DW02 Dragon War (23 page)

Finally George saw a short line of men dressed in colorful robes make their way toward the front of the enemy’s ranks. No doubt about it, George thought, them there is wizards.

“Runner!” he cried. “Alert the mages. Alert all units. Stand by for magical attack.”

George continued to scan the enemy front. Slowly one figure came to dominate the foreground. George squinted—it was Valdaimon!

“Runner!” he called again. Another youth sprinted to his side. “Go fetch those priests up here, and make them come double time,” George ordered.

The order was delivered none too soon. Shortly after Valdaimon’s appearance, the sky grew overcast, blotting out the brilliant morning sun. Then a vast mist began to form in front of the Heilesheim ranks, seeping out of the ground and rising slowly higher and higher, until at length it blotted out all view of the enemy forces. This mist began to roll slowly forward toward the center of the Alliance troops.

“Steady now, lads,” George called. He moved himself laterally to the gap between his left and center blocks. With relief he saw the colorfully robed figures of priests hastening to the front, the robes whipping in the light wind that had come up, the various symbols of their gods in their hands.

“‘Ere! Ere! Form a line ‘ere!” George directed.

The priests seemed to keep their own counsel, ignoring George but nonetheless doing as he said, placing themselves in a line squarely in front of the advancing wall of fog.

The wall was less than a hundred yards away when the forms began to emerge from it.

Wails of despair went up from the front ranks of the Alliance infantry whose vision was not blocked by the priests. Prayers to a dozen gods soared upward as the hideous hodgepodge of undead began to slowly advance. The wights were the first to appear, bestial, stooped, brutish things, whose mere touch could freeze flesh and whose bite was fatal to the soul as well as the body. Behind them lumbered a host of zombies, and overhead a few bats began to soar—the more mobile form of the few vampires Valdaimon had seen fit to summon.

George grabbed a horse from a runner, sprang up on its back, and galloped along the front of the infantry line.

“Hold firm boys! The priests will get them!” he cried. “The priests will get them!”

Soon the chant of “The priests will get them!” arose along the Alliance front, and the priests slowly advanced, more than a hundred holy symbols held aloft, their deep voices chanting prayers to their gods and commands to the undead to return from whence they had come in the name of all that was holy.

The exorcisms had great effect. Of the three hundred zombies who had stumbled from the mist, all but a handful fled stumbling backward. About a dozen of the wights were strong enough to continue their advances, only to be hacked to pieces by priests armed with silver swords and spears for just such purposes. The few vampires, being intelligent creatures, were hardly affected by the priests’ chanting, although they were discomfited, and thus chose not to launch themselves at hordes of increasingly excited, angry humans armed with wooden poles topped with iron and steel points. The undead attack evaporated more quickly than it had begun.

The sun peeped out from behind the clouds, which had rapidly began to dissipate, and soon the wall of mist was evaporating as well. George reined in his horse in front of his central infantry. As the fog lifted, he began to see the enemy front more clearly—which was now not more than 200 yards away!

The wily Culdus had chosen to launch his attack behind the cover of the undead and the wall of fog!

“Priests to the rear, priests to the rear!” George cried, galloping once more along the front line. “Infantry, prepare to receive charge! Prepare to receive!”

Unit commanders repeated the vital order, and the green peasant infantry of the Holy Alliance prepared to do the one thing they had been taught to do well. The front three ranks of the pike lines knelt, their long pikes extended forward at a low angle, making a hideous front for a mass of men or horses to break. Their comrades in the fourth and fifth ranks raised their pikes to shoulder height and held them extended frontally, adding to the death trap for any frontal assault.

But the Heilesheim pikemen were also well trained, and even their green men were a match for the Alliance troops. Pikes shouldered, they advanced to within sixty yards, where they paused, and then, the order given, advanced forward at the double-time step, their own pikes leveled. Those in front carried their deadly spears in both hands at waist height; those in the rear at shoulder height. At twenty yards the massed formation broke into a full run, and second later the impact occurred.

Hideous screams arose from the field as men in the front ranks on both sides were impaled in the mesh of pike points. Neither mass yielded; the Alliance troops held, and those in the rear ranks began stepping forward to fill in for their fallen comrades. In the front-most ranks the few that had survived dropped their pikes, often made useless by the burden of an impaled body, and began the brutal hand-to-hand slaughter with swords and daggers.

George galloped down the gap between his center and right units. “Bowmen to the front and fire at the enemy,” he ordered.

The sturdy northerners moved forward on the run in the gap between the units, the first to arrive near the front, pausing to send a lethal volley of missiles into the few Heilesheim men who, trying to exploit the gaps, had moved inward toward the flanks of the Alliance block formations.

George galloped on toward the rear. He had to find a vantage point where he would see what was happening. How fast, he wondered, were the flanking forces coming? In seconds they would come crashing in on both flanks, and the battle would be lost.

Volley after volley of arrows poured forth from the archers as they whittled away the front ranks of the attacking Heilesheimers. But on the flanks, the archery was not enough.

George reached a very slight rise, just in front of his first line of cavalry, where the kings of Parona and Argolia sat watching with dismay as full legions of Heilesheim troops began to maneuver on the Alliance flanks.

Then the winds hit. At first it was just a roaring sound, like the howl of a tornado in the distance, but it grew louder and louder—though from whence it came no one could tell, for the mighty gusts blew in both directions across the field, along the length of the engaged fighting lines. A few seconds more, and the first men began to tumble over, unable to keep their footing.

George looked up to the sky, and terror struck his heart. For there, high above, coming one from the far right and one from the far left, were two seemingly tiny, winged creatures who were the source of this awesome wind. In his heart of hearts, George knew at once.

Dragons.

“By all the gods,” George shouted to the kings. “Look! ‘E’s brought us dragons!”

All along the front, pandemonium broke out. Men began to scream in terror. Many fell to earth, hugging it, weeping with fear. Others tried to run, but the winds kept knocking them about so that they flew across the field like tumbleweeds in a storm.

George kicked the flanks of his horse and rode forward full tilt, struggling to keep his body on the steed as the winds continued to increase.

“It’s fire from ‘eaven, boys! Fire from ‘eaven! And it’s on our side. It’s on our side!” he shouted, again and again, stopping now and then to scream his message into the ear of an officer, who could pass it along.

The fire came down.

Bagsby’s mount swooped low over the field, heading straight toward the two legions that moments before had been about to embrace the Alliance only fifty yards away. Scratch opened his mighty jaws, and the greatest stream of flame the dragon had yet breathed came forth in an enormous, streaming gout—rolling and licking down the line of the Heilesheim pike blocks, incinerating everything in its path, spreading with the speed of lightning until, in a matter of seconds, the flames fanned by the intense winds had burned through the entire force of ten thousand men.

The Heilesheimers screamed in fear and panic, then they became silent as the flames sucked the very air from their seared lungs. Bodies burst into flames, and the stench of charred flesh, whipped by the winds, rose from the field and made its way toward the rear ranks of both armies where horses, spooked by the scent, began to bolt in panic.

On the Alliance right, Lifefire and Shulana dealt similar treatment to the enemy, until the two great dragons passed one another at a height of a mere fifty feet above the field.

Bagsby screamed into the din, with no hope of being heard, “The day is ours! The day is ours!”

“Valdaimon, you must do something! Do something!” Ruprecht cried in panic and rage as he saw the magnificent, fire-breathing beasts consume his legions.

“Retreat!” Culdus ordered curtly, waving back the cavalry.

“No!” Ruprecht screamed. “No! Wizard, kill those dragons! I know you have the power! Use it!”

