by David Weber
He growled again, silently, but then he stopped and gave himself a mental shake. Perhaps all wasn’t lost after all, he thought, and glanced at the loaded catapult behind and above his position at the barge’s bulwark. He was no trained artillerist himself, but how much training would it require to arrange an “accident” that tragically hit the Order of Tomanāk’s command group once the fighting got sufficiently confused? Of course, he’d have to exercise a certain caution about how he contrived it, but he was a capable fellow...and almost as good a swimmer as a ghoul. That was a point eminently worth keeping in mind, since the northern bank of the Hangnysti happened to be a part of the South Riding.
* * *
“Oh, shit.”
Bahzell wasn’t certain who’d said the two words. He knew it was one of the Sothōii sitting their horses about him, but only from the accent. The words came out almost conversationally, quietly yet with a certain heartfelt fervor, as the ridge crest before them turned suddenly black and swarming with ghouls. The tall, gangly, ungainly looking creatures paused for just a moment as they found Trianal’s army drawn up in battle formation before them. It was almost comical, in a way...or might have been if there’d been a few thousand less of them. They’d clearly hoped to catch the entire force on the march, spread out, and the leading ranks of the creatures skidded in the muddy grass when they saw those unshaken, armored lines of infantry, arbalesteers, and mounted archers waiting for them, instead.
Unfortunately, the reason their feet skidded was that the thousands upon thousands of additional ghouls coming on behind them hadn’t seen the waiting humans and hradani. They kept charging straight ahead, slamming into the ones who’d tried to stop to reconsider their options. Assuming that was what those front ranks had done, that was. It seemed unlikely, ghouls being ghouls...but no more unlikely than the tall, narrow diamond-shaped shields altogether too many of them carried.
“Shields?” he heard Brandark mutter from beside him. “Ghouls with shields? That’s against the rules, isn’t it?”
“As to that,” Bahzell’s ears twitched in amusement at the other hradani’s aggrieved tone, “I’m thinking whoever’s put these lads together isn’t so very much concerned about the rules.”
“No, I suppose not,” Kelthys said from his other side, raising his bow but not yet drawing it. “I agree with Brandark though. It offends my sense of the way things are supposed to be.”
“I’ll not argue with you there,” Bahzell conceded. He hadn’t raised his own bow yet. The targets he was waiting for had not yet put in an appearance, but for others in the army—
“Arbalests ready!”
Only a hradani’s bull-like voice could have produced that thunderous bellow, and the strange, singing tension of the Rage’s steely purpose rang through it like a bell. Bahzell felt his own Rage stirring, raising its head as he summoned it to him, and the front rank of arbalesteers seemed to shiver as the weapons were raised, butt stocks pressed shoulders, heads bent so that cold, focused eyes peered over their sights.
“Brace!” platoon leaders and sergeants in the foremost rank of infantry shouted, and the kneeling hradani leaned forward, driving their shoulders against their close-spaced shields.
Drums thundered beyond the the ridge. A vast, bestial, yelping chant rose from thousands of ghoulish throats in a massed warcry no human or hradani had ever before heard. And there was something else behind it, a howling something, a sound that was both more and less bestial than the ghouls themselves. Bahzell had heard its like before, and so had Walsharno, and Vaijon, and Brandark, and Hurthang. Not exactly the same thing, of course, for this one was deeper, a vehicle for commands and not simply an undifferentiated howl of elemental fury and hunger. Yet there was no mistaking it.
“I’m none so sure we sound any different—humans from hradani, I’m thinking—in their ears,” Bahzell replied.
Bahzell flicked his ears in agreement, and then the ghouls came spilling down the western side of the ridge, waving their crude weapons in a flint-edged tidal bore of hate. Those who’d hesitated hesitated no longer. They raced forward with the loping, deadly speed of their kind, screaming their hatred...and their hunger.
“Arbalesteers!” The deep voice bellowed once more as the ghouls foamed down the long, gentle slope. Five hundred yards separated them from the waiting army. Then four hundred. Three hundred. Two—
“Looooooose!”
