Their torches expended, the Thelgaard Lancers fought with swords; many simply flowed out of the way of the enemy troops, riding their fleet horses away from the rear of the enemy camp. Snarling warg wolves raced after them. Some of these savage canines bore goblin riders, while others simply screeched and howled, drawn by the lure of the hunting pack. But the horses were too fast, and the wolves could only follow them across the plains, away from the camp, the battle, and the decision of the day.
The sun had not yet risen, but the eastern sky was now a broad swath of pale blue, brightened near the horizon by the imminent sun. The fires throughout Ankhar’s camp still burned but no longer as beacons in the darkness. Instead, they spewed broad columns of dark smoke into the sky, each pyre marking the ruins of some part of the enemy army.
Jaymes turned to General Dayr, a command rising in the lord marshal’s throat-but the general guiding the Crown Army was already shouting to his captains.
“White Riders, charge!”
Now the heavy knights advanced, in more concentrated columns than the Thelgaard Lancers. The White Riders formed the shock troops of the Crown Army, armored and shielded, riding huge, shaggy steeds that loomed over every other creature on the battlefield. They charged in four files, each spilling across one of the bridges near the center of the enemy camp. Trumpets brayed, marking the pace as each company accelerated.
Hearing the horns, feeling the thundering cadence of heavy hooves, the dwarves protecting those four bridges quickly wheeled to the side, allowing the knights to cross with undiminished momentum.
One company of Ankhar’s human warriors tried to make a stand near the river gorge, but they were shattered by a single charge of the White Riders. Shields broke beneath crushing hooves, pikes and spear shafts snapped in two, and the little knot of defenders shrank until the last of them were ridden down.
Much of Ankhar’s army streamed away, falling back around the charred outlines of the artillery park, hastening southward along the bank of the Vingