Venir stuck his hand into the spider’s split-open body. He pulled out a sack of glistening white goo, and stretched the dripping glob toward Brak.
“Father, what are you doing?”
“Unless you want that venom to eat your hand off, you’d better apply it.”
Covering his nose, Brak said, “It’s smells awful.” Wincing, he put his hands in the goo. The hairs on his brows lifted. He let out a sigh. “How can something so bad feel so good?”
“Only Bish knows.” Venir retrieved Brool. “It’s time to get back at it.”
Brak showed a broad grin. “Aye!”
The intense fighting went on for hours.
CHAPTER 22
Nikkel ran a wooden slot handle down the groove in the track of his heavy crossbow. It pushed the crossbow string back and locked it into place. In half a second he loaded a bolt, took aim, and fired.
Clatch-zip!
The missile sailed true, traveling from one building top to another before burying itself inside an underling’s belly. The fiend doubled over, clutching its bleeding belly before falling behind the building’s parapet.
Beside him, along with a host of other dwarves on the roof, Billip fired arrow after arrow as fast as he could shoot them. In a moment between notching an arrow on the string, he said, “Where did you get that thing?” He fired.
“What thing?” Nikkel reloaded and shot again. The next bolt rocketed over two buildings before dotting the eye of an underling. “Hah! Let’s see you top that mark. Not even your bowstring has that much power.” He held up the little block of wood with a groove and a handle on it. “As for this little device, I like to call it my speed loader. I invented it on my own. It’s much faster than using my foot, or turning that clumsy crank. You just have to be strong enough. I don’t think you’re strong enough.”
“I don’t need to be.” Billip fired two more arrows, hitting underlings who battled on the adjacent rooftops. Each arrow landed dead in an underling’s head. “I’m hitting twice the marks, twice as fast,” the archer said.
“Hah. I should show you how to drop them fast.” Nikkel closed an eye and aimed. He spied a pair of underlings fighting side by side, but one slid behind the other. He pulled the trigger. The bolt zipped across the street below and ripped out the necks of two underlings. As the fiends swayed, the dwarves they fought hacked them down with hammering chops. “Top that one!”
“You really don’t need to challenge me.” Billip notched two arrows on the same string. Nikkel rolled his eyes. Billip turned the bow on its side and aimed at underlings rushing the wall from the streets. Nikkel leaned over the roof. Billip fired. His arrows busted one underling in the clavicle. The second underling had an arrow sticking out the top of its head. It waved its arms and ran in a tight circle. Loading more arrows, Billip laughed. “Now that’s a first.”
Nikkel laughed so hard he fumbled to reload Bolt Thrower. “Now that was funny!” He took aim at an underling who climbed the window ledges on the outer wall. While the orcs and ogres battled in the streets, the smaller, quicker underlings had taken another battle to the rooftops. Their numbers were hard to count. Nikkel lined up his sight on an underling with dark-blue eyes, who glared at him. “Stop looking at me!”
The underlings chittered.
Nikkel fired. The bolt went down the underling’s throat, vanishing fully in its mouth. It fell from the ledge, landing face-first with the tip of the bolt sticking out of its backside like a tail. “Top that!”
“No more games,” Billip said in a serious tone. His eyes were cast beyond Nikkel’s shoulder. Sweat glistened on his face. “I’ve got a feeling we might not have enough arrows.”
Nikkel turned his chin over his shoulder. Underlings, spiders, and the small but muscle-bound white-furred albino urchlings came at the dwarves in howling clusters. “Huh!” Nikkel snorted. “I guess there’s one thing we can do. Grab whatever you can scrape up! Lock! Load! Fire!”
***
Fogle stood on the wall of the City of Bone, a few dozen yards south of the East Gate. The underlings had begun their assault. In superior numbers, they heaved their bodies against the gate. The dwarves and human soldiers dropped hunks of stone, boiling pitch, and flaming oil at them. They called out to one another, asking for more. The dwarves made the arsenal of supplies as fast as they could. They hustled barrel after barrel of oil and kerosene back and forth.