KEERRWHUNNNG!
Two hundred steel-bowed arbalests fired as one, driving their flat, lethal quarrels into the ghouls’ faces. Those diamond shields were little more than woven wicker, covered with leather. They didn’t even slow the steel-headed shafts, and deeper, bubbling shrieks—of agony this time, not simply hate—erupted in sprays of torn flesh and blood. Scores of ghouls went down, many of them tearing at the wounds those quarrels had ripped through them before going on to strike yet other targets, somewhere behind them. More of the creatures, coming on behind them, stumbled and fell, and any ghoul who fell in the face of that swarming avalanche never rose again. Its own companions’ taloned feet trod its shredded corpse into the mud.
The first rank of arbalesteers stepped back through the open gaps in the second and third ranks behind them. They slung their arbalests across their backs and picked up the pikes stacked ready between the infantry and the horse archers.
“Second rank—loose!”
A second deadly volley sleeted into the ghouls, tumbling still more of them, caving in the front of the charging horde like an ocean wave devoured the wall of a child’s castle of sand. But the ghouls were no static wall. For every creature who fell, two more stormed forward across its bleeding body, driven by their own fury and the merciless will of the devils behind them.
Bows began to sing as the range fell and the the mounted Sothōii arced their first arrows up to come driving down deeper into the mass of ghouls like steel-pointed rain. The third rank of arbalesteers stepped forward and fired a third murderous volley while the second rank reloaded. Then it was the second rank’s turn once more. The third. The second. And even as they fired, that arching canopy of arrows slashed down in lethal waves.
Gaps appeared, filled in almost instantly, and still the endless flood swept over the crest, pounding closer, absorbing quarrels and arrows alike. It was like watching a landslide or a tidal wave, not flesh and blood, however brutish that flesh and blood might be. The ghouls simply absorbed the fire and drove onward, closing the range with all their fearsome speed, getting close enough to bring their enemies into their own reach and force the hradani to abandon their missile weapons.
Showers of flint-tipped javelins hissed upward as they drew closer. Most of them glanced off of the front rank’s shields or the arbalesteers’ breastplates and helmets. But not all of it, and men and hradani grunted or cried out in anguish as sharp-edged stone sheared flesh and muscle. The screams of wounded warhorses added themselves to the hellish din, and Walsharno twitched as one of those javelins hammered off the close-linked chain barding a courser could carry with relative ease.
Sir Kelthys’ bow sang again and again in Bahzell’s ear. Flint spear points and flint and obsidian-edged war clubs thudded against the front rank’s shields. The kneeling hradani thrust upward through the narrow chinks between them, driving longswords deep into the ghouls’ vitals.
The arbalesteers who’d snatched up the waiting pikes stepped forward as their companions filtered to the rear, slinging their own arbalests to take up shields or pikes of their own. Those with pikes joined their fellows, thickening their line to present an impenetrable, glittering wall of pikeheads, while those with shields formed into reserve squads, r
eady to reinforce the fighting line’s front ranks at need. The pikemen’s weapons reached out above their companions’ shields, punching into the enemy, filling the air with the reek of riven bowels and blood. Some of the ghouls reached across the tops of the front rank’s shields, fastening their talons on the shields’ edges, trying to wrench them away from their bearers...or to drag the infantrymen out of their formation and into the maw of the ghoulish vortex of destruction. Here and there, they succeeded, but the pikemen held the gaps until more shield-bearing swordsmen could fill them. And even as the mound of bodies began to grow before the shield wall, the Sothōii, well behind the vicious melee, continued to send their looping fire far back into the ghouls’ ranks.
Stymied by that wall of shields and stabbing pikes, the ghouls swept around the angle of the army’s formation, flowing down its long western face. Some of them swung in, trying to break the angle itself, but Trianal and his officers had anticipated that. That angle was held by the Horse Stealer warriors of Clan Iron Axe, men of Prince Bahnak’s own household, armed with sword and shield and all the controlled fury of their Rage. They might be killed, but they would not be broken, and their swords reaped a grisly harvest from the ghouls who tried.
