by DB King
“Hold fire!” Marcus yelled. “Prepare to repel the attackers!”
“Get up on the wall!” roared Kairn. “Get up there and fight for your home and your lives!”
Kairn was in the middle of the crowd, his two-headed axe in hand. The big dwarf was not built for climbing barricades, so he stayed on the ground. Marcus was confident that they could repel most, if not all, of the murgals from the wall, but before this fight was over, he didn’t doubt that there would be fighting on the ground for Kairn to do. The dwarf was practically snarling as he waited for his chance to give his axe a new home in a ratman’s skull.
Marcus stood on top of the wall as the Gutter Gang took up their positions around them, armed with spear and shield and sword. They stood close together, each ready to protect the man to his left. This way of protecting each other was something that Kairn had brought from his homeland. Far away, in the northern kingdom of the dwarves where Kairn had been born, the dwarves often used this tactic. They were used to fighting in underground tunnels and passageways down in the deep mines that were their homes, and this close-packed shield wall worked well for them there.
It worked well for the Gutter Gang too. The murgals flung themselves at the wall, scrambling upward hand over hand and waving their strange, multi-pronged spears overhead. They screeched and howled as they came up, but as soon as they reached the top of the wall, they were met with a well-practiced wall of shields and spears.
The Gang chanted in rhythm as they stabbed forward, impaling murgals on their spear points and sending them tumbling back down the wall to sprawl among the dead on the ground. At first, their bodies hit the ground with a sharp thud, but now as the dead piled higher, they fell with a soft, bloodied squelch.
As they fought, one Gang member got a spear jammed in a murgal’s neck. Marcus glanced toward the Gang Member’s dismayed cry and realized it was a woman—Tessa, a member he did not know particularly well. The spear was wrenched from her grip as her enemy fell backward, and before she could sweep her sword out, another murgal had bashed into her, knocking her backward. She tumbled down the wall with the murgal that had tackled her.
They grappled together as they fell, and the murgal had a dagger in his hand. He tore at her with his teeth, while smashing his dagger against her plate armor—clang, clang, clang. The murgal snarled impatiently. She screamed.
Marcus leaped off the barrier as the spear wall closed around him. He landed near the struggling pair, dashed in, and kicked the murgal in the head to get it off her. In the moment that it looked around at him, he swung his mace and smashed its face in with a single blow.
Marcus looked up and found that Jay was there, helping him haul the murgal’s corpse off Tessa. Jay looked Marcus in the eye and nodded reassuringly as they pulled the creature away.
“Tessa,” said Marcus, pushing her helmet back. “Are you badly hurt?”
Jay gasped as Tessa’s white face was revealed. Sweat marked her face, and she looked drawn and in pain. She reached under her armor and then brought her hand back out. Her fingers were stained with blood.
“Jay,” said Marcus. “To the wall. You’re needed there.”
Jay hesitated for a moment, then followed Marcus’s command, clambering up the wall to join the defense. Marcus looked up and saw Kairn standing over them.
“It’s bad,” said the dwarf, shaking his head, “but that’s war. It’s unavoidable. There’s nothing we can do, Marcus. Leave her be.”
“Oh, I think there may be something I can do,” said Marcus grimly. He sincerely hoped he could do this. Quickly, he stripped the plating away from Tessa, lifted her chainmail, and found the leather undershirt torn and saturated with blood.
Tessa looked down at the wound, then her eyes rolled back, and her head slumped heavily backward.
The dwarf narrowed his eyes. “What are you—”
“Kairn, hold this out of the way,” Marcus ordered. The dwarf seemed about to protest, but then he just shrugged and did as he was asked.
Crouching, Kairn lifted Tessa’s torn leathers out of the way. Below, there was a ragged stab wound in Tessa’s side. Blood had poured from it, and now it pulsed out sluggishly and dark with every beat of Tessa’s heart.
“Marcus…” said Kairn, but Marcus just lifted both hands and held them over the wound. Water surged from his palms suddenly, mixing with her blood. Marcus concentrated, putting everything he could into drawing energy down into the water and through it, into Tessa’s wound.
