and all with weapons. I had the impression that any second now the statues would come to life and throw themselves at each other.
The columns running through the center of the hall gave out a silvery light, but there were thick shadows along the walls, and that gave most of the shadows an ominous look. Remembering that in Hrad Spein things sometimes came to life when they really shouldn’t, I walked through the hall very cautiously indeed.
There were several thousand statues in the immense hall. Some overzealous individual had managed to put together an entire army. And do I even have to mention that the statues were not identical, in fact, they were all completely different?
Every elf had his own face and bearing, his own armor and weapon. At first I thought the sculptures were standing about at random, and it took me a while to realize that this was a formation. A complex and highly effective formation.
At the front were elves in heavy armor, with very broad s’kashes set on long poles; behind them came bowmen in light chain mail; and behind the bowmen were three rows of swordsmen, standing with spaces between them, so that the bowmen would be able to pull back.
The orcs were frozen facing the elves. Their spears were raised and they were protecting their bodies with long, heavy shields. They also had bowmen, swordsmen, and some lads with mighty two-handed axes. Like I said —an entire army.
I walked past the ranks of this stone army and into the next hall.… I stopped and caught my breath.
It looked as if the gods had clapped their hands and stopped time right in the middle of a furious battle. The jagged formation had fallen apart, and now the statues of the orcs and the elves were all jumbled together. There were Firstborn and Secondborn fighting all the way across the hall, and the sculptural composition was simply breathtaking.
Most of the elves and orcs were lying on the floor. Some with arrows stuck in the eye slots of their helmets or the joints of their armor. Some with their chain mail hacked apart, some with spears stuck into their stomachs, some were missing arms that had been chopped off, some had lost their heads.
Right in front of me an orc was frozen in the act of thrusting a spear into an elf who was trying to get up off the ground. A little farther on, the yataghans and s’kashes of dozens of irreconcilable enemies were locked in bloody combat. I walked past the frozen battle, looking at the warriors as I skirted round them.
There was a grinning orc protecting a fallen comrade with his shield, but he hadn’t noticed the elf armed with an orcish ax standing behind him. There was a Secondborn struggling to stay in the saddle, and a Firstborn had grabbed his horse’s bridle and was just about to hack off the elf’s leg with his yataghan. There were an elf and an orc, twined together in a knot of death, each struggling to hold back the other’s arm and at the same time reach him with his dagger.
I forgot all about being cautious and looked at the statues as if I was spellbound. Waiting for frozen time to thaw out again, for the underground hall to resound with the clash of weapons and roaring of the warriors.
There, at the very center of the hall, was a small brigade of Firstborn with spears, drawn up into a circle to form a round “hedgehog” and trying to hold off elves on horseback. Over there a group of elves had fired arrows into ten orcs who were attacking them, and now they were reaching to take more deaths out of their quivers. Six Firstborn were already lying on the floor, despite their chain mail, but the other four—one of them was wounded in the leg—were still running toward their enemies. I wondered whether, if this was a real battle, they would manage to reach the Secondborn before the bowmen could fire another volley.
I walked on.
There was an elf desperately trying to protect himself with his arm against an ax that was being swung down on him by a brutal orc wearing the clan badges of the Grun Ear-Cutters.
I walked on.
An elf with his arms raised, and his open palms upward. But he wasn’t thinking of surrendering. There were heaps of orcs lying around the elf, like trees felled by a fierce hurricane. The elfin shaman had swept away a whole detachment of Firstborn, like a vicious dog that has come across a litter of blind kittens.
I walked on.
An orc was protecting himself with a shield that had a picture of some mythical bird as he tried to repulse an attack from three very young and very eager elves. Four of the Secondborn had already lost their lives, and a fifth was grimacing in pain as he tried to bind up the stump of his right arm.
I walked on.
An elf sinking his fangs into an orc’s throat.
Farther …
An elf trying to hold in the entrails tumbling out of his gashed stomach.
Farther …
An orc smashing an elf’s head with a spiked club.
Farther …
An elf firing an arrow at point-blank range into an orc who was looking the wrong way.
A new scene …
The commanders of the Firstborn and the Secondborn have launched into a duel with spears; orcs and elves have forgotten their own mutual hostility and are standing around together, watching the fight.
An elf holding a Firstborn by his braid and raising his s’kash to hack off his enemy’s head.
An elf lying crushed under his own horse, with his arm twisted at an unnatural angle.
An orc standing alone in the shadow, aiming his bow at the commander of one of the elfin detachments.
I walked on.
Like a weightless shadow, I slipped between the figures, under the spears poised to thrust and swords suspended in the air.
I looked at the elves and the orcs trying to deal with an ogre that had appeared out of nowhere, clutching a stone hammer.
My gaze fell on an orcess. It was the first time I’d seen a woman from the race of the Firstborn. She looked a lot like Miralissa, except that her hair wasn’t gathered into a braid, but a long tail. The orcess was armed with two crooked swords and the sculptor had caught her as she was spinning round. One crooked sword had slit an elf’s throat and the other was thrusting forward toward another enemy.
I walked right up to the orcess and gazed into that smooth face with its imprint of wild beauty and desperation. I couldn’t resist touching her cheek with my finger. For a second nothing happened, and then a series of thin, winding cracks ran across the statue’s cheek. The cracks ran across the entire face, branching and spreading, and small pieces of stone started to fall away, revealing the true face of this female warrior.
Staring out at me through empty eye sockets was a skull bearing the remains of rotted flesh. The orcess’s wild beauty had disappeared in an instant.
And then I realized that it wasn’t stone, but only a thin glaze, covering bodies that had once been alive. I realized that the figures in the halls were not statues, but orcs and elves who had once been alive and had been frozen instantly in eternal sleep. Someone had played a vicious joke, forcing the dead soldiers to continue with a never-ending war that had been going on for thousands of years now. I stopped admiring the battle and tried to get out of the halls of “toy soldiers” as quickly as possible. I made my way through the ranks of elves, trying not to touch anyone, in order not to break the dead warriors’ covering.
But I still wondered if there really had been a battle here. If there had, then what power and what magic could have instantly transformed all the soldiers into statues that had stood there for thousands of years? Of course, I couldn’t come up with an answer to that question, so I simply walked faster, quite reasonably assuming that the foulest surprises happen at the most unexpected moments, and I could easily get caught by some nasty magical trap, too. It wasn’t very pleasant to think of somebody seeing me in a thousand years’ time as a statue entitled
The Halls of the Warriors ended as suddenly they had started. There were no more statues ahead. Well now, it was the first time I could remember when not a single line of a verse had come true. Nobody had tried to stick a knife or a pair of fangs into me. And I didn’t understand those phrases “tormented by thirst” and “undead sinners,” either. I wasn’t particularly upset that nothing genuinely unpleasant had happened, but … the verses had never been wrong before, and then suddenly here was this surprising discrepancy between the word and the fact. Maybe I’d just walked through at a safe time?
