"Keep your spear up, Richards, don't lose your head. Should anything get through I'll shift to stone," said Tarquin urgently. "Just remember you won't be quite so nimble when I do. Keep that in mind, dear boy, and it'll all be tickety-boo. You'll see."
"I don't see why we can't just fuck off," Richards said.
The commander of the arbalesteers shouted, and the first rank readied themselves. Two hundred heavy crossbows clicked into place on their tripods. They waited, their arms steady, their gaze unwavering. The commander held his arm. The hounds came on.
"Company!" called Richards' sergeant. "Present pikes!" Richards cursed his quaking limbs as he fumbled his spear into place.
"This is where it all begins my friend," said the hare behind Richards. "Wish me luck."
The arbalesteer captain dropped his arm, and the world dissolved into violence.
Two hundred barbed quarrels sped unerringly. The yelps of two hundred dogs filled the air.
A shout went up from the morblins, and they broke into a run towards the allied lines, the trollmen beside them, the ground thundering as they came. The air crackled with electricity as the lancers of Pylon City discharged their weaponry into the front of the horde. Hundreds fell, burnt and writhing, but there were thousands behind. The lancemen parted ranks, and with a mighty squeak a horde of vole mercenaries, the vanguard of the League of Brave but Small Animals, hurled themselves through the gap towards the approaching morblins. There was a crash as the lines connected.
The lancemen reformed smoothly and pumped bolt after bolt of cerulean energy into the rear ranks of the horde, picking out the larger creatures as the valiant voles held back the enemy. By Richards the foreign crossbowmen fired by rank an endless rain of quarrels. The dead of the enemy tumbled in heaps.
The enemy artillery opened up. Shells whistled overhead from the tracked towers of Penumbra. Dozens of shells slammed into the packed lines of men and animals. Screams filled the air. Earth and blood fountained skywards and body parts rained down. Groups of the more timid animals looked close to dissolving into panic.
"Eyes front, soldier!" shouted the sergeant at Richards.
The allied guns replied. Heavy lightning burned through the air, leaving glowing after-images and a sharp smell. Iron towers burst into flame and stopped in their tracks. One carried on moving forward, a track blown clean off. It heeled over ponderously, and crashed down, crushing hundreds of its own side. The allied lightning cannon raked bloody furrows in the horde, but their numbers seemed inexhaustible.
The arbalesteers kept firing as the enemy closed, ignoring the desperate fights of their comrades with the surviving warhounds. The corpses of morblins and trollmen lay five deep. The enemy were so numerous that they kept on coming, fifty metres away, then thirty, then twenty. The arbalesteers shot until they were on top of them. Richards saw one go down screaming under a haemite, his body sucked dry. More haemites followed, and the sounds of blades on metal bodies rang out across the field as the arbalesteers abandoned their crossbows and drew their short swords.
"Steady, lads!" barked the sergeant. "Here they come!"
The earth shook under the weight of charging trollmen. The line of arbalesteers bent backwards, wavered and broke. The enemy surged through in one and twos and then by the dozen. They flung themselves at the line of men, flattening many. Richards' arm juddered as a bellowing creature impaled itself on his spear.
"Watch out!" roared the lion. Richards jumped back as another trollman swung at him, leaving his spear in the guts of his toppling foe. He ducked a hammer blow, narrowly keeping his footing. The trollman readied his weapon for another strike. Richards had nowhere to go, hemmed in by the dead and those desperate not to be. A blast of lightning felled the trollman, leaving Richards gasping. Limbs and blades whirled around him.
A morblin cannoned into him, clawing and biting. He wrestled with it a while, but it was as weak as its fat body suggested, and he managed to snatch out his sword and despatch it. Richards looked at his sword, slick and treacherous in his hands, then at the creatures from innumerable virt-games warring in deadly earnest all around him, the violent deaths of scores of talking animals and gaming cliches.
"This is fucking ridiculous!" shouted Richards.
The world disappeared behind a sheet of white. Richards stumbled, blood in his eyes, hearing gone. He blinked and found himself in a lull in the fighting.
Bodies lay all about. A ruddy crater garnished with the limbs of friend and foe occupied the space where the centre of his regiment had been. A lucky few stood blinking, covered in blood. They stared at one another, shocked, lost between surprise and relief.
Richards staggered in a rough circle, his head spinning. Shouting, loud and frantic, impinged on the ringing in his ears. Away to his right, a knot of surprised troops yelled as the weasels attacked them from behind.
Richards wiped the blood of his comrades from his face. His head cleared. "I've got to get out of here," he said, and cast about for a means of escape.
A paw grabbed him from behind, spinning him round. The lame hare, one of his ears a tatter.
"Where are you going? Fleeing is the blackest treason…"
"I…" said Richards.
The hare held up a hand to remonstrate. It was the last thing it ever did. A cannonball whistled by, a gust of hard wind stirring Richards' hair. It removed the hare's head neatly. Blood fountained from its neck, splattering Richards, and the hare folded onto its lame leg like a collapsible chair.
Richards stumbled back, caught sight of a stray thog and ran for it. He grabbed its reins and swung atop. It lowed angrily and stamped its six legs, but held fast. He tugged on its reins, dragging its head around, and the animal performed a tight circle.
Fighting raged all about. There was no way out.
"Dammit! What do we do now?"
"Let's get to the centre, tell the hedgehog. We'll better be able to be on our way if they win," said Tarquin.
Richards debated the lion's suggestion with himself. He spun the mount round again. There was little chance he'd get off the field intact, not with the weasels butchering their way through their own side all around him. "OK," he said, "OK." He kicked with his heels, and the thog took off.
Shells exploded to the left of Richards, to the right of him, reducing the battle to a series of violent tableaux, surging into view and then lost in veils of gunsmoke and sheets of earth.
Three half-naked anime heroines tackled a trollman, baiting it with spears. A band of otters in lab coats tackled a purple octopus covered in smilies. Men rolled in the dirt with morblins, dodging the thrusts of filthy knives. Haemites fed on friend and foe alike, their whistles an industrial dirge. Here and there disciplined pockets of men and beasts formed tight groups, spearpoint and blade keeping the Penumbra's minions at bay. But every enemy felled was replaced by four more. Gone were the proud ranks; the field writhed with small and personal wars, all thoughts of strategy obscured by blood and sweat and terror. Creatures came at Richards to fall to his sword or bounce from the flanks of the six-legged cow, their cries snatched away by speed and steel.
"Nearly there!" yelled Richards.
Tarquin turned to stone and saved Richards from a spearpoint. "We're not out of the woods yet."
Richards hammered toward the centre, where the disciplined corps of hedgehogs stood firm. Heavily armoured in burnished steel, they surrounded the Lord High Commander's command post, an enormous tortoise with "Roger" written in childish script on its shell.
Atop Roger was a howdah of metal. Telescopes and small lightning cannon were fixed to the rails. One gunner lay dead in the harness of his shattered weapon, but the others trained theirs still upon the enemy, spikes of electricity writhing periodically through the air. In front of the howdah, on a seat on the lip of Roger's shell, sat another hedgehog holding a set of metal reins. It flicked a whip about the tortoise's head. Roger seemed unperturbed. Through his helm's eye-slits, he pondered the bloodbath with the slow bemusement with which tortoises regard the world.