“By the teeth of Ironbeard!” Kairn swore as the wound was washed clean and began to knit up. Marcus kept the flow going until the wound was gone.
Tessa sat up sharply, gasping. She coughed, looked around, then looked down at where her wound had been. She felt the healed flesh in disbelief before she stared at Marcus. Her eyes were wide, and her mouth hung open.
“Is that… did you… can it be?” she stammered.
“On your feet, soldier,” said Marcus. “I said you would see magic today. Here it is. Pick up your weapon and take your place on the wall.”
“Y…yes, master!” she said. After a moment of hesitation, she did as she was asked, sorting out her plate and mail, pulling her helmet on and heading for the wall again, sword and shield in hand.
Elemental ability: Water
Current Mastery Level: Novice
Level progress: 15%
Progress to Apprentice level: 35%
“My friend,” said Kairn quietly. “I knew there was magic here, but I had no idea that it was so… so…” He trailed off, unsure what to call the magic he just witnessed. Then his eyes lit up. “You have the healing hands!”
“So it would seem, my friend,” said Marcus with a smile. “Go on now. Look to the defense. Send the wounded to me as they come, and I will do with them as I did with Tessa. Go on, your folk are relying on you.”
Kairn straightened up and saluted in dwarf fashion, smacking a clenched fist to his breastplate with a clang. He turned and marched back to the wall.
Marcus glanced up at the wall. The murgal attack was slowing. A few had made it over the wall into the tunnel beyond, but they had been cut down mercilessly by the Gang reinforcements who waited on the other side. A cheer of victory rang out at the top of the wall.
“They’re running!” he heard people shout. “Flee, murgal scum!”
Marcus nodded in satisfaction. The ratmen would come next, he was certain of it. They would have sent the murgals against the wall first to test the Gang’s strength, but the rats would be the main assault. From the sound of it, they had ranged weapons and probably flamethrowers too.
They will try to force a breach in the defensive wall, Marcus thought. If they can do that, then the cavalry—the warg-mounted Sewer Slayers and the battle spiders—can come through and sweep the defenders away.
That meant that the dungeons would soon be occupied, if all went according to plan. Marcus would need to set up his management table and ready the Dungeon Meld spell. He hoped he would be able to maintain his attention effectively between the dungeons and the fighting behind the wall.
Only one way to find out, he thought.
Marcus conjured his dungeon management table a little distance behind the wall, so it was out of the way if the fight spilled over the top of the wall. As the sleek black top of the table caught the first glimmer of torchlight, Ella flew down next to him.
“I wondered where you’d got to,” he said, relieved to see her.
“I’ve been up in the shadows above the wall, at the top of the tunnel. I can stay there and stay out of sight, but also have an eye on what’s going on below. I can feel something strange, a kind of rumbling noise through the ground from up above. I don’t know what it is, but I thought you should know.”
That made Marcus feel uneasy, but there was nothing he could do about it now. A rumbling up above. What could it be?
“You’d better go back up to the ceiling and keep an ear out for anything else strange. Maybe scout in t
he main chamber too if you can. If you see or hear anything, find me here and let me know.”
Ella gave a quick nod and flew away again, vanishing into the shadows up above.
Marcus returned his attention to the dungeon table and initiated the Dungeon Meld. Immediately, his attention was split between the chamber, the Bladehand dungeon, and the Harpy dungeon. With care, he found that he could manage the split, keeping most of his awareness in his own body, while still maintaining awareness of the dungeons.
As he stepped back from the table, satisfied with the results, he heard a shout from on top of the wall.
“Here they come! Slingshots!”
Jay was shouting. He had climbed to the top of the wall, along with ten of the Gutter Gang. The other twenty had arrayed themselves behind the wall again, readying their slingshots. Marcus jogged past them and clambered up the wall to look.
The ratmen were coming on now. In the wide space before the barricade, they came forward in loose, disordered groups, roughly split by weapon type. There were very many of them, and they were all dressed in chainmail and leather, clumsily pulled over their dirty, matted fur.
