Summa Elvetica: A Casuistry of the Elvish Controversy and Other Stories (49 page)

Somehow, I made it to the rope without any of them actually drawing blood, although I was still seeing stars from being flattened by the one behemoth. I ran my fingers over the stone to make sure it was facing the right way, then I slapped it down and ran for my life toward what I hoped was the north.

Most of the torches was well off to my right, so I thought I was nearly home free. Then, without so much as a hint of warning, someone struck a flint, and a torch flared into life not ten paces to my left.

I don’t know who was more surprised, me or the orc holding the torch, but I barely broke my stride as I angled away from him and his two fellows, desperately seeking to lose myself again in the darkness. They was too busy shouting and howling that they’d seen me to break into full pursuit right away, but with my night vision ruined by the sudden burst of light, I tripped over an unseen branch and smashed my left kneecap into stone.

“Sainted Mother!” I grimaced and forced myself to my feet right away, even though the pain was enough to make me see red. I kept running, but in a weird sort of half-run, half-hop that wasn’t going to get me away from the torches that was rapidly coming in my direction, accompanied by the shouts and cries of the closest pursuers. I tried not to curse my fate. After all, without the elf spells we was probably all dead anyhow, but I wasn’t feeling all that inclined to be noble, not with my head ringing, my knee feeling like it was broken, and a score of orcs on my arse.

I could hear their footfalls closing in on me now, so I gave up. I couldn’t run much farther anyhow, and at least I could take one or two of the bloody breeds with me. I crouched low, putting my free hand forward, thinking that if I could stab the one with the torch quickly enough, maybe I could grab it, throw it in the face of the other two, and break free again.

But they wasn’t stupid enough for that. The one with the torch hung back, and the other two spread out to flank me, making sure I wouldn’t have nowhere to run.

Then the one with the torch screamed for no reason I could see and leaped away from me as if he’d seen the devil, flailing wildly with his torch. At the same time, the orc to my right dropped to the ground like a stone.

Night turned into day. Without warning, within the blink of an eye, it was as if midnight magically exchanged itself with high noon. I could see everything stretching out before me: the orcs running toward me, scores of boars going berserk and pulling at their chains, a troop of gobbo infantry marching out from the camp in the direction of the pen, even the fallen orc lying on the ground with an arrow through his eye.

A heat wave struck me, and the ground trembled beneath my feet. There was the roar of a thousand devils cursing Heaven, followed by a thunderclap that knocked me from my feet. The elven spell!

Too awestruck to move, I watched a huge column of flame rising from the bowels of the earth, surging up as if from the depths of Hell itself and climbing toward the moons to devour them. How high did it rise? I couldn’t say, but it was the most awesome and terrible thing I had ever seen.

The screaming started.

The boars squealed frantically in agony and terror as the hellfire burned their flesh from their bones. The orcs was crying out in fear and terror, shrieking in their barbaric tongue as if the great circle of flames that towered over us all was one of their pagan gods.

I pushed myself slowly, painfully, to my feet. The two orcs near me was still on their hands and knees. The one with the burning torch was staring at me wide-eyed and gabbling away nonsensically as if he was praying. They didn’t look like they had any intention of attacking me, which was a dirty good thing because I don’t think I could have defended myself against even an unarmed, week-old goblin.

“Just leave me the hell alone,” I said wearily, waving my knife in the direction of the silent one. I swear, it turned almost yellow, threw its arms in front of its head, and cringed. That’s when it hit me. Exhausted and sore and scared as I was, standing there alone, staring at a whole army of orcs under that vast tower of roaring fire, I nearly started laughing. The poor bastards thought I did it! They must have thought I was the most fearsome bloody wizard L’Académie had ever produced, to call up fire on a scale like that!

“Go,” I shouted at them, waving them away as I wiped my dagger on my pantalons. “Get on out of here!”

They may not have understood the words, but they understood the meaning all right. They ran. They ran, and I laughed. I watched the world burn. I listened to the orcs shrieking and screaming and shouting, and it was like music to my ears. I laughed and laughed. I didn’t even understand what was so funny. I just knew that if I didn’t laugh, I was going to go mad from the fear, and the shock, and the horror of it all.

That was when that godforsaken bird hit me from behind, and the ground abruptly vanished from beneath my feet.

