Dark Path: Book Three of the Phantom Badgers

by RW Krpoun

  Axel was dimly aware that the second onager had released, and that both Hawk section and the crossbowmen distributed through the line sections had gone into action as the wave of Goblins passed over the range stakes. He closed his eyes as the Orb grew close to the command group, focusing his inner sight as clearly as his grasp of the Art would allow. He released the Orb when it was a dozen feet from its target, ‘tossing’ it at the anchor for the spell as if it were a pebble. The shaman’s wards brushed at the Orb, knocking it slightly off course to miss the anchor point, such a shift being all that was needed to render harmless an arrow or javelin. Deflected, the Orb shattered a foot from the Goblin spellcaster.

  Opening his eyes, Axel snapped out a phrase and pointed; a faint white line darted from his fingers, and in the distant command group a Goblin convulsed and died, frozen. The Wizard chuckled ruefully: wrong Goblin. He swept his hand in a broad gesture; two Goblins in the front ranks of the east Serao fell dead and a half-dozen howled as intense cold seared their limbs. Short bow arrows, fired on the run, began to drop around him, wobbling out of the sky at the extreme end of their range. Axel ignored them, frowning in concentration as he tried to discern what the shaman was up to, ignoring a cheer from the militia as one of Nowotney’s stones pulped a spider in a freakishly lucky shot.

  The assault team saw the wall of fire roar up in the heart of the command group, and took advantage of the diversion to close to within twenty yards of their quarry.

  “Looks like Axel got an Orb in close,” Kroh muttered to Rolf, carefully peeking around a battered shrub. “Look at the buggers dance: one’s down, looks dead, no burns though. Shaman’s still alive but his clothes are on fire, there, they’re out. Damn.”

  “What’re the Trolls doing?” Rolf muttered, carefully positioning his crossbow. His plan was simple and straightforward: the Trolls were sixty feet away; another sixty feet beyond them was the Serao of veteran Goblins held in reserve. He and Kroh would rush the Trolls and try to cut them down before the Goblins noticed; Starr would provide covering fire should killing the Trolls take too much time.

  “One’s digging in its butt, the other’s just standing there. Both’re looking at the command group. Let’s quit sitting here.”

  “Not yet. Starr, are you ready?”

  The little Threll, kneeling behind a tree a few feet away, stuck one last arrow into the ground before nocking her bow. “Now I am.”

  “On a count of three,” Rolf breathed to the scowling Dwarf. “One.”

  Their quarry were still staring at the command group even though nothing remained of the fire but a long burnt line in the ground, two massive humanoids with bodies that seemed too squat for their nine-foot height, their overly long limbs and lack of necks giving the impression that they were some form of wood tick that had learned to walk upright. Their rubbery gray-green hide was covered in patches of scabby growths that, were it tested, would be found to consist of very fine stone; Trolls, like sharks, have little or no bone structure, being mostly cartilage and sinew at birth. By ingesting powdered stone and gravel, they generated a rocky skeleton and an outer armoring of stone. Given their rugged frames, height, two hearts, insensitivity to pain, long reach, and tremendous strength, Trolls were exceedingly tough foes, a list of assets which was only balanced by the creature’s rarity and bone-deep stupidity. Each would have a Goblin handler to instruct the creatures, but apparently both guides were at the command group, having provided their charges with a pile of melons to ensure that they would not wander off until the food was gone.

  “Two.” One Troll reached down and picked up another melon; the other finally transferred its gaze to the Goblin charge. Both were naked and unarmed save for a four-foot long club that sprouted clusters of inch-thick iron spikes at the business end..

  “Three.” Both Badgers were up and trotting, not running, watching where they stepped to avoid twisting an ankle. Their progress in full war gear should have alerted any creature even without the distraction of the Goblin charge, but neither Troll seemed to take notice as the Badgers closed.

  Twenty feet from his target Kroh hurled his long axe; runes glowing, the three-foot long weapon flew through the air and struck the melon-eater a massive blow to the left shoulder blade, biting in deep before defying natural laws as it ripped itself free and flew back to the Dwarf’s hands. Even as he caught the weapon Kroh hurled an enruned throwing axe which repeated its larger cousin’s progress, chopping a thick divot from the creature’s side before flying back. Spitting out a quart of well-masticated melon, the Troll squalled out a mewing cry and laboriously turned to meet his foe.

