“Sarth!” Geran shouted, but the sorcerer did not hear him; he was already snarling another spell at more Bloody Skulls surging up the dike. Geran realized in an instant that even if he caught the sorcerer’s attention, the wyvern would still be upon him too quickly to dodge or avoid. There was no time to reach him; Geran seized the flowering symbols of a spell held in his mind and hurled his will behind the arcane words. “Sierollanie dir mellar!” he cried, and in a dizzying eyeblink he stood where Sarth had been standing, while the sorcerer stood where he’d been. Sarth reeled and floundered on the slope, but Geran paid him no mind-he was already looking up at the wyvern hurling down at him. He shouted out a word of shielding, and then the monster was upon him. He slashed it once across its snout, leaped aside and blocked the deadly stinger with his shielding spell, and spun around to rake his blade across its wing as it hurtled past him. The wyvern screeched once in rage and tried to beat for altitude again, but it was too fast and too low. Its damaged wing buckled and the monster cartwheeled across the embankment. For a moment it lay still, tangled up in the brush, but then it shook itself and clambered to its clawed feet, glaring at Geran with pure hate.
“I think I just made it angry,” Geran muttered.
He put his point between the wyvern and himself and dropped into a fighting crouch, holding his shielding spell firmly in his left hand. The monster charged at him with the speed of a striking snake, far faster than Geran would have imagined. He managed to parry the sting once, then twice, but then the wyvern got its jaws clamped around his right leg and worried him like dog. It whipped him from side to side and then flung him away; Geran’s sword flew from his hand, and he hit the ground hard enough that his vision went black for an instant. When he could see again, the wyvern was darting toward him, yellow fangs gleaming. He started to climb to his feet, only to find that the world swayed drunkenly when he tried to sit up.
The wyvern hissed and sprang at him-but a coruscating green ray struck it in mid-leap and knocked it aside. An instant later Sarth appeared by Geran’s side and shouted another of his spells. A barrage of shrieking purple darts shot from his scepter and pinioned the wyvern to the ground; the monster snapped and snarled at the phantasmal javelins transfixing it, then shuddered and fell still.
“Are you all right?” the tiefling said.
“I think so,” Geran answered him. Sarth reached down and helped him to his feet; the swordmage staggered over to his sword and picked it up. “I hope there aren’t any more of those around.”
The tiefling scanned the skies anxiously. “Thank you, Geran Hulmaster. I did not see the monster’s dive. But next time, I’ll ask you to give me a moment’s warning before you teleport me.”
Geran looked around, trying to get a sense of the battle. He could see several places where the orcs had overwhelmed the dike, and scores of the ferocious warriors fought to widen the breaches and push on past the weakened defenses. Human riders did their best to counter the breaches, as did haphazard bands of the volunteers who had shown up to fight. With lance and bow they held back the black tide, but they were failing fast. “Gods, what chaos!”
“It seems the issue is still in doubt,” Sarth replied-an understatement if Geran had ever heard one.
Geran spied a large breach less than a hundred yards away. Orcs were fighting their way east and west along the top of the dike, rolling up the defenders still trying to hold back the rest of the attack. “There,” he said, pointing. “Try to do something about that, and I’ll see what I can do here.”
The tiefling nodded grimly and leaped into the sky. In a moment he hovered over the orc breakthrough, hurling blasts of fire down on the Bloody Skull warriors. Geran started to rejoin the fray, but a rider came galloping up from behind Lendon’s Dike.
“Lord Geran! Lord Geran!” the messenger called. “Lady Kara says to bring any troops you can spare and come to the center at once! She needs help there.”
“Spare? I can’t spare any!” Geran replied.
The rider was a young Shieldsworn, bloodied and disheveled, and he simply stared at Geran in confusion. The swordmage grimaced and glanced around at his part of the field. Kara wouldn’t have asked for help unless she needed it, he told himself. She knew how many soldiers he had on his part of the line. He held up his hand and said to the messenger, “No, wait. I’ll bring as many as I can.”
The swordmage climbed back up to the top of the dike and found the young soldier carrying his banner. “Shieldsworn, to me!” he shouted. “Marstel, Double Moon, to me! Assemble on the south side of the dike! Spearmeet, House Sokol, stand your ground!”
