Geran shielded himself from a fierce cinder-storm with a word of warding, throwing his arm over his eyes and slashing his sword back and forth to drive away the burning sparks. Searing pinpricks announced places where the burning embers had found their way through his defenses. He hissed and brushed one from his shoulder, nostrils burning with the hot, acrid stink. “Where in the Nine Hells did the orcs find wizards to aid them?” he demanded. No one nearby heard him, for they were swearing or praying or shouting in anger or pain at the same time.
The Bloody Skull horde smashed into the failing line of Hulburg’s defenders like a mighty black-armored fist. Geran fought in a bright frenzy, determined to stand his ground, but the rush was irresistible. He was swept back twenty yards in twenty heartbeats, simply carried along in the orc charge even as he slashed at the warriors streaming toward him. Then the whole roaring wave of savages seemed to shudder and slam to a stop. Across the breach the Ironhammer dwarves and Kara’s Shieldsworn linked their shields together in a fortress of steel and determination, refusing to give any more ground. The Bloody Skull charge became a furious melee that roiled and surged within the breach, a storm tide hammering into a battered coast. Rage though they might, for the moment the orcs and ogres were contained, funneled into the narrow space of the road and its gap.
In the crowded field, human mages and orc shamans did terrible work. Furnace blasts of yellow-glowing sparks and seething clouds of green, poisonous vapor washed back and forth among the combatants. A brilliant sphere of crimson light hurtled at Geran and exploded nearby, sending stabbing bolts of red lightning through a band of Ironhammers and Shieldsworn struggling to hold the gap. The swordmage deflected the vicious spell with his enchanted blade, but dwarves and humans all around him fell writhing to the ground. He whirled from side to side, wildly searching for some glimpse of the enemy spellcasters amid the chaos and confusion of the fight-and then he spotted a tall human in black armor, wearing a horned black helm.
“A Warlock Knight,” Geran said softly. That explained much. Orcs had little talent for sorcery, but the masters of Vaasa were formidable magic-users. Did they incite the Bloody Skulls against us? the swordmage wondered. Or did they come in answer to the Bloody Skulls’ promises of loot? Either way, the Vaasan mage was a dangerous enemy, shielding the Bloody Skulls from the spells of Hulburg’s defenders and burning down soldier after soldier with cold, inhuman efficiency. Several black-armored Vaasan soldiers stood near their master, guarding him against the fray. Geran frowned-the soldiers would be skillful swordsmen, handpicked as bodyguards. He’d have a hard time getting to the Warlock Knight as long as the swordsmen were on their guard, and he simply didn’t have any more spells or arcane words left to him that could overwhelm them quickly.
A bolt of crimson lightning struck the knot of Vaasans from the side, tearing through the swordsmen. The Warlock Knight parried the spell with an arcane defense of his own, but several of his guards were down, smoke rising from their burned armor. Geran glanced to his right and saw the tiefling Sarth leading a counterattack from that side of the line. The sorcerer threw bolts of fire and blasts of thunder with reckless abandon, burning down the Bloody Skulls. “Back to Thar with you, vile ones!” he shouted between spells. “There is no victory here for you today!”
It was just the opportunity he was looking for. While the Vaasans turned their attention to Sarth and his barrage of spells, Geran scrambled across the blackened overgrowth and embers of the dike’s face, dodging past battling orcs and Hulburgans. He reached the Vaasans and cut down one of the mage’s bodyguards with a single thrust between the shoulder blades. His old mentor, Daried, would not have approved, but this was no contest of skill and honor; this was a fight for survival.
The Vaasan mage blasted Sarth off his feet with a spell that made the ground under the tiefling’s feet slam upward as if struck from below by the hammer of some subterranean titan. Then he glanced over his shoulder and saw Geran lunging at him. The Warlock Knight snarled an arcane word and threw up a shield of dazzling blue light that stopped Geran’s point as firmly as if he’d tried to drive his sword into a granite wall. Then he leveled his staff at Geran and hurled an unseen thunderclap back at the swordmage, but Geran deflected the blast with a word in Elvish and a flick of his swordpoint.
“You follow the elven ways!” the mage snarled in frustration.
Geran did not reply, but instead attacked again, trying to find his way around the Vaasan’s magical defense. His enchanted blade rang and shivered as he struck at the edges of the glowing blue haze protecting the Warlock Knight. He managed to slip the point around the edge and give the Vaasan a nasty cut to the meat of his left arm; the mage cursed in pain and jumped back a step, but he missed his footing and tumbled down the earthwork, rolling to the foot of the hill. Geran started after him, but several rampaging ogres suddenly swarmed up the embankment in front of him, momentarily hiding the Vaasan mage from him. Geran evaded them, but when he looked again the Vaasan was gone. He’d fled the scene or simply been swept away in the tide of battle.
The orcs around him raised a ferocious cheer, and Geran looked up. A large banner waved in the air nearby, a square of mustard yellow marked with the image of a crimson, dripping skull. Below the banner he saw a knot of big orc warriors dressed in fine black mail, each with a painted skull over the heart… and in the center, an orc who wore armor of black plate. That must be Mhurren, Geran realized. The chief of the Bloody Skulls must have tired of watching his assaults stall on the tangled embankment of Lendon’s Dike. He meant to lead his warriors to victory.
The swordmage ran over to the human soldiers nearest him, a number of battered and exhausted Shieldsworn. The soldiers of Hulburg had nothing left to give, but he had to ask it of them anyway. “The banner!” he shouted to them. “We’re going to take the banner! Follow me, lads!”
The Shieldsworn soldiers raised a strong cry and surged toward the orc banner, sliding down the embankment after Geran. A huge, grossly fat ogre strode up to meet him and smashed a hammer with a head the size of an ale barrel down at him, but Geran leaped aside. The monster raised its mighty weapon for another swing, but the swordmage darted in close to its crooked legs and sliced out its hamstring with one long cut. The creature bellowed and fell, its arms flailing, but Geran pressed forward. “To me!” he shouted.
A few yards away he heard another rallying cry-Kara darted into the fray from the other side, cutting her way closer to the banner at the head of another small band of Hulburgans. She had her bow in hand, and its deadly song floated over the roars and shouts of the fighting. She shot down two of the warlord’s Skull Guards, each with an arrow in the heart, and then retreated before a sudden rush from the others, allowing her soldiers to meet them blade to blade. A moment later she threaded her way back into the fight and shot again, killing the orc who carried the standard. The banner wavered and began to fall before another of the Skull Guards seized it from its dying bearer and raised it aloft again.
“Hulburg is mine, you spellscarred slut!” Mhurren roared. “You defy me for the last time!” He leaped for Kara with a heavy fighting spear in hand. She calmly nocked her arrow and drew, taking aim at the eye-slit of his visor-only to be roughly jostled aside at the last moment by one of the Skull Guards, who smashed his Shieldsworn foe out of the way and nearly took her arm off at the shoulder with his whistling axe. Kara jumped back and stumbled to the ground.