Ragnarson stood in the parapet from which he had directed the first battle of Baxendala. His foster brother leaned on the battlements. General Liakopulos snored behind them. Varth-lokkur paced, muttering. Below Karak Strabger soldiers worked on the defenses. Fifty thousand men, half Kaveliners. Five thousand Mercenaries, Hawkwind himself commanding. Nineteen thousand from Altea, Anstokin, Volstokin, and Tamerice, the second-line states. The remainder were Itaskian bowmen, a surprise loan. They would make themselves felt.
Wagons swarmed behind the ranked earthworks, palisades, traps, incomplete fortifications. Long trains labored up from the lowlands. Baxendala had been converted to a nest of warehouses.
Bragi meant to compel Feng to overcome an endless series of redoubts in close fighting, under a continuous arrowstorm. Attrition was his game.
Marco said there would be twenty-eight legions supported by a hundred thousand auxiliaries from Argon, Throyes, and the steppe tribes. Ragnarson couldn't hope to turn such a horde. He aimed only to cut them up so badly they would have bitter going after they broke through.
Bragi wasn't watching the work. He stared eastward, over the peaks, at a pale streamer of smoke.
It was a signal from Maisak. While it persisted the fortress held.
Ragnarson used mirror telegraphy and carrier pigeons too.
Shinsan had learned. The Tervola brought dismantled siege engines. For a week they pounded Maisak. The Marena Dimura reported encounters with battered patrols which had forced the Maisak gauntlet. They finished those patrols.
Those little victories hardly mattered. The patrols were forerunner driblets of the deluge.
"Smoke's gone!" Liakopulos ejaculated.
The mirror telegraph went wild.
"Damn! Damn-damn-damn! So soon." Ragnarson turned his back, waited for the telegraphists to interpret.
It was a brief, unhappy message. Maisak betrayed, Tenn Horst.
The last pigeon bore a note almost as terse. Enemy led over mountains into caverns. ims! message. Good luck. Adam TennHorst.
It spoke volumes. Treachery again. Radeachar hadn't rooted it all out.
"Varthlokkur, have Radeachar check everybody out again. A traitor in the right place here would be worth a legion to them."
The weather was no ally either. A warm front accelerated the snow melt. Bragi's patrols reported increasingly savage skirmishes.
Then Ko Feng attacked.
Two things were immediately apparent. Shinsan had indeed noted the lessons of the previous battle. And the Tervola hadn't understood them.
Cavalry had ruined O Shing. So cavalry came down the Gap, steppe riders who had come for the plunder of the west.
Ragnarson countered with knights. Though grossly outnum-bered, they sent the nomads flying, amazed at the invincibility of western riders.
Three days later it was an infantry assault by the undisciplined hordes of Argon and Throyes, Again the knights carried the day. The slaughter was terrible. Hakes Blittschau, an Altean commanding Ragnarson's horse, finally broke off the pursuit in sheer exhaustion.
Feng tried again with every horseman he could muster. Then he used his auxiliary infantry again. Neither attack passed Blittschau. The troops in the redoubts grumbled that they would never see the enemy.
When knights fought men untrained and unequipped to meet them, casualty ratios favored the armored men ridiculously. In five actions Blittschau killed more than fifty thousand of the enemy.
Ravens darkened the skies over the Gap. When the wind blew from the east the stench was enough to gag a maggot. After each engagement the Ebeler ran red.
Blittschau lost fewer than a thousand men. Many of those would recover from their wounds. Armor and training made the difference.
"Feng must be cra/y," Ragnarson mused. "Or wants to rid himself of his allies."
Liakopulos replied, "He's just stupid. He hasn't got one notion how to run an army."
"A Tervola?"
"Put it this way. He's not flexible. The pretty woman. Mist. Says they call him The Hammer. Just keeps pounding till something gives. If it doesn't, he gets a bigger hammer. He's been holding that back."
"I know." Twenty-eight legions. One hundred seventy thousand or more of the best soldiers in the world.
When Feng swung that hammer, things would break.
The legions came.
The drums began long before dawn, beating a cadence which shuddered the mountains, which throbbed like the heartbeat of the world.
The soldiers in the works knew. They would meet the real enemy now, dread fighters who had been defeated but once since the founding of the legions.
Ragnarson gave Blittschau every man and horse available.
The sun rose, and the sun set.
Hakes Blittschau returned to Karak Strabger shortly before midnight, on a stretcher. His condition reflected that of his command.
"Wouldn't believe it if I didn't see it," Blittschau croaked as Wachtel cleansed his wounds. "They wouldn't give an inch. Let us hit them, then went after the horses till they got us on the ground." He rolled his head in a negative. "We must've killedtwenty.... No, thirty, maybe even forty thousand. They wouldn't budge."
"I know. You can't panic them. You have to panic the Tervola." Ragnarson was depressed. Feng had broken his most valuable weapon. Blittschau had salvaged but five hundred men.
The drums throbbed on. The hammer was about to fall again.
It struck at dawn, from one wall of the canyon to the other. Stubbornly, systematically, the soldiers in black neutralized the traps and redoubts, filled the trenches, demolished the barriers, breached the palisades and earthworks. They didn't finesse it. They simply kept attacking, kept killing.
Ragnarson's archers kept the skies dark. His swordsmen and spearmen fought till they were ready to drop. Feng allowed them respites only when he rotated fresh legions into the cauldron.
The sun dropped behind the Kapenrungs. Bragi sighed. Though the drums sobbed on, the fighting died. His captains began arriving with damage reports.
Tomorrow, he judged, would be the last day.
The archers had been the stopper. Corpses feathered with shafts littered the canyon floor. But the arrows were nearly gone. The easterners allowed no recovery of spent shafts.
Mist was optimistic, though. "Feng has gone his limit," she said. "He can't waste men like this. The Tervola won't tolerate it. Soldiers are priceless, unlike auxiliaries."
She was correct. The Tervola rebelled. But when they confronted Feng they found....
He had yielded command to a maskless man named Badalamen. With Badalamen were two old-timers: a bent one in a towering rage, and another with dull eyes. And with them, the Escalonian sorcerer, Magden Norath.
The bent man was more angry with himself than with Feng. His tardiness had given Feng time to decimate Shinsan's matchless army.
Feng grudgingly yielded to the Pracchia. The transition was smooth. Most Tervola chosen to come west were pledged to the Hidden Kingdom.
At midnight the voice of the drums changed.
Ragnarson exploded from a restless sleep, rushed to his parapet. Shinsan was moving. No precautions could completely squelch the clatter.
Reports arrived. His staff, his wizards, his advisors crowdedonto the parapet. No one could guess why, but Shinsan was abandoning positions they had spent all day taking. Sir Tury Hawkwind and Haaken attacked on their own initiative.
"Mist. Varthlokkur. Give me a hint," Ragnarson demanded.
"Feng's been replaced," Mist said.
"Yeah? Okay. But why back down?"
"Oh!" Varthlokkur said softly.
Mist sighed. "The Power...."
"Oh, Hell!"
It was returning. Ragnarson decided he was done for.
The Unborn streaked across the night. Beneath it dangled Visigodred. After delivering the shaken wizard, it communed with Varthlokkur. "Gather the Circle!" Varthlokkur thundered. "Now! Now! Hurry!"