Valdaimon stood silent, gazing in undisguised awe at the spectacle of the fiery field and soaring, red-hued beasts of whom he had, for countless centuries of his undead existence, only dreamed. They were, he thought, magnificent. They were beyond his wildest expectations. They were the secret of the Treasure of Parona, the fire from heaven, the source of limitless power. They were everything for which he had schemed and dreamed for centuries. It was only a matter of chance circumstance that they were, at the moment, arrayed against him. He could change that—he could make a plan ...

“Kill them!” Ruprecht screamed at the old mage.

“Kill them?” Valdaimon shouted back. “You stupid upstart pup! I will not kill them! They shall be mine! They must be mine!”

“How in ten thousand hells can those ever be yours?” Ruprecht cried.

“Make peace!” the wizard screamed back. “Make peace! We shall win them over yet!”

An explosion of brilliant light suddenly illuminated Valdaimon and his king, and from that light—teleported instantly from the Great Temple of Wojan in Hamblen—Sigurt the high priest stepped forth.

“Valdaimon!” the high priest called. “You have broken your oath to the God of War. Your healing is revoked.”

“No!” Valdaimon screamed, his single, extended syllable becoming unintelligible as the wizard’s arm withered and his face appeared to melt before the horrified eyes of the king.

“Ruuuuppp ...” Valdaimon called. “Oooomuss em meee ...”

“Now, evil one, learn the price of disobedience to the gods,” Sigurt continued in a loud monotone. “Valdaimon of Heilesheim, in the name of Wojan, I command you ...”

A horrible wail arose from the stinking disfigured form as Sigurt’s hand reached forth to touch Valdaimon lightly on what was once his shoulder.

“Live!” Sigurt said.

Ruprecht watched in horror as the body of Valdaimon crumbled to dust before his eyes, to be scattered by the great wind still sweeping from the field, where Scratch and Lifefire, Bagsby and Shulana were finishing the destruction of the army of Heilesheim.

Far from the continuing din of battle, on the field where the astonished Alliance troops consolidated their victory and their knights were at last unleashed to pursue the panicked, routing cavalry of Heilesheim, Bagsby stood by Scratch’s side and watched Shulana slide down from Lifefire’s back.

“I thank you, friends,” Bagsby said. “I assure you, I will see that the peace I promised you is yours.”

“As for the rest of your promise...” Lifefire began.

“It will be kept,” replied the voice of Elrond.

Shulana whirled to see the old elf—the leader of the Elven Council, her blood kinsman, the oldest of his kind—slowly walking toward Scratch.

“I hear you are called Scratch,” Elrond said, “and you are Lifefire.”

“True, elf,” Scratch grumbled.

Shulana ran forward, throwing her arms around Elrond.

“You can’t,” she said.

“It will be all right,” Bagsby said lightly. “Tell me, Scratch, who was it that the elf killed? You know, the Ancient One she’s called, but what was her real name? Bet you don’t even know it!”

Scratch bellowed in anger, a word unintelligible to human ears. “There, you see, I do know it,” the dragon roared.

“Thank you, Scratch,” Bagsby said. “Now that we know the name, we can lift the curse she placed on the elves, proclaiming their destruction.”

“Enough!” Lifefire bellowed, her voice for once even deeper than that of Scratch, and the volume so great that Bagsby and Elrond were thrown to the ground by the blast. “Scratch, be silent! The old ways will no longer do. We have a race to create—we need peace,” Lifefire said.

The dragon turned her huge neck and lowered her head over Elrond’s prone body. The old elf looked up into the dragon’s eyes.

“Tell me, elf,” Lifefire demanded, “how are you called?”

“My name,” Elrond said, revealing his true name in the magical language of elves, “is Lelolan.”

“Then, Lelolan, let there be peace between your kind and mine.”

“Yeah,” Bagsby said with a weary sigh. “But what peace will there be between us humans once we get this mess cleaned up?”

“Perhaps,” Shulana suggested, “you can come up with some mad scheme that will help. You’re usually pretty successful with those ...”

“Sometimes,” Bagsby said, smiling. “Sometimes.”

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