War Maid's Choice

by David Weber

  And wasn’t that going to be fun?

  Ghouls were nothing anyone in his right mind, even a hradani, wanted to engage in hand-to-hand combat. They were constructs from the Wizard Wars which had doomed Kontovar, and no one seemed to know how any of them had made the journey to Norfressa. They weren’t the only...less than desirable echoes of the Fall which had washed up in Norfressa, unfortunately. In fact, until very recently, no Sothōii had made much of a distinction between ghouls and hradani, and in some ways—especially considering the way in which arcanely enslaved hradani had served as the Carnadosans’ shock troops during the Wizard Wars—it wasn’t that hard to understand. But even the Sothōii at their worst had recognized that ghouls were far more dangerous than the hradani, and not simply because they had even more objectionable personal habits.

  Unlike hradani, with their low fertility rates, ghouls had been specifically designed to reproduce quickly and mature rapidly, which meant even a relatively small infestation of them could grow to frightening size with dismaying speed. They weren’t precisely what anyone might call fastidious eaters, either, and any given band or village of ghouls had no friends, even among their fellow ghouls.

  Physically, ghouls resembled trolls. They were a bit shorter—few of them stood much over eight and a half feet in height—and more lightly built, but their frames were deceptively powerful and their reflexes were unbelievably swift. According to Wencit of Rūm, who certainly ought to know, that speed had been arcanely engineered into them along with their reproduction rate, and they paid for it with ravenous appetites and shortened lifespans. It was unusual for any ghoul to attain as much as forty years of age, and most of them died before they were thirty-five, which was no more than half the lifespan of a troll. They were almost as hard to kill as a troll, though, and like trolls, they recovered with almost unbelievable speed from any wound which didn’t kill them outright. Indeed, they healed much faster even than hradani; it wasn’t unheard of for a troll’s or a ghoul’s blood-spouting wound to close itself and actually begin healing in the course of the same battle in which it had been inflicted. The only way to be certain of killing one of them was to take its head; otherwise, what a warrior might have been certain was a corpse was all too likely to recover and rip his head off from behind.

  What made ghouls even worse than trolls was threefold. First, their greater speed made them far more dangerous in a fight, far more difficult to outrun, and far more difficult to run down if they tried to evade. Second, unlike trolls, ghouls used weapons other than their own admittedly efficient talons and fangs. They were crude weapons, fashioned out of stone and wood, not iron or steel, but a chipped flint javelin head could kill a man just as dead as one forged from the finest Dwarvenhame steel, and the sawlike obsidian teeth which fringed their wooden war clubs might be fragile, but they were also razor-sharp. And third, and worst of all, they were smart.

  The one true blessing about trolls was that they were stupid, little more than mobile appetites. That had its downsides, since it meant they were unlikely to recognize times when discretion was the better part of valor, but it also meant every small band of trolls operated entirely on its own. The idea of cooperating with anyone outside the immediate family group simply didn’t occur to them.

  Ghouls understood the advantages of cooperation. Like trolls, they were egg layers, and—also like trolls—they were carnivores. The one good thing about their intelligence (from anyone else’s perspective, at least) was that they understood the value of raising their own meat animals, and as long as there was sufficient chicken, mutton, goat, or beef from their own flocks and herds, they were content to stay home. Unfortunately, it took a lot of meat to keep a village of ghouls fed. Even their willingness to eat their own eggs—or their own young—often failed to keep their populations down to something their herds could support, and when that happened, they went raiding.

  And since they were prepared to eat their own young, they saw no reason they shouldn’t eat anyone else’s, as well. Which, coupled with the fact that—like the trolls from which, according to Wencit, they’d been bred—they preferred their food living, pretty much explained why they were not preferred neighbors.

