Douglas Niles: The Crown and the Sword

The result was the shots of the second volley landed in slightly different places. Two were lost to soft ground, but the four that rumbled onward tore through the shaken line of pikemen in different areas. Before the men and their startled officers could even grasp what was happening to them, four additional holes had been punched through the line-the line that depended on unbroken integrity for its battlefield effectiveness.

Now the horses of the Solamnic Knights picked up the pace of their advance. They trotted, the thunder of many thousands of hooves reverberating across the distance between the two armies. The gap was narrowing so the armored lancers were only a quarter mile away from the pikes. Still, they came in a measured, far from hasty charge.

The thunder of the hoofbeats was nearly drowned out by the stunning explosive noise when the next volley blasted from the bombards. Officers in the line of pikemen had recovered their wits and were frantically ordering their men to fill in the gaps in the line. These efforts met with some success until the next, stronger volley ripped through.

One of the shots took off the head of a veteran sergeant major just as he was trying to rearrange his men into some semblance of order. The corpse of the grizzled warrior fell, blood spouting from its neck, and a hundred men who had witnessed the decapitating blow dropped their pikes and fled to the rear. They left a wide gap in the center, and the men of the neighboring companies nervously shifted their eyes among that breach, the approaching horsemen, and the imagined safety far behind them.

The guns belched again, their position clearly marked by the cloud of smoke that blossomed across the ridgetop. More balls ripped through the line, even as another volley boomed forth. Now the gray, churning smoke all but enveloped the ride and nothing else could be seen, except for the repeated flashes that burst through the cloud, bright as the fires of the Abyss.

Then the battle began in earnest as the captains of the knights raised their lances, shouted their battle cries, and all their armored warriors spurred their heavy warhorses into a gallop.

“What are they doing to us?” demanded Ankhar, watching in horror as dozens more of his pikemen were punched out of the line by a strange new power he still could not comprehend. He glared up at the smoke-shrouded ridge, certain that the explosive noises up there and the lethal destruction in front of him were related somehow. But aside from the flashes of flame, he could make out nothing within that murk.

And he couldn’t understand what was happening!

“Some kind of projectile weapon,” Hoarst speculated, his tone surprisingly dispassionate as he came up beside the army commander, giving Ankhar a start. “It’s launching those stones like it was a giant sling… or a tremendously powerful catapult. They’re flying a mile or more before they come down.”

“Is it magic?” demanded the half-giant. “Can you fight it with spells?”

Maddeningly, the Thorn Knight merely shrugged. “I don’t see how-not from here in any event. However, I came to speak with you about another important matter-the wand.”

“What?” Ankhar was so distracted that he had to think for a moment to realize what the Thorn Knight was talking about. “Yes, my mother tells me it has been finished.”

“Yes. I should be able to use it to command the elemental king… even better than before. We will have the monster to lead us in battle again.”

“But I must have an army left for that to happen!” roared the half-giant. “Look at the line! You must go up there and try to destroy those… things!” ordered Ankhar until he was distracted by an even more immediate threat. “Damn them! Look, the knights!”

The armored knights were bearing down on his army now at breakneck speed, riding shoulder to shoulder, heavy lances leveled. The pike line was a shambles. Many men had fallen, but even more of the troops had panicked and run. Huge gaps had opened up and the galloping knights poured through these openings. Once through, they curled around to the right and left, stabbing with lances, hacking with swords, and the footmen could not possibly wield their cumbersome weapons fast enough to defend themselves.

The principle behind the pike formation was the uniform presentation of a line of the weapons. Once the line was ruptured, however, the individual pikeman was almost helpless against an enemy on horseback-a soldier wielding a twenty-foot shaft of wood with a steel blade on the end could do very little against a close, mobile opponent. And even if a lone man tried to hold a horse at bay with a pike, the knight could easily bash the tip of the ungainly weapon to one side or the other then ride in for the kill.

And kill the Solamnics did, along the whole breadth of the once-formidable line. The horsemen trampled the pikemen. When they were too close to use their lances, the knights drew massive swords and cleaved the helpless pikemen. The horses kicked and reared, stomping on the men of the infantry, further smashing the crumbled line.

At the same time, the thunderous assault continued and adjusted to the shifting battle. Now the balls flew over the heads of the knights and pikemen, thumping to the ground and rolling through the rear formations of Ankhar’s army. These were spread out enough so that many shots fell between the units, but whenever a tumbling ball crashed into a tightly packed column of warriors, it inflicted terrible carnage. Ankhar was shocked to see an ogre blasted in two by a hit in his belly, and he could only gape in horror as the same ball rolled on to knock down a dozen more of the brutish warriors.

“Rib Chewer!” cried the half-giant, summoning his goblin warg rider. He pointed at the melee, where the last of the pikemen were frantically trying to form squares or circles to hold the swarming knights at bay. It already seemed a losing cause.

“Attack the knights! Break up that charge!” ordered the army commander. “We need time!”

“Yes, lord!” cried the venerable captain. He raced away atop his wolf, howling for the attention of his men.

Soon a tide of savage cavalry was loping toward the front of the half-giant’s army.

Once more the terrible weapons on the ridgetop roared, fire flashing through the clouds of smoke. Ankhar remembered his command to the Thorn Knight and turned to repeat the order. But Hoarst had disappeared.

Dram was pacing up and down behind the line of bombards, encouraging his gunners and occasionally running forward far enough to watch the shots land. As he scurried back to the ammunition wagons, amidst the swirling smoke a flash of white caught his eye, and he veered toward the familiar, alabaster figure.

“Lady Coryn!” he exclaimed, recognizing the white-robed wizard as she materialized to the rear of the cannons. She was holding her hands to her ears, and her face-like Dram’s and everyone else’s-was streaked with soot and sweat. Her robe, somehow, remained as white as a blanket of new-fallen snow. “What are you doing up here?”

“Looking for trouble,” she replied after lowering her hands. “I have a feeling you’ve attracted Ankhar’s undivided attention.”

The mountain dwarf grinned. “Yeah, they’re doing the job, aren’t they,” he said proudly, standing beside her as he watched the nearest bombards-the only two he could see because of the thick smoke-get loaded for their next shot.

“Very impressive,” Coryn said.

Dram had good cause to be pleased. The tubes were all holding up well. His armorers periodically tightened the clamps on the steel straps holding them together, and none had shown signs of failure. If anything, the steady firing was turning out to be harder on the wagons supporting the bombards than on the weapons themselves.