the Bloody Skull army surged forward and swept over the unplanted fields toward the dike-thousands of orc warriors, running headlong into battle with axes and spears high.
“Here they come!” Durnan Osting shouted. “Get ready for ’em, lads! They’ll no’ find a weak spot here!”
Geran drew his sword, weaving spells of ruin on his blade. The elven steel gleamed a deadly silver-blue in the gloaming, and he flicked the point from side to side to set the grip in his hand. He hadn’t expected the orcs to simply rush the entire line at once; it would have been more effective to concentrate a blow at a single point. Then again, the mass charge would keep him from sending help to any other point of the defenses as long as he was fighting to hold his own position. “Archers!” he shouted. “Fire at will!”
He had only a few dozen bowmen under his banner, so few that there was little point in trying to volley their fire. Most of the archers had no experience with the tactic, anyway-they weren’t even militiamen, just Hulburgans or foreign laborers who’d joined the effort to defend the town. Their arrows hissed out over the earthen rampart. Many missed, but as the orcs continued to close, Geran saw a few of the charging warriors stumble and fall.
“Sarth, save your spells for the moment,” Geran told the sorcerer. “I want your magic at the point of decision.”
“I understand,” Sarth answered.
Geran watched the dark tide rushing closer and seized the shoulder of a young Spearmeet lad next to him. “Get over to the far right, and tell whoever’s in charge of the Marstels and Sokols to bring all their men here, right now. We’re going to need them. Go swiftly!” The teenager nodded once and bolted off to the east, heading for the handful of mercenary fighters Geran had on that end of his line. Few of the orcs were heading toward the uphill side of the dike. Then he faced the oncoming horde and breathed a few words of warding, preparing for the fight to come.
The first of the Bloody Skulls reached the bottom of the dike. The old earthworks were not more than fifteen feet tall, but heavy brush and small trees grew thickly on the sloping mound; despite the ferocity of their charge, the orc warriors had a difficult time struggling through the thickets.
“Stay in ranks!” Geran shouted. “Let them come to you!”
A band of orc berserkers bulled their way up the embankment near Geran, and he hurried through the thickets to meet them when they crested the wall. He caught a thick-muscled orc axeman as he scrambled up the slope with a hand on the ground, and lunged down to bury his swordpoint in the orc’s neck. The apelike warrior bellowed, clapping his hand to the wound, and staggered up to swing at Geran. The swordmage danced back a few steps, avoiding the orc’s wild axe-swings until the dying warrior’s feet slid out from underneath him and he fell heavily to the ground. Geran found more orcs swarming up the slope all around him, and for a hundred furious heartbeats he slashed and stabbed, charged and retreated, wielding his blade of elf-wrought steel in a blinding blur of searing blue-white radiance.
“For Hulburg! For the harmach!” Geran shouted.
All around him Hulburgans set their spears in a deadly fence atop the dike and took a heavy toll on the orcs who recklessly attacked into the teeth of their defenses. They died too, overwhelmed by the sheer strength and fury of the orc assault. Near Geran’s banner Durnan Osting killed three orcs with a two-handed warhammer before several more swarmed over him and hacked him to pieces with their war axes. More Spearmeet men fell there, cut down as the Bloody Skulls scrambled up the suddenly undefended slope. But then the sorcerer Sarth stepped forward and sealed the breach with a devastating blast of fire from his fearsome rod, burning down most of the berserkers. “To the banner!” the tiefling cried. He held off the orc assault until the mercenaries Geran had summoned from the unengaged end of his line showed up and filled in to take the place of Durnan Osting and the other fallen Spearmeet there.
A shriek from overhead wrenched Geran’s attention from the roaring line of orcs trying to overwhelm the dike. He looked up and saw a huge bat-winged shape swoop low over the line of defenders. It seized a man in its talons and started to beat its way back into the air. Its tail whipped around to sink a long, wicked stinger into the back of another man fighting nearby as the monster flapped away from the dike. The stung man arched in agony and sank to the ground, and the monster dropped its first victim among the seething ranks of orcs pressing close to climb the dike.