• • •

I missed the first part of the battle the next morning. The Company was in reserve, so the capitaine let me and Shady sleep in. One of the wounded men serving as a runner told us the goblins had already come at us twice and been thrown back both times by the elven infantry. I was a little surprised to hear the elves was still around. Me and the she-elf had barbecued our pigs, but something went wrong on Shady’s side, and the spell never triggered. I guess the king figured we’d thinned them down enough to keep them from breaking our lines, or maybe he never planned to run away in the first place. Wasn’t the first time the scuttlebutt had it wrong.

“You sure you put the stones face-down?” I asked Shady as we was walking toward the position the Company had taken up. They was in the middle, waiting to relieve some elf prince or another, about fifty paces behind the two ranks of elves waiting for the third goblin wave. Two bells before noon, it was a cool, clear day, which made it easy to see the four warhawks keeping a watchful eye on the enemy lines overhead. All in all, not a bad day for battle.

“Yeah, carved side down, just like they said.”

“And equal distant?”

“I can count to five, Sarge.”

“Then what happened?”

“I don’t know. I slipped in, the guards didn’t notice, I placed the stones, I went back to the rendezvous and met the elven raider there. No trouble at all. But the spell didn’t work. I don’t know, maybe he did something wrong. All I know is that mage what gave us the stones was chewing him a new one when we got back. What about you, how’d you go?”

“Oh, the same,” I lied. “In and out, just like you said. Except the stones went off.”

“Yep,” Shady agreed. “That was a sight. They probably saw them going off back in Fleurance.”

“You’re walking funny, Sarge,” the Bastard observed as we reached the Company. Most of the men were sitting in the formations they'd be standing in later. The Bastard was in charge of the Company's makeshift armory, and it was his job to ensure that everyone had a sword and a shield before forming up. Me and Shady was the only ones not good to go yet, but there was still dozens of shields on the ground. Each unclaimed one represented a casualty who wouldn’t take the field today. “I heard that elf wench took you up. She like it rough?”

“Yeah, but she said she was thinking about you while we was doing it.”

“Did she now?” The Bastard was reliable enough in a fight, but there was a reason he was still a ranker after six years with the Company. He was big, though more fat than muscle, and when he grinned you could see he was missing teeth on the left side where he'd taken a punch from a mailed fist three years ago.

“Sure she did,” I assured him, picking up a shield, a solid oak one with good iron rim on it. It had a deep gouge on one side, but the wood wasn’t cracked. It would do.

“She’s a damn elf,” Shady snarled as he searched for his favorite shield, a small, battered buckler with the Company’s symbol painted in blue instead of the usual red. “Sooner cut your bloody todger off and feed it to her bird than stick it anywhere useful.” Shady didn’t like failing much, not even when it wasn’t his fault.

“Bird that big eats bigger worms than the Bastard got,” Baldo Bigarse said gravely as he came wandering over from his men positioned in the center, looking disturbingly like a sausage on the fire about to burst its skin in his too-small leather jerkin. His face was even red. “Good to see you, Sarge, Shady. Heard you burned us some pigs. Hey, Bastard, when you giving out the pigstickers?”

“When the capitaine says.”

Baldo grunted. He was one of the Company’s three caporals, and he was always dour before the fighting started. The pigstickers, oversized spears twice the height of a man and as thick as a man’s arm, was stacked neatly in long pyramids. The capitaine had set the men to making them as soon as he heard we might be facing warboars. They was heavy and unwieldy but would be our best defense against Ulgor’s cavalry if he chose to risk the one hundred and fifty or so warboars left to him.

“Sergent, Shadow, so pleased you elected to join us before we took the dance floor.” In contrast to Bigarse, the capitaine was in high spirits this morning.

It’s amazing what renewed hope will do for a man’s attitude. Not that Capitaine Donnier was ever down in the dumps, but he’d been uncharacteristically grim ever since hearing about the warboars. Knowing that half of the orc's cavalry was charbroiled by elven fire seemed to have cheered him up considerably.

“What’s the plan, Capitaine?”

