was sure of was that, at the rate her allies were flinging the magic javelins, they were bound to run out soon.
Even closer to hand, it was difficult to decipher what was happening. Humans and orcs battled xulgaths across the barricades with dead and wounded comrades sprawled or crawling at their feet. But who was winning? It was all just howling, screaming chaos, and she wondered fleetingly if her father or even Lord Varnug, with all his experience leading the Blacklions' following, would have understood it any better.
At least she could see that her shamans were still alive. Every tribe had contributed at least one, and they chanted and jabbed with the spears, clutched the carved fangs and claws, or brandished the quartz crystals that lent force to their prayers.
A young girl pointed, and blades of grass shot up tall, thick, and bristling with thorns to catch the xulgaths who were scrambling through them.
Ghethi filled the air with a piercing shriek that, audible even above the general din, knocked half a dozen reptilian warriors reeling backward.
Spiders the size of wolves, no doubt controlled by one of the enemy shamans, swarmed over a barricade, and Holg rattled off an incantation and lashed his staff at them. The scuttling creatures abruptly shrank until Kagur could no longer make them out and they were presumably too small to hurt anyone.
But a couple human shamans had already stopped fighting to drag wounded warriors back from the battle line and tend them. Kagur assumed they'd used up all their battle magic, and it wouldn't be long before their fellow spellcasters did the same.
She hoped the xulgath shamans were running out of power, too. Then more reptilian warriors rushed at her spot on the battle line, and she no longer had thought to spare for anything but killing the next foe, and then the one after that.
Still, she noticed when the blasts of lightning came to an end, and constant dark engulfed the slope once more. Sometime after that, xulgaths stopped rushing up to try to slaughter her.
She looked around. No one else was fighting across the barricades, either, although two Dragonflies were dispatching a spearbeak that was thrashing around on the ground nearer the cave mouth. Mostly, warriors slumped weary and panting amid the mingled stinks of blood, sweat, charred flesh, and the thunderstorm smell of the lightning bolts responsible for the charring. The wounded moaned and whimpered, or, in the case of the maimed xulgaths littering the slope, croaked and hissed.
But what was going on farther away? Kagur didn't think there were any longstriders still towering over all the other reptiles, but what about the other war beasts? Were any of them still alive? And were her allies still harassing the xulgaths' flanks? She could hear cries and make out hints of movement that suggested they were, but it was impossible even to guess how they were faring.
She turned to Holg and felt a shock of dismay. As far as she could tell, no enemy had wounded him. But he was wheezing, hanging his head, and leaning on his staff like he'd fall over without it.
But she knew the old man wouldn't want her to remark on his exhaustion or hold back from seeking his help. "What do you see," she asked him, "and what do you think it means?"
"We held them and hurt them," Holg answered, "but they hurt us, too."
"Did we hurt them enough to make them run away?"
The shaman shook his head. "I doubt it. Not while the giant with the shining axe is still alive to lead them."
"Good." Win or lose, live or die, it was time to dance the final measures of the dance.
Down below, the xulgaths in the center of the hillside, the ones not busy fighting on the flanks, raised a hissing, screeching clamor. Then they cleared a path. Tower shield on his left arm and greataxe in his right hand, Eovath rode out of the darkness.
Mounted just behind the bony ruff, which further shielded the lower portion of his body, the frost giant rode the hugest threehorn Kagur had yet seen. As far as she could tell, the steed didn't have any lightning burns or other wounds on its hide. Maybe Eovath had kept it well back, holding it in reserve, or perhaps he'd just now summoned it out of the forest.
For all its bulk and thick legs and the steepness of the slope, the threehorn accelerated until it was lumbering fast as a man could run. Xulgaths screamed and charged alongside it.
Kagur aimed at a beady eye and let an arrow fly. But the beast's head bobbed up and down as it ran, and her first effort struck the bony beak, pricking the creature but nothing more.
At first, no lightning bolts leaped at the threehorn, and she assumed her comrades had expended them all. Then Rho scrambled up to the barricades and cast the one he'd evidently held in reserve.
As the weapon dissolved into a streak of burning light, Eovath s
hifted the tower shield to the side to uncover the black breastplate beneath. The lightning disappeared into it as the earlier magical fire had, without seeming to do the wearer the slightest harm.
Rho should have thrown at the threehorn, Kagur thought. But she understood how the creature moved now, its rhythm. She could accomplish what the youth hadn't. She nocked one of her last remaining arrows and drew it back to her ear.
The longbow writhed in her grip, twisting and locking into a contorted shape incapable of propelling a shaft. A xulgath shaman had evidently cast a spell on it.
Kagur pivoted back toward Holg. He shook his head to indicate that he couldn't restore the weapon to usefulness. With a curse, she dropped it and her quiver as well.
Meanwhile, Eovath, his mount, and the allies charging with them pounded into javelin range. Men and orcs threw relentlessly, exhausting the last of the missiles. Xulgaths dropped, but the shield protected the giant, and the threehorn only suffered scratches.
Vom bellowed commands, and warriors massed and extended spears over the section of barricade Eovath was charging. The threat didn't deter him or the war beast, either. They kept coming, and when they smashed into the spear points, the weapons gouged the reptile's visage but then snapped or glanced away.
An instant later, the threehorn rammed through the barrier and trampled the center of it flat. Humans and orcs scattered, but some weren't quick enough. Swinging its head back and forth, the beast battered warriors with the sides of its two longer horns, flinging them about. It tossed its head and ripped an orc open from crotch to throat with the curved horn on its beak.
Xulgaths poured through the breach the threehorn had opened. Howling tribesfolk rushed to meet the threat, and where they only fought enemy warriors, they held their own. But when the war beast turned its horns in their direction, they had to scurry out of the way or die.
Kagur circled. The threehorn was all but invulnerable from the front but might prove less so if she attacked its flank.
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