Dan Parkinson - Hammer and Axe

Casually blocking a final arrow with his shield, Willen Ironmaul, chief of chiefs of Thorbardin, jumped from the wall to the protected ledge and told Barek Stone, “Cale has given us a few minutes to regroup. Make good use of the time. The humans will attack again as soon as they catch their breaths.” He turned, then, shading his eyes to look out across the bloody fields of battle. In the distance, beyond the masses of human invaders, something new was happening. Grabbing a far-seer, he set it to his eye and saw the red crests and gray cloaks of the members of the Roving Guard, moving fast, spreading into an assault line.

“It’s Damon,” the chief of chiefs muttered. “Damon has found the wizards.”

By old Theiwar trails and Daewar traders’ routes, the volunteers of the Roving Guard had bypassed the masses of human warriors pressing upon Thorbardin and come to its rearmost lines just as the Neidar horsemen plunged into the assault there.

Seeing what Cale was doing, Damon had held his volunteers back, then moved in swiftly behind the Neidar, cutting down a few dozen scattered defenders to concentrate on the wizards running about in confusion.

Ignoring their “magics,” the Roving Guard cut out, separated, and began rounding up the practitioners of high sorcery, herding and driving them, pushing them out onto the Promontory, farther and farther from the human forces they had been directing. Not all of the wizards fell into their sweep. Some—perhaps many—were still with the barbarian army, protected by its ranks. But Damon had not expected to get all of them. His hope was only to find and separate enough of the magic-users that their absence would soon be noticed. By the time Damon looked back, to estimate a half mile of distance from the nearest marauders, his trotting wedge of determined dwarves had nearly fifty motley, raging humans running ahead of them, spitting spells and shouting curses.

All around, fires erupted on the landscape. Lightning flared, and illusions tangled with illusions. The day went from day to night and back to day again; monsters grew from clumps of brush; rain pelted down through bright sunlight; and dwarf after dwarf seemed to turn into something else, but stubbornly kept moving.

At one point, Damon seemed to be flanked by a seething gargoyle and a porcupine, and at another point it seemed that he, himself, was sprouting doors and shingles. But the single-minded rejection of spells that he had drilled into the survivors of Mace Hammerstand’s proud legion held strong, and the mages scampered ahead of the determined line, at the mercy of blades, shield edges, and heavy hammers if they lagged.

Caught completely off-guard, the wizards fled in confusion, their spells interfering with one another far more than with the purposes of the determined dwarves. Some of them didn’t survive. Hammers and swords put an end to some spells before they were completed, and the fallen wizards lay forgotten on the ground like crumbs dropped by a busy cartman having lunch as he worked.

A mile out onto the Promontory, Damon and the Roving Guard herded the wizards up a knoll, within clear view of the besieged and the besiegers on the mountain slopes, and halted them there.

“What do you think you’re doing, dwarf?” an angry magic-user demanded. “You can’t get away with this, you know!”

“We have so far,” Damon pointed out.

Quickly, with a wave of his hand, the mage muttered a spell and smiled in satisfaction. “Now, before you all die, just out of curiosity, why did you bring us out here? What did you think to gain from us?”

“What did you do, just then?” Damon asked.

“The spell? I summoned Kistilan. He is the favored of the Scions, with powers beyond most. He will deal with you. But I asked you, what did you want of us?”

“I have what I wanted,” Damon assured him. “You just gave it to me.” With a raised hand, he signaled his guards. Grinning savagely, the gray-cloaked dwarves moved in on their captives, some of them pulling the men down, others wielding their hammers. Some of the wizards might eventually recover from the taps their skulls received that day; others would not. The power of a hammer is in the arm that swings it, and the purpose of the swing is in the mind behind that arm.

Within seconds, Damon Omenborn and his Roving Guard stood alone on the knoll, surrounded by dead and unconscious wizards. As one, then, they turned to look northward. A dot had appeared there, in the air above the lower slopes, and was growing in size as it sped toward them.

Kistilan the Dark, Kistilan the Deadly, Kistilan the Would-be Conqueror, intended ruler of Thorbardin—Kistilan who was one of only a few given the favor of the Scions and the force of elemental magics—had heard the summons from the captured wizards. Kistilan was coming now, to strike down the arrogant dwarves who had dared to defy him.

Within moments of the departure southward of the dark mage, Kistilan, the relentless, fanatical attack on the slopes below Southgate began to falter—at first only a little, but enough for the defending dwarves to notice a change in the intensity of the human marauders. It was as though, here and there, groups of them became confused and uncertain, pausing in their attacks, shifting to defense as they gaped at the strewn bodies of their own kind all around them.

It was Quill Runebrand, the lorekeeper, who suggested a reason. Quill had come to Southgate carrying an armload of scrolls in which he had recorded all that Damon Omenborn had earlier reported about the nature of magic. He was hoping to question the big Hylar about the strange “double vision” which illusionary sorcery seemed to create. Quill had missed Damon, though he arrived in time to see the Neidar attack on the humans’ rear forces and to get a glimpse through a lens tube of the Roving Guard rounding up wizards.

The little he saw, before a burly Daewar took the lens tube away from him, answered his questions. He saw one of the Roving Guard change abruptly into a tusked ogre and realized that he could see both the “ogre” illusion and the reality of the guard as he actually was, simultaneously. He scribbled furiously at a scroll, jotting down his observation, then looked up again in time to see the floating magician—or magician on the floating chair—soar off to the south.

Occupied with such thoughts, it seemed obvious to the scrollster what it meant when—as Willen Ironmaul noted—the human horde seemed to lose its momentum.

“Some of those companies are without their wizards,” Quill said. “They are seeing the field now as it really is, rather than as they have been made to believe, and they don’t like it. There are a lot of dead humans down there.”

Barek Stone turned to gaze curiously at him, then nodded. “He may have something there,” he told Willen. “There aren’t many wizards left among them, and they must have their hands full.”

“Worry about the reasons later,” the chief of chiefs rumbled. “Drummers! Sound general advance!”

The drums sang a fast tattoo, and all along the slope dwarven companies pushed forward, beating and slashing at the hordes of humans before them. With their short, sturdy statures, and the downhill slope in their favor, the dwarves pushed the human assault backward down the hill, and at several points the human defenders turned and ran in panic.

“Locate the wizards,” Willen told his spotters. “Damon didn’t get them all. Where are the rest?”

As though in answer to his question, human heads appeared suddenly, directly before him across the ledge wall, and a long arm drove a flashing blade toward his neck. Barely in time, the chief of chiefs got his shield up to deflect the killing cut. The sword clanged on steel, flashed above his head, and Willen continued the shield motion, hurling himself forward, half across the low wall of the ledge, to drive the corner of his shield into the man’s face. Blood spurted, the man screamed and toppled backward . . . and disappeared.