Douglas Niles - The Heir of Kayolin

To the left and right, the landing sites were the small tunnel mouths terminating in docks and wharves; each was the objective of a small force, numbering some fifty boats. It was the center, where the broad ramp had been lowered, that the main portion of the attacking force, numbering more than two hundred boats, would come ashore.

General Darkstone, in the lead boat, could see the ramp had been lowered precisely as the wizard had planned. The commander was the first dwarf ashore, and he was met by two black-robed apprentices.

“We have not been discovered,” one of them informed him.

“Good.” Darkstone turned back to the boats, which were drawing up to the ramp as close together as their many oars would allow. “Debark and form up,” he said in a hushed voice. The word swiftly passed from boat to boat: the main route to the city was open.

He watched the veteran troops splash onto the ramp and move rapidly forward to clear the way for the next arrivals. When he turned to look along the dark road leading toward Norbardin, he didn’t see his army; instead, he saw his daughter’s face in his mind’s eye. She was beautiful and young, as he remembered her-before she had been captured by the king’s agents and given away like some sacred token to Ragat Kingsaver. When she had killed herself, she had salvaged her honor and signed a death sentence for the king and his commanding general.

“Rest well, my child,” Darkstone whispered to himself.

Then his brow knitted and he pictured Jungor Stonespringer, General Ragat, and the task ahead.

“Your hour of judgment is near,” he promised his enemies, who remained unseen in the darkness. But surely they must know he was coming.

“Hey! Who goes there?”

The first challenge came from the leftmost of the landing sites, where one of the royal garrison had taken note of the disturbance on the water. The reply came in the form of a hundred crossbow bolts, loosed by archers standing in the prows of the approaching boats. The sentry fell into the water with a gurgling splash, and the panicked cries of his comrades receded quickly, as the small garrison fled precipitously toward Norbardin.

The garrison at the right tunnel similarly bolted, and the flotillas reached dry land at the same time. The dwarves wasted no time in scrambling out of their boats. The flanking forces charged, shoulder to shoulder, along the two narrow tunnels leading into Norbardin. Veinslitter’s Daergar, a disciplined formation bearing swords and axes while protected by shields and plate armor, marched in tight ranks along the road to the left. To the right, Captain Forelock’s Klar advanced in a swarm, jogging along the smooth pavement, grunting and shouting as they picked up the pace of their advance.

General Darkstone himself led the main body of his force, the Theiwar regiments with Hylar skirmishers in the lead. As they were the largest of the army’s elements, the general took extra time to organize and form up his units as boat after boat debarked, depositing its complement of the army onto the sloping shore formed by the lowered ramp. Eight boats could pull up at a time, and the empty crafts were quickly shuttled out of the way so the next wave could beach and make ready. The dwarves of William’s army had drilled the procedure many times on the similar shores of the Isle of the Dead, and the practice paid off as the whole operation of emptying the many boats took less than fifteen minutes.

When the whole force, several thousand strong, had landed, Darkstone supervised organizing them into ranks, and finally they all started marching toward the city. They moved at a measured pace, for it was Willim’s plan that the two flanks would be engaged before the powerful knockout punch was delivered by the center.

The right wing advanced first, with General Forelock’s Klar charging at an enthusiastic trot, whooping and shouting as they swept around the bends of the narrow tunnel-stealth being not much valued by the impetuous Klar. As the right formation spread out, the dwarves of that undisciplined clan raced each other toward the nearest enemy positions. Barely a mile from the lake, the Klar berserkers encountered the first guard posts of the king’s royal garrison. Because of the inevitable noise they had made during their advance, they found the defenders stoutly waiting for them-but the fanatical attackers would not have had it any other way.

The first guard posts were blockhouses carved into the walls on both sides of the roadway. They had stout metal gates, usually left open, ready to block any undesirables. The guards, alerted brief moments earlier by the sound of the wild-eyed Klar’s advance, had already started to swing that gate shut when the attackers burst into a mad sprint. Howling wildly, the Klar hit the moving barrier at full tilt, the weight of the onslaught slamming the gate back against the defenders.

Swinging axes and swords with mad glee, the berserkers hurled themselves at the doors and the shuttered windows of the two blockhouses, quickly forcing their way inside. The outnumbered defenders had been expecting a small raiding party at best and were stunned by the onslaught of a full regiment. The king’s defenders were quickly slaughtered while the rest of the Klar spilled through the barricade and down down the tunnel in a mad rush toward the streets of lower Norbardin, some three miles away.

To the left, the Daergar also had taken out their first guard post in a sudden, silent rush, approaching the city gates with more stealth. There, the last of Willim’s apprentices had worked their sleep spells on the advance guard posts, and as a result the first company rushed through the entryway before the guards even knew what was happening. As some of Willim’s warriors took control of the wide plaza just inside the gate, the follow-up ranks swarmed over the defensive positions, killing the royal guards in their barracks, often before the startled dwarves had time to get out of bed.

In the center, finally, the Hylar skirmishers took the main gates of Norbardin in a whirlwind of fighting. The ruined hinge of the massive gate was discovered too late, and the great barrier stood useless as the attackers stormed past. Many of the garrison dwarves were distracted, having been called to fight the fire that had erupted in the gatehouse’s main storeroom. Using grappling hooks and ropes to scramble up the steep walls, Willim’s attackers carried the upper ramparts in the first few intense minutes of combat. The main bulk of Darkstone’s force, the Theiwar regiments in their tight, disciplined formations, marched through the gate and broke into a double-time march.

The first goals, all three of them, had been achieved by surprise and ferocity. Across a wide plaza, protected by a series of moats and walls, loomed the next, the main objective: the royal palace of Jungor Stonespringer, High King of Thorbardin.

The king of Thorbardin was jolted awake, wrested from a dream wherein he was being tended, most gently, by a harem’s worth of beautiful dwarf maids. The dream was exceedingly pleasant, and his initial reaction was outrage that someone would have dared to interrupt his reverie. Almost immediately, however, he realized that something was gravely wrong.

First, a dwarf-one of his guards or household members, almost certainly-had the audacity to pound loudly at the door that led into the king’s sleeping chamber.

“Your Majesty!” came the urgent cry, and Stonespringer recognized the voice of his chamberlain, Robards. “Please get up! We are attacked!”

Shaking his head, the king sat up in bed and swung his short, skinny legs over the edge of his hard mattress. Even above the clamor of Robards’s shouts of alarm, he could hear screams and battle cries, all close enough to indicate the enemy was already in the city. Even as he digested that shock, he heard the resounding clash of steel against steel, a nightmarish clanging that seemed to fill the whole of the great plaza beyond his palace walls.