Michael Stackpole - When Dragons Rage

The flags atop Darovin immediately shifted. Down came the red and black. In their place rose two long green pennants.

Phfas cackled. “He demands two legions to help. Fool!”

The Kingsmen had advanced enough to be seen from Darovin and raised their voices in a cheer as they saw that signal. The Gurolans must have figured out what was happening, for their song redoubled in strength and the ram lurched, moving faster. The song pulsed power and Adrogans could feel Pain attuning herself to it, reading the ache of muscles, the creaking of sinews, the sharp tingling of frozen toes.

The Darovin ballistae launched their missiles. Adrogans took heart, since the heavy shafts with the foot-long blades had not nearly the power of a single dragonel ball. Even so, some spears did pierce the roof and Pain communicated to him the golden torture of the cold, steel head spitting a man.

The song faltered for a heartbeat, then resumed again, stronger and more defiant. The Kingsmen started forward again, but Adrogans held up a hand to restrain them. He read the urgency in the jingle of tack and the quivering of muscles, but shook his head. “Wait for the signal.”

The two green flags flew down. When they rose again, a third had joined them. This green flag had three white dots on it.

Phfas’ eyes narrowed. “Sorcerers.”

Adrogans nodded. “As we expected.” The elven scout on the far side of the river flashed a confirmation that reinforcements were moving up, including vylaens and the kryalniri .

The shaman threw off his robe, interlinked his fingers, bridged them, and raised them over his head in a stretch. The little charms hanging from his leathery skin stood out. Whereas Phfas normally wore rings of gold or other precious metals, this day he sported small stone amulets painted white, bits of bone, and two frostclaw feathers.

The general smiled. “Are you ready?”

“Yes.”

“If you please.”

Phfas’ hands parted, but remained above his head. The fingers splayed out and quivered. Tendons stood out and veins twisted beneath his skin. Scars became almost luminous and wove themselves into a network that closely resembled a snowflake. They burned whiter than snow itself.

Then the shaman’s hands convulsed into fists.

A crack sounded from the mountaintop. For a heartbeat after that there was nothing, then a slow rumbling rose in its wake. The rumbling built, quickly, swallowing the song, eclipsing the screams from the tower.

Phfas, like Adrogans, had bound to himself yrun , though his closest ally was air. As his fists closed, air hardened on the mountaintop. It drove down solidly at various points cracking the crusted snow and pressing it into the softer, looser powder below. The snow began to slip and slide, passing quickly over a deeper, icier level. The rumble grew as it picked up speed, then the snow flew from the mountain in a white cataract.

Snow, so light that it would drift down easily from the clouds, hardly seemed a threat, but it poured off the mountain swiftly and heavily. Tons of it flew in a fluid sheet, mixing huge chunks of ice with a few trees and the occasional rock, pounding down onto the roadway between Varalorsk and Darovin with the fury of storm-driven waves.

The Aurolani reinforcements—all three legions—vanished in the avalanche. Snow landed twenty feet deep on the roadway, rising higher than the walls of Darovin itself. The swath of snow flowed onto the river and the ice cracked. The snow poured down into the dark hole and disappeared.

The ram continued forward and the Darovin ballistae shot more hurriedly. More men died, but soon enough the shots from the tower played back against the middle and tail of the ram. Archers lined the top of the gate wall and shot down, trying to drive their shafts through the roof, but to no avail.

Adrogans watched the aft end of the ram swing back, then forward. The first impact sounded like a giant hand knocking politely on the gate. Then another knock, heavier and harder, echoed through the valley. A third came, then a fourth, each insistent, solid and undeniable. With enough time, the gate would shatter.

Suddenly chaos erupted on the walls. Gibberers pitched forward, spinning from above the gate to bounce from the ram’s roof. The gates opened, slowly at first, then more quickly, and the Gurolean song transformed itself into a cacophony of war cries.

Adrogans spurred his horse forward, with the signalman and Phfas trotting in his wake. He glanced back at the shaman. Phfas’ skin had taken on a blue tone and the older man shivered, but his eyes still burned bright. He smiled even more brightly.

“You see, uncle. It worked.”

Phfas nodded. “The Zhusk could have done this.”

“The Zhusk did. They just had help.”

Adrogans dismounted at the ram and, drawing his sword, ran in through the gate. The Stonehearts had already reached the far gate and opened it. A few of them ran out toward the mountain of snow cutting the road. A couple of gibberers lay broken on the roadway, or struggling to drag themselves from beneath tons of snow. The Stonehearts ended their misery.

The Alcidese general, Caro, begrimed but smiling broadly, met Adrogans in Darovin’s courtyard. “It worked perfectly, my lord. Yes, more blood flowed than water, but that’s because so little water flowed.”

The difficulty in taking the Three Brothers really fell into two areas. The first was a need to lure troops out from behind walls so they could be slaughtered. The roadway offered an obvious killing ground, and the Blackfeathers could have slain many of the reinforcements, but they could only have done so from the river and there they would have been in the open and terribly vulnerable.

The second problem was a manifestation of the first: how to approach the fortresses unseen. At first he had considered having the Nalisk Mountain Rangers descend on ropes from the mountain, but that would still have left them outside the fortresses, and as vulnerable as any troops on the road. With the river frozen, nothing could be floated down to deliver troops, and they would have still remained outside the walls.

Ultimately Duke Mikhail had provided the solution. So exact were his models that he even showed the stone tunnels where the fortresses’ offal flowed into the river to be carried away. Those tunnels provided a way in, but one that was guarded by twenty feet of frigid water.

More blood flowed than water because, fifteen miles upriver, Zhusk shamans whose yrun were water summoned all their power and diverted the river into an old flood channel. While the river pooled into a lake, Caro’s Alcidese King’s Horse Guards, the Helurian Imperial Steel Legion and the Okrannel Kingsmen had traveled beneath the ice, in the frozen riverbed, to the effluent tunnels. They slowly snuck into the fortresses and then, when the avalanche thundered down, Caro’s and Mikhail’s men attacked Darovin and Varalorsk respectively.

A man on the top of Darovin called down. “Varalorsk just raised a green legion flag. Elves say reinforcements are heading to Varalorsk.”

“Understood.” Adrogans raised a hand and summoned the leader of the troops who had appropriated the Kingsmen’s livery forward. “Captain Dmitri, have your people get that ram in here, then close the gates and man them.”

The man from Svoin nodded, then turned and began to issue orders to his troops.

Adrogans looked at Caro. “Shall we make our way to Varalorsk?”

“After you, my lord.”

With Phfas trailing them, the two generals hiked up over the hill of snow and back down to Varalorsk. The small sally port in the southern gate opened and filthy Kingsmen waved them forward hurriedly. Their urgency did not surprise Adrogans, as the green flag requesting reinforcements had been raised by the Kingsmen to lure Aurolani forces into the open. On Varalorsk’s north wall archers who would slaughter the reinforcements would be hidden, and this was something to which all of the attackers had looked forward.