On either side there were groups of spear and sword units, protected with head-high wooden shields, very unlike those typically used by the ratmen. Berserker units stood in front—big ratmen, almost man-sized, driven insane by the powerful, mind-bending drugs and magical rituals of the ratmen. They were armed with cleavers, but they wore very little armor—just a small piece of leather loosely draped over their bulky chests. In the middle, three units of ratmen armed with flamethrowers waved the ends of their weapons, as if searching for someone to burn. The weapons were just like the one that Marcus had come up against in the tunnel.
As he watched, another unit of ratmen pushed ballistae up behind, a row of nine big bolt throwers, painted black, with groups of small ratmen scurrying about them setting them up.
“Defenders!” Marcus shouted. “Take cover! Slingers! Fire a volley!”
A hail of fat round rocks shot over the wall. The defenders ducked suddenly, avoiding the slingshots’ first volley. The stones crashed into the army beyond. One rat took a stone to the eye. Another’s skull cracked clean open like an egg. One lucky shot smashed into a flamethrower wielder, and its weapon exploded in a plume of fire. Its fur caught alight, but the blaze didn’t stop there—flames spread to the surrounding ratmen, enveloping their ranks. Flaming ratmen flailed about, spreading the fire as they desperately tried to extinguish their fur. Soon, another flamethrower rat burned, its screeching cut off by his weapon exploding. That set off a chain of explosions and sent the other flamethrower units scurrying out of the way, but it didn’t slow the advance.
Then the berserker units saw the dungeon doorways. They took the bait at once, the commanders screeching out their orders as they peeled away from the main host and charged eagerly into the dungeon chambers.
As they entered, Marcus felt his attention tear away from his body. He scrambled out of the way, off to the side of the wall defenders so that he still had a view, but wasn’t in full view of the attackers. Jay took command on top of the wall, calling out to the slingers to fire their volleys. “Fire!” Jay shouted. “Fire!”
The nine ballistae thrummed and sent their great arrows trailing flame through the air to thump into the wooden planks at the top of the wall. The flames caught on the dry wood immediately. One of the ballista bolts smashed into the head of one of the Gutter Gang, decapitating him.
Even my magic won’t grow him back his head, Marcus thought. More’s the pity. He knew that the magic might be able to heal wounds—maybe even fatal wounds, as with Tessa—but they would not be able to restore life to a headless man, despite what Ella’s legend had said. Perhaps once he reached a higher level, but for now, the man was done for. He’d died defending his home, and Marcus thought the man would have been proud of that at least.
In the dungeons, the berserkers were pressing their way up the tunnels toward the chambers. Marcus grinned with satisfaction as their headlong rush triggered the traps. In both corridors, the ratmen were smashed to pieces by falling rocks or stabbed by flying blades, but now he realized that even more were pressing up behind.
Behind the well-armed and disciplined units were many more ratmen, less well-armed. Their discipline was as bad as their blades, and they came on in a headlong rush, getting in the way of the ballistae teams and shoving the flamethrower teams forward toward the wall. Many of them, seeing the glowing doors, poured into the dungeon corridors, and Marcus felt their life force filling up the dungeon chambers like water through a dam.
He was becoming more and more distracted, and it hit him that he couldn’t stay here. He would need to retreat from the main defense if he was going to be able to keep an eye on the two dungeon chambers through his meld. Unwilling to sacrifice the ability to see what was going on in the dungeons, he was preparing to turn away and leave the wall when he heard a commanding shout from below.
He looked down through the flames that were now sheeting up the front of the barricade. The flamethrower teams were lined up in a row, raising their weapons.
“Back!” Marcus yelled suddenly. “Off the wall! Off the wall!”
He flung himself off, and the Gutter Gang fighters followed him as the flamethrower teams unloaded on the wall. Blue and green flames exploded off the outside of the wall, and a great jeering shout went up from the army that was gathered behind the flamethrowers. The edges of the wall blackened, and the smoke crowded the top of the Underway tunnel.
