“Charge!” Grimes cried, gesturing with his sword. The horsemen, in five companies of twenty, surged into a broad line. Lances lowered, they plunged into the regiment of ores, scattering the creatures beneath their hooves, breaking them into panicked remnants.
The ogres stood firm, clubs upraised, before the rush. But the deadly lances found these, and many a hulking monster shrieked in mountainous pain before falling to the earth before a charging rider. Desperately the dying monsters struggled to hold their torn bodies together as the last remnant of their life fluid seeped over the ground.
The horses wheeled and rode back, wracking the regiment again, trampling the survivors beneath the crushing hooves. The surviving ores broke and fled toward the shelter of the jungle. Grimes, minus a few of his riders, pulled the horsemen back behind the line.
Another regiment pressed forward, pushing around to the roar of the village of Nayap. Payit spearmen resisted. them courageously, even felling several ogres with their long, obsidian-tipped weapons. But then a dozen trolls ripped into the center of the warriors’ line, and in moments, the whole company fled in disorder.
Howling in triumph, the monstrous formation rushed to fill the gap and encircle the village. But then a small form darted across the sky, soaring over the onrushing beasts.
Pryat Devane rode his flying carpet at high speed, bringing the little platform to a sudden stop when he reached a position a hundred yards in front of the charging regiment.
“By the power of Helm, I call a plague upon you!” he shouted, raising his metal gauntlet and pointing to the first monstrous rank.
In the next moment, the buzzing, hissing, and clicking of millions of insects rose across the plain, competing with the din of battle in its intensity. Immediately the leading ogres howled in pain and surprise, slapping at their skin and twisting grotesquely in an effort to escape.
Wasps, bees, hornets, flies-all manner of stinging insects flew among the monsters, and instantly the momentum of the attack vanished. All the beasts could think about was escape, and the entire regiment dissipated as the creatures raced in every direction to escape the insect plague. Some of
them tumbled through the ranks of a neighboring regiment, one that pressed against Nayap itself, and for a little while the weight of that savage attack eased.
For long, bloody minutes, the battle stood in terrible balance. Humans, ores, dwarves, ogres, halflings, horses, and trolls, all bled into the dark earth, beneath the encloaking clouds that blacked out even the slightest glimpse of stars or moon.
Hundreds of lives expired. Companies of ores or humans, decimated by battle, turned to flee. Others on each side expanded their fronts to cover gaps thus exposed. An exhausting, costly equilibrium held along the front.
Then another horrifying sequence of whistles and bellows erupted from the forest. The din of the battle faded to insignificance against the cacophony of fresh strength symbolized by that throaty, hungry roar.
More hulking shapes emerged from the forest, their shadows spreading across the savannah. Another powerful wave of destruction, they pressed toward the cringing shore as Hoxitl throw another ten regiments into the fight.
Erixitl stumbled forward, helped by Colon and Halloran. They made their way slowly down the shore toward Twin Visages on foot, since the ground in places was too rough for safe travel by horseback. Jhatli led Lotil by the hand.
They followed the coast, since all the paths through the jungle from Ulatos to Twin Visages were obscure and difficult to follow. The shoreline route took longer but was far more certain.
“It’s not much farther,” Erix said finally, after hours of marching. The sun neared the western horizon, and now they strived to reach their goal by nightfall.
Halloran remembered the place called Twin Visages, the place where he and Erixitl had met. It had seemed even then to be a place of dire portent and deep, abiding power. Now it fell like the focus of his world, the place toward which all his roads had been leading.
“When we get there, do we climb the pyramid?” he asked. That structure, much smaller than the one in Tewahca seemed hardly large enough to support the massive dragon they had glimpsed, so briefly, in the City of the Gods.
“Yes.”
“And the god will arrive there?” Halloran asked.
“I think so,” Erix replied. She shook her head in frustration. “I don’t know! I can only do what seems right’”
She gasped in sudden pain and bent double. “It’s… all right,” she said, pushing herself along.
The ground rose beneath them as they moved onto the bluff that formed the broad headland of the point. Silently they walked on, pushing along the fringe of brushy ground between the deep jungle and the sheer drop toward the wave-battered shore below.
Then Halloran stopped, raising a hand before him and soundlessly pointing. Erix looked and saw it, too, even though the moon had set an hour before. She would never forget that horrible place where she had come so close to death.
Before them stood the squared bulk of the pyramid and Twin Visages- Beyond, etched in streaks of sunset, stretched the lagoon and the endless ocean. They couldn’t see the top of the pyramid, but the last rays of the sun brightened the side facing them.
Erixitl groaned again in sudden pain. With a gasp, she grabbed her belly and sank slowly to the ground.
Flames exploded into the dark sky from one after another of the huts of Nayap. Metal-armored soldiers from Amn fought desperately for each square foot of ground, making the beasts pay for every forward step with one, two, a dozen lives. But the monstrous army could afford the price.
Finally the defenders gathered around the pyramid attacked on three sides by a howling, slavering mass. Fire and ash and smoke drifted around the squat structure, though the din of battle drowned any sound of the blaze.
A great ogre bulled his way onto the steps of the pyramid, crushing the skull of a metal-helmed soldier with a blow of his heavy club. Laying about him to the right and left, the beast lumbered up several steps. A swordsman leaped at it from the side, driving a steel blade deep into the beast’s thigh. With a howl, the ogre turned, seizing the courageous soldier as the monster tumbled down the steps, crushing the life out of the man during the brutal fall.
In the meantime, a thousand ores-a full regiment of the beasts-pressed around behind the village. The insect plague cast by the cleric had dissipated by now, and the few warriors who stood in the regiment’s path had been brushed easily aside.
Even as the defenders fought courageously to hold their key outpost to the last, the monstrous advance slowly cut them off from all retreat. In the smoke and the chaos of the night battle, this maneuver went undetected until it was too late. Abruptly the men on the pyramid realized that the village had been taken around them and that all connection with the rest of their army had been severed.
And now the breach in the pyramid’s defense had been opened. More ogres, followed by ores, rushed onto the side of the structure. The archers atop the pyramid poured a deadly fire into the creatures’ faces, sending many of them tumbling back. But others-others without number, seemingly without fear-advanced from the darkness to take their places, and slowly the beasts pressed higher up the four sloping sides of the pyramid.
The arrows of the defenders couldn’t last forever, and when the last missile was exhausted, the archers drew their short swords and prepared to die fighting. Now, with the village in flames around them, the pyramid cut off by the ores behind it, they could think no longer of escape. They could only fight and die like the men they were. In another moment, the last of them fell, and a dozen ores howled their triumph from the top of the structure.