Bazil Broketail (30 page)

The pressure was too much and in moments they were all falling back, men and elves pressed together too tightly to fight, while their enemies hewed at them like standing wood.

But fleet-footed Lagdalen had already reached the dragons with the news, and now they split into two groups and pushed themselves up the slopes, huge reptile claws digging into the rocks for purchase, stentorian breaths venting from their nostrils.

The trolls hammered men and elves to the ground and strode over their bodies, crushing them to pulp. Imps pressed in with stabbing blades seeking unguarded eyes and chests. The men fought back with desperate energy, but their swords were too light and their shields too slender for combat with trolls.

At one point Sergeant Duxe was knocked headlong and saved only by burly Cowstrap’s quick thinking when he seized the sergeant’s collar and yanked him out of range of the troll’s lethal axe. Kesepton lost his shield to another troll’s axe and would have been mown down except that he slipped in slick blood and fell under a wrestling heap of imps and elves.

Troll axes rose and fell and the slaughter grew terrible. It seemed they were doomed.

And then when all seemed lost the dragons arrived on the scene and, with scarcely more than a deep breath, threw their weight into the struggle.

Their arrival broke the death spell of the trolls and rocked back the mass of imps until there was a cleared space before them, on which were strewn the bodies of dozens of dead and wounded.

For a moment it seemed they had witnessed the worst, but then drums thundered and horns brayed and out of the woods came another host of imps with more long-legged trolls on either side. Kesepton knew with a sick feeling that the dragons were outmatched.

“Form the hedgehog!” he shouted to the men scrambling up beside the dragons.

The elves were giving ground, on the verge of breaking and running. Only the presence of Matugolin, fighting side by side with Lessis herself, who had taken a sword from a fallen soldier, was keeping them standing against the shock of so many imps and trolls.

Just then a troll smashed five elves to the ground with a terrible blow from a mace that bore a ball the size of a man’s head. The line wavered, and suddenly Lessis was there, alone in front of the troll.

With a shout of “Lessis!” another slim figure in grey pushed through beside her. Two small blades thrust at the troll as it swung its mace. The two Sisters ducked beneath the hurtling iron and ran in and stabbed the monster in the thighs.

It snarled in rage and batted at them with a heavy hand and caught the second small figure a glancing blow that sent it tumbling head over heels.

Lessis threw up a hand and said something in a voice of cold power. The troll snarled, momentarily distracted, and the great mace missed and slammed into the ground inches from its target.

And then Bazil the Broketail was upon him. Piocar sang down with a shriek of steel and the troll flung up the mace convulsively to save itself.

With a flash of sparks Piocar cut the handle of the mace in two. The troll stared stupidly at the broken shaft, and Bazil stepped forward smartly and smashed the troll in the face with his shield and knocked it spinning around, completely off its feet.

As they danced over her, Lagdalen had had the wit to crawl away from the giants and avoid being crushed beneath their massive feet.

For a moment the leatherback, still puffing for breath from the climb up from the canyon floor, was face to face with Lessis.

“Thank you, Sir Dragon. Rarely have I seen a blow so powerful and so well struck.”

Bazil let out a breath and recovered his balance. “We’ll need some more of those, lady. Here they come.”

And the shriek of charging imps resounded again.

But now the men were moving forward in the dense phalanx of the hedgehog position, with spears facing outwards in a ring of steel points. With a loud crash of steel on steel the hedgehogs bit into the dense mass of imps.

This sight, and the presence of the dragons, put new heart into the elves, and they swung around and returned to the attack.

Lessis found Lagdalen and pulled her back from the fighting. A quick examination showed no serious wounds, although the girl’s head was still ringing from the troll’s head slap.

“Can you fight, girl?” said Lessis.

“Yes, lady, I think so.”

“Good, but get your breath back first. We need every blade today and you need your wits about you.”

And indeed the clash was intensifying swiftly on both sides of the canyon. Once again the trolls came forward, surging through the imps as if they were wading through a flood.

Each dragon faced three trolls. Impossible odds, but with the men in hedgehog position on either side of each dragon the trolls were only able to come at them one at a time for the moment.

