Swordmage

TWENTY-EIGHT

11 Tarsakh, the Year of the Ageless One

If Geran was any judge of the weather, the approaching day promised to be bright and cold. The skies were cloudless, but a cold wind gusted and moaned over the vale, making the meager handful of banners and pennants over Hulburg’s defenders ruffle and snap. He wished the wind would have chosen a different quarter for the battle to come. It was blowing in the faces of the hundreds of men and women waiting along the top of the dike, and it would hinder what little archery they’d scraped together for the fight. On the other hand, orcs don’t care for bright sunlight, Geran reminded himself. The disadvantages of weather seemed equal to both sides.

“When d’you think they’ll come at us, Geran?” Durnan Osting said quietly. The brewer and his company of Spearmeet volunteers lined the top of the dike to each side of Geran. Kara and Harmach Grigor had entrusted Geran with command of the right wing of their small army-two Spearmeet companies, a battered band of Shieldsworn, and a motley collection of mercenaries from Marstel, Sokol, and the Double Moon. He needed about three times as many men to properly defend the length of wall he had, but there simply weren’t any more to spare.

“Soon, Durnan,” Geran answered. “Before the sun comes up, I think, and that’s not far off now.”

The valley floor was a patchwork of gray shadows, growing brighter by the minute. On Geran’s end of the line, Lendon’s Dike climbed to meet the steep wall on the east side of the Winterspear vale. From Geran’s elevated vantage, he could see the torch-dotted line of the earthworks stretching across the valley floor to the inky shadow of Lake Hul, a mile and a half away under the western margin of the vale. The old dwarf Dunstormad Goldhead and Burkel Tresterfin’s Spearmeet company held the spot where the dike met the lake, strengthened by the Veruna mercenaries. In the center of the line, where the Vale Road pierced the old dike, the harmach’s banner fluttered. Kara and most of the Shieldsworn were there, along with the Icehammer mercenaries and the weaker Spearmeet companies. The heaviest blow would fall right in the middle of the line; Geran could see the dark, seething mass of the orc horde gathering only a few hundred yards from the dike.

The valley shook with orc shouts and chants. Dozens of massive drums thumped and battled with each other, and the clamor of spears striking shields was overwhelming. Geran looked at the militiamen around him; he saw faces gray with anxiety, knuckles white as they clenched their weapons close.

“Come on, lads!” he shouted to the men nearby. “Let’s make a little noise of our own. Show them that we’re still here!” He raised a piercing war cry, and the men nearby joined in. Within a few moments the cry spread up and down along the dike until hundreds of men were shouting together against the orc horde. The orcs were far louder, but Geran kept at it, and he heard the small echo of his warriors’ voices rolling back from the hills amid the orc clamor.

“A vain gesture,” Sarth muttered from close by, but a moment later the tiefling joined his voice to Geran’s and shouted defiance as well. Vain or not, Geran thought that the men around him looked a little less frightened. Perhaps they felt that way, too. He wished Hamil were at his back, but the halfling hadn’t been able to march; Geran had left him at the Troll and Tankard.

The orc chant reached a crescendo then broke apart into countless individual roars and cries. The front line of the Bloody Skull army surged forward and swept over the unplanted fields toward the dike-thousands of orc warriors, running headlong into battle with axes and spears high.

“Here they come!” Durnan Osting shouted. “Get ready for ’em, lads! They’ll no’ find a weak spot here!”

Geran drew his sword, weaving spells of ruin on his blade. The elven steel gleamed a deadly silver-blue in the gloaming, and he flicked the point from side to side to set the grip in his hand. He hadn’t expected the orcs to simply rush the entire line at once; it would have been more effective to concentrate a blow at a single point. Then again, the mass charge would keep him from sending help to any other point of the defenses as long as he was fighting to hold his own position. “Archers!” he shouted. “Fire at will!”

