the main vanguard, alongside the High Wizard on his pony. An eager-looking young Skatterhawk rode on Thanderahast’s other side, paired with an older, grimmer Thundersword. As they rode, both nobles waggled the blades of their swords to flash reflected sun into the eyes of their foes.
They had closed about half the distance to the enemy line when the bats appeared. The ungainly creatures lofted up from the back of the enemy lines, great fur-covered giants with twisted faces and dead-white skin, shadowing the morning light with their numbers. Humans rode the backs of the daunting beasts-humans wearing dark helms bedecked with stag antlers. The lieutenants of the Witch Lords.
They swooped over the Marsembian troops, and light-fling bolts laced down. The bolts were erratic, gouging the soft, peaty earth more than the troops, but for every two Marsembians who fell, only one rose again.
On his left, Aosinin heard Thanderahast let out a shout of anger, then call out Luthax’s name. His personal enemy was among the bat riders, though how the mage knew, Aosinin could not guess. Thanderahast began to bark the ancient phrases of a spell. Aosinin realized what the mage was doing and reached out to stop him, but his armor did not allow him such swift, stretching overbalancing, and the mage finished the spell and lofted himself out of his saddle, flying upward to meet the bat riders. The pony, as trained, immediately halted and started to trot back up the hill.
Aosinin bellowed at his cousin, and the king nodded grimly. From other wings, Thanderahast’s pupils were rising as well, abandoning their troops in order to join in the airborne carnage.
Ahead, the Witch Lords’ troops halted on the near slope of the valley. Ogres were bellowing orders, and orcs and goblins were desperately trying to form a line, spear-points out, to break the Cormyrean charge. Most would not complete the maneuver before they were struck down.
Above their heads, the bat riders and flying mages wheeled and dodged. Lightning cracked across the clear sky, and the Royal Wizard’s pupils replied with gouts of fire. Here a human form would plummet to the earth, and there a flaming bat wing would flutter downward, trailing ink-black smoke down to its death. Thanderahast had removed the danger of any unopposed, concerted attack from above, but at the cost of any protection of the line troops on the ground if the Witch Lords had any other tricks up their sleeves.
The next horror of the necromancers was apparent when the two armies fully closed. At first Aosinin thought he faced humans-traitors, rebels, and mercenaries. They might have been once, for he recognized some badges on the armor they wore. But now they were marching dead things, the remains of their eyes hanging bloody in their sockets, and their flesh drained of all blood. To a man, they had deep slashes across their exposed throats.
The walking dead! Zombies, Aosinin realized with a groan, magical creations under the control of a powerful necromancer. And unlike the animated skeletons they had fought in previous battles, these were recently made and still had some of the power they held in life. The noble thought of the fires and the drums of the previous evening and realized that it had not been a rallying celebration, but a grisiy enchantment. The Witch Lords had consumed their own living troops to provide fodder of the utmost loyalty for this crucial battle.
The Arabellans in the front line quailed when they saw what they faced, and several began to retreat. Galaghard rode among them to the front of the line, raising his arm and sounding the attack. The Arabellans stiffened at the sight of the king and, with a shout, pressed forward into the undead.
Aosinin spurred his horse forward to follow his king, and all around him, the battle lines disintegrated into the usual chaos of hacking and thrusting and dying as the ranks of soldiers broke into a swirl of smaller conflicts-man against goblin, against ogre, and against undead abomination. The Truesilver wasted no breath on battle cries but set his teeth and hacked at the butchered humans, seeking to carve a path to the king, who wheeled and slashed again and again against the Undead horde.
At the king’s flanks rode two priests of Helm the Watchful. Golden lights danced from their palms as they drove the animating essences from the fighting corpses. As Aosinin watched, one of the priests was overwhelmed by a wave of clutching undead and dragged from his mount. Aosinin did not see him again. Instead, the Truesilver found himself beset on all sides by swarming goblins, who were spilling into the heart of the Cormyrean host in the wake of the undead, slashing at zombie and Cormyrean with equal abandon.