Over thirty feet below, underlings came at the wall with ladders. Fogle sent a mystic missile from his finger into one that hit the wall a few feet below his chin. The steps on the ladder split open.
“There’s another one down there.” Melegal stood to the right of Fogle. The brisk winds rustled his vest. “And another beyond that, as well as another. How many ladders can they make?”
“I don’t know, but I’m not worried about the ladders, so much as I am that machinery.” Fogle focused on one of the wooden siege towers rolling toward them at a slow pace. They were each filled with three decks of underlings. There were over a dozen towers that he could see. “I don’t know what the dwarves have in mind, but I see that as a problem.”
“Can’t you shoot a missile at them?” Melegal said in a slightly sarcastic quip.
“I could shoot a missile at them, but I don’t think it would do any good. Perhaps I could make a portal, you could cross through it, and set them on fire one at a time.”
“I like my idea better.” A dwarf bustled by Melegal with a barrel on his shoulder. Fogle jumped aside before the dwarf knocked him over the wall. “They really take this fighting very seriously.” Eyeing the sky, he buttoned his vest. “Where is that bird of yours? I thought you were searching out Master Sinway?”
“Inky is on the lookout.” Fogle’s eyes flinched. “I can shift back and forth from what the familiar sees and what I see. I don’t like anything that either one of us is seeing. There are so many. It’s as if—”
“It’s as if the entire race is out there. I know.” Melegal caught his cap as a stiff wind nearly took it from his head. He flipped it off, combed his finger through his salt-and-pepper hair, and put the cap on again. “It has my guts crawling as well.”
“Do you think this is the end?”
“Well, it sure as Bone isn’t the beginning.”
CHAPTER 23
A victorious cheer went up from the streets. Dwarves and men shouted with elation. Melegal was making his way back inside the castle when he heard the wild cries. He saw Venir and Brak on the rooftops. He grabbed a handful of supplies, hustled down to the main gate, and slipped outside with the reinforcements.
Wounded soldiers trudged along the streets as reinforcements took their place. Weary, they carried the tone of victory in their voices. The last sun of the day was setting. Venir and Brak climbed down from the top of a building across the street and approached Melegal.
“It looks like everyone has had a long day.” Melegal tossed each of them a skin of water. “You’re so coated in gore I can’t even tell what color you are. Not that it matters. It still doesn’t cover up the ugly. So, what happened? The streets became oddly quiet for a moment, then all of a sudden, the dwarven voices were dancing.”
Brak inhaled his skin of water. “Do you have another?”
Venir poured half of his skin of water on his face. “We were up to our necks in the fiends, and without a word of warning, they retreated.” He sucked down a couple of gulps. “They’ll be back. They always come back.”
“Yes,” Melegal agreed. “I don’t know how many were slain, but Fogle says the other quadrants are filled with their numbers. On the wall, they are rolling up siege towers. They stopped the advance a hundred feet away when I left. Fogle is still watching.”
“I’d like to see that.”
“Are you going to chop down the towers with your axe?” Melegal said, eyeing the menacing head of steel.
“I might.”
Brak spit out some water. His hand had nasty burn marks on it.
“What did you do, hit a sand spider in the face?” Melegal said.
“I hit a few.” He put his hand in Melegal’s face. The thief turned his nose. “Bish, that’s awful. What did you do, wipe your arse between your battles?”
“Just a time or two.” Brak’s stomach rumbled. His eyes started to glaze over. “I need rations. I need them now.”
Melegal pointed down the street, where supply tents had been set up. “You’ll find what you need there.”
“I’ll be back,” Brak said. He limped off.
“So, you fought without the helmet and lived. Imagine that.”
Venir leaned Brool against the wall. “So far, I haven’t had the need for it. It’s somewhat liberating, but I can still feel them, me. There’s only going to be one way out of this.” Venir combed the blood and grit from his hair. He flicked a hunk of flesh from his scale mail. “I must have been hit dozens of times, at least the ones I could feel, but this armor held. You should try a set; it’s not so restricting.”
“That will never happen.”