Bazil engaged the first. He feinted with tail sword and then dropped his left shoulder and hooked the troll’s round shield with his own and pulled it away. The troll responded with a textbook mistake, jerking backwards and losing balance so that its chest was exposed. Bazil hewed it through the waist with Piocar and it collapsed with thrashing limbs.

The next was already upon him, a bulky maroon with a square shield and a sword of its own: a sword troll. They’d heard of them, a new breed with the intelligence and skill to wield a sword, but they’d never seen one yet.

“There’s a first time for everything, right?” shouted Bazil over his shoulder.

Relkin dodged around behind the dragon, snapping arrows past him as fast as he could load them. He saw the troll with the sword and whistled.

“Sword troll, beware his blade!” he shouted.

Two men in the nearest hedgehog thrust at the brute with their spears and it slashed at them, turning aside their spearheads on its shield and then hewing down the nearest of them.

Relkin got an arrow into its shoulder, and it roared with pain and rage, turning back on Bazil in time to meet Piocar with its own blade.

Steel struck shards from steel and Piocar was turned. Baz was still surprised by this when the troll swung in an overhand strike that Baz took on the shield. Tail sword flashed and struck on the troll’s helm but caught only a glancing blow. The troll danced away from Piocar’s sweep.

The troll was quick! It slipped to one side and thrust with that heavy sword. Baz only just avoided the blade in his belly; his tail lashed reflexively and knocked Relkin sprawling.

A brave fellow in the hedgehog to Bazil’s right ran in and got his spear into the monster’s thigh. It responded by emitting a weird scream, and then it clipped the man with its shield and knocked him to his knees. Then its sword came down and clove him from neck to crotch.

Imps surged in around it to protect it from the men, and a great clatter went up as spears struck aside spears and sought to stab through to the shields beyond. Behind these imps came a third troll with the dragon lance, its yard-long tip gleaming.

Bazil exchanged more hammer blows with the maroon sword troll, pieces of their shields flying in odd directions under the terrible impact.

Meanwhile the troll with the lance waited for the right moment and then hurled itself forward behind that glittering point of steel.

Bazil jerked aside just in time, but the lance pierced his shield and lodged there. He flung himself backwards and swung Piocar out to deflect the maroon’s next sword thrust, but with the shield pinned he could not maneuver freely.

Relkin was back on his feet, and he saw with a sinking heart that the maroon was surely going to score sooner or later. The men in the hedgehogs could not help now; they were fighting twice their number of imps. Relkin drew his own sword and ran in.

He got under the troll’s shield before it was even aware of him, and his sword was in the monster’s leg a second later. Black blood flowed thickly as he pulled it free, and the maroon gave an anguished grunt before it struck with the inside rim of the shield and shoved Relkin towards its sword arm.

The sword flashed in, but he leaped high and it passed under his toes. However, he tripped on landing and rolled directly between Bazil’s stamping feet.

“Fool boy!” roared the dragon, staggering to avoid trampling him. His feet tangled, and with a sick groan Bazil lost his balance and toppled. The dragon lance snapped beneath him and he wound up holding the business end of it with his shield hand.

The maroon swung at him but Bazil deflected the blow with a blind swipe of the dragon lance, which was knocked away with a whine of hot metal. Bazil shoved back and rolled away, missing Relkin by a hairsbreadth.

But the maroon was on him now; Bazil was flat on his haunches, sword trapped behind him, shield down. The maroon’s blade rose, death looming, until suddenly the slender figure of Relkin rose unsteadily in front of the troll and with a cry of rage and despair thrust home with his own small sword once more, right into the troll’s belly. Still screaming his war cry Relkin ripped upwards, his sword point searching for the monster’s heart.

The maroon’s sword stroke withered; it gave a great moan and black blood gushed from its mouth in a sudden torrent, covering Relkin from head to foot. With a second, deeper moan it clutched its ruined stomach and fell backwards with a crash, its enormous sword toppled to the ground.

