One wouldn’t come swooping down on us.
After walking down a low hill covered with aspens, we came out onto a wide road. The frost had frozen the mud created by the previous day’s rain into a whimsical pattern of bumps and hollows. It wasn’t very easy to walk on, but still a lot better than the liquid slush that would have delayed us for a long time if the weather hadn’t turned cold. I’d already regretted that we didn’t have any horses four times at the very least. I’d had quite enough of tramping about on my own two feet. Sagot be praised that the cobbler hadn’t deceived me, and my boots hadn’t fallen to pieces somewhere in the Labyrinth.
“Have you noticed anything strange?” Eel suddenly inquired.
“You have the right idea,” Egrassa responded. “I don’t like it, either.”
“What do you mean?” asked Kli-Kli, puzzled. Just in case, she snatched out one of her throwing knives.
“We’ve been walking along the road for an hour, but we haven’t met anybody,” Eel explained.
“What’s so strange about that?” said Mumr, shifting the bidenhander from one shoulder to the other. “Who’d want to go to Zagraba? That’s where the road leads, doesn’t it?”
“Some people would,” Egrassa objected. “As I recall, there are several fishing villages along the edge of Zagraba, and this is the time when the fisherman should have sold their fish and be on their way home from Moitsig.”
“Maybe the fish weren’t biting? Or they don’t need to sell any fish?” I suggested.
“When there’s a war on? The prices for grub should shoot up so far that any fisherman could make his monthly earnings in a single day! Skipping into town and selling is exactly what they need to do!” Hallas droned.
“Then I don’t know…”
“I do! I swear on my mountain mattock, Harold, there’s something not right here. We’re about to get clobbered! I swear by the Fury of the Depths that we are!”
“Now you’re the one who’s talking disaster,” Kli-Kli teased the gnome.
“We have to do something, and not just wander along the road like a flock of sheep. Any bowman could pick us off here! Egrassa, why don’t I go on ahead? That way, if we run into trouble, I’ll have time to warn you.”
“No,” said the elf after a brief moment’s thought, and he shook his head. “Eel and I will go. You stay on the road for now; we’ll give you a sign if anything happens. Harold, hold the spear.”
The elf handed me the krasta and he and the Garrakian went running on ahead. We waited for the two warriors to disappear over the top of the next hill before we moved on. For half an hour nothing happened, and then we heard a whistle.
For a moment my heart dropped into my boots, but Lamplighter dispelled my fears.
“That’s Eel. Let’s get a move on. There’s something interesting up there.”
“And doesn’t interesting mean dangerous?”
“If it was anything dangerous, he’d have whistled in a completely different way. But try to keep behind me just in case.”
“I promise not to stick my neck out. And I’ll keep hold of Kli-Kli so he doesn’t get under your feet.” Whatever anyone might say, I do have heaps of good qualities, and the most important one is common sense.
We hurried forward as the road climbed the next low hill. Eel appeared on the top and waved to us. When we got up there, we saw what had attracted our scouts’ attention—there was the city of Moitsig ahead of us.
“And who was trying to tell me the Firstborn hadn’t come this far?” Hallas growled.
His question went unanswered. From up on the hill there was an excellent view of the river, a huge uneven open space with scattered patches of open woodland, and the city, just a quarter league away from us. Towering up on the right, between the open space, the city, and the river, were the mighty gray walls of a small fortress. I knew there were another two fortresses on the other side of Moitsig. The reason for building them like that was to have the city at the center of a triangle of three citadels. Quite a good defensive arrangement—before you could storm the city walls, you had to deal with the outposts, otherwise you had a good chance of being hit on the flanks or from the rear by soldiers from the castles making a sortie while you were busy trying to break down the city gates.
But storming one of the bastions was risky, too. While you were dealing with one, help could arrive from another, and the soldiers in the city wouldn’t let a chance to take a lunge at you pass them by. So Moitsig was a genuinely tough nut to crack. It was practically impossible to take by storming it head on, unless you launched simultaneous attacks on all three castles and the city, using a very big army. If all the orcs had gone for Moitsig and not split up into three separate armies, they would have had a chance, but this way—this way was obviously hopeless, as the scene on the open field made clear.
It was absolutely littered with corpses. The scene was too far away for me to make out the details, but a blind beaver could have seen that the orcs had tried to storm the nearest castle and then been hit with a blow on their flank by forces from Moitsig and the other two bastions. The citadel they tried to take had stood firm, but parts of its walls and three of its six towers had been destroyed. I wouldn’t have been surprised if that was the work of orcish shamanism. But not even magic had helped the Firstborn, and they had been overwhelmed by the army of men. I never doubted for a single moment who had won this battle.
“How many are there?” I asked unthinkingly.
“Without counting, no more than three thousand,” said Hallas, screwing up his only eye. “They got a right royal battering. It’s a pity we didn’t get here in time to join in the scrap.”
Personally speaking, I didn’t have the slightest regret that we’d arrived late for the massacre. Darkness only can understand these gnomes, always so desperate to break someone’s armor open with their mattocks.
“I don’t think there are three thousand,” Lamplighter objected.
“What point is there in guessing? Let’s go and take a look! Or, better still, ask someone!”
“Slow down, Hallas! I reckon we’d better not stick our noses in! Our own side could take us for deserters, and that would be the end of us. If this is the way things are, I suggest we ought to avoid the city. Why go sticking your own head in the noose?”
“We’ll have to go in, Mumr. It will take us too long to reach the next town without horses.”
“What do we need a town for, Egrassa? We can call into any village and buy horses.”
“Uh-huh!” said Kli-Kli, positively radiating skepticism. “Sure, they’ll sell you horses. And throw in smart bridles and saddles to go with them. You should try using your head sometimes! You won’t find a single worn-out nag in any of the villages around here! All the horses have been commandeered for the army, and if they haven’t, the peasants won’t let you have their own plow horses.”
“So Harold will have to steal the horses from them,” Mumr parried coolly.
“I’m no horse thief,” I exclaimed, and added hastily, “Anyway, they could regard it as looting and string us up from the nearest tree.”
“We’ll have to go in,” said the elf. “Right now information is far more important than horses. We have to listen to what they know here before we set out for Avendoom. The Firstborn could have the whole area ringed off, and this detachment might be no more than the advance guard.”
And so saying, Egrassa started walking down the hill. The rest of us followed him. Kli-Kli took hold of my sleeve just to be on the safe side, but this time I didn’t try to free myself from her tenacious fingers.
“What were they hoping to achieve?” I asked out loud. “It’s almost impossible to take a fortified city like this with three thousand soldiers.”
“Why is it impossible?” said Eel, who had heard me. “It’s quite possible. If I remember my military history and the history of the Spring War, two thousand Firstborn took Maiding at a trot when they surprised an army of men three times that size, and then they held the city until their main army arrived. These lads probably thought they could repeat the heroic feat of their ancestors.”
“But they bit off more than they could chew,” Hallas concluded pitilessly. “What were they thinking of? Trying to break through defenses like these! Even dwarves would have realized the city must have heard about the orcs moving down the east bank of the Iselina and had plenty of time to prepare! These Firstborn are real oafs! Only the Doralissians could be more stupid!”
“The Firstborn weren’t stupid,” the elf objected. “They were young, and youth tends to be overconfident.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Egrassa’s eyesight is better than yours,” Kli-Kli explained to the gnome. “Wait until we reach the battlefield,