  Rolf’s Troll had begun to pivot (having very little neck meant the Troll had to turn its entire torso to see to the sides) when he reached it, unaware that it was under attack. Rolf swung Moonblade in a hard, flat arc, putting all of his weight (over to three hundred pounds in full war gear) and muscle behind the stroke. The sword caught the Troll just below one gnarled, misshapen knee with a force that sent the enchanted edge plowing through the horny flesh. The blow, which would have cleanly decapitated a prize bull, sliced half-way through the leg and stopped, causing the big half-Orc to crash into his sword hilt, ripping the blade free with a shock that would have shattered unenchanted steel like glass, and spilling the Badger onto the ground.

  The twin blows had caused the melon-eater to stagger forward a couple steps, giving the Waybrother time to jam his enchanted throwing axe back into his belt. As the massive creature came around, raising its club, Kroh closed, the blood pounding in his temples as the killing rage took him. Working his axe with a blinding precision, the Dwarf struck three times, twice to the chest and once into the creature’s club-like right foot before neatly side-stepping a massive club blow. While the Troll was off-balance by its over-strong swing, Kroh leapt in and chopped it twice on the right biceps and again in the right ribs, working to the right to force the creature to shift position to keep him in sight.

  Twisting to land on a tucked shoulder and rolling to his feet, Rolf shook his head as he crabbed sideways and back, making the Troll come after him on its ruined leg, half-stunned by the fact that the hardest blow he had ever made with the best weapon he had ever borne had failed to sever or even completely cripple the thing’s limb. The troll swiped with its log-club; Rolf ducked and thrust hard with Moonblade. Three times they circled, repeating this pattern, until even the Troll’s limited wits discerned that a six-and-a-half foot tall half-Orc wielding a two-handed sword with a five-foot blade had, while thrusting, a longer reach than even a Troll.

  Despite the fear for her friends locked in mortal combat with two of Nature’s most horrible creations mere yards away, Starr kept her eyes on the reserve Serao forty yards away. The arrow in her bow was the enchanted one she had used on the Adder lizard, and it was attuned now to the Serann, or captain, in charge of the Goblin unit, while a dozen ordinary arrows were thrust into the ground in a neat row before her, ready for instant use. The jugata themselves were watching the assault on the Ravenmist lines, awaiting the order that would send them to strike wherever the Humans seemed likely to give way, and she heartily hoped they would keep their attention focused in that direction just a few minutes longer.

  The Troll had made three complete circuits, mechanically shuffling and swinging its club after the darting Dwarf with a grim persistence, completely ignoring the ever-increasing number of rents in its clay-like hide, or the quantity of syrupy blood that was oozing out. In the portion of his brain that controlled his fighting skills even in the midst of the killing rage Kroh was aware that his strength, although massive, was bleeding away from the rain of full-armed blows and the constant dancing in breast-and-back plates. The realization was seeping in that no matter how many times he hit this thing, he could not win a battle of endurance or attrition, or kill it with a single titanic blow, as he had won so many other single combats.

  Moonblade licked in and opened another wound on the Troll’s torso; Rolf danced back, c
ursing as a rusty spike scored a crease into his armor, leaving a bruise despite the padded tunic he wore underneath. It did not help that the tunic was sopping with sweat, the big Badger’s arms were beginning to ache, and his hands were going numb from the rebound of the blows he had been raining on the creature. The Troll was still game despite the terrible wound to its leg and a well-hacked torso; Rolf had never seen any living creature take such punishment and continue to fight. The thing ignored the wounds and fought with a single-minded determination and no outward signs of fatigue; the half-Orc was only thankful that the Goblins had chosen to give it a log-like club weighted down with iron spikes instead of a lighter weapon, such as a long iron bar, which would have allowed the creature to double its attacks and vastly speed up its response time. Cutting away at this thing was getting him nowhere; he could have killed a dozen Orcs with the wounds he had put on this creature, and had only succeeded in laming it. Timing his attack, he sliced another rent in the Troll’s side.