  Both the hradani and the Sothōii had tried at one time or another to sweep the Ghoul Moor clear and exterminate them once and for all. Unfortunately, a single female could produce literally scores of eggs in her lifetime, which was the reason even a handful of trolls or ghouls could grow to astounding numbers in an astonishingly short time. Even worse, both Troll Garth and the Ghoul Moor backed up against Barren Fell, and Barren Fell was terrible terrain to follow them into. Hilly, uneven, heavily overgrown, it offered ideal hiding places or spots from which they could ambush pursuers. And, worse yet, directly on the far side of Barren Fell, lay the Forest of the Sharmi. No one in his right mind went into the Sharmi, and upon occasion things much worse than any troll or ghoul came out of the Sharmi. At least twice, the Sothōii had believed they’d actually finished the ghouls off, only to have them re-emerge from the Sharmi and Barren Fell to reclaim the Ghoul Moor once again.

  There was a reason the River Brigands confined themselves almost entirely to their settlements and towns close to the shores of the Spear and the Lake of Storms. There was also a reason Bloody Swords near the fringes of Troll Garth lived in palisaded towns, not on individual farmsteads, and always posted sentries at night. And there was a reason Prince Bahnak and Baron Tellian had decided the best they could hope for was to clear a strip along the Hangnysti and secure it with fortified camps and patrols.

  But to do even that, they had to clear out the ghoul villages in that area, and that was always hard, dangerous, and ugly. Ghouls matured physically quickly, but there were always dozens of their young—for the life of him, Vaijon simply could not apply the word “children” to them—in any village. Ranging in size from twenty or thirty pounds up to as much as a hundred, they were just as vicious as their fully grown parents, but killing them bothered him far more than it did to kill a full adult. Unfortunately, there was no way to convince any ghoul—cub or adult—to surrender. The only two approaches to any other living creature which they seemed to grasp were to attack and devour or to run away, and running away was usually their second choice.

  Tomanāk, he thought now wryly, I know I just told Yurgazh the weather was up to Chemalka, but if You could see Your way to giving Her a nudge and getting this fog out of here, I’d appreciate it.

  There was no direct reply, although he did think he might sense someone else’s rueful amusement in the back of his brain. Not that he’d really expected a reply. A champion of Tomanāk didn’t count on his deity to lead him about by the hand.

  “Well,” he sighed finally, pulling his dwarf-made watch from his belt pouch and consulting its face, “it’s about time, Yurgazh.”

  “Lovely,” Yurgazh grunted, and glanced over his shoulder.

  Vaijon and the twenty or so human members of the Hurgrum Chapter who were present were the only mounted troops in Yurgazh’s entire force. Now the Bloody Sword turned to look at those motionless, waiting ranks of infantry with the fog drifting about them and shook his head.

  “All right, lads,” he told his officers. “You see the Phrobus-damned fog as well as I do. So it’s going to be cold steel instead of arrows.” No one said a word, but no one had to. Although the majority of Bloody Swords continued to feel archery was an effete and possibly even immoral way for a proper warrior to settle a quarrel, none of them looked forward to letting a ghoul into sword range. “Keep your ranks, keep those damned shields up, and keep your heads,” Yurgazh continued in that same pre-battle growl, raising his voice to reach the companies closest to hand. “We want as many kills as we can get here so we won’t have to kill ’em later, but I’d just as soon take as many of you home afterward as I can. Keep that in mind.”

  Something almost like a chuckle rolled along the waiting lines of infantry, and he smiled.

  “In that case, let’s summ
on the Rage and be about it!” He glanced at the bugler beside him. “Sound it,” he said flatly.

  * * *

  “Hear that, Milord?” Sir Yarran said sharply as the clear, rapid notes came soaring through the fog, faint with distance, and Trianal nodded.

  “I told you they wouldn’t leave us hanging about by ourselves, didn’t I?”

  “That you did, Milord.”

  Trianal flashed the older man a smile, then looked at his own bugler.

  “Be ready,” he said.

  * * *

  Vaijon moved forward behind the double line of infantry Yurgazh had deployed to lead his attack.

