On the barren meadow outside Kendermore, the harsh, fierce tone of a hundred war horns sounded all around the city. Howling with bloodlust, the ogres charged, a black wave dotted with foam of bronze and steel. The war bands standards flew high. The thunder of the war drums echoed the pounding of iron shod feet.
In the midst of it all, however, Tragor paused, angling his head and frowning with confusion.
Kurthak glanced at his champion, wondering. “What is it?” he asked, shouting to be heard over the din of his charging troops.
Tragor concentrated a moment longer, then shook his head. “Nothing,” he said. He raised his great sword above his head, bellowing a ferocious battle-cry, then charged onward. He didn’t tell Kurthak that, just for a moment, he would have sworn he’d heard the faint sound of kender singing.
Paxina dashed up the steps to the battlements at the city’s south wall, Moonsong and Stagheart right behind her. At the top, she peered through the crenellations and saw the dark stain spreading out of the Kenderwood.
Fear swelled within her, an unfamiliar and unwelcome sensation that choked off her voice. The sweat that trickled down her face turned cold, and her mouth went dry “So many,” she breathed.
A hand touched her shoulder, its grasp at once tender and firm. Paxina glanced up and saw Moonsong. The Plainswoman’s face was pale, but she smiled nevertheless. That smile was a balm, easing the dread in Paxina’s mind. The Lord Mayor looked back out at the field and laughed.
Then, recklessly, she leapt up on the merlons and turned to face the eerily quiet city. She cupped her hands to her mouth and shouted as loud as she could. Along the walls and among the streets, other voices echoed her call, sounding it all over Kendermore.
“Be ready! Here they come!”
When the silver-haired kender jumped up on the battlements and sounded the call to arms, Kurthak laughed aloud. He and Tragor marched at the rear of the horde, thousands of raging ogres before them. Swords and hammers, axes and spears waved above the army’s heads.
“Remember!” he bellowed, his voice barely audible above the din. “Take as many of them prisoner as you can! Ten thousand steel pieces to the one who captures the most slaves!” He pointed his spiked club at the silver-haired kender. “And another thousand to whoever brings me that one’s scalp!”
“I’ll remember that,” Tragor said, leering wolfishly. “You’d best be ready to pay up when this is over, my lord.”
The Black-Gazer howled with glee, then raised his cudgel high above his head. “Charge!” he cried.
Tragor winded his horn again. Other trumpeters echoed the call. The army stopped marching and broke into a run, bellowing and shrieking as though their very voices would topple Kendermore’s walls. The ogres closed around the city like a noose. Their pounding feet churned the blasted ground, sending great clouds of dust billowing high into the sky.
Atop the battlements, archers and slingers began to fire. As before, when Baloth’s war band had assailed the city many ogres fell to the barrage-but many, many more held their shields high and kept running, eagerly striving to be the first to reach the walls. They struck on all sides at once, hammering against the flagstones with weapons and fists. The stones did not yield. More and more ogres caught up with their fellows, adding their weight to the onslaught. From atop the walls, the kender on the walls met the attack with more arrows and rocks. Looking up, Kurthak saw the silver-haired kender flinging stones with her hoopak; beside her, one of the Plainsmen peppered the field with arrows.
“Where are the cauldrons?” Tragor wondered suspiciously, scanning the battlements. An arrow glanced off his plumed helmet, knocking it momentarily askew; he straightened it with an irritated grunt. “They poured buckets of pitch on Baloth’s band.”
Kurthak squinted at the walls, his brow furrowing. Then he shook his head stubbornly. “What does it matter?” he snapped. “Fewer dead on our side this way!”
The blasted ground ran red with the blood of dead and wounded ogres, but the living far outnumbered the slain. Some of his troops heaved javelins up at the battlements; pierced by those spears, kender began to topple from the walls. The horde crushed them into the ground where they landed.
“Ladders!” Kurthak cried.
Tragor sounded a third call on his horn. Ogres picked up scaling ladders-more than a hundred of them-and started forward, into the melee. Some didn’t make it, brought down by the bombardment from above, but most pressed on, until at last they were in place. They planted the bases of the ladders in the blood-dampened earth and raised them toward the battlements.
Then something curious happened. Atop the wall, the silver-haired kender who had stood on the merlons at the start of the battle called out again. “Retreat!” she shouted.
At once, the kender vanished from the battlements, yelling and screaming as they climbed down the insides of the walls. In mere moments, none remained. The ogres whooped with malevolent joy, clashing their weapons against their shields.
“What’s happening?” Kurthak wondered aloud.
“They’re retreating!” Tragor cried jubilantly, waving his great sword in circles above his head. “The walls are ours!”
The ladders rose upright. Ogres started to clamber up toward the abandoned battlements. They spread along the catwalk, tossing aside the bodies of kender who had died on top of the walls.
The new sound was low at first, scarcely audible above the yowling of the horde. It grew quickly louder, though, and Kurthak and Tragor glanced at each other in confusion as the ground trembled beneath their feet. Then their eyes widened when they recognized the noise. It was the grinding and cracking of stone.
“Fall back!” Kurthak shouted to his troops. “Get away from the wall!”
Too late. With a rumble that shook the earth, the city’s walls groaned and gave way. The ogres on the battlements screamed as the catwalks fell from beneath their feet, then they plummeted to their deaths in the middle of the avalanche. The walls did not simply collapse, however; the kender had spent weeks preparing them, chipping away the stones at their bases so they would do the most damage to their enemies. They fell outward, on top of other attackers.
Stones pounded down on top of ogres, crushing them by the score. Scaling ladders, pushed back from the crumbling battlements, crashed to the ground. Within seconds, a large part of Kurthak’s horde disappeared beneath countless tons of rock.
Dust exploded outward from Kendermore in a billowing, gray wave. Kurthak and Tragor choked and wheezed as it broke over them, stinging their eyes and filling their throats. When it cleared, they stared in shock at the ruins. The clattering of stone mixed with the cries of injured and dying ogres. Besides the hundreds who lay buried beneath the rubble, hundreds more lay on the ground, their legs crushed, or staggered aimlessly along the edges of the wreckage, clutching broken arms and bloodied bodies. Those who had escaped stood about the periphery, staring dumbly at the heaps of shifting flagstones.
Soon, however, the stupor wore off. The ogres had toppled the walls. The city lay naked before them, inviting and defenseless. What was more, hundreds of kender stood, in the courtyards just beyond the ruined battlements, leaning on their hoopaks and grinning mockingly. It was too much for the dull-witted ogres. Howling furiously, they surged over the shattered walls, trampling their own dying comrades as they boiled into the city.
They poured into the courtyards like water through a broken dam, weapons held high. As they ran, though, the ground gave way beneath their feet. Their bloodthirsty roars became a chorus of screams as they vanished into the earth.
The kender had dug over a thousand pits in the courtyards. Most swallowed at least one ogre, and many claimed two or more. Kendermore’s attackers died by the hundreds, their massive weight breaking the fragile rope-and-wood lattices that held up the cobblestones. They fell, landing hard on the sharpened stakes that lined the bottoms of the pits. Gored, they writhed and choked as they died.