The world became a small, blood-red, frantic place of wheeling and cutting and slashing, Aosinin’s horse bucking under him like a mad thing. He trampled foes who sought to gut his mount and drag him down. He made little charges to nowhere, wheeling as his mount lashed out in all directions with steel-shod hooves, then surging back along the line of destruction he’d already cut, to reap more goblin lives. Twice he was nearly torn from the saddle, and once his gauntlet was ripped clear from his hand. A goblin tried to climb up on his mount, its clawlike fingers scrabbling against the horse’s barding, clawing at Aosinin’s face. The Truesilver cursed and ran the small creature through. As the goblin fell away, Aosinin saw young Skatterhawk, transfixed by three black goblin blades, topple from his horse, knocking over three zombies. There were yet more of the undead to swarm over the fallen noble’s body, and more orcs and more goblins. Aosinin’s world was reduced to the length of his sword.
When Truesilver did have time and breath to look up again, he was wet with blood clear up to his gorget, and half the nobles of the Glory of Cormyr were down. Cormaerils, Dauntinghorns, and Crownsilvers had vanished from their saddles and now lay dead and trampled beneath feet and hooves in the battle. The king was farther away now, driven apart from his cousin by the weight of the advancing undead.
As Aosinin cursed and fought to bring his mount around, he saw a huge shape rise up from among the heaped dead. A monstrous troll, larger than any Aosinin had seen, cunningly hidden among the undead troops and goblins, surged into battle with the king. Galaghard’s mount reared, whinnying in fear, and the king fought to keep it under control.
Another horseman spurred into the space between the king and the troll. One of the Bleth boys, by his markings. To the troll, one human was as good a victim as another. One swipe of its huge claws unhorsed the impulsive Bleth, and another ripped his armor open from neck to waist. Blood fountained, and the young noble threw back his head in a cry of agony that Aosinin could not hear. He fell out of view, lost in the press of staggering zombies and desperately thrusting Arabellan billmen.
Bleth’s sacrifice bought the time the king needed. Aosinin realized that, besides himself, Galaghard was now nearly the only mounted knight left. The king wheeled his charger and brought his sweeping blade around nearly level with the troll’s neck. As the horse plunged forward, the monster’s head was cut from its shoulders and bounced into the throng of advancing goblins.
That would not kill the creature, thought Aosinin, but the loss would keep it busy for a while. Indeed, the troll had already abandoned its attack on the king and was now throwing goblins about like handfuls of straw, searching in the confusion for its lost head.
The king wheeled again, this time facing Aosinin. Seeing his cousin, he raised his sword in salute, and the Truesilver returned it, seeing Galaghard give him a bloody smile. There were no doubts in his liege’s mind this day. No hollowness in the king of Cormyr.
The king used his uplifted blade to point to the left flank, where the Marsembians were slowly being driven back by a wedge of orcs and goblins. Were that wing to fail, the Witch Lords could drive around behind the Cormyrean lines, surrounding them, and force the Glory of Cormyr into a knot of men too tightly packed to fight. Then the outermost could be slain at leisure, while those on the inside were crushed or trampled to death.
Aosinin rallied a small band of Arabellans with hoarse shouts and windmilling waves of his sword-by the gods, was his arm going to fall off?-and led them in a charge across the field of heaped and broken bodies, seeking to reinforce the Marsembian foot soldiers.
The Arabellans took heart for the first time that day and began to shout as they came down on the orcs from one side.
Their cries were drowned out by the sound of horns, shrieking like great hunting hawks. Aosinin had heard only one horn sound like that-a trophy horn carved all of one piece of crystal, as smooth as glass, that resided on a cushion in a room deep in the palace. An elven horn!
Heart rising in sudden hope, he stood in his stirrups as his faithful steed raced along, and he looked beyond units of snarling, hurrying ogres in time to see the elves arrive on the battlefield. Some were flying, and these joined the wizards in their airborne struggle with the bat riders. The remainder rode great stags, giant elk whose heads were heavy with iron-tipped antlers.
This was the true Glory of Cormyr, Aosinin realized. The armor of the elves glowed, as their tent had the night before, in a scintillating pattern of green and gold. They were few in number, but to an elf, they were heavily armed and armored.
The Witch Lord line disintegrated as they struck it full force, the ogres falling like crops at harvesttime under