  No one was going to confuse Confederation troops with the Royal and Imperial Army, but hradani tactics had improved immensely under Bahnak Karathson’s influence. Yurgazh had placed two of his battalions in a line five hundred men wide and two ranks deep while his other two battalions followed in platoon columns, prepared to deploy to either flank or to reinforce the front line. Vaijon and the double handful of mounted Sothōii members of the Order of Tomanāk rode between the columns, followed by fifty dismounted brothers—and one sister; let’s not forget that, Vaijon thought just a bit sourly, deliberately not glancing back at Sharkah Bahnaksdaughter—all ready to counterattack any unexpected break in the hradani lines. Not that any such break was likely to occur.

  There were two schools of thought about the best way to attack a ghoul village. One was to sneak up on it as unobtrusively as possible and attack with the advantage of surprise. The other was to let it know you were coming in order to draw its defenders out into the open in one spot so you knew where they all were. Of course, in either approach the idea was to kill as many of them with bows or crossbows as you possibly could before you ever got to the hand-to-hand part of the business, which wasn’t going to happen this time, but the principle remained the same even for those stupid enough to take ghouls on without archery support. Over the last couple of years, Vaijon had had the opportunity to see both approaches tried, and he’d decided that—given steady troops who could be expected to hold their formation—drawing them out was better than the sorts of ambushes and nasty little fights which were likely to accompany a surprise attack that went charging in among a village’s crude stone and notched-log buildings.

  Now he heard the yelping voices of ghouls, calling to one another, sounding the alarm from the other side of the dim, misty fog. Their intelligence on exactly how many ghouls they were about to confront was less complete than he would have liked—intelligence was usually less complete than one might like where ghouls were concerned—but it was unlikely there were more than a few hundred of them. This was one of the villages they’d cleaned out (and burned) last year, and not even ghouls would have had time to repopulate it with an entire new generation. On the other hand, it was an ideal location for a village, with reliable water and plenty of pasture land near at hand, which made it exactly the sort of place which would attract any roving band looking for a place to settle. From the number and volume of the yelps coming out of the fog, it sounded like the band in question might well have been larger than they’d anticipated.

  “Watch your front!” Yurgazh’s voice bellowed. There was something different about its timbre—something Vaijon recognized instantly after all these years. It was the voice of a hradani who’d given himself to the Rage, deliberately summoned the ancient curse of his people to serve his will.

  Vaijon still didn’t know whether he more envied or pitied the hradani for the Rage. He’d seen it in action too many times not to recognize the strength and focus and absolute clarity it bestowed upon someone who had knowingly summoned it, and no fighting man could possibly fail to understand what an enormous advantage it was in combat. But by now he’d seen too many instances of the old Rage, the Rage which had come without summons—often even without warning—and reduced its victim to a berserk, blood-maddened killer who could be stopped only by killing him, instead. It happened far less often than it had since Tomanāk and Bahzell had told the hradani they could master it rather than be mastered by it, but it was still far too common. Much as he might envy the power and absolute, unstoppable determination of the new Rage, the price the hradani had paid for it had been terrible almost beyond belief, and they were not yet done paying it.

  His thoughts broke off as the first wave of ghouls came loping out of the fog towards them. Most of them yelped louder, waving their war clubs and their spears, when they saw the hradani. A handful—smarter, or perhaps simply more cautious—turned and fled back the way they’d come, but the ones who didn’t flee hurled themselves towards their enemies with all the blinding speed of their kind.

  “Axes! Axes!”

  The bull throated warcry of clan Iron Axe went up from the lead battalion, but no one rushed to meet the ghouls. Once upon a time, they would have, but that had been when the Rage was their master, not their servant...and before Bahnak had taught their warriors to be soldiers, men who understood discipline was far more valuable than simple individual skill and strength. Now they drew the Rage’s focus, that ice-cold, distilled purpose, about them, holding their ranks, advancing at a steady walk rather than charging furiously as so many individuals.

