The rider was a young Shieldsworn, bloodied and disheveled, and he simply stared at Geran in confusion. The swordmage grimaced and glanced around at his part of the field. Kara wouldn’t have asked for help unless she needed it, he told himself. She knew how many soldiers he had on his part of the line. He held up his hand and said to the messenger, “No, wait. I’ll bring as many as I can.”
The swordmage climbed back up to the top of the dike and found the young soldier carrying his banner. “Shieldsworn, to me!” he shouted. “Marstel, Double Moon, to me! Assemble on the south side of the dike! Spearmeet, House Sokol, stand your ground!”
All along the earthen wall, soldiers of Hulburg began to disengage, backing down the dike while the miltiamen on either side spread out to try to cover their absence. It left Geran’s line woefully thin-another concerted attack would certainly punch through. But Geran realized that his hodgepodge force had largely repulsed the first rush of the Bloody Skulls. The dawn was a thin orange sliver clinging to the hilltops of eastern Highfells; sunrise could not be far off now. By the growing light he could see that the embankment was littered with dead or wounded orcs, and that many of the ironclad warriors of the Bloody Skull horde were shifting across his front, flowing toward the middle of the fight.
Geran looked around and found Brun Osting, the son of Durnan, standing by the tattered flag of his Spearmeet company. He hurried over to the young brewer and clapped a hand on his shoulder. “I’ve got to go help in the center,” he told him. “I’m leaving you in charge here. You Spearmeet have to hold this end of the line on your own. I’ll leave you the Sokols to help, and the sorcerer Sarth there. Can you do it?”
The young man nodded soberly. “We don’t have much choice, do we? We’ll hold the line or die where we stand, Lord Geran.”
“Good fortune,” Geran said. He squeezed the young man’s shoulder, and then hurried down the back of the dike to the spot where his small company was assembling. It was a little less than a hundred strong, and he wondered if it would be enough to make a difference in the heavy fighting in the middle. He took a moment to speak with the Sokol captain-a fierce-looking Turmishan woman whose detachment was down to a dozen riders-and point out Brun to her. Whether she’d follow the brewer’s orders, he had no idea, but at least she hadn’t ridden away from the battle yet.
“Where to, Lord Geran?” one of the Shieldsworn footmen called from the ranks.
“The Vale Road!” Geran called back. “They need us in the center, lads. Let’s go lend them a hand. Follow me!”
He set out at an easy jog, holding back his pace so that the soldiers in their heavier armor could keep up. It helped that they were moving downhill and had only five or six hundred yards to travel. Sporadic fighting continued atop the dike a short distance to Geran’s right, but he passed no more major breaches. In a few moments they came in sight of the furious melee swirling around the spot where the Vale Road pierced the embankment. Hundreds of orcs thronged the gap, pushing inward against a thinning line of Icehammers and Shieldsworn.
Geran looked around for Kara’s banner or the harmach, and saw nothing but pitched battle. He would’ve liked to know where she wanted his small strike to fall, but one glance was enough to show him that he couldn’t wait. Strange, he thought. For all the years I’ve lived with a sword in my hand, I’ve never fought in a real battle, only duels and skirmishes-nothing more than twenty or thirty warriors on a side. After traveling for ten years all over Faerun, I find the biggest battle of my life not three miles from the castle where I was born.
The men behind him said nothing, staring at the scene in nervous silence. Geran shook himself free of his weary musings and tried to think quickly and well about what he could see in front of him. He had little gift for strategy, so he tried to see the battle as a duel of sorts. The orc spearhead had pushed deep into the center like a reckless and powerful lunge at the center of an opponent’s torso; if someone came at him with an attack like that, what would he do? “I wouldn’t try to stop it,” he murmured to himself. “I’d deflect the point, let it go past me, and then strike at my foe’s hand.” That suggested a strike not at the tip of the spear, but back a little farther. Geran looked back toward the gap in the embankment and saw that a few Hulburgan soldiers still fought along the dike to each side of the breach. If he moved along the inside of the dike and hit the orcs on their flank, perhaps he’d succeed in knocking their thrust aside.