Yet if they held, thousands of additional ghouls streamed past and around them, turning in, flinging themselves bodily against the rock-steady line of infantry further south. Arbalest bolts hissed to meet them, pike heads thrust and bit deep, swords sheared and stabbed, yet there were far more ghouls than any of them had truly believed was possible. No one had ever seen—no one had ever imagined—anything which could force fifty thousand of the creatrures together into a single, unified horde. Trianal’s troops were outnumbered by better than two to one by enemies bigger and stronger—and faster—even than Horse Stealer hradani, and these ghouls seemed willing to absorb any casualties rather than break and run even in the face of such losses. They threw themselves bodily against their foes, no longer trying to wrestle the infantry’s shields away from them but content to simply bear those shields down by weight of numbers. To bury them under the massive weight of their own dead flesh if that was the only way to open gaps in that unflinching line.
And here and there, especially along the long southern face, they succeeded.
* * *
WHUNNNNGGGG!
The ballistae aboard Tharanal’s barge thumped and thudded, throwing their vicious darts into the ghouls. Each of those atrocious missiles plowed a furrow through the creatures, rupturing chests and torsos, ripping heads completely off, taking down a dozen or two dozen of them in a single shot. But they were single shots, individual thunderbolts rather than a massed volley, and it took time to re-span the weapons between shots.
Tharanal watched the two humans on the ballista he’d observed earlier. They flung themselves on the windlass cranks almost before the spring steel bow stave stopped vibrating. The handles blurred with the speed and fury of their efforts, yet it still took time, and the dwarven gunner danced impatiently, his loader waiting to slam a fresh dart into the firing tray, as the enormous bow bent once more. The cocking mechanism locked, the windlass men stood back, and the loader leapt in, dropping the dart with a skilled shove to make sure it was properly seated, then jumped out of the way himself.
“Clear!” the gunner shouted, raising the gimbal-mounted weapon, peering through his sights as he trained it on the enemy pressing the eastern end of the line. He drew a deep, steadying breath and took took one more moment to aim, and then—
WHUNNNNGGGG!
Tharanal watched the dart whizz across the river in its flat, fleeting trajectory. He watched it disappear into the mass of ghouls in a fresh shower of blood. A score of them went down in a ruler-straight line, parallel to the fighting line and barely fifteen yards from it...and the horde simply absorbed the blow and kept right on coming.
THUMPPP!
His head came up as one of the catapult barges launched a beer keg-sized clay vessel in a high, graceful arc. Smoke and flame trailed behind it as it sailed across the entire width of Trianal’s army and into the forest of enemies pressing in upon it. The projectile struck like an angry meteor, bursting the instant it hit the ground, sending its inextinguishable contents across the ghouls in a gouting, liquid river of fire.
The banefire clung, burning, consuming, impossible to remove or put out. Not even rage and hate, not even the driving will of Anshakar and his fellows, could stop the shrieking victims’ desperate efforts to escape the agony. They whirled in place, clawing at their own flesh. They ripped it off in gobbets, yet that only gave the flowing banefire fresh fuel to consume, and they howled in torment, turning to flee as if they could somehow run away from the torrents of flame running down their own bodies. But there was no escape from that clinging holocaust, and in their flight they brushed up against dozens of others, spreading the banefire to fresh targets, new torches. The stench of blazing flesh, the black smoke of burning, rose all along the line, and still fresh waves of ghouls pressed forward in the chinks between those dreadful pools of fire.
“Ware the water!” someone shouted. “Ghouls in the water!”
Tharanal looked down just in time to see the first ghoul explode upward out of the river like a leaping salmon, claws reaching for the top of the barge’s bulwark.