  The ghouls attacked with less concern about formations than even pre-Bahnak hradani would have shown. They were smart enough to recognize the advantages in working and fighting together, yet the notion of actually thinking through their tactics seemed to elude them...which was just as well, given their sheer size, speed, and strength. There were very few foes who could match hradani for size and strength; ghouls overmatched them. A foot and more taller than all but the tallest Horse Stealer, they towered over the shorter Bloody Swords, with an enormous advantage in reach and sheer physical power. And they were faster, faster even than a hradani riding the Rage. They hit the front line of Yurgazh’s infantry as individuals, but only in the sense that an avalanche was built of individual boulders.

  “Axes! Axes!”

  Howls of pure ghoulish fury answered the warcry, and then the outriders of that avalanche were upon the hradani. Stone-tipped javelins—javelins longer and heavier than many humans’ two-handed thrusting spears—soared over the front rank, seeking targets beyond, and one of the Order’s horses screamed in agony and went down. But only a handful of them were thrown; the others came thrusting for flesh with deadly speed.

  Stone shattered on stout shield faces as the infantry closed up the way Bahnak—and Vaijon—had taught them. Their huge, rectangular shields—boiled leather over heavy multi-ply layers of seasoned wood and rimmed in iron, modeled on the tower shields of the Axeman army but even larger—were a moving fortress wall, covering them from shoulder to knee. They were big enough to help cover the man to their left, as well, leaving an opening between adjacent shields just wide enough for them to wield their own weapons. The ghouls flung themselves against that shield wall, snarling and slavering in their rage, and yelps of fury became howls of anguish as steel blades licked out from the wall’s battlements, driving into flesh and bone with ghastly, wet crunching sounds.

  Some of the ghouls went down, snapping and twisting, clutching at their own wounds and yet still lashing out at any hradani they could reach. Others hewed at the shields, scoring their surfaces, splintering the stone heads of their spears or the stone teeth of their war clubs. They were so strong, so powerful—and struck so quickly—that even Horse Stealer hradani riding the Rage were staggered by the raw impact of their blows, and here and there, a hradani went down, as well. There were no screams of pain from them—not from hradani in the Rage—and even as they went down, they struck back. Vaijon saw one of them on his back, covering himself under his shield, as he drove a sword blade up and completely through the body of the ghoul leaping on top of the shield to claw and tear. The ghoul twisted and raised its snout to howl in agony just in time for one of the downed hradani’s shieldmates to lop its head from its shoulders. It pitched over, and someone in the second rank grabbed the fallen
man’s harness and heaved him to his feet.

  The stink of blood and riven bowels rose in the distinctive stench of battle, but the hradani drove onward, moving forward with steady, merciless precision. Many of those who’d gone down came back to their feet, like the one Vaijon had watched, as their companions advanced. Some had been merely stunned, bowled over or lightly wounded, and they moved forward to regain their places in the formation. Others, with more serious injuries, were turned back by sergeants and corporals when they tried to do the same thing. Not all of them were able to rise, even with the Rage pulsing in their veins, and parties of designated and trained corpsmen (another innovation of Prince Bahnak’s) followed the front line, checking for signs of life and moving the more seriously wounded back from the fighting.

  Part of Vaijon wanted desperately to fling himself from the saddle and minister to those wounded warriors himself, but he couldn’t do that yet. The battle was still to be fought, and he couldn’t turn away from that.

  Many of the ghouls had shattered and broken their weapons against the shield wall. Most of those who had went loping back towards the village, perhaps in retreat but more probably to find fresh spears and clubs. Others, though, flung themselves bodily on the hradani’s shields, seizing them in razor-sharp, curved talons, trying to wrench them aside, batter them down so that they could lunge across them with their fangs. Some of them were so strong they actually managed to drag even Horse Stealer hradani forward, out of formation, shaking them by their shields the way a terrier might shake a rat. A handful of other ghouls turned on the exposed hradani, ripping at them from behind, yet the rest of the infantry line drove forward, taking the ghouls from the side or behind in turn. Another handful of ghouls hurled themselves into the openings where hradani had been pulled out of position, but only to meet the unshaken shield wall of Yurgazh’s second line and the avenging swords driving in from either flank as the first line cut them down.