All along the earthen wall, soldiers of Hulburg began to disengage, backing down the dike while the miltiamen on either side spread out to try to cover their absence. It left Geran’s line woefully thin-another concerted attack would certainly punch through. But Geran realized that his hodgepodge force had largely repulsed the first rush of the Bloody Skulls. The dawn was a thin orange sliver clinging to the hilltops of eastern Highfells; sunrise could not be far off now. By the growing light he could see that the embankment was littered with dead or wounded orcs, and that many of the ironclad warriors of the Bloody Skull horde were shifting across his front, flowing toward the middle of the fight.
Geran looked around and found Brun Osting, the son of Durnan, standing by the tattered flag of his Spearmeet company. He hurried over to the young brewer and clapped a hand on his shoulder. “I’ve got to go help in the center,” he told him. “I’m leaving you in charge here. You Spearmeet have to hold this end of the line on your own. I’ll leave you the Sokols to help, and the sorcerer Sarth there. Can you do it?”
The young man nodded soberly. “We don’t have much choice, do we? We’ll hold the line or die where we stand, Lord Geran.”
“Good fortune,” Geran said. He squeezed the young man’s shoulder, and then hurried down the back of the dike to the spot where his small company was assembling. It was a little less than a hundred strong, and he wondered if it would be enough to make a difference in the heavy fighting in the middle. He took a moment to speak with the Sokol captain-a fierce-looking Turmishan woman whose detachment was down to a dozen riders-and point out Brun to her. Whether she’d follow the brewer’s orders, he had no idea, but at least she hadn’t ridden away from the battle yet.
“Where to, Lord Geran?” one of the Shieldsworn footmen called from the ranks.
“The Vale Road!” Geran called back. “They need us in the center, lads. Let’s go lend them a hand. Follow me!”
He set out at an easy jog, holding back his pace so that the soldiers in their heavier armor could keep up. It helped that they were moving downhill and had only five or six hundred yards to travel. Sporadic fighting continued atop the dike a short distance to Geran’s right, but he passed no more major breaches. In a few moments they came in sight of the furious melee swirling around the spot where the Vale Road pierced the embankment. Hundreds of orcs thronged the gap, pushing inward against a thinning line of Icehammers and Shieldsworn.
Geran looked around for Kara’s banner or the harmach, and saw nothing but pitched battle. He would’ve liked to know where she wanted his small strike to fall, but one glance was enough to show him that he couldn’t wait. Strange, he thought. For all the years I’ve lived with a sword in my hand, I’ve never fought in a real battle, only duels and skirmishes-nothing more than twenty or thirty warriors on a side. After traveling for ten years all over Faerun, I find the biggest battle of my life not three miles from the castle where I was born.
The men behind him said nothing, staring at the scene in nervous silence. Geran shook himself free of his weary musings and tried to think quickly and well about what he could see in front of him. He had little gift for strategy, so he tried to see the battle as a duel of sorts. The orc spearhead had pushed deep into the center like a reckless and powerful lunge at the center of an opponent’s torso; if someone came at him with an attack like that, what would he do? “I wouldn’
t try to stop it,” he murmured to himself. “I’d deflect the point, let it go past me, and then strike at my foe’s hand.” That suggested a strike not at the tip of the spear, but back a little farther. Geran looked back toward the gap in the embankment and saw that a few Hulburgan soldiers still fought along the dike to each side of the breach. If he moved along the inside of the dike and hit the orcs on their flank, perhaps he’d succeed in knocking their thrust aside.
He drew his sword and signaled to the men following him. “After me, lads!” he cried. “We’re going to cut them off and trap them inside our lines!” Then Geran shouted a battle cry and ran ahead of his hodgepodge company, leading them under the cover of the old dike. He heard a ragged chorus of roars and cries behind him. Both orcs and human soldiers looked around in his direction, but Geran didn’t slow his steps. Instead he cried out the words of a spell to set his sword aflame with a brilliant white light, and he hurled himself into the torrent of orc warriors pushing their way through the low defile. He cut his way through three or four Bloody Skulls before they even realized their danger, and then the mass of the Shieldsworn and mercenaries behind him drove into the orcs with an audible shock that seemed to shiver the icy morning air.