Three different arbalest bolts struck it in mid-air, and it shrieked, falling back to dye the water with its own blood. Yet even as it thrashed and flailed, three more followed it up from the depths. Then more—and more! Dozens of the creatures hurled themselves at the barge, enough to set even its broad hull and tonnage rocking in the water, and warcries rose as the infantry detailed to man the bulwarks hacked and hewed frantically at their attackers.
* * *
Darnas Warshoe did swear this time, but he was scarcely alone in that. His saber slashed the throat out of the first ghoul up his barge’s side, and the creature’s talons opened, surrendering their grip as it splashed back into the river. Another lunged up in its place, and another. The arbalesteers and archers on the elevated platforms behind him continued to pour out quarrels and arrows, but most of their fire was reserved for the ghouls throwing themselves ashore to get at the army’s back. The waiting infantry and cavalry met them with lance, pike, and sword all along the riverbank, yet they came in waves—disorganized, uncoordinated, but still deadly—and the water nearer the shore turned crimson as the barges’ fire ripped into them.
But the ghouls attacking the barges themselves were more elusive targets. Swimming deep underwater, they were invisible to the archers until they burst from the river’s surface to claw their way up the vessels’ sides. That was why so many infantry had been assigned to their defense, yet no one had anticipated there would be so many attackers, and Warshoe swore again as three of the creatures hurled themselves straight at him.
An ax-armed hradani appeared at his side from somewhere, swinging his battleaxe with silent, vicious power and the relentless speed of his people’s Rage. Ghoul hands and arms and heads flew in grisly profusion, and Warshoe stepped back a pace. He knew when he was outclassed, and he let the hradani take his place while he guarded the other man’s flanks and rear. He heard more screams and shouts rising all along the barge’s shoreward side, but he dared not look away from his own front. Either the other defenders would hold their ground or they wouldn’t, and there was nothing he could do about their fight, anyway.
A ghoul’s arm came over the bulwark, stabbing at the hradani’s side with a flint dagger. The hradani never saw it coming, but Warshoe lunged forward, bringing his saber down with all the elegance of a meat axe on the ghoul’s wrist. Its thick, warty hide was like a treetrunk, but the dagger flew as tendons sheared and bone shattered, and the arm disappeared back over the side in a spray of blood. Warshoe whirled, leaping to intercept another attacker—then screamed as a talon came out of nowhere. It avoided his breastplate and ripped through his leather armor as if it were paper, shredding his left shoulder, splitting the shoulde
r joint in a scarlet fountain of blood and agony.
He turned his head, seeing the ghoul who’d struck him, hearing its howl of triumph. It drew him towards its gaping maw, and he smelled the stench of its breath, saw the spittle running between its fangs. He’d seen more than enough maimed and broken bodies in his time to know what the hot spray of arterial blood from his own sundered flesh meant. There was time for him to realize he wouldn’t be completing any more assignments for Baron Cassan, and then he snarled and twisted his body, pivoting on the agonizing talon driven through his shoulder, and slammed the tip of his saber into that wide-open mouth. The point came out the back of the ghoul’s head as the saber’s basket guard slammed into its fangs, and then both of them pitched over the side into the water waiting below.
* * *
“Oh, that’s just wonderful!” Brandark shouted in Bahzell’s ear as a towering monstrosity loomed up among the ghouls. It thrust its way through them, trampling them underfoot, crushing those unable to get out of its way. It bellowed its fury as it came, shaking its massive horned head and waving a huge iron mace. Sickly green fire licked about that weapon’s flanged head, glowing even in the bright sunlight, running down its shaft and dripping from its end like tears of poison.
The ghouls tried desperately to clear its path, but they were packed too tightly. Sothōii arrows sheeted out at the thing, skipping and glancing from its shaggy, hairy hide. One or two of them didn’t bounce. They sank into that hide—no more than an inch or two, far too little to possibly injure something its size, but it howled its fury at the fleabites. It lowered its head, sweeping those horns through the ghouls in its path, scything them out of the way in a bow wave of shattered, screaming bodies and blood, and its eyes flashed with crimson and green fire as it cleared a way to the prey it truly sought.
“That, I presume, is a devil?”