He had only a few dozen bowmen under his banner, so few that there was little point in trying to volley their fire. Most of the archers had no experience with the tactic, anyway-they weren’t even militiamen, just Hulburgans or foreign laborers who’d joined the effort to defend the town. Their arrows hissed out over the earthen rampart. Many missed, but as the orcs continued to close, Geran saw a few of the charging warriors stumble and fall.

“Sarth, save your spells for the moment,” Geran told the sorcerer. “I want your magic at the point of decision.”

“I understand,” Sarth answered.

Geran watched the dark tide rushing closer and seized the shoulder of a young Spearmeet lad next to him. “Get over to the far right, and tell whoever’s in charge of the Marstels and Sokols to bring all their men here, right now. We’re going to need them. Go swiftly!” The teenager nodded once and bolted off to the east, heading for the handful of mercenary fighters Geran had on that end of his line. Few of the orcs were heading toward the uphill side of the dike. Then he faced the oncoming horde and breathed a few words of warding, preparing for the fight to come.

The first of the Bloody Skulls reached the bottom of the dike. The old earthworks were not more than fifteen feet tall, but heavy brush and small trees grew thickly on the sloping mound; despite the ferocity of their charge, the orc warriors had a difficult time struggling through the thickets.

“Stay in ranks!” Geran shouted. “Let them come to you!”

A band of orc berserkers bulled their way up the embankment near Geran, and he hurried through the thickets to meet them when they crested the wall. He caught a thick-muscled orc axeman as he scrambled up the slope with a hand on the ground, and lunged down to bury his swordpoint in the orc’s neck. The apelike warrior bellowed, clapping his hand to the wound, and staggered up to swing at Geran. The swordmage danced back a few steps, avoiding the orc’s wild axe-swings until the dying warrior’s feet slid out from underneath him and he fell heavily to the ground. Geran found more orcs swarming up the slope all around him, and for a hundred furious heartbeats he slashed and stabbed, charged and retreated, wielding his blade of elf-wrought steel in a blinding blur of searing blue-white radiance.

“For Hulburg! For the harmach!” Geran shouted.

All around him Hulburgans set their spears in a deadly fence atop the dike and took a heavy toll on the orcs who recklessly attacked into the teeth of their defenses. They died too, overwhelmed by the sheer strength and fury of the orc assault. Near Geran’s banner Durnan Osting killed three orcs with a two-handed warhammer before several more swarmed over him and hacked him to pieces with their war axes. More Spearmeet men fell there, cut down as the Bloody Skulls scrambled up the suddenly undefended slope. But then the sorcerer Sarth stepped forward and sealed the breach with a devastating blast of fire from his fearsome rod, burning down most of the berserkers. “To the banner!” the tiefling cried. He held off the orc assault until the mercenaries Geran had summoned from the unengaged end of his line showed up and filled in to take the place of Durnan Osting and the other fallen Spearmeet there.

A shriek from overhead wrenched Geran’s attention from the roaring line of orcs trying to overwhelm the dike. He looked up and saw a huge bat-winged shape swoop low over the line of defenders. It seized a man in its talons and started to beat its way back into the air. Its tail whipped around to sink a long, wicked stinger into the back of another man fighting nearby as the monster flapped away from the dike. The stung man arched in agony and sank to the ground, and the monster dropped its first victim among the seething ranks of orcs pressing close to climb the dike.

“A wyvern too?” Geran muttered aloud. They hardly needed any more trouble. He hurried after the flying monster, trying to guess where it would swoop next.

Sarth conjured a bolt of lightning and blasted half a dozen orcs from the top of the embankment. The brilliant flash of light and deafening thunderclap caught the wyvern’s attention. It wheeled in midair and fixed its eyes on the sorcerer. The reptilian monster plummeted down at Sarth from directly overhead, deadly sting whipping from side to side behind it.

