A rain of heavy, large stones complemented the dwarf’s arrival. The northern, left flank, far from open, had been charged to the giants, half a dozen of the behemoths, standing tall now behind a wall of ice blocks that had obscured their position. With their light, bluish skin, white hair, and wrappings of white fur, they blended well with their shiny and eye-stinging environment, but that camouflage did nothing to diminish their overwhelming aura of strength now that they had been spotted.
Bransen started to call the dwarves back up, but stopped, stunned, as they seemed more excited and eager to get down than they had before the giants had risen up.
“Giants!” Bransen pleaded with those dwarves around him, a call seconded by Cormack.
“Bah, them ain’t giants,” Mcwigik said with a howl.
“Not like the giants we got on the Julianthes,” Bikelbrin added, using the powrie name for the Weathered Isles, their Mirianic Ocean homeland.
“Not half,” Mcwigik agreed, “but I’m betting their blood runs thick!”
That was all the others had to hear, and Pergwick and Ruggirs nearly tumbled from the ledge as they fought and scrambled over each other to get to the descent. After the dwarfish tumble rolled away, the three humans stepped up to the ledge.
“You do not seem convinced of your course,” Cormack remarked to Bransen, and the Highwayman smiled at his own inability to keep his emotions from his face.
“I came here to buy freedom for myself and my family,” he replied honestly. “Badden’s head for a journey south.”
“We’ll make sure that you get the foul one’s head, then,” Milkeila assured him.
Bransen snickered. “All who came north with me are lost. Either dead or trapped in that castle. Dame Gwydre would not refuse me my reward even should I return now, before the task is complete.”
“But Badden must be stopped,” Cormack said.
Bransen looked at him skeptically.
“Do you deny his evilness?” said Cormack.
“Not his, not that of your Church. Not of the lairds-not one of them,” said Bransen.
Cormack stiffened at that poignant reminder of the lack of familiarity between them.
“Then you agree that he, Badden, is worth killing,” said Milkeila, her voice taking on a distinctively sharper edge.
Bransen looked at her carefully, his expression measured, and caught somewhere between amusement and condescension. “That is not the question. The question is: Is Badden worth dying over?”
Below them, the powries encountered a group of trolls and the fight was on. “He is,” said Cormack, and he started over the ledge, moving swiftly down the steep decline. Milkeila shot a disappointed look Bransen’s way and followed.
Bransen passed them easily, using his Jhesta Tu training and his marvelous control of his body to run down the cliff.
TWENTY-NINE
Despoilment, Inevitability, and Questionable Triumph
By the time Bransen got down to the ice shelf, most of the trolls were either down or scattering and more than half of the powrie contingent was already in a full sprint to the edge of the chasm just south of their position. Both their courage and commitment stunned Bransen, for not only were they charging headlong into the waiting giants, but they were putting themselves into a position where they would be afforded one less avenue of retreat, where, if the battle went badly, they would find no escape.
It wasn’t stupidity, or ignorance of battle techniques, that launched them to the chasm, Bransen knew. They weren’t going to retreat. They were either taking the fight right to Badden’s castle across the way, or they were going to die trying.
His surprise and confusion over their level of commitment nearly cost Bransen his life, as a troll spear flew in for his side. At the last moment, and with the prompting of a cry from Milkeila, the Highwayman half turned and snapped a backhand against the spear, just below its stone head. The force of the blow flipped the light spear into a near-right-angled turn, and the nimble Bransen flipped his hand and snatched it from the air, his legs moving perfectly to catch up to his shifting shoulders.
He sent the missile back out at the nearest troll, though he didn’t know if that was the missile-thrower or not. The creature flailed wildly and tried to fall away, and indeed did fall away, though not as it had intended, embedded as it was on the end of the spear.
Bransen thought to yank that spear back out of the squirming troll as he ran past. But he shook his head, confident that his hands and feet would prove to be all the weaponry he needed at that time. He skied into a pair of trolls, spinning a circle-kick as he came in. That one foot turned both their spears aside, and as he came around fully, Bransen quick-stepped forward, snapping off quick left and right jabs into the faces of the respective trolls. He pressed forward, staying inside the optimum reach of their weapons. He spun to face the one on his left and drove his elbow back behind him to further smash the face of the other.
A fast left-right-left combination knocked the troll facing him back and to the ground; then Bransen similarly dropped, turning sidelong and coiling his legs as he did. The troll behind him, now below his prostrated form, had just begun to recover from the elbow to the face when Bransen swept his lower, left leg across, hooking the troll behind the ankle and sliding its foot forward, while Bransen’s right leg straight-kicked for that same knee.
Legs weren’t supposed to bend like that, as the troll’s howl of agony proved.
Bransen thrust his left arm down below him, driving his upper torso up from the ice. He tucked his legs again and spun with the momentum, right into a standing, turning position that allowed him to circle-kick the descending troll right in the face.
Its head snapped over backward with such force that its neck bones shattered.
A roar from behind turned Bransen around just in time to see a giant topple over, grasping both its knees. The powries wasted no time, swarming over the behemoth with glee, stabbing it and slashing it and wiping their berets across the wounds.
Bransen’s jaw dropped open in disbelief as he lifted his gaze to view the fight beyond the fallen giant, to where a group of powries was rushing to and fro and back again, in and around the legs of a futilely swatting giant who never got close to hitting any of them.
Oh, but they were hitting the giant! Great, reverberating smacks, and always about the knee. They looked like wild lumberjacks chasing animated trees. The giant danced and tried to keep ahead of them, but they’d only reverse direction, dart between its legs, and whomp it yet again. They howled with excitement and sheer enjoyment, and that only infuriated the beast more, it seemed, and its swings became more frantic, and more futile. Other powries joined in the dance, chopping, always chopping, at the giant’s legs. Down it went, to be swarmed and finished.
Bransen remembered his feelings upon first seeing the giants. How puny and helpless he had thought himself. But the powries had long ago found the answer to the imposing, seemingly impregnable behemoths. One after another, the giants fell. And the powries rolled along, berets glowing in the afternoon sun.
Cormack and Milkeila collected the stunned Bransen as they rushed to catch up. “We’ll be at the ice castle within the hour!” Cormack predicted.
Accurately, Bransen knew.
Toniquay sang great songs of rousing tenor, heroic deeds, captured and amplified and now enhanced magically to provide more than a morale boost, but an actual physical boost to the listener. And the warriors of Alpinador, the brave men and women of the many tribes that inhabited Mithranidoon, lived up to their heroic heritage. With coordination and fury, their line drove deep into troll ranks; whenever one group broke through and spearheaded out in front, those to either flank appropriately stretched behind them, so that instead of having any group get caught out alone and surrounded, the length of the barbarian line surged forward in a series of small wedge formations. One-against-one, there was no contest to be found. The larger, stronger, better-armed Alpinadorans stabbed ahead with impunity, skewering troll after troll.