“Time is short. Perhaps you should try something new. You might not ever get another chance.” Venir finished off the water skin and flung it over to a passing dwarf headed to the supply tents. “I’ve always wanted to wear a vest like yours.”
With his arms crossed, Melegal said, “It’s disappointing that you still haven’t lost your horrible sense of humor through all of this.”
“Would you rather I whined about everything like you do?”
“No, it’s those simple pleasures in this miserable life that I like to hoard for myself.”
“So, how are things holding up on the East Gate?”
“All I can say is that it’s still there.”
“Let’s walk.” Venir led the way south down the roadway toward the East Gate. Hundreds of soldiers were stationed outside and on top of the gate. Many of the soldiers from the front lines of the blockade were switching posts with the gate guards. The grimy soldiers exchanged greetings, sharing food and drink and telling war stories before they headed to the front lines of the battle. Venir pumped forearms with many of them.
A black-haired man sat on the ground, sharpening his longsword with a stone. He had a twisted smile on his face when he looked up at Venir. “I stabbed an ogre in its bowels. I lived to tell about it. Heh-heh.”
Venir nodded and moved on. With Melegal, he scaled the ladder beside the gate to the top of the wall. He moved north, with his restless eyes on the towers lined up in a row less than one hundred yards away. The siege towers stood thirty feet high. Three levels of underlings were in the holds underneath. Down on the ground, the underlings, numbering in the thousands, either stood or sat on the ground. They stretched along the wall from one end to the other before their ranks vanished behind the bend.
“Those towers should burn. Why haven’t we set fire to them?” Venir said.
“The dwarves tried. They have underling mages among them. They are now dousing the flames and shielding them from our missile weapons.” Melegal shrugged his narrow shoulders. “That’s why I made the chopping-the-tree-down suggestion.”
“What is Fogle doing?”
“When I left him, he was sitting behind the battlements, reading his spellbook.”
“I take it he hasn’t located Sinway.”
“Oh, did you say Sinway? I told him Elypsa. She is such a divine creature. I was hoping that once I won, I’d be able to keep her.”
Venir gave him a disapproving glance.
“Yes, he’s looking for Sinway, but—”
“Why don’t you just shout our plans over the wall for all of the underlings to hear.” Fogle approached them from the other side of the East Gate. His book was tucked underneath his arm. “I can hear you and so can everyone else.”
“That comes with the territory with him,” Melegal said. “You should be used to it by now, even though you never get used to it.”
Standing in front of Fogle, Venir said, “They don’t understand our words. Tell me, what have you discovered. Anything.”
Fogle’s eyes twitched. They became glassy for a long moment. Speaking as if he was standing on the other side of the city, he said, “It’s all soldiers, Venir. You’ve thrashed the ranks of orcs and ogres, but we had heavy losses as well. I suspect the underlings will really hit hard tomorrow.” His eyes twitched and came back into focus. “Not that they didn’t hit hard today, but tomorrow will be different. They’ll use more magic.” He looked at the ominous siege towers. “They’re hiding something else in there. I can sense it.”
Venir grabbed Fogle by the collar of his robes. “Then you better make sure we are ready for it.”
CHAPTER 24
With a scarlet moon shining through her window, Kam swung her legs out from underneath the sheets and slid her bare toes down to the floor. Wincing, she covered Erin back under the blankets. Putting the back of her hand to her cheek, she yawned. Her mouth was dry. She grabbed a pitcher of water from her bedside table, refilled the glass, and drank. As she made her way to the window, she let out a sigh.
Her room overlooked the Royal Roadway, and she could see hundreds of soldiers spread out among the small bonfires. Aside from the rustling, the streets were oddly quiet. On and off throughout the day, the ring of steel from the fighting woke her up from heavy sleep. Her side still burned and she was very weak. Her eyes were always tired.
She searched for Venir in the cluster of shadowy figures. She hoped to hear his voice. She missed the soothing rumble he produced when he spoke. It put her at ease more than she cared to admit. A soft creak of the bedroom door caught her ear. Her quick turn made her head dizzy, and she swooned.