“Sarth!” Geran shouted, but the sorcerer did not hear him; he was already snarling another spell at more Bloody Skulls surging up the dike. Geran realized in an instant that even if he caught the sorcerer’s attention, the wyvern would still be upon him too quickly to dodge or avoid. There was no time to reach him; Geran seized the flowering symbols of a spell held in his mind and hurled his will behind the arcane words. “Sierollanie dir mellar!” he cried, and in a dizzying eyeblink he stood where Sarth had been standing, while the sorcerer stood where he’d been. Sarth reeled and floundered on the slope, but Geran paid him no mind-he was already looking up at the wyvern hurling down at him. He shouted out a word of shielding, and then the monster was upon him. He slashed it once across its snout, leaped aside and blocked the deadly stinger with his shielding spell, and spun around to rake his blade across its wing as it hurtled past him. The wyvern screeched once in rage and tried to beat for altitude again, but it was too fast and too low. Its damaged wing buckled and the monster cartwheeled across the embankment. For a moment it lay still, tangled up in the brush, but then it shook itself and clambered to its clawed feet, glaring at Geran with pure hate.

“I think I just made it angry,” Geran muttered.

He put his point between the wyvern and himself and dropped into a fighting crouch, holding his shielding spell firmly in his left hand. The monster charged at him with the speed of a striking snake, far faster than Geran would have imagined. He managed to parry the sting once, then twice, but then the wyvern got its jaws clamped around his right leg and worried him like dog. It whipped him from side to side and then flung him away; Geran’s sword flew from his hand, and he hit the ground hard enough that his vision went black for an instant. When he could see again, the wyvern was darting toward him, yellow fangs gleaming. He started to climb to his feet, only to find that the world swayed drunkenly when he tried to sit up.

The wyvern hissed and sprang at him-but a coruscating green ray struck it in mid-leap and knocked it aside. An instant later Sarth appeared by Geran’s side and shouted another of his spells. A barrage of shrieking purple darts shot from his scepter and pinioned the wyvern to the ground; the monster snapped and snarled at the phantasmal javelins transfixing it, then shuddered and fell still.

“Are you all right?” the tiefling said.

“I think so,” Geran answered him. Sarth reached down and helped him to his feet; the swordmage staggered over to his sword and picked it up. “I hope there aren’t any more of those around.”

The tiefling scanned the skies anxiously. “Thank you, Geran Hulmaster. I did not see the monster’s dive. But next time, I’ll ask you to give me a moment’s warning before you teleport me.”

Geran looked around, trying to get a sense of the battle. He could see several places where the orcs had overwhelmed the dike, and scores of the ferocious warriors fought to widen the breaches and push on past the weakened defenses. Human riders did their best to counter the breaches, as did haphazard bands of the volunteers who had shown up to fight. With lance and bow they held back the black tide, but they were failing fast. “Gods, what chaos!”

“It seems the issue is still in doubt,” Sarth replied-an understatement if Geran had ever heard one.

Geran spied a large breach less than a hundred yards away. Orcs were fighting their way east and west along the top of the dike, rolling up the defenders still trying to hold back the rest of the attack. “There,” he said, pointing. “Try to do something about that, and I’ll see what I can do here.”

The tiefling nodded grimly and leaped into the sky. In a moment he hovered over the orc breakthrough, hurling blasts of fire down on the Bloody Skull warriors. Geran started to rejoin the fray, but a rider came galloping up from behind Lendon’s Dike.

“Lord Geran! Lord Geran!” the messenger called. “Lady Kara says to bring any troops you can spare and come to the center at once! She needs help there.”

“Spare? I can’t spare any!” Geran replied.

The rider was a young Shieldsworn, bloodied and disheveled, and he simply stared at Geran in confusion. The swordmage grimaced and glanced around at his part of the field. Kara wouldn’t have asked for help unless she needed it, he told himself. She knew how many soldiers he had on his part of the line. He held up his hand and said to the messenger, “No, wait. I’ll bring as many as I can.”

The swordmage climbed back up to the top of the dike and found the young soldier carrying his banner. “Shieldsworn, to me!” he shouted. “Marstel, Double Moon, to me! Assemble on the south side of the dike! Spearmeet, House Sokol, stand your ground!”

