“ On! Break them- break them now! ”
The shamans heard him, and the drums thundered and rolled, pounding out their commands and the fury of the shamans’ god. They swept over the ghouls, gathered them up, and hurled them straight into the teeth of the defenders’ shields, swords, and pikes. It was death to charge that unyielding line…yet there were some things worse than simple death, and one of them was named Zurak.
“Stand! Stand your ground! ”
Yurgazh Charkson’s thunderous shout carried clearly even through the tumult of battle and the deafening boom of the drums. It was probably the most superfluous order he’d ever given, he thought, remembering other fields and other battles. He’d won his officer’s rank by holding even Rage-maddened hradani firm in the face of defeat, but there was no comparison between the foes he’d fought then and the ones his men faced today. Bahnak Karathson’s infantry had been hard, dangerous opponents, but they’d been men, not red-fanged creatures driven and goaded by something out of nightmare.
He drew his own sword and settled his shield as the avalanche of shrieking ghouls hurled themselves forward with redoubled fury. Around him, his staff and runners did the same. They’d learned, as Prince Bahnak had demanded, that generals-even hradani generals-had no business surrendering control of their forces by wading into the middle of a melee. Unfortunately, this time it looked like the melee was going to be wading into them.
The ghoulish charge slammed into the hradani infantry like a battering ram. War clubs, spears, talons, and fangs came at them in a wave of fury beyond belief. They obeyed their general, those infantry. They stood their ground, as only hradani riding the Rage could, but standing their ground wasn’t enough. Not this time.
Hundreds of them died where they stood that ground, and the line directly in front of Zurak broke.
Bugles sounded, their notes rising clear and clean above the yammering thunder of battle, summoning the reserves. But in that instant, in that moment when the line broke, there was no time for any of those reserves to respond.
A torrent of ghouls exploded through the break, foaming out, swinging to take the pikemen to either side in flank and rear. Squads of infantry posted immediately behind the line turned to face them, battling to hold the influx until more powerful reinforcements could arrive, but they were driven back, forced to give ground step by bleeding step. And through the middle of that break, straight into the teeth of the Sothoii behind it, came a creature out of nightmare, still wrapped in its glaring corona of banefire and shrieking its fury.
Arrows and arbalest bolts streaked to meet it from either side, but the men directly in front of it were too busy fighting for their lives, and the Sothoii armsmen who’d exchanged bows for lances surged forward. A mounted trooper’s most valuable weapon was momentum. They would have been fools to take that charge standing, but neither did they have the time and space to build speed. Against something with the physical size and power of ghouls, that was a fatal shortcoming. Their light lances gave them the advantage of reach even over something with arms that long, but they lacked the velocity to drive home a true countercharge. Scores of the creatures went down, shrieking and twisting, clutching at the lances which had transfixed them. But they also took those lances with them, dragging them out of the hands of the armsmen who’d felled them.
The veteran armsmen released their weapons rather than try vainly to retain them. Sabers swept out of scabbards all along the Sothoii front, thrusting and hewing desperately, but now it was the ghouls with their unnaturally long limbs who had the reach advantage. Stone-edged weapons hacked wildly-with a minimum of skill, but enormous speed and power. Some of them shattered on steel breastplates; more of them found the more vulnerable leather armor protecting arms and legs. The screams of wounded men rose to meet the howls of wounded and rampaging ghouls. Horses shrieked as throats were torn out or legs were hewn out from under them. Armsmen were snatched from saddles, disappearing into the flood of destruction. Dismounted hradani infantry fought desperately to reach them, a millennium of mutual hatred forgotten…and most of those infantry died in the process.
The rupture of the army’s line spread, widened. The last of the mounted Sothoii went down, and Zurak bellowed in triumph from the heart of his shroud of banefire as his creatures engulfed their foes like the Spear River in springtime flood.
And then the Order of Tomanak charged.
“ Tomanak! ”
The massed battle cry cut through the incredible din of battle like summer thunder, and Zurak shrieked his fury at the sound of that hated name.
Although the Hurgrum Chapter of the Order had grown steadily over the years since its founding, it remained the smallest single contingent attached to Trianal’s army. It counted less than five hundred warriors, against thousands upon thousands of ghouls, and over four hundred of its total strength was infantry, not cavalry. But those infantry were hradani infantry, with a training and discipline even Bahnak Karathson’s army had yet to attain, and that relative handful of cavalry were overwhelmingly Sothoii cavalry…and all of it had been trained and mercilessly drilled by Vaijon Almerhas.
Unlike the Sothoii who’d been stationed immediately behind the original line to support it with bow fire, the Order had almost a hundred yards to build velocity. That wasn’t a great deal of distance for horses to build maximum speed, but it was more than enough for Horse Stealer and Bloody Sword hradani riding the cold, mercilessly focused fury of the Rage.
The Order went into the triumphant ghouls like a thunderbolt-like the very mace of the deity it served. It struck not in a meticulously dressed line but in an even more meticulously ordered wedge, driving its point into the disorganized, swirling tiderace of the victorious ghouls like the prow of a ship. The Order’s small cavalry force covered the wedge’s flanks, for even now the whirlpool of ghouls overspread the Order’s entire formation, but the tip of that wedge was made of Horse Stealers in full, articulated plate, gift of the Dwarves of Silver Cavern, and armed with the great daggered axes of Clan Iron Axe. Flint and obsidian were no match for tempered steel, and the men behind those axes were almost as big, almost as strong, and far, far better trained than the ghouls themselves.
The creatures recoiled as that juggernaut crashed into them, hurling them back in windrows of broken bodies. Many of those to either side of the Order’s wedge were seized by the same panicked reaction as their unfortunate fellows directly in front of it. The more immediate terror of slashing steel, especially when they’d finally tasted victory only moments before, was enough-barely-to overcome even their terrified obedience to Zurak’s driving will. They turned, tried to scatter and flee, but they were too tightly packed, too congested, and the Order’s infantry thundered their battle cry as they hewed mercilessly at their enemies’ backs.
Yet not all of the ghouls could flee. They simply couldn’t get out of the way, and as the infantry wedge drove forward, trampling dead and wounded ghouls underfoot, the rearmost ranks taking time to slash off heads to be certain “dead” ghouls stayed that way, it moved deeper and deeper into the swirling torrent of its enemies. Infantry battalions from Trianal’s central reserve moved at a dead run to reinforce the hideously outnumbered Order, but they were still minutes away, and minutes were eternities on that field.
Ghouls who found themselves squeezed between the still resisting infantry on the flanks of the original breakthrough and the angled faces of the Order’s wedge, turned upon their foes with the redoubled fury and power of desperation. They sought any opening, any gap, and some of them-a handful, at first, then dozens, and finally scores-spurted out through the mercilessly closing spaces between the Order and Yurgazh Charkson’s infantry and burst into the open area at the heart of the army’s rectangular formation.
They were far too intermingled with the defenders for archery, and the reserves charging to the Order’s support were still too far away to engage them, yet it was obvious even to ghouls that those inside the army’s lines were doomed if the Order succeeded in plugging the breakthrough. They turned, leaping forward with all the speed and agility of their kind, to swarm around the wedge’s flanks and sweep into its center from behind.
