Douglas Niles - Goddess Worldweaver

“But they killed a dwarfmaid-poured hot oil over her!” the king protested. “A brutal murder!”

“Brutal indeed, but who committed that murder, sire?” Darann retorted. “Did you see the goblins do this-or did Nayfal tell you that’s what happened?”

“Of course I didn’t see,” the king snapped. “But I had the report-from…” His glowering gaze fell upon the hapless lord, who had risen to his feet. “Another lie, my lord, isn’t it?” Lightbringer drew a deep sigh. “A lie that has resulted in more innocent bloodshed.”

He glowered, sitting straight in his throne, seeming to grow as they looked at him. “You, more than anyone else, has crusaded against the malignance of treason. Yet now it seems that you are treason’s most able practitioner. To this end you have caused to be murdered an innocent dwarfmaid, a palace guard-if he was corrupt, he was corrupted by your hand-and countless goblins. You have much blood on your hands. There can be only one sentence for such treachery.”

“No!” the lord screamed. He broke away, starting toward the back doors to the great hall.

“Stop him!” the king snapped, as some of his guards drew their swords and the archers, near the door, raised their crossbows. “Immediately!”

It was over in another instant, the twang of a crossbow spring shockingly loud in the lofty chamber. The echoes lingered even after Nayfal, shot through, fell to the floor and lay still.

The elves of Barantha reached the Ringhills first, but it was the trolls, arriving at that natural barrier a full day later, who made the real difference in preparing the defenses. Jubal spoke to Awfulbark even as the lanky forest dwellers were spreading wearily along the outer slope of the hills, and that worthy king responded with an energy that the Virginian found deeply gratifying.

“We can dig a ditch and pile up a dirt wall, sure,” Awfulbark declared. “Where you want?”

“Up the slope a short distance,” the man explained. “So that the ghost warriors have to start climbing the hill before they get to the ditch. But close enough to the bottom that archers on the wall will be able to shoot arrows into the enemy troops as they gather at the foot of the hill.”

He showed the trolls where to collect picks and shovels, the tools that continued to arrive by the wagonload from King Fedlater’s miners on Dernwood Downs. Immediately Awfulbark’s warriors set out along the line and wasted no time in displaying their great capacity for dirt moving. Natac had selected the forward slope of the first ridge for the position, some hundred feet above the tabletop expanse of dry plains extending Nullward from this section of the hills, and Jubal had the elves mark off the proposed excavation with flags and pickets.

“Dig it deep enough so that the bastards will fall into the ditch,” he ordered, demonstrating at the barrier of the sharp-walled trench. Then he marked out the sample of the wall, the obstacle the enemy would have to attack as soon as they crawled through the ditch. “And make this high enough and steep enough that the bastards will roll right back down into the ditch again!”

The Argentian elves arrived as the work was beginning, and both Tamarwind and Kelland set their warriors to helping. For the most part the elves were mere bystanders, however, as the trolls attacked the ground with relentless chopping pickaxes, then scooped away the loose rubble with a churning of shovels. Jubal watched as, minute by minute, the long ditch grew deeper, the matching wall climbing higher above the rugged slope.

Within another forty-eight hours, the fringe of the rocky rise was scoured by a trench and adjacent breastwork some thirty miles in length. Each hilltop along that winding path had been turned into a palisade in its own right, surrounded by an earthen wall, with a flat platform excavated as a mount for one of Gallupper’s batteries. Unfortunately, the line was so long that not every hilltop could be defended with one of the lethal guns, and even those thus equipped had but one. That weapon would have to be wheeled into position for shooting forward or toward either flank.

Jubal’s troops were deployed thinly along that long line, but he was pleased that so much of the approach could be covered. As he strode along the crest of the wall he was reminded of a great fortification on Earth-he had learned about it, seen pictures in a book, when he had been a child in Virginia. It was a wall thousands of miles long, protecting the entire northern border of China; it was not hard to imagine that, given a little more time, Awfulbark’s trolls would be able to create a barrier of similar extent.

This was a useful realization, for he knew that the hills presented a more than four-hundred-mile circumference around the entire span of Circle at Center and its great lake. If the ghost warriors moved to one side or the other, then the defenders would have to follow the same course. Fortunately, many parts of the range were precipitous and jagged, with lots of sheer cliffs and deep gorges. He knew that those were places no army would try to traverse.

Other places were more vulnerable, however, and if the enemy changed the direction of its advance, he and Natac would simply have to move their army to one side or the other to continue to block the approach to the city. It was a tactic eerily similar to that employed by Robert E. Lee in his defense of Richmond. Jubal tried not to dwell on the fact that, for the Army of Northern Virginia, these maneuvers had eventually, perhaps inevitably, resulted in defeat.

For the first day the scouts reported that the attackers were coming across the plain like a flood, a great dark stain across the ground. The ghost warriors were loosely formed into columns, but each of these was a mile or more across, composed of a seemingly endless number of plodding, purposeful killers. The dust raised by these massive formations formed a self-sustaining cloud in the sky, and by Lighten of the second day this murk was visibly approaching the Ringhills, an ominous storm.

As that day progressed and the trolls and elves and the few surviving gnomes labored to deepen the ditch and raise the dirt wall of their immense palisade, the columns themselves came into view. From his vantage on a high hilltop Jubal thought they looked like snakes, great black predators, reptilian in nature, slithering closer and closer to the Ringhills and the Center of Everything.

Gradually, toward sunset of that day, another force became visible, marching from the direction of Riven Deep. These were the Delvers, the general knew. As they came closer, he could begin to make out the gigantic iron golems striding among their number. If all remained as it was, the dwarves would fall upon the far right flank of his earthwork barrier, while the ghost warriors would come up against the center and the left.

Near the Hour of Darken the Hyaccan elves rode forward in a great raid, harassing one of the columns with a shower of lethal arrows. As dusk closed around the massive formation, the elves turned their nimble ponies and scampered away. None of the riders was wounded, but neither did their attack seem to inflict any perceptible delay upon the great column.

The night’s approaching darkness seemed exceptionally complete. The ghost warriors built no campfires nor fires of any kind, so only the camp of the Delvers was visible from the heights. And even that small portion of the attacking army seemed to kindle a million fires, blazes winking like stars across a great swath of the plain.

Finally Jubal went to the high hill crest near the very center of the line, the elevation he had taken to calling Hill Number One. There was a pool of water there, and-as they did every Darken and Lighten-a trio of druids began to spin the water. This was to allow teleportation from Circle at Center or elsewhere. Idly the Virginian watched the scene, half expecting the twinkling lights to indicate that someone was arriving magically.