  The Goblin Serann’s turning towards the Trolls came as a weird sort of relief to the little Lanthrell after what seemed like an eternity of fighting between Rolf, Kroh, and the Trolls, fighting she dared not even glance at. The enchanted arrow took the Goblin officer square in the chest, dropping him in his tracks so cleanly that she had time to take and nock an ordinary arrow before any of his Serao reacted. Her second arrow transfixed the neck of a jugata she had marked in the front rank, guessing him to be a Pa, or Corporal, by the elaborate plume he wore on his rusty helm. The sudden attack, loss of their leader, and the sight of the fighting Trolls badly shook the reserve Serao, a state of mind Starr helped along with three more arrows, wounding three more Goblins.

  Kroh feinted in, turning towards the Troll’s center chest rather than towards its side to force it to turn; his axe swept in as if to strike, but never completed its arc, being pulled back to the ready position before it had progressed too far. The Troll swung lustily, slamming yet another dent into the trampled turf. Instead of leaping away, Kroh stepped in, swinging hard, but not too hard to make a precision blow impossible. The enchanted edge of his axe caught the Troll’s left hand midway between knuckles and wrist where it gripped the use-smoothed shaft of its club. The Waybrother felt the welcome grate of wood against steel as his blow shuddered to a wrist-jarring stop, having cut through into the club itself. Deftly wrenching his weapon free, he hammered two quick blows into the right shoulder of the startled beast as it tried to flex its now fingerless left hand.

  Ducking another ponderous swing Rolf dove in and punched Moonblade’s point a palm’s width into the creature’s side. Instead of withdrawing the blade, he rocked it in another half-inch and let go of the hilt. As the Troll fumbled for the annoying blade pulling at its side just out of its inhibited field of view, the big Badger circled behind it and stabbed the distracted creature in the small of the back, driving his boot dagger in two-handed with such force that the blade sank in five inches and the tang bent at the narrow brass crossguards. Releasing the dagger, Rolf ducked back and jerked Moonblade free.

  Starr drew and released with the absorption of an expert, dropping one jugata dead in his tracks and wounding two more with her next three arrows. The Goblins were veterans and wasted little time in falling back into the woods to the south, orders or no orders. The immediate threat was dispersed, but the short Threll had no doubts that the jugata would quickly begin circling around to come up behind her. Grabbing up the remaining arrows she had set out, Starr darted back to take up a blocking position to delay the Goblins. In the planning, both Rolf and Kroh had been confident that they could cut the Trolls down before the reserve Serao could close, but she wasn’t so sure of that prediction at the moment.

  The Troll quit trying to flex its maimed hand and turned its attention back to Kroh, who was now closing to hammer his axe into its left side. After one awkward cross-body swing with its club, the creature discarded its weapon and alternately grabbed at the Dwarf or swung vicious blows with its freely-bleeding stump-hand.

  The loss of its club cut the Troll’s reach in half; it was forced to lean well forward to grab or swing at the much shorter Dwarf. Kroh, gasping for additional air to fuel his burning muscles, kept the pressure on the Troll until it incautiously combined a right-hand grab with a clumsy step forward. Pivoting, the Waybrother ducked under the creature’s hand and deliberately smashed one armored shoulder into the Troll’s left knee, driving outwards. The impact of two hundred fifty plus pounds of armored Dwarf slamming into its leg in mid-step sent the Troll crashing awkwardly to the ground.

  Grumbling in a weird, high-pitched tone, the Troll arched its back and fumbled behind it, feeling for the dagger, letting the club in its other hand droop to the ground. Rolf leapt in, driving Moonblade’s blood-darkened point directly into the Troll’s face, slicing open one moss-colored eye like a big boiled egg. The stricken creature mewed out an even higher-pitched cry and pawed at its face, ignoring the blows Rolf rained onto its leg until the limb finally severed, toppling the creature onto the ground.

  Ducking a short bow arrow that whipped past her with, Starr fired a pointed reply, nodding slightly at the scream and thrashing that followed. The jugata were pressing in; she had used up her five readied arrows and was drawing from her quiver now, darting from one tree to another, shooting and moving. This last arrow had been the first confirmed causality she had inflicted on the flanking Goblins, but she had held down their advance to a yard or two a minute. She hoped that that would be enough.

