panic. But six hundred barbarians—either completely witless or delirious with battle fever—had carried on and were already swarming across the moat.
“Swordsmen! Make ready!” Honeycomb yelled so hard that his voice almost cracked and broke. “Pepper! Leave that cannon for now and you and your lads get behind shields!”
“Damned if I will!” The gnome cursed, threw aside the swab that they used to clean the cannon, and took up his battle-mattock. “You’ll never see gnomes hiding behind anyone else’s back! Zhirgzan! Give me my helmet!”
At Nuad the battle was raging. The enemy had obviously decided to finish off the indomitable castle, no matter what the cost. The battalions standing on the left road heard a distant cannonade.
“My nephew’s over there,” the pikeman suddenly said.
“What’s your name, brother?”
“Bans.”
“I’m Jig.”
“My hands are frozen. They’ll freeze to the pike even through my gloves soon,” Bans complained.
“Want some garlic?”
“Will it warm me up?”
“They’re the ones who’ll warm you up,” said Jig, nodding in the direction of the Crayfish infantry advancing on them. “In a couple of minutes it’ll be hotter than in a gnome’s furnace.”
“How many of those lousy mongrels are there?”
“As many as there are of us. Or more.”
From the hill Izmi Markauz saw the enemy infantry divide up into three unequal sections and start moving toward the positions of the army of Valiostr. The smallest detachment, which was the farthest away, advanced on Slim Bows, almost at a run. About ten thousand Crayfish, split into five sections, made for the left army. The rest of the infantry and a countless horde of barbarians moved to attack the center.
“Why are our magicians not doing anything, milord?” Vartek asked indignantly. “The entire Council of the Order is up there on the hill!”
“The entire Council, my dear Marquis, is a standing in a circle, holding each other affectionately by the hand,” one of the guardsmen growled from under his helmet. “It’s thanks to them that the Nameless One hasn’t done anything to us yet.”
“Commander!” panted a guardsman who came running up at that moment. “The king has ordered us to watch the left flank of the defense and go into action if they need help!”
“At last!” Vartek growled in delight.
“Is there anything else?” Izmi Markauz asked the messenger.
“They say all the ogres are dead!”
A rumble of joy swept through the lines of guards.
“Who says so?”
“Everyone does. I heard it myself from one of the scouts.”
“Excellent. You can rejoin the ranks.”
“We fought the lousy brutes off! My, but they were stubborn buggers!” said Pepper, waving his bloody mattock.
The barbarian attack had broken down. Two thousand crossbowmen along the entire front of the right army had wrought carnage in the ranks of the attackers. The few barbarians who had managed to cross the moat and the embankment had been finished off by the swordsmen. Now there were mounds of bodies lying under the walls and Honeycomb was afraid that after a few more attacks like that the enemy would be climbing up onto the wall over the corpses of his comrades, like a stairway.
“Zhirgzan! Drop that repulsive thing!” Pepper told the red-headed gnome, who was examining a captured skull helmet curiously. “Get loading! You saw the way those slanty-eyes legged it, didn’t you?”
“They won’t run a second time.”
“What makes you think that, centurion?”
“They’re good warriors, even if they are superstitious. Next time they’ll realize that not everybody dies when the thunder roars, and they’ll continue with the attack.”
“Honeycomb!” called the company commander, walking up to them.
“Yes, commander?”
“Our losses?”
“Eight killed and seven wounded.”
“Here, take this fellow into your unit,” said the commander, indicating a pale, taciturn young lad. “This is His Magicship Roderick. He’ll give your boys a hand if need be.”
Roderick nodded rather nervously and cast a fearful glance at two swordsmen who were throwing a barbarian’s body over the wall.
“Do you have chain mail, Your Magicship?”
The Wild Heart didn’t really believe this lad was a magician. By his reckoning, even Kli-Kli could run rings round this pallid youth.
“Yes,” said the youth, nodding hastily.
Horns sounded outside the walls. The enemy had launched another attack.
There was a loud crash behind him, the heavens echoed the sound, and the smoking comet fired from the Crater hurtled down right into the center of the front square of infantry that was advancing on the center.
It was an appalling blow. Everyone who was anywhere near the explosion was torn to pieces. The impact of the Crater’s shell put Izmi in mind of a god stepping on men by accident.
The infantry was advancing in five units. Three in the first line and another two behind them, at a distance of a thousand yards.
Jig gazed with a strange indifference through the ranks of men and raised pikes at the steel tortoise moving toward them.
“They’ve got crossbowmen!” one of the pikemen shouted.
Jig’s blood ran cold. If the enemy infantry had sklots, then even in their armor the front ranks would be hit hard. At close range a bolt would go straight through the armor as if it was paper, not glorious Isilian steel.
The elves started bombarding the detachment advancing against the left battalion.
“Let me through! Let me through, I say!”
The magician, who had stood behind Jig all this time without saying a word, was scrambling his way forward.
Jig gave a piercing whistle and yelled: “Let the magician through to the front, you damn blockheads! Quick now, or we’ll all be catching steel bolts!”
That did the trick, and the pikemen moved aside to make way. The magician dashed forward, stood in front of the first rank, and held out his hands with the open palms toward the detachment of infantry that had almost reached the Wine Brook. A blinding ball of fire went darting from the magician’s hands and struck the first row of shields, vaporizing them, together with the men, then moved on to the second row, and the third row, and the fourth row of the crossbowmen, until it finally exploded.…
That set them wailing! Jig could hear the howls of dying men as they were burned alive. Many of the soldiers in his battalion swore in satisfaction when they saw how many casualties a single man could inflict on the enemy.
Meanwhile the magician created another fireball, then another, incinerating men by the dozen. The lines of infantry faltered and broke, scattering in panic along the bank of the Wine Brook. The smell of burnt flesh even reached Jig’s battalion.
Suddenly the magician swayed and collapsed in a heap on the snow. Someone from the front ranks dashed to the fallen man, picked him up, and pulled him back into the battalion.
The vigilant unit commanders roared:
