Tor Alessi began to burn. As the sun wheeled westward, fires kindled by the rain of rune-fire projectiles erupted into life, resisting every effort to put them out. Explosions flared up on the walls where they impacted, adding columns of twisting smoke to the growing film of murk in the air; others burst out within the city itself, drawing troops away from the perimeter to fight the stubbornly persistent blazes.
Morgrim watched the carnage unfold from his vantage in the centre of the plain. He could not lie – it made his heart swell.
The bickering and hesitation was over. He didn’t know what he would have done if the elgi had not broken the ceasefire. He knew full well that warlords within his own host had been planning similar acts of sabotage, but remained confident he could have prevented them.
Perhaps there was something to Imladrik’s fanciful tales. It didn’t matter any more. So many acts of cruelty had been committed that the need for grudgement was now overwhelming. Even if he had withdrawn his own army from Tor Alessi, others would have come in time. He knew of musters in the mountains to the east, each one already setting off toward other asur outposts – Athel Toralien, Athel Maraya, Oeragor. There was no way he could have stopped all of them even if he had wanted to.
And he did not want to. He wanted the dwarf armies, all of them, to succeed. He wanted the elgi gone, banished back to their strange and unnatural island, their taint wiped from the honest earth of the dawi homeland. Only then could the wounds of the past be healed, old poisons withdrawn, new mines delved.
It all starts here, he thought grimly. May Grimnir curse us if we falter now.
Morek lumbered up to him, his staff acrid with discharged energies.
‘Tromm, lord,’ said the runelord, bowing low.
Morgrim nodded in acknowledgement. As he did so, strange flashes of light lashed out from Tor Alessi’s summit. Morek and Morgrim watched as magefire in all hues – emeralds, sapphires, rubies – spiralled down into the dawi front lines, tearing them up like ploughs turning a field.
Morek regarded the development sourly. ‘Their magic is as flighty as they are,’ he muttered.
A siege tower, the first to come near the city’s gatehouse, ignited, its crown exploding as magefire kindled and bloomed on its protected shell. Flames raced unnaturally through the heavy leather shrouds and timber bracing-beams, streaking down the structure’s core. A few seconds later and it was little more than charred scaffolding, its deadly cargo leaping to safety as the wooden platforms and ladders disintegrated around them. More trundled onward to take its place.
‘Deadly, though,’ observed Morgrim.
His voice was distracted. For some reason he couldn’t take the loss of a few siege towers and trebuchets as seriously as he ought. Something nagged at him, dragging his mind from the conduct of the battle.
‘Where are the dragons?’ he asked at last, out loud though not speaking to anyone but himself. Everything he had been led to believe, not least from Imladrik himself, told him that the drakes were the most potent weapon the asur had.
Morek looked up at the walls contemptuously. ‘We have killed wyrms before.’
The grip around the city tightened. Morgrim saw miners finally reach the base of the walls just south of the gatehouse. He saw more war engines pull into position and begin to unload their deadly contents. He saw fires burst into life on the parapets, sending smoke boiling up into a wearing sky. The light was beginning to wane and turn golden as the sun began its long slow descent towards the ocean. As the shadows lengthened, Tor Alessi looked battered, proud, and doomed, ringed by a veritable sea of ground-deep loathing.
‘So we have,’ he said softly. ‘But keep your runesmiths aware, rhunki. The drakes will fly. Only then we shall truly see Imladrik’s mettle.’
Chapter Nineteen
‘They’re coming!’
The shouts of panic were superfluous – Thoriol could see perfectly well that they were coming. Everyone along that section of the parapet could see that they were coming. That didn’t stop the shouts, though. Loosing arrows into the skies was one thing; going face to face with the enemy was another.
Magefire rippled through the air like strands of crystallised starlight, spinning and flickering in the dying day. Arrows still flew, though less thickly than they had done. Thoriol wondered just how many thousands of darts had been loosed – how many warehouses had been emptied and how many quivers discarded. His own arm muscles were raw with effort despite the increasingly frequent breaks the company had been forced to take. Using a longbow was not like twanging a hunting bow – it was exhausting, back-bending work.
The endless flights had hurt the enemy. He could see the piles of dead on the flat below, bent double, twisted. No enemy, no matter how well armoured or disciplined, could march through such a storm without taking damage.
But the advance had not been halted. The dwarfs had come closer and closer, wading stoically through their own dead, shrugging off the slamming impacts of mage-bolts and quarrel-shots, all the while hurling their strange guttural abuse up at the defenders.
Now the outer walls were reeling. Some sections had been shattered by the stone-throwers, opening breaches that were desperately reinforced by thick knots of spearmen. The dwarf vanguard brought ladders and grapnels with them; once the parapets were blasted clear by the trebuchets a hundred hands would start to climb and a hundred pickaxes would begin to swing. As soon as one ladder was knocked back another two would lurch up again, propelled by burly arms from the boiling mass of bodies on the plain.
Thoriol’s own wall-section had weathered the storm. No impacts had shaken their parapet and no rune-magic had been slammed