  Kroh rolled free of the thrashing legs, collecting a rib-bruising kick along the way, and levered himself to his feet with the shaft of his axe. Racing forward, he planted his weapon into the back of the Troll’s head as the creature rose to its hand and knees. Ripping the axe free, he struck again and again, aiming the enchanted edge at the point where the Troll’s bulging head met its flat shoulders. At the third blow the Troll rolled to its side and blindly pawed at its attacker, trying to catch the axe. Kroh struck with precision rather than force, wielding his weapon with the skill born of decades of practice and hundreds of battles, and the axe’s keen edge, kept razor-sharp despite heavy use by dint of its good Dwarven enchantments, sheared off the Troll’s remaining fingers and chopped the palm and wrist into a twisted mass of shredded, blood-oozing meat liberally sprinkled with gray-brown bone splinters.

  Large arms suddenly clamped around the Dwarf’s barrel chest, lifting him bodily off the ground. “Kroh, let it go, we’ve got to leave. Leave it go, it’s crippled, no hands. Time to GO!” Rolf yelled into his friend’s ear, knowing that the Waybrother’s fighting rage made communication difficult. Growing exhaustion had weakened the rage’s grip, and Kroh only struggled for a moment before letting himself be led back to where they had left their crossbows. Behind them, the two crippled Trolls thrashed about, still mindlessly seeking their foes.

  A flurry of burning disks suddenly slashed through the air around Hawk section, bursting into gouts of flame wherever they landed. One archer rolled, howling, to put out his burning trousers. Axel stomped out a patch of burning grass that marked the closest strike to him, scowling into the distance as he tried to sense the shaman’s actions. He ignored the screams as a Hawk section archer fell with a Goblin arrow in his chest, focusing his full attention on the problem at hand. It was obvious that his assault squad would not relieve him of the shaman, but that was just a complication to be dealt with.

  Whispering hoarsely, the Wizard executed a complex pattern of finger-gestures, sparks trailing from his digits. Clapping his hands together, he shouted a cryptic phase, and waited. In the Goblin command group, he knew, the temperature would be dropping rapidly with each passing second; what he waited for was the shaman’s response, to move or counter-spell. A smile danced across his face: a simple warming spell, centered on the shaman, countered his much more complex casting.

  “Too much reliance on spells,” he murmured to himself. “Fire to fire.” An abrupt gesture sent a brilliant puls
e of light leaping from his palm, flashing south. A fraction of a second later the pulsing sensation of the shaman’s wards winked out.

  The shaman dead or wounded too badly to cast spells, Axel turned his attention to the oncoming assault. The jugata were closing on the stake belt; through the gaps in their line he could see the reserve Serao moving south, away from the Ravenmist. Apparently the assault squad had gone into action and were accomplishing at least part of their mission.

  As the charging Goblins, now moving at a steady run, swept in to the stake belt Axel intoned a spell; the center of the Goblin line was engulfed in a brief, pounding wave of hailstones that battered and blinded, causing more than one Goblin to impale a foot or calf on a stake. On the right, a brief, swirling dust storm accomplished the same results as Helmuth employed one of their few remaining Storms of Disruption.

  Flames raced down the Human line as members of the Ravenmist lit torches from coals kept smoldering in shallow holes behind each warrior; the brands were tossed or driven into the ground a few feet in front of the Human line. Confusion erupted in the Spider forces as they entered the stake belt, with the surviving war dogs and spiders recoiling from the line of fire as a hail of hurled stones, javelins, and burning brands swept into their ranks. The jugata struggled forward, cursing caltrop wounds, barking shins on the stakes, and taking causalities from the Ravenmist’s last desperate missile fire.

  With a crash like two hogsheads filled with scrap metal slamming into each other, the two forces met. Archery, artillery, magic and defensive works had slowed and bloodied the Purple Spider force, but they had pressed on and now it would be the work of the infantry to hold. Hawk and Lighting sections took up arms and filled their gaps in the line as the Ravenmist shuddered from the impact of the Spider charge. With his four runners and Eclipse, whom he had ordered to his side just as the battle had joined, Axel hobbled to the center of the line and mounted a simple structure consisting of a ladder supported by two stout poles, an edifice that afforded him a (slightly) elevated view of the battle. At least he could see over the fighting line.