“The sage-ambassador Belynda-she says she needs you in the city, now!”
“I can’t leave!” was his first reaction, until fear jolted through him. “Miradel!”
“Yes, the lady druid is in dire trouble. The sage-ambassador only hopes that you might be able to help. But you must come at once.”
All of his concern focused on that one woman, his lover, his partner. The battle… in his heart he knew that all the parts were in motion, and the bitter result had already been determined. “Jubal, you’ll have to take over. I’m going to Miradel!” he said. “She needs me. I’m sorry to leave now-”
“Don’t be,” replied the other man firmly. Natac could tell that Jubal, too, understood the inevitable collapse of their position, the fact that the battle was lost. “Go to her-and good luck. We’ll hang on here as long as we can.”
In two minutes Natac had raced to the top of the hill, where the druids maintained a teleport pool, a deep bowl of water on the rampart. Several warriors had already started the water spinning as Natac stepped up to the edge, and the sparks of teleportation magic quickly glowed around him.
A second later, Natac was at the edge of the lake, with the Worldweaver’s Loom towering above him, rising into the same sky that had begun to Darken over the battlefield. But now he was in Circle at Center, staggering dizzily, suppressing the nausea that still afflicted him with teleport magic.
“Come here-look!” It was Belynda, a few steps away from the pool. She had her Globe of Seeing on the bench, and she gestured to him urgently.
“What can I do?” he cried, kneeling, peering into the sphere of cloudy glass.
He saw at once that Miradel was in a terrible place, alone on a shelf of rock, in a world of eternal darkness. “Can you send me to her?” pleaded the general.
“No… there is no swirl of water. In any event, I fear it is already too late. See!”
The image shifted, and the veteran warrior paled at the sight of a grotesque monster, gigantic and horned, with a bestial muzzle and wicked, talon-tipped fingers. “Is that the Deathlord?” he asked in horror.
“No… I cannot see the Deathlord. That is the gargoyle, the guardian of Karlath-Fayd’s citadel. I watched it kill Shandira; she died to distract the monster from Miradel. Miradel climbed to this ledge, but I fear she is trapped.”
“Look-there’s water!” Natac indicated the stream flowing across the ledge. “Please-send me to her.”
Belynda shook her head. “That is only a straight flow. You know that it must be swirled to allow the spell. Besides, I would not send you, merely to watch you both die. But watch-we will see if she gives us cause for hope.”
At that moment the monster took to the air, launching itself with a powerful spring and flying with draconic grace, soaring directly toward the druid. Miradel stood as if transfixed, and the beast pulsed its wings, flying at tremendous speed. At the last instant she ducked away, rolling across the rocky ledge as the gargoyle crashed into the mountainside, just beside the waterfall, with enough force to break loose a cascade of rocks.
“She’s doomed!” cried Natac, looking into the globe as Belynda maintained the spell of vision.
“No, wait-look!” whispered the elfwoman excitedly. “It is what she wanted to happen!”
Natac saw it, too: rubble, knocked down by the gargoyle’s collision, now piled in the stream, damming the flow, instantly forming a small pool. Apparently Miradel saw it at the same time. She jumped into the water, which rose only to her knees, started to twirl madly, using her hands to scoop the liquid into a roundabout current.
“Now! Teleport!” Natac cried, as Belynda concentrated on the casting of the spell. The warrior groaned, willing Miradel to hear, to answer his summons. The monster turned, jaws gaping, talons reaching. The red eyes flashed, as if it was already savoring its prize.
And then there were sparks dancing in the air, right past Natac’s face. In another second his black-haired druid was there, swaying weakly on her feet, taking a step forward before collapsing into her warrior’s arms.
20
Tapestry
Picture painted,
Image stained,
Artist’s likeness,
Goddess rained;
All lies are true
When sewn
From immortal thread
In the end, the tide of ghost warriors proved to be unstoppable by even the most valiant efforts of the Nayvian Army. The fighting on the wall lasted for two days, with a hundred or more ghost warriors slain for every elf and each troll. But an endless supply of attackers insured that there was no easing of the pressure and no hope of victory.
The ditch had long been full of corpses, and the foreslope of the rampart was likewise tangled with the dead. The measured decay of the slain soldiers could not match the rate at which fresh bodies were added to the pile. The surviving ghost warriors merely climbed over their lifeless comrades, the attackers clawing and climbing upward until they could hurl themselves against the weary defenders atop the wall. They fought well, those warriors of Nayve, but they were mortal, and inevitably mortal limits of pain, endurance, and strength began to impede their courageous striving.
The warriors of humankind, the men summoned by the druids over the last fifty years, were the bravest of all the defenders. Each a hero of Earth, granted a second life on Nayve, fought for that new world with a passion deeper and more comprehensive than anything that had motivated him upon the world of his birth. For a long time, wherever one of these men went, the ghost warriors were driven back, and the elves and trolls took heart.
A Zulu champion slew a thousand before clutching ghost hands dragged him into the corpse-filled ditch. Even in falling he killed, laying about with a short javelin and a double-edged sword until he was buried by frenzied attackers. When the pile ceased twitching, not a bit of the African’s body could be seen through the heap of his victims.
A captain of artillery, raised on a Wisconsin farm and schooled in the Iron Brigade at Gettysburg and beyond, directed the fire of a lone battery from a strategic elevation. When all the elves on the wall below were slain, the ghost warriors rushed the vacant rampart in the hundreds. The brave gunner maintained a barrage of fire intense enough to clear the platform until reinforcements could arrive. Then, as a company of Argentian elves rushed to fill the breach, he lifted the field of his fire, spraying explosives down the sloping wall, incinerating hundreds more ghost warriors with each incendiary volley.
Bearing a sword in each hand, a stocky samurai warrior whirled and stepped back and forth with lethal precision, hacking and stabbing and laying waste to the enemy along a fifty-foot section of the rampart. When the teeming warriors showed a reluctance to press toward him, he shouted a battle cry and charged down the wall, into the enemy ranks. He cut his way through two lines, then fought his way back again, holding firm in the ditch as he stood on the shifting pile of bodies. Only when he tried to climb the wall back to the parapet did he fall, taken in the back by a spear. Three elves rushed down, trying to pull the stricken Japanese warrior up, but the ghost warriors pressed in with fury, surrounding the body, cutting the heroic fighter to pieces.
Yet there were too few of these heroes and too few of the elves and the trolls as well-though in many cases they displayed similar bravery, dedication, and sacrifice-to hold against a virtually infinite foe. Along one half-mile length of the wall all the defenders were slain, and the ghost warriors spilled across like water coming over a dam. In another section just a few wounded trolls tried to hold, and they inevitably succumbed to the hacking blades of a thousand attackers.