He drew his sword and signaled to the men following him. “After me, lads!” he cried. “We’re going to cut them off and trap them inside our lines!” Then Geran shouted a battle cry and ran ahead of his hodgepodge company, leading them under the cover of the old dike. He heard a ragged chorus of roars and cries behind him. Both orcs and human soldiers looked around in his direction, but Geran didn’t slow his steps. Instead he cried out the words of a spell to set his sword aflame with a brilliant white light, and he hurled himself into the torrent of orc warriors pushing their way through the low defile. He cut his way through three or four Bloody Skulls before they even realized their danger, and then the mass of the Shieldsworn and mercenaries behind him drove into the orcs with an audible shock that seemed to shiver the icy morning air.
Geran cut and stabbed with every ounce of skill and lethal purpose he could dredge up, from his boyhood exercises to the long years of study with Myth Drannor’s fabled bladesingers. He threw spells where he could, searing his foes with bursts of golden fire, dazzling and disorienting them with deadly enchantments that stupefied thick-thewed berserkers until elven steel drove through flesh and bone. And his small, battered company fought like lions in the narrow gap of the Vale Road. They carried the open breach with the force of their charge. Geran looked up to see Kara dashing through the melee on her fine white charger, plying her deadly bow at a full gallop. She shot down an orc that he was about to engage, and felled another one who was trying to beat his way through a Shieldsworn’s guard not ten feet away. “For harmach and Hulburg!” she shouted.
The swordmage whirled where he stood, searching for more foes to engage. To his amazement he realized that the Bloody Skulls who’d forced their way through the gap in the dike had melted away. Dozens of duels and skirmishes continued around him, but the first great thrust was spent-the warriors of Hulburg had held the Vale Road, at least for the moment.
“They’re falling back,” Geran called to his cousin.
“Not for long,” Kara answered. She pointed toward the north, out to the fields beyond the dike. Geran followed the point of her sword, and his heart sank. A few hundred yards away, around the great black banners at the center of the Bloody Skull horde, hundreds of orc warriors stamped and shouted and struck their spears to their shields. An armored wedge of lumbering ogres stood at their head, bellowing their crude challenges. Kara’s eyes glowed with their uncanny blue fire, smoldering in the shadows of her helm. “That was only the first attack. The next one’s gathering already.”
Geran shook the blood off his blade and turned to face the ogres and orcs streaming back into the fight. He readied himself to sell his life as dearly as he could-and then a thin, cold breath of wind suddenly stirred the ground around him, turning the wet grass white with hoarfrost. Sinister voices whispered dark things on the wind, and a sense of icy dread clutched at his heart like a murderer’s hand. He shivered and faltered back several steps. The rosy glow of sunrise faded to dull gray, and streamers of pale fog seemed to coalesce from the very air, darkening the dawn. Stout-hearted dwarves groaned in fear and hid their faces, while men who had fought valiantly for hours let their futile blades slip from nerveless fingers. Even the bloodthirsty orcs pouring across the fields slowed and stopped, halting well short of the sinister fog.
A dull scraping caught his attention, and Geran looked down at the black earth under his feet. Dirt buckled upward, stirred from beneath. Then a skeletal hand thrust up into the chill, deadly mists of the morning. He backed away from it, only to find another bony hand clutching at his heels. He kicked his foot free with a sudden burst of panic. Scores of the things-dirt-encrusted skeletons still draped in the rusted remnants of ancient armor-were dragging themselves up out of the ground.
“What foul necromancy is this?” Kara snarled into the freezing fog. Her horse Dancer shied away in panic, her eyes rolling. The ranger threw a panicked look in Geran’s direction. “We can’t fight the undead and the orcs at the same time!”
“This is Sergen’s doing!” Geran snarled. The rogue Hulmaster’s undead allies had failed to kill the harmach at Griffonwatch, so now he was trying again… and that meant that his cousin had to be somewhere near, since Aesperus had said that the wielder of the amulet could not send the lich’s minions far. Geran wondered if Sergen’s House Veruna allies were making their move as well. Doubtless Sergen would order the undead to spare the Verunas, but the rest of the Hulburgan army was in dire peril. “Stand your ground as long as you can, and protect the harmach!” he called to Kara. “I have to find Sergen before the dead overwhelm us all!”
Turning his back on the skeletal ranks assembling themselves before the defenders of Hulburg, Geran sheathed his blade and ran into the frigid mists.