All along the earthen wall, soldiers of Hulburg began to disengage, backing down the dike while the miltiamen on either side spread out to try to cover their absence. It left Geran’s line woefully thin-another concerted attack would certainly punch through. But Geran realized that his hodgepodge force had largely repulsed the first rush of the Bloody Skulls. The dawn was a thin orange sliver clinging to the hilltops of eastern Highfells; sunrise could not be far off now. By the growing light he could see that the embankment was littered with dead or wounded orcs, and that many of the ironclad warriors of the Bloody Skull horde were shifting across his front, flowing toward the middle of the fight.

Geran looked around and found Brun Osting, the son of Durnan, standing by the tattered flag of his Spearmeet company. He hurried over to the young brewer and clapped a hand on his shoulder. “I’ve got to go help in the center,” he told him. “I’m leaving you in charge here. You Spearmeet have to hold this end of the line on your own. I’ll leave you the Sokols to help, and the sorcerer Sarth there. Can you do it?”

The young man nodded soberly. “We don’t have much choice, do we? We’ll hold the line or die where we stand, Lord Geran.”

“Good fortune,” Geran said. He squeezed the young man’s shoulder, and then hurried down the back of the dike to the spot where his small company was assembling. It was a little less than a hundred strong, and he wondered if it would be enough to make a difference in the heavy fighting in the middle. He took a moment to speak with the Sokol captain-a fierce-looking Turmishan woman whose detachment was down to a dozen riders-and point out Brun to her. Whether she’d follow the brewer’s orders, he had no idea, but at least she hadn’t ridden away from the battle yet.

“Where to, Lord Geran?” one of the Shieldsworn footmen called from the ranks.

“The Vale Road!” Geran called back. “They need us in the center, lads. Let’s go lend them a hand. Follow me!”

He set out at an easy jog, holding back his pace so that the soldiers in their heavier armor could keep up. It helped that they were moving downhill and had only five or six hundred yards to travel. Sporadic fighting continued atop the dike a short distance to Geran’s right, but he passed no more major breaches. In a few moments they came in sight of the furious melee swirling around the spot where the Vale Road pierced the embankment. Hundreds of orcs thronged the gap, pushing inward against a thinning line of Icehammers and Shieldsworn.

Geran looked around for Kara’s banner or the harmach, and saw nothing but pitched battle. He would’ve liked to know where she wanted his small strike to fall, but one glance was enough to show him that he couldn’t wait. Strange, he thought. For all the years I’ve lived with a sword in my hand, I’ve never fought in a real battle, only duels and skirmishes-nothing more than twenty or thirty warriors on a side. After traveling for ten years all over Faerun, I find the biggest battle of my life not three miles from the castle where I was born.

The men behind him said nothing, staring at the scene in nervous silence. Geran shook himself free of his weary musings and tried to think quickly and well about what he could see in front of him. He had little gift for strategy, so he tried to see the battle as a duel of sorts. The orc spearhead had pushed deep into the center like a reckless and powerful lunge at the center of an opponent’s torso; if someone came at him with an attack like that, what would he do? “I wouldn’t try to stop it,” he murmured to himself. “I’d deflect the point, let it go past me, and then strike at my foe’s hand.” That suggested a strike not at the tip of the spear, but back a little farther. Geran looked back toward the gap in the embankment and saw that a few Hulburgan soldiers still fought along the dike to each side of the breach. If he moved along the inside of the dike and hit the orcs on their flank, perhaps he’d succeed in knocking their thrust aside.

He drew his sword and signaled to the men following him. “After me, lads!” he cried. “We’re going to cut them off and trap them inside our lines!” Then Geran shouted a battle cry and ran ahead of his hodgepodge company, leading them under the cover of the old dike. He heard a ragged chorus of roars and cries behind him. Both orcs and human soldiers looked around in his direction, but Geran didn’t slow his steps. Instead he cried out the words of a spell to set his sword aflame with a brilliant white light, and he hurled himself into the torrent of orc warriors pushing their way through the low defile. He cut his way through three or four Bloody Skulls before they even realized their danger, and then the mass of the Shieldsworn and mercenaries behind him drove into the orcs with an audible shock that seemed to shiver the icy morning air.