Marcus dropped the Dungeon Meld for now. He had no choice—it was more important to concentrate on the defense here. Shouting commands, he gathered the Gutter Gang into a line and got them to form their shield wall again.
“Shield wall!” Marcus shouted.
The barricade was on fire now, and the sound of ballista bolts smashing into it was not encouraging. Even less encouraging was the strained crackle of the barricade as it bore the assault.
“The wall is about to fall!” yelled Kairn. He stood right at the front, his legs planted and his axe in his hand, ready to fight.
Marcus cast the Dungeon Meld spell again. In the Harpy dungeon, all the monsters had been triggered. It seemed that the number of enemies in the dungeon bore some relationship to the number of enemies spawned, because Marcus had never seen so many skeleton duelists in the dungeon. They had created an army of their own, charging forward in waves and working together to corral the berserkers and accompanying ratman infantry toward the trees.
The four trees had awakened, their demonic impulses stirring as soon as the ratmen entered the chamber. Their roots smashed into their ranks wildly, sending rats flying in all directions—and those were the lucky ones. Others were crushed or chomped in the trees’ massive jaws. Either way, a satisfying crunch of rat bones sung through the chamber.
The ratman berserkers were chewing through the crowds of duelists, but the three harpies that had spawned tore up the ratman infantry mobs that were still pouring in through the door. Marcus could feel the dungeon straining with the sheer weight of enemies within. Could the dungeon break if there were too many enemies inside? Would the door just close? Marcus had a feeling that he was going to find out before too much more time had passed.
In the other dungeon, an oversized bladehand had spawned and was holding the entrance against the ratmen. None of them had thought to use the torches against the bladehand, and there was no hope for them. Even the biggest of the berserkers couldn’t hope to beat the bladehand. The four razor sharp swords, two gold and two iron, swung in deadly arcs. The bloody corpses of the ratmen fell limply as the bladehand cut their throats or split their torsos.
They could not retreat, because more and more were trying to press their way into the dungeon through the doors, so they flung themselves at the bladehand in ever greater fury, only to be cut to pieces by the swirling swords. The sickly iron stench of ratman blood overwhelmed the chamber.
A cr
ash brought Marcus back to his body.
He looked up. The wall was falling. A huge rush of red sparks went up as wood and stone collapsed to the ground, and the ratmen came screaming through. They hit the shield wall, broke, then reformed and came on again. The shield wall was pushed back by the sheer press of them against it, though Marcus was pleased that none of the Gang actually fell. Kairn had trained them well, and they gave ground in a steady, orderly march backward.
A deafening blast of a hoarse war horn drowned this section of the Underway. Marcus looked toward the breach in the wall and saw a wave of cavalry charging through. This was the Sewer Slayers, waiting until the wall had been breached, just like he had thought they would.
The Slayers were fewer in number, but they were mounted on wargs—wild wolf-like creatures that were found wild in the Gronwold, the Orklands of the west. The orks captured them and bred them as fighting steeds, and they could be bought at great price on the docks.
Diremage Xeron’s money at play here, Marcus thought. He found that his attention could be kept now on the two dungeons and sustained in the main battle. The splitting of attention was becoming stronger quickly, even as he used it.
At first it had made him feel slightly nauseous, like looking through two pairs of eyes at the same time. Now, he found that it had resolved into an overarching vision, like looking down on one of the amphitheaters in the far eastern city states of Zenreth, where they would act out three stories at once with different sets of players, and the actors would swap between stories as they went.
Marcus smiled at the thought, but he kept his mind on the task at hand. The Gutter Gang took the impact of the cavalry bravely, but several fell. The wargs snapped at the line, forcing them back even further. It was time for Marcus to join the fray.
With his mace in one hand and his sword in the other, he charged down and crashed into the flank of the cavalry like a whirlwind. They were hampered by the corpses of their own fallen warriors. As in the dungeons, the press of men and ratmen coming up behind stopped them from reforming and charging again.
