If the knights were doing as well as he, the captain thought, then the goblin presence was as good as removed from the enemy’s battle line.
Suddenly a call drew his attention, and he turned to see his fellow guardsmen mustering a hundred yards to the south. He cantered forward quickly, and as soon as he was within range he noted the horror-stricken expressions on the faces of his comrades.
“We have to go back” Colonel Payne insisted. “If we do not, the knights will all be killed! There should be enough of us to break through to Sir Amik’s standard. Then we can withdraw from the field.”
Captain Ingrew glanced again to the south. As far as he had been aware they had been winning. But one look was all it took to banish that illusion.
“We’re running away?” a young officer cried in disbelief.
“We are extracting Sir Amik from that butchery, and whoever else may still be alive. We will withdraw back to Falador through the swamp.”
With that, the colonel goaded his horse southward, and his men followed his example.
Hundreds of knights fell to Sulla’s pikes. Even the goblin infantry succumbed. Knights and goblins had given up fighting one another in an effort to escape the deadly trap.
Sulla looked on approvingly. The knights could do nothing.
“Send in the berserkers!” he ordered. “Let us have some sport with our enemy.”
Behind the lines of pikes, several ladders had been erected, and climbing them were savage humans. The berserkers were a chaos-worshipping people who lived in The Wilderness, practising cannibalism on any traveller who strayed into their clutches. They filed their teeth and their nails to a deadly sharpness and rarely used any weapons, for their savagery was weapon enough.
Sir Amik raised his banner at the centre of the trap, calling his men to gather around him in a last effort to break out. Then the first berserker leapt into their midst over the tops of the pikes. Others followed, leaping directly onto the horses of their enemies and dragging both man and beast down into the crimson mud.
Sir Amik turned to face one of the cannibals and was shocked to see that it was a woman. He saw a green flash leap at him from his right, and instinctively he swung his sword up, parrying the goblin’s thrust. But he could not protect himself from the frenzied woman who stepped in toward him with her teeth bared.
As he staggered back, a battle cry reached him through the confusion of the melee. It was Sir Vyvin, fighting at his side. Sir Vyvin hesitated before the berserker, and she took the initiative, leaping at him, her teeth finding his face, biting at him like a rabid animal. With a cry he stabbed her, finishing her off with a swift backhand swipe that cut her throat. Then he groped his way toward Sir Amik in their ever-shrinking space, his hand pressed over a wounded left eye.
The enemy’s drumbeats quickened. As they did so, the Kinshra infantry moved in with a terrible haste, pinning back individual knights with several pikes at a time.
“Gather to me, men!” Sir Amik roared. “Under my banner we shall make a stand that will inspire a hundred generations of men!” His eyes were tearful as he drove his standard into an earth made soft not by rain but by the blood of men and goblins.
With a great shout his host charged the northern flank, hacking and slashing and dying on the impenetrable pikes, cutting down any berserker that landed amongst them.
Master Troughton, one of the most skilled of all the knights, was slain as he ducked in under the pikes, cutting down three of the Kinshra warriors before falling.
Nicholas Sharpe died also, saving Sir Amik from being impaled in an area where the two Kinshra lines had come close enough for the end of one pike to touch the end of its opposite number. And it was here that the real slaughter began.
The knights had thinned out as they had been squeezed, and now each man fought desperately to keep the pikes from stabbing at his front and his back. It was a battle that could only end in one brutal way. The men could only hope to delay their deaths.
Sir Amik was stabbed viciously in the side, and as he staggered another pike rammed into his calf. He dropped his sword in agony and seized his banner for support, and he knew the end could not be far away.
He looked at the men he had led to their deaths. With a feeling of pride he noted that none of them begged, that no one cursed him for his leadership. They were true Knights of Falador. They would die as they had lived.
Yet suddenly a panic seized the northern line of Kinshra infantry. Sir Amik watched as Colonel Payne and his sixty guardsmen crashed in upon the rear, forcing the pikemen to scatter across a wide front.
“Sir Amik Varze! Knights of Falador! To me! To me!” The colonel rode amongst the pikemen, mercilessly cutting them down as he perceived the carnage that they had wrought. Such was the ferocity that he and his men exhibited, Sir Amik was able to rally his troops.
“Knights of Falador, we must retreat!” he called. “Back to the city! Back to Falador!” Every man that could, took to the nearest horse, some even seizing steeds of fallen Kinshra warriors.
“Here, Sir Amik, take my horse,” a young squire shouted, helping him up.
“Run, boy!” Sir Amik cried faintly. “Save yourself-and our banner!”
But the squire seemed not to listen. As the Kinshra cavalry pushed their way through their panicked infantry to finish the last few knights left, he gave a savage slap to the horse’s flank that sent Sir Amik on his way to life and freedom.
The youth had no time to run as a steel blade swept down on him in a deadly arc.
“Hold them off!” Colonel Payne cried, riding at full speed into the Kinshra cavalry, preventing them from pursuing the fleeing knights.
But his luck had run out. The Kinshra soldiers surrounded him, hacking at him from all directions. He fell from his horse into the soft earth.
“Shall we pursue them?” Gaius called to Sulla.
“No. Let them go” Sulla replied. “Let the people of Falador see their beloved protectors run. Let them know there is no one who can save them.”
He turned to look at the city walls, visualising the weeping of men, women, and young children.
He imagined their fear. And he revelled in it.
SIXTY
Their journey was one of utter silence.
Once, just after crossing the southern road that led to Falador, Kaqemeex had hastily instructed them to lie their horses down behind a small embankment covered in ferns. Within a minute a troop of goblin infantry clattered past only yards away.
The druid left the companions at the foot of the mountain with Doric to guide them the rest of the way.
The dwarf led them further east, up onto the slopes of the mountain, heading always toward the snow line. After three hours of climbing, the atmosphere was noticeably cooler. Castimir took his fire staff and warmed them all in the red glow from the knotted tip when they paused to rest.
All of them were sombre, and seemed to become more so as they climbed.
“It is not far now. Another hour at the most,” Doric said loudly, intending to instil some confidence into his friends. “We must travel along that ledge above us. It is wide enough for three men to walk side by side, and it will lead us to the entrance on the western face of the mountain” He noted the look of fear on all their faces, and admitted to himself that he didn’t much like the ledge, either, with its terrifying drop of hundreds of feet.
“I do not recall this entrance,” Kara said, “but I spent most of my time on the other side of the mountain. There is even a village above ground on a plateau to the south.”
“All of that is true” Doric said, breathing wearily. “But this entrance is the most secure, and one which I am certain I can locate. Better this than spending hours searching for one of the hidden entrances near the valley floor, where the goblins would certainly find us.” Without waiting for any further discussion, he urged them upward toward a flat plateau which led onto a narrow ledge.