Geran cut and stabbed with every ounce of skill and lethal purpose he could dredge up, from his boyhood exercises to the long years of study with Myth Drannor’s fabled bladesingers. He threw spells where he could, searing his foes with bursts of golden fire, dazzling and disorienting them with deadly enchantments that stupefied thick-thewed berserkers until elven steel drove through flesh and bone. And his small, battered company fought like lions in the narrow gap of the Vale Road. They carried the open breach with the force of their charge. Geran looked up to see Kara dashing through the melee on her fine white charger, plying her deadly bow at a full gallop. She shot down an orc that he was about to engage, and felled another one who was trying to beat his way through a Shieldsworn’s guard not ten feet away. “For harmach and Hulburg!” she shouted.

The swordmage whirled where he stood, searching for more foes to engage. To his amazement he realized that the Bloody Skulls who’d forced their way through the gap in the dike had melted away. Dozens of duels and skirmishes continued around him, but the first great thrust was spent-the warriors of Hulburg had held the Vale Road, at least for the moment.

“They’re falling back,” Geran called to his cousin.

“Not for long,” Kara answered. She pointed toward the north, out to the fields beyond the dike. Geran followed the point of her sword, and his heart sank. A few hundred yards away, around the great black banners at the center of the Bloody Skull horde, hundreds of orc warriors stamped and shouted and struck their spears to their shields. An armored wedge of lumbering ogres stood at their head, bellowing their crude challenges. Kara’s eyes glowed with their uncanny blue fire, smoldering in the shadows of her helm. “That was only the first attack. The next one’s gathering already.”

Geran shook the blood off his blade and turned to face the ogres and orcs streaming back into the fight. He readied himself to sell his life as dearly as he could-and then a thin, cold breath of wind suddenly stirred the ground around him, turning the wet grass white with hoarfrost. Sinister voices whispered dark things on the wind, and a sense of icy dread clutched at his heart like a murderer’s hand. He shivered and faltered back several steps. The rosy glow of sunrise faded to dull gray, and streamers of pale fog seemed to coalesce from the very air, darkening the dawn. Stout-hearted dwarves groaned in fear and hid their faces, while men who had fought valiantly for hours let their futile blades slip from nerveless fingers. Even the bloodthirsty orcs pouring across the fields slowed and stopped, halting well short of the sinister fog.

A dull scraping caught his attention, and Geran looked down at the black earth under his feet. Dirt buckled upward, stirred from beneath. Then a skeletal hand thrust up into the chill, deadly mists of the morning. He backed away from it, only to find another bony hand clutching at his heels. He kicked his foot free with a sudden burst of panic. Scores of the things-dirt-encrusted skeletons still draped in the rusted remnants of ancient armor-were dragging themselves up out of the ground.

“What foul necromancy is this?” Kara snarled into the freezing fog. Her horse Dancer shied away in panic, her eyes rolling. The ranger threw a panicked look in Geran’s direction. “We can’t fight the undead and the orcs at the same time!”

“This is Sergen’s doing!” Geran snarled. The rogue Hulmaster’s undead allies had failed to kill the harmach at Griffonwatch, so now he was trying again… and that meant that his cousin had to be somewhere near, since Aesperus had said that the wielder of the amulet could not send the lich’s minions far. Geran wondered if Sergen’s House Veruna allies were making their move as well. Doubtless Sergen would order the undead to spare the Verunas, but the rest of the Hulburgan army was in dire peril. “Stand your ground as long as you can, and protect the harmach!” he called to Kara. “I have to find Sergen before the dead overwhelm us all!”

Turning his back on the skeletal ranks assembling themselves before the defenders of Hulburg, Geran sheathed his blade and ran into the frigid mists.