Geran cut and stabbed with every ounce of skill and lethal purpose he could dredge up, from his boyhood exercises to the long years of study with Myth Drannor’s fabled bladesingers. He threw spells where he could, searing his foes with bursts of golden fire, dazzling and disorienting them with deadly enchantments that stupefied thick-thewed berserkers until elven steel drove through flesh and bone. And his small, battered company fought like lions in the narrow gap of the Vale Road. They carried the open breach with the force of their charge. Geran looked up to see Kara dashing through the melee on her fine white charger, plying her deadly bow at a full gallop. She shot down an orc that he was about to engage, and felled another one who was trying to beat his way through a Shieldsworn’s guard not ten feet away. “For harmach and Hulburg!” she shouted.
The swordmage whirled where he stood, searching for more foes to engage. To his amazement he realized that the Bloody Skulls who’d forced their way through the gap in the dike had melted away. Dozens of duels and skirmishes continued around him, but the first great thrust was spent-the warriors of Hulburg had held the Vale Road, at least for the moment.
“They’re falling back,” Geran called to his cousin.
“Not for long,” Kara answered. She pointed toward the north, out to the fields beyond the dike. Geran followed the point of her sword, and his heart sank. A few hundred yards away, around the great black banners at the center of the Bloody Skull horde, hundreds of orc warriors stamped and shouted and struck their spears to their shields. An armored wedge of lumbering ogres stood at their head, bellowing their crude challenges. Kara’s eyes glowed with their uncanny blue fire, smoldering in the shadows of her helm. “That was only the first attack. The next one’s gathering already.”
Geran shook the blood off his blade and turned to face the ogres and orcs streaming back into the fight. He readied himself to sell his life as dearly as he could-and then a thin, cold breath of wind suddenly stirred the ground around him, turning the wet grass white with hoarfrost. Sinister voices whispered dark things on the wind, and a sense of icy dread clutched at his heart like a murderer’s hand. He shivered and faltered back several steps. The rosy glow of sunrise faded to dull gray, and streamers of pale fog seemed to coalesce from the very air, darkening the dawn. Stout-hearted dwarves groaned in fear and hid their faces, while men who had fought valiantly for hours let their futile blades slip from nerveless fingers. Even the bloodthirsty orcs pouring across the fields slowed and stopped, halting well short of the sinister fog.
A dull scraping caught his attention, and Geran looked down at the black earth under his feet. Dirt buckled upward, stirred from beneath. Then a skeletal hand thrust up into the chill, deadly mists of the morning. He backed away from it, only to find another bony hand clutching at his heels. He kicked his foot free with a sudden burst of panic. Scores of the things-dirt-encrusted skeletons still draped in the rusted remnants of ancient armor-were dragging themselves up out of the ground.
“What foul necromancy is this?” Kara snarled into the freezing fog. Her horse Dancer shied away in panic, her eyes rolling. The ranger threw a panicked look in Geran’s direction. “We can’t fight the undead and the orcs at the same time!”
“This is Sergen’s doing!” Geran snarled. The rogue Hulmaster’s undead allies had failed to kill the harmach at Griffonwatch, so now he was trying again… and that meant that his cousin had to be somewhere near, since Aesperus had said that the wielder of the amulet could not send the lich’s minions far. Geran wondered if Sergen’s House Veruna allies were making their move as well. Doubtless Sergen would order the undead to spare the Verunas, but the rest of the Hulburgan army was in dire peril. “Stand your ground as long as you can, and protect the harmach!” he called to Kara. “I have to find Sergen before the dead overwhelm us all!”
Turning his back on the skeletal ranks assembling themselves before the defenders of Hulburg, Geran sheathed his blade and ran into the frigid mists.
TWENTY-NINE
11 Tarsakh, the Year of the Ageless One
Geran loped through the unnatural murk as night seemed to descend over the vale a second time. The eerie fog thickened by the heartbeat, closing in around him like a tomb of cold gray stone. It felt as if he were blundering through a damp gray vault, a spectral dungeon that was slowly becoming more substantial, more threatening, with every passing moment. Soldiers appeared like ghosts in the mist, dark forms that drifted past or simply stood where they were, shivering in terror. He almost ran onto the spearpoint of a shambling skeleton draped in the remains of a lord’s robes, and he retreated quickly from a pair of ancient berserkers whose jawbones hung open in silent howls of battle-madness and rage.
All around him in the mist he heard the battle resume in a dozen places at once, but instead of the bellowing of ogres and the war cries of bloodthirsty orcs, he heard only the whispering of dry dead voices and the shrieks of human pain and terror. In the frost-heavy mists, sounds seemed distant and uncertain; Geran couldn’t really tell if he was moving away from the fight or circling around to stumble into it again. Why didn’t I make sure of Sergen when I had the chance? he berated himself. Perhaps Sergen’s mercenaries would have cut him down if he’d paused for the moment necessary to administer a killing blow, but it might have been worth his life to make sure that the traitor didn’t survive to summon more undead.
Geran came to a low rise and scrambled to the top of a frost-slick knoll, hoping to get above the dense fog. From the top of the little hill, he thought that the fog directly overhead looked noticeably brighter, but he could see little else. He turned in a circle, searching for any sign of his cousin. “Think, Geran, think!” he admonished himself. Sergen was wounded and likely not interested in getting any closer to the fighting against the Bloody Skulls than he had to; he’d be somewhere on the south side of the old dike and well back from the battle-probably somewhere near the Verunas. House Veruna was over on the left flank of the line by Lake Hul, anchoring the western end of Lendon’s Dike.
He caught sight of a war-horse standing over its fallen rider, a young cavalryman of House Sokol. Geran hurried to the animal and caught its reins. The horse whickered and shied away, but Geran patted its muzzle to calm it, whispered a few words in Elvish, and then swung himself up into the saddle. His new mount snorted and pranced nervously, but he set his heels to its flanks and kicked it into a run. Fortunately the horse was well trained and eager for a rider to guide it; its hooves kicked up wet clods of turf as it cantered across the muddy fields.
A skeleton carrying a round bronze shield suddenly lurched into his path, its rusted sword ready to strike. Geran swept out his own blade and parried the ancient iron; a jolt of frozen fire ran up his sword arm from the impact, but he circled his point underneath the
skeleton’s blade and rammed it home in the creature’s empty eye socket. Shards of bone burst from the back of the skull, and the thing staggered back. Geran wrenched his sword free and rode past. When he glanced over his shoulder, the skeleton was moving away to find another foe to fight, seemingly untroubled by the horrible wound he’d just dealt it. Necromantic magic knitted its dead sinews and yellowed bones together. What was a sword wound to such a creature?
Geran dodged away from several more encounters with the skeletal warriors. On one occasion he spurred his mount right over a skeleton in front of him. The warhorse knocked the horrid thing to the ground, crushing bones beneath its heavy iron-shod hooves, and that one did not rise again. Then he seemed to break out of the heaviest mist and found himself a few hundred yards west of the Vale Road, a short distance behind the old dike. The supernatural chill of the fog diminished a little, and he could see more of the sky graying overhead-the day would have been clear and cold, though he doubted it would have much power over the fell mists.
On that end of the line battered Spearmeet companies still held the dike, with a number of Veruna footmen stiffening their lines. More than a few men were gazing nervously toward the middle of the battlefield; Geran glanced back the way he had come and saw that the fog darkened over the center of the field like a stationary storm, weirdly still despite the strong, cold wind that swept the rest of the battlefield. A short distance behind the line on the dike, thirty Veruna horsemen and a handful of Shieldsworn riders formed the left wing’s cavalry reserve. They sat waiting on their mounts. The orc assault seemed to have retreated for now, likely because the Bloody Skulls were waiting to see if the army of Hulburg would still be standing against them once the evil mists lifted. Geran couldn’t fault the orcs’ instincts. If some supernatural horror was cutting its way through your enemy’s ranks, then there was little reason to rush back to close quarters.
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