Morgan Rice - Night of the Bold

If Duncan could manage to kill the entire southern legion of the Pandesian army in the Gulch, and if Seavig could manage to destroy the Pandesian fleet in Ur, then the final battle against the Pandesians would be waged here, Kavos knew, in these icy mountains of Kos. If he and his men could win this battle, then they would rid the land of the last of the Pandesians, and Escalon would be free once again. It was a dream he harbored with all his heart – and he was determined to make it happen.

Kavos knew what was at stake, and he did not hesitate as he climbed higher and higher, despite his shaking arms, his numb hands, scaling his way up the cliffs like a goat. His muscles burned, tore at him from every side; he could no longer feel his nose, his cheeks, yet still, he did not stop climbing. He would rest when he was dead.

Finally, he reached a broad plateau of ice jutting out from the cliff, the halfway point to his home high above. He collapsed for a moment, lying on it gratefully, arms shaking, as all the others caught up with him. They all lay there, catching their breath, relieved to be alive in the howling wind.

Kavos finally gained his feet, nodded to his men, and they raised long, curved horns from their waists, leaned back, and blew. It was the sound he remembered, the special horns reserved for the warriors of Kos, horns which only fellow men of Kos would understand. The sound echoed over the very cliffs, reaching every contour.

As they sounded them, there came a great rumbling high above. It was the rest of his warriors, he knew, the ones he had left behind to guard his homeland, to act as reserves when the time came. Kavos looked up and as he knew he would, saw hundreds of his men, dressed in battle furs, grabbing their ropes and quickly rappelling down the face of the icy cliffs. They moved like lightning, all heeding his call. They wielded the long, sharp instruments of his people, special weapons forged for centuries by the men of Kos. They resembled pikes, twenty feet long, with long, shiny silver handles and pronged, steel-reinforced tips. They were built to withstand the cold, and to puncture the one thing they had in abundance: ice.

Within moments, they landed beside him, hundreds of men, joining his men on the broad plateau, tripling the size of his force. His men embraced.

Kavos felt all eyes on him. He walked to the edge, joined by Bramthos, and looked down the cliffs. He watched the tens of thousands of Pandesians below pathetically try to climb the cliff. Most slid back two feet for every foot they gained. Yet still, they were foolish enough to come.

“Man the shelf!” Kavos commanded, shouting over the wind.

His men spread out and ran to the edge of the plateau, each grabbing a pike. Kavos grabbed one, too, admiring the weight of the long silver staff. All the others carried the long, heavy instruments in groups of two, but Kavos needed only himself.

Its weight was tremendous, but Kavos finally managed to hoist it to the edge of the cliff. He stood there, face against the howling wind, and he looked left and right to check his men’s positions. He looked up at the massive icicles overhead, hundreds of them, some of them fifty feet long and just as thick. All of them pointing straight down, an overhang over the cliff, like weapons of death. These icicles of death were the crop of Kos.

Kavos looked back down at the Pandesians below, still climbing, oblivious to what was about to come. The time had come to let the terrain do the fighting for him. All his life he had prepared for a day like this.

“NOW!” he cried.

With a shout his men rushed forth with their pikes, Kavos leading the way, Bramthos beside him, and they stabbed the great icicles clinging to the side of the cliff. Kavos stabbed again and again, until the pronged tip began to puncture the thick slabs of ice. Soon, a sharp cracking noise began to spread.

All around them icicles began to separate and fall. There came a whooshing noise, and Kavos felt a great wind rush past.

Kavos looked down and watched as the stalactites fell on the first wave of Pandesian soldiers. Even above the howling of the wind, shrieks began to fill the air. Hundreds of them, halfway up the cliffs, cried out and fell as they were pierced by the ice. Hundreds more, gathered below, were crushed by falling ice and bodies.

Again and again the icicles fell, landing far below with explosions that shook the world, even up here. An avalanche formed as immense ice boulders broke off the mountain and began to roll into the army. Thousands more fled, but not in time, crushed by the mountain of ice and snow.

The Pandesians, panicked, sounded horns and retreated from the mountain face, clearly stunned by the loss of so many men so quickly.

Kavos would not give them time.

“The ice shelf!” Kavos yelled. “Now!”

His men ran all the way to the very edge of the icy plateau they were standing on and, following Kavos’s lead, each man grabbed a rope. They then raised their pikes high and smashed them down on the very shelf they had been standing on.

All at once, the shelf gave way, the massive plateau separating from the mountainside. It fell not straight down, but leaned over sideways, a huge slab of ice, falling far out from the mountain face, like a pancake, coming right down for the Pandesian forces.

Kavos felt the weight of it disappear from beneath him, and with suddenly nothing left to stand on, he held on tight to the rope, as did his men around him. Dangling in mid-air, he looked and watched the entire shelf land on thousands more soldiers, crushing them with a great cloud of ice and snow. There followed an awful rumbling as an enormous cloud of ice spread like a wave, engulfing the rest of the Pandesian army. They tried to run, but could not outrun it. As Kavos watched, thousands more men were crushed.

The Pandesian army was now entirely in panic and disarray. Kavos would not give them time to reassemble.

“MEN!” cried Kavos. “WE FIGHT!”

There came a great cheer as his men joined him in rappelling down the mountain. They slid down to the ground in no time, ran across the ice, and made right for the scattered Pandesian forces. Kavos hurled a javelin, sending it skidding along the ice, and it took out three soldiers, puncturing their legs, before it even slowed.

All around him his men hurled spears, taking out dozens of soldiers. They soon closed the gap on the fleeing soldiers, and as they did Kavos drew his sword and threw himself into the enemy, as did the men around him.

They hit the Pandesians like a tidal wave, his several hundred men attacking an army in shock, an army still reeling from the avalanche. Some Pandesians tried to put up a fight, but they slipped on the snow and ice, not used to the terrain as the men of Kos were. They could barely raise a sword against the men of Kos, who hacked down man after man after man as they tore through the remaining forces like a whirlwind.

In but moments, thousands of Pandesians were felled – and the ones who were not, turned and fled.

“Catapults!” Kavos commanded.

His men sounded their horns, this time in a series of short blasts, and they were answered by horns high atop the cliffs. Barely had the answer come when the sky was suddenly filled with the sound of whistling. Kavos did not need to look up to know what it was, but he craned his neck anyway to watch: his other men, high above, as commanded, were unleashing the catapults of ice.

Before them huge boulders of ice fell from the sky like hail, each the size of ten men. Explosions followed, the first with enough power to make the earth quake and send Kavos stumbling off his feet.

Within moments, what remained of the Pandesian army was decimated.

Finally, the catapults stopped, and Kavos cried: “CHARGE!”