massive screws set under the muzzles. The hill dwarves cranked the simple machines, and the barrels were raised almost imperceptibly.
Even as the aim was being adjusted, other gunners swarmed over the wagons, swabbing out the barrels and loading in new casks of powder. Six of the burliest dwarves acted as the ball handlers, and each of these now lifted his heavy missile over his head and dropped it into the gaping black mouth of the bombard.
“All right,” Dram said with relish. “Let’s try this again.”
CHAPTER TWENTY — FIVE
Six perfect spheres of stone, each weighing well more than one hundred pounds, soared lazily through the air. From a distance they looked harmless, like a spray of pebbles tossed by a child. But as they neared, they grew in apparent size even as their flight remained deceptively lyrical. Ultimately the rocks crashed only a few dozen paces before the line of Blackgaard’s pikemen, striking with enough force to send tremors through the ground.
One of the balls landed in a low, wet swale and simply vanished into the mud with an audible plop. The other five missiles struck harder patches, and they bounced and tumbled irresistibly forward. Momentum carried them onward, not at all lazily now, thumping and pounding the ground as they rolled. In scant moments they tore through the tightly packed ranks of human flesh and wooden shafts. Pikes splintered and snapped, bones shattered, and flesh was crushed by the irresistible mix of mass and momentum.
Wherever they hit that line, the heavy balls simply burst through, following the trajectory imposed when they blasted out of the muzzles of the bombards a mile away on their mountain ridge. They came up against no obstacle that could obstruct them or even seriously impede their progress. Any stick or body in the way of the flying boulders was simply borne along as the balls blasted through the line and tumbled across the grass to settle at the rear. Thus, human heads, torsos, arms, legs, and sometimes complete bodies, were blasted away, swept like grains of sand propelled by a broom, leaving a gory wake of body parts in the path of each of the five balls. The unbroken line of leveled pikes wavered as five distinct gaps were instantly carved in the previously unbroken formation.
Most of the spherical missiles rolled far enough to end up between the large, dense blocks of Ankhar’s troops, assembled a hundred paces or more behind the pikes. One rolled in a seemingly gentle fashion up to a column of goblins. A gob raised a foot in a casual attempt to bring the ball to a stop as it approached, only to have both of his legs torn away by the shot’s weight and thrust. By the time the stone ball came to rest, in the middle of the column, a dozen more goblins were down with broken legs or crushed feet.
Now another boom sounded from the ridgetop. Smoke tinged with angry yellow flame billowed from the six barrels, and six more balls exploded on their trajectory toward the distant line. There were slight variables between the paths of the two volleys-the kegs of black powder did not possess identical explosive force, and furthermore the heavy wagons had been jolted back by the recoil of the first round. When the hill dwarf gunners rolled them back into firing position, the barrels were not aimed exactly as before.
The result was the shots of the second volley landed in slightly different places. Two were lost to soft ground, but the four that rumbled onward tore through the shaken line of pikemen in different areas. Before the men and their startled officers could even grasp what was happening to them, four additional holes had been punched through the line-the line that depended on unbroken integrity for its battlefield effectiveness.
Now the horses of the Solamnic Knights picked up the pace of their advance. They trotted, the thunder of many thousands of hooves reverberating across the distance between the two armies. The gap was narrowing so the armored lancers were only a quarter mile away from the pikes. Still, they came in a measured, far from hasty charge.
The thunder of the hoofbeats was nearly drowned out by the stunning explosive noise when the next volley blasted from the bombards. Officers in the line of pikemen had recovered their wits and were frantically ordering their men to fill in the gaps in the line. These efforts met with some success until the next, stronger volley ripped through.
One of the shots took off the head of a veteran sergeant major just as he was trying to rearrange his men into some semblance of order. The corpse of the grizzled warrior fell, blood spouting from its neck, and a hundred men who had witnessed the decapitating blow dropped their pikes and fled to the rear. They left a wide gap in the center, and the men of the neighboring companies nervously shifted their eyes among that breach, the approaching horsemen, and the imagined safety far behind them.
The guns belched again, their position clearly marked by the cloud of smoke that blossomed across the ridgetop. More balls ripped through the line, even as another volley boomed forth. Now the gray, churning smoke all but enveloped the ride and nothing else could be seen, except for the repeated flashes that burst through the cloud, bright as the fires of the Abyss.
Then the battle began in earnest as the captains of the knights raised their lances, shouted their battle cries, and all their armored warriors spurred their heavy warhorses into a gallop.
“What are they doing to us?” demanded Ankhar, watching in horror as dozens more of his pikemen were punched out of the line by a strange new power he still could not comprehend. He glared up at the smoke-shrouded ridge, certain that the explosive noises up there and the lethal destruction in front of him were related somehow. But aside from the flashes of flame, he could make out nothing within that murk.
And he couldn’t understand what was happening!
“Some kind of projectile weapon,” Hoarst speculated, his tone surprisingly dispassionate as he came up beside the army commander, giving Ankhar a start. “It’s launching those stones like it was a giant sling… or a tremendously powerful catapult. They’re flying a mile or more before they come down.”
“Is it magic?” demanded the half-giant. “Can you fight it with spells?”
Maddeningly, the Thorn Knight merely shrugged. “I don’t see how-not from here in any event. However, I came to speak with you about another important matter-the wand.”
“What?” Ankhar was so distracted that he had to think for a moment to realize what the Thorn Knight was talking about. “Yes, my mother tells me it has been finished.”
“Yes. I should be able to use it to command the elemental king… even better than before. We will have the monster to lead us in battle again.”
“But I must have an army left for that to happen!” roared the half-giant. “Look at the line! You must go up there and try to destroy those… things!” ordered Ankhar until he was distracted by an even more immediate threat. “Damn them! Look, the knights!”
The armored knights were bearing down on his army now at breakneck speed, riding shoulder to shoulder, heavy lances leveled. The pike line was a shambles. Many men had fallen, but even more of the troops had panicked and run. Huge gaps had opened up and the galloping knights poured through these openings. Once through, they curled around to the right and left, stabbing with lances, hacking with swords, and the footmen could not possibly wield their cumbersome weapons fast enough to defend themselves.
The principle behind the pike formation was the uniform presentation of a line of the weapons. Once the line was ruptured, however, the individual pikeman was almost helpless against an enemy on horseback-a soldier wielding a twenty-foot shaft of wood with a steel blade on the end could do very little against a close, mobile opponent. And even if a lone man tried to hold a horse at bay with a pike, the knight could easily bash the tip of the ungainly weapon to one side or the other then ride in for the kill.
And kill the Solamnics did, along the whole breadth of the once-formidable line. The horsemen trampled the pikemen. When they were too close to use their lances, the knights drew massive swords and cleaved the helpless pikemen. The horses kicked and reared, stomping on the men of the infantry, further smashing the crumbled line.
At the same time, the thunderous assault continued and adjusted to the shifting battle. Now the balls flew over the heads of the knights and pikemen, thumping to the ground and rolling through the rear formations of Ankhar’s army. These were spread out enough so that many shots fell between the units, but whenever a tumbling ball crashed into a tightly packed column of warriors, it inflicted terrible carnage. Ankhar was shocked to see an ogre blasted in two by a hit in his belly, and he could only gape in horror as the same ball rolled on to knock down a