“A wyvern too?” Geran muttered aloud. They hardly needed any more trouble. He hurried after the flying monster, trying to guess where it would swoop next.
Sarth conjured a bolt of lightning and blasted half a dozen orcs from the top of the embankment. The brilliant flash of light and deafening thunderclap caught the wyvern’s attention. It wheeled in midair and fixed its eyes on the sorcerer. The reptilian monster plummeted down at Sarth from directly overhead, deadly sting whipping from side to side behind it.
“Sarth!” Geran shouted, but the sorcerer did not hear him; he was already snarling another spell at more Bloody Skulls surging up the dike. Geran realized in an instant that even if he caught the sorcerer’s attention, the wyvern would still be upon him too quickly to dodge or avoid. There was no time to reach him; Geran seized the flowering symbols of a spell held in his mind and hurled his will behind the arcane words. “Sierollanie dir mellar!” he cried, and in a dizzying eyeblink he stood where Sarth had been standing, while the sorcerer stood where he’d been. Sarth reeled and floundered on the slope, but Geran paid him no mind-he was already looking up at the wyvern hurling down at him. He shouted out a word of shielding, and then the monster was upon him. He slashed it once across its snout, leaped aside and blocked the deadly stinger with his shielding spell, and spun around to rake his blade across its wing as it hurtled past him. The wyvern screeched once in rage and tried to beat for altitude again, but it was too fast and too low. Its damaged wing buckled and the monster cartwheeled across the embankment. For a moment it lay still, tangled up in the brush, but then it shook itself and clambered to its clawed feet, glaring at Geran with pure hate.
“I think I just made it angry,” Geran muttered.
He put his point between the wyvern and himself and dropped into a fighting crouch, holding his shielding spell firmly in his left hand. The monster charged at him with the speed of a striking snake, far faster than Geran would have imagined. He managed to parry the sting once, then twice, but then the wyvern got its jaws clamped around his right leg and worried him like dog. It whipped him from side to side and then flung him away; Geran’s sword flew from his hand, and he hit the ground hard enough that his vision went black for an instant. When he could see again, the wyvern was darting toward him, yellow fangs gleaming. He started to climb to his feet, only to find that the world swayed drunkenly when he tried to sit up.
The wyvern hissed and sprang at him-but a coruscating green ray struck it in mid-leap and knocked it aside. An instant later Sarth appeared by Geran’s side and shouted another of his spells. A barrage of shrieking purple darts shot from his scepter and pinioned the wyvern to the ground; the monster snapped and snarled at the phantasmal javelins transfixing it, then shuddered and fell still.
“Are you all right?” the tiefling said.
“I think so,” Geran answered him. Sarth reached down and helped him to his feet; the swordmage staggered over to his sword and picked it up. “I hope there aren’t any more of those around.”
The tiefling scanned the skies anxiously. “Thank you, Geran Hulmaster. I did not see the monster’s dive. But next time, I’ll ask you to give me a moment’s warning before you teleport me.”
Geran looked around, trying to get a sense of the battle. He could see several places where the orcs had overwhelmed the dike, and scores of the ferocious warriors fought to widen the breaches and push on past the weakened defenses. Human riders did their best to counter the breaches, as did haphazard bands of the volunteers who had shown up to fight. With lance and bow they held back the black tide, but they were failing fast. “Gods, what chaos!”
“It seems the issue is still in doubt,” Sarth replied-an understatement if Geran had ever heard one.
Geran spied a large breach less than a hundred yards away. Orcs were fighting their way east and west along the top of the dike, rolling up the defenders still trying to hold back the rest of the attack. “There,” he said, pointing. “Try to do something about that, and I’ll see what I can do here.”
The tiefling nodded grimly and leaped into the sky. In a moment he hovered over the orc breakthrough, hurling blasts of fire down on the Bloody Skull warriors. Geran started to rejoin the fray, but a rider came galloping up from behind Lendon’s Dike.
“Lord Geran! Lord Geran!” the messenger called. “Lady Kara says to bring any troops you can spare and come to the center at once! She needs help there.”
“Spare? I can’t spare any!” Geran replied.