“I see you found your sword.” He nodded approvingly then pointed in front of where the elves was positioned. “That’s the weak spot. The ditch there is only half the depth it is elsewhere on the line. And, since you probably didn’t notice, we haven’t any artillery directly covering the approach. They know it by now, so unless the orc is dumber than we imagine him to be, that’s where he’ll try to break through. When we hear four horns, we’ll relieve the elves. The understanding being that we’ll take our place on the line when Ulgor finally sends in his boars, or when Lord Ysfaliss there, the elf in the red armor with the ribbons on his helm, requests relief.”

I nodded, mentally noting the elf lord. He was easy to spot, what with being half a head taller than most of the other elves and wearing glass armor that looked as if it was carved from a giant garnet. Neither me nor the capitaine had a lot of experience fighting mixed breeds before this contract, but the elves did, and we'd learned in the pass that they liked to send in wave after wave of goblins, trying to wear down the enemy before sending in their heavy troops. Ulgor appeared to be sticking to conventional tactics today, which suited us in the Company just fine. We was happy to sit and watch the elves instead of standing and bleeding ourselves. Two horns sounded, indicating one of the sky riders had seen a third wave on its way toward us. There was a moment of abrupt silence as everyone, man and elf, listened attentively. Then the two horns was followed by a single one, and all of us in the Company relaxed. Goblins. Not our problem.

I wondered how long that was going to be true, as the gobbos marched toward us, drums booming out the step and thousands of unshod goblin feet kicking up a cloud of dust that obscured their numbers. They was in at least twelve ranks, with a front as wide as the entire elven line, and it didn’t seem possible that for all their skill with their swords, the lightly armored forest elves would be able to withstand the sheer weight of numbers being pressed against their flimsy two-rank line. But the capitaine and everyone else seemed entirely unconcerned. No order to form up was given, and most of the men wasn’t even bothering to watch the bloodshed that was about to take place.

Soon I began to understand their disinterest. The Silverbows and the other archers loosed just when the goblins was close enough to begin their final charge. Nearly every shaft struck home, and I saw one goblin sergent hit by three, one in each eye and the third through his mouth, just as he opened it to shout out orders. At such close range, the elven longbows did not miss.

We could hear the relentless thwang-thwang-thwang of the bowstrings snapping, punctuated by goblin shrieks as one after another at the front of the line dropped. But there was way too many of them for the archers to drive them back, and when a wailing, high-pitched horn sounded, the mass of little breeds howled and sprinted toward the thin elven line between us and them.

“Did the king pack up his machines or something?”

The capitaine shook his head. “No, he’s saving them for when the orc finally commits to the real attack.”

“What about the warhawks?”

“It would surprise me if Ulgor didn't have a shaman or two hidden in the goblin rear.”

I nodded. Ulgor would happily trade an entire goblin wave for the chance to take out a warhawk, let alone an elf mage riding one. If a mage was close enough to rain fire and lightning down at the enemy, then he was close enough to have it thrown right back in his face. I knew from the pass how nasty those orc shamans and their devil magic could be. If I was the elf king, I wouldn't risk my sky riders just to kill a few goblins neither.

A thought struck me. I looked around and saw no sign that the enemy was using the machines that had driven us down out of the pass.

“He didn’t bring down his catapults?”

“I’ve never heard that patience was a virtue among orcs. According to the elf king’s eyes in the sky, they left them on the other side of the mountain.”

I nodded. That was a break. But still I couldn’t understand why the capitaine was leaving the men at their ease in the middle of the bloody battle.

“Shouldn’t we at least form up, sir, in case they break through? This ain’t like the pass. The elves ain’t got no depth here.”

“Just wait and see, Sergent. This assault is smaller than the previous two. It may even be the last. More likely, we’ll see one, maybe two more after this, then Ulgor will have to make up his mind about whether he’s going to throw the bones or not.”

He sounded pretty confident, so I shrugged and turned back to watch the battle.

The gobbos had almost nothing in the way of armor. Most of them was bare-chested, and some wore nothing more than a wrap of filthy skins covering their todgers. They marched under banners that was as threadbare as their clothing. The front ranks was carrying what was supposed to be spears but was actually thin wooden poles shaved to a point. Not something you wanted up your arse or in your eye, mind you, but it wasn’t no Amorran steel neither. The ranks following was mostly carrying crude clubs, although a few was armed with small blades. The clubs was more dangerous, especially the studded ones. I knew from the battles in the pass that the metal in their knives would barely punch through leather, and it would shatter when striking an iron shield or breastplate.