Troy Denning - The Obsidian Oracle

Agis threw himself beneath the gate, then watched from his shelter as the rest of the company rushed into the courtyard. By the time the last giant had passed through the gates, the apron had become, quite literally, a mountain of dead flesh and stony rubble. Only a small space directly in front of the gates remained relatively clear, for it appeared that the Saram had deliberately avoided dropping any boulders in this area. Agis found this puzzling, since the Saram ambush would work better if their enemy’s only escape was blocked by bodies and stones.

Mag’r’s deep voice began issuing orders inside the courtyard, and Agis crawled from his hiding place. To both sides of the isthmus, he saw Joorsh warriors wading toward the castle entrance from the Bay of Woe. At the same time, the clatter of boulders dropping into the courtyard increased in frequency, fixing the attention of Mag’r and his warriors on the walls above their heads.

Agis saw Brita’s camouflaged form slip out of the courtyard. She grabbed the gate with the harpoon in it and began to quietly pull it closed. Nal’s plan, the noble realized, was even more ingenious than it had appeared. Once Brita closed the gates, the true slaughter would begin-leaving him locked outside the castle, while Tithian remained inside with the Dark Lens.

Agis rushed over to the body of the nearest Joorsh and pulled the warrior’s bone dagger from its sheath. The weapon was taller than the noble, and he had to hold it like a two-handed sword, but he suspected he could wield the blade well enough for his purposes.

By the time Agis turned back around, Brita was reaching for the second gate. Hefting the borrowed blade over his head, the noble rushed forward. The chameleon-head turned one eye on him and one on Mag’r, her club-ended tongue flickering in anger. Paying her gesture no heed, Agis swung his blade with all his might. The beasthead deftly pulled her leg out of the way, narrowly avoiding a gash across her knee, and kicked.

The giant’s toe caught Agis square in the stomach, wracking his body with pain and causing him to drop his weapon. The noble went tumbling across the rocky apron, not stopping until he hit a pile of Joorsh corpses.

Agis was still trying to shake the dizziness from his head when he saw that his brief skirmish with Brita had been noticed. Ignoring the steady clatter of boulders in the courtyard, Sachem Mag’r stepped up behind the Saram spy and sent her reptilian head flying with one hack of his obsidian blade. Agis barely had time to roll out of the way before her body crashed down on the same pile of corpses into which he had tumbled.

Mag’r scowled and pointed his sword at Brita’s body. “What was she doing here?” he demanded.

As the sachem spoke, the first Joorsh reinforcements began to arrive from the Bay of Woe.

“She was hiding, I guess,” Agis replied.

The noble cast a nervous glance around the apron. To all sides, Joorsh were slowly hauling themselves onto the barren rock, silt pouring off their bodies in long gray streamers.

The king frowned and stepped toward the noble. Before he could ask another question, a deafening thunder erupted inside the courtyard. Even from his side of the gate, Agis could see tons of boulders pouring down into the courtyard. The Joorsh warriors cried out in a single shocked voice. A cloud of rock chips and dust came roiling out of the gateway to engulf Mag’r.

“It’s a trap!” the sachem yelled.

Agis ran for cover, sprinting at an angle for the cliffs that flanked Castle Feral’s gateworks. He narrowly avoided the outthrust hands of several Joorsh who were just climbing onto the apron, and dived into a hollow at the base of the bluff. He crawled to the back of this hole, hoping that it was small enough to keep the giants’ thick fingers from plucking him out.

The noble need not have worried. No sooner had he found his hiding place than a soft, low-pitched rumble issued from the gates, growing louder and more resonant with each passing moment. The dust haze settled enough for him to see Mag’r looking back through the gate, and the rumble developed into a roar. Castle Feral began to shake so badly that Agis could see centuries of encrusted dirt and loosened building stones dropping onto the apron outside his hole.

Mag’r spun and threw himself away from the gate. Half his reinforcements did likewise, but the other half were still standing on the apron when a cataclysmic bang shook its barren stones. A massive granite ball came blasting from the gateyard. The gateworks erupted into a shower of jagged masonry, cutting down every living thing that stood before the blast and raising a thousand plumes of dust as the shattered stones splattered into the Bay of Woe.

The ball continued on, plowing into the mountain of rubble that covered the apron, flinging dead giants and huge boulders high into the air, then arcing out over the silt bay to vanish from sight beneath a long plume of dust.

Like Mag’r and the Joorsh warriors who had survived the explosion, Agis could only stare in open-mouthed wonder as the debris stirred up by the stone came drizzling back to the ground.

Finally, the shower stopped. Mag’r appeared from the far side of the gate, a mountainous silhouette lumbering through the dust haze. Behind him came a dozen more Joorsh forms, long spears or heavy clubs clutched in their hands, too dazed to speak and stumbling over the rubble like the survivors of an inferno that had destroyed an entire city.

“Come out, spy!” yelled Mag’r, pulling an enormous dagger from its sheath. “Don’t make me search for you, or your death will be twice as painful!”

Agis remained motionless and silent in his little alcove, content to take his chances. It would not be long, he suspected, before the Poison Pack charged to his rescue.

Sure enough, the noble soon heard the clatter of stumbling giants coming from the rubble-strewn gateyard of Castle Feral. The sound was followed by the raucous battle cry of the Poison Pack, an angry wail so full of hissing and chirping that it sounded almost ghostly.

Forgetting about Agis, Mag’r raised his sword and charged into the courtyard. The rest of the Joorsh followed, but the Poison Pack began to pour out of the castle onto the apron. Peals of thunder rolled over the peninsula as the two groups of warriors met, their weapons clashing like bolts of lightning. Angry yells and savage snarls filled the air. Dripping fangs sank into unprotected flesh, while bare hands smashed arachnid skulls and snapped serpentine necks. Soon giants from both tribes were crashing to the ground, their blood running in dark rivers and gathering in steaming lakes.

For a few awestruck moments, Agis watched the battle without moving. Then, once he judged that the giants were too preoccupied with each other to bother with him, he slipped from his hiding place and crept along the wall. Just a few feet away danced the legs of fighting giants, their blows echoing off each other like clashing mountains. Once, Agis was nearly crushed when a Saram toppled over in front of him, and another time he was bowled over when a Joorsh tooth, still slick with the giant’s saliva, crashed down on his shoulder.

Eventually, the noble reached the hole where the castle gate had once stood. The place was even more littered with bodies and rubble, if that were possible, than the rest of the apron. The gateyard was an impassable jumble, except that a valley of crushed stone and flesh marked where the granite ball had rolled through.

In the center of this valley, Agis saw Bawan Nal and Sachem Mag’r, the only living beings in the gateyard, battling furiously. Nal fought with his back to the trench-path, thrusting first with a lance he carried in one hand, then slashing madly with the crude bone sword he held in the other. His owlish eyes blazed with a murderous light, and his hooked beak hung half-open, ready to clamp down on any appendage that came too near it.