Bazil got to his feet in time to meet the charge of the remaining troll. Piocar struck aside the troll’s axe and Baz met its charge with a knee up into its belly. The troll stopped dead with an explosion of foul breath. Then Piocar flashed and the troll’s head flew away to land among the imps.

The dragon’s eyes were flaming and his nostrils were dilated enough to make flames like his terrible ancestors.

The other dragons were doing almost as well—they exchanged shouts in their own tongue and clashed their weapons on their shields and dared the enemy to come on against them.

The trolls moaned in panic like cattle tormented by thunder and lightning. They put down their heads and turned and ran.

The trolls were broken. They fled back down the ridge and with them went the tide of imps, maddened beyond the power of the commanders to control them.

One last maroon troll stood at the edge of the cliff, snarling defiance and waving its heavy axe. Nesessitas exchanged blows with it, and then used her tail sword to hammer it senseless and topple it into the gorge.

Nesessitas turned back and showed her teeth.

“Count three for me!” she said in triumph.

“Two!” roared Bazil.

“Two also!” bellowed Kepabar.

“And one for me!” shouted Relkin Orphanboy as enormous dragon hands seized him up and lifted him into the air.

“And one for damn fool boy!” roared a huge voice in his ear.

For the moment the enemy was driven from the field, leaving a heap of dead strewn before the victors. What had begun so disastrously had been retrieved from complete rout and destruction.

But still Lessis’s heart was heavy. The casualties were terrible, and while they fought she knew Thrembode was escaping past them into the west. He would be over the high pass by nightfall and she would have failed once again to close the net. The Princess Besita would be removed to the evil embrace of the Doom in Tummuz Orgmeen, and the future of the white city of Marneri would be left in the hands of the cretin Erald.

Lessis cursed herself for foolishly listening to an elf in matters of war. Elves were notoriously bad at warfare, the major reason for their sharp decline across the world.

At one point she found herself face to face with Kesepton; she winced at the look of betrayal in his eyes.

“Thank you, Captain. You and your men fought like heroes today,” she said quickly.

Kesepton did not reply, and after a moment she turned away.

There were more trolls out there. How many of the damned things did Thrembode have with him? The enemy must have rated the successful abduction of the princess very highly to send
so
many. And sword trolls, too! That was an ominous precedent. The Doom had been working hard for several years to improve the intellectual capabilities of the maroons. Now it appeared to have succeeded.

More men were marching up the slope and behind them came the other two dragons, Vander and Chektor. Kesepton was consolidating his small command on the south side of the pass.

Meanwhile the elves were grieving for their dead. Matugolin was wounded; Lessis paused beside the place where he lay. The elf king had taken a sword thrust in the side—he would not fight again. Prince Afead would be the next king, and that in itself would not help the alliance of elf and man. Lessis could do little for the king, who was already drifting into a reverie of his own. She tried speaking to him, but either he did not hear or could not respond. The other elves stared at her with eyes filled with shock and sorrow. After a few moments she rose and went on.

To make herself useful she joined young Lagdalen, who was assisting the surgeon. A screaming man, slit across the belly, was thrashing on the ground. Lagdalen was trying to hold the man’s innards inside him.

Lessis knelt beside her. The man was doomed. There was nothing to be done for him. She took Lagdalen’s hands and pulled them away.

“Tend to the others, girl. Leave this one for me.”

Lagdalen’s eyes were filled with the sights of war, things she had seen in these last few days that were enough to break the heart of anyone, much less a girl not yet out of her teens.

“So many, my lady, so many.”

“I know. Go to the surgeon, help him.”

Lagdalen left. Lessis laid her hand on the brow of the dying man. She closed her eyes and summoned the power, and after a while her hand became warm and his struggles slowed. The cries faded and died away as his agony was replaced by a slow heaving bliss, the sweet prelude to his departure from life.

Nearby a man shrieked as the hot cauterizing iron was pressed to a wound. Lessis shivered; she had seen enough battlefields for one lifetime, and for the moment she wished she were far away from here, tending sheep on the Rehba hills with none of this pain, horror, blood and death which now oppressed her spirit.