Jubilee, who was peeking in, rushed inside. Her pretty little face was stricken with concern as she caught Kam by the waist and steadied her. “You shouldn’t be out of bed. Come, let’s get you back under the covers.”
“No, I’m fine, Jubilee. Your entrance startled me.”
“Did you think I was an underling?”
“Aren’t you?” Kam said with a smile.
“Ha, ha,” Jubilee said. She was dressed in a rugged set of clothing that castle messengers wore, which offered some protection. The buckles on her leather bracers snagged the pink sleeping gown that Kam was wearing. Jubilee ran her hands over the finely woven fabric. “That is so soft. Have you seen any in my size? It’s been a long time since I’ve been so comfortable. I was spoiled with it, once, you know.”
“Yes, I know, little royal.” Kam put her handless arm over Jubilee’s shoulder. “Let’s go for a walk. Perhaps we can find you something in another room.”
“I like that idea.” Jubilee’s gaze drifted to the bed. “Should we take Erin?”
“No, I don’t want to wake her. She was very restless all day. Come.” Kam led the way into the hall. To her surprise, there were two dwarven soldiers posted in the hallway. It gave her a great deal of comfort. Her time spent with Mood and his dwarves was eye-opening. The dwarves were the very definition of duty. “Let’s take the steps. I need to build my strength up, and I wouldn’t mind seeing more of the castle. The architecture is so different here than in the City of Three.”
“I really like the City of Three. It was prettier. I miss the waterfalls. I never imagined there was so much water before in the entire world.” Jubilee helped Kam down the stairs until they made it to the ground level. The floors were stained from battle. “Three was much cleaner, too.”
Kam enjoyed the great pillars, columns, and archways that made up the castle’s framework. There was an artistic flair to them, but with hard lines and edges, unlike the smoother stones in the City of Three. After walking for a while, she angled into one of the many living rooms. Huge portraits lined the walls. The heavy folds of the drapes pulled over the windows made for a dreary setting. Only a few candles were lit.
“Huh, I’ve never seen this room before.” Jubilee rose up on her toes, staring at one in particular. “They sure did like paintings of themselves.
”
“They are royals. They like everything about themselves.”
“I’m a royal, and you’re a royal. So, it’s bad to like ourselves?”
“No, so long as you like others just as well, but look at all of those froward faces. There’s hardly a smile among them. That was one of the things that always irked me most about a royal. I had everything I could possibly need, except for happiness. Being spoiled ruined things.”
“I liked being spoiled, but I think I understand what you mean. My life is much fuller now.”
Kam rubbed her head. “Mine too.” An image of a man in one of the pictures caught her eye. She leaned closer. “Huh?”
“What?” Jubilee was searching the picture that consisted of a group of twenty royals. They were all sitting together in a vast living room with twin fireplaces burning on either side of the group. “I don’t see anything unusual. It’s just a group of unhappy people, like you say. Many are pretty and handsome, but they seem empty.”
Kam grabbed a candlestick and shed more light on the painting. “That one there looks very familiar.”
Rising up on her toes and squinting her eyes, Jubilee suddenly gasped. “Slat, that’s Melegal!”
They both looked at each other with eyes bigger than saucers. Kam let out an abrupt giggle. “I can only suppose it’s an odd coincidence. We’ll have to show it to him the next chance that we get. Who knows, perhaps Melegal has some royal blood in his veins.”
A group of soldiers moving quickly down the hall passed by the living room. The last one in line was Ebenezer. He almost made it by them before he turned his head and saw them. He came to a stop and said to the other men, “I’ll catch up.” Entering the room, he bowed. “Ladies, it is good to see you out and about. Can I do anything for you?”
Ebenezer was in his late forties, and he carried the rugged, aristocratic charm of a royal. Wearing a suit of ghost armor that had been exposed to long hours of battle, he wandered closer. His broadsword’s scabbard clicked lightly against his waist as he walked.
The Darkslayer: Bish and Bone Series Collector's Edition (Books 1-10): Sword and Sorcery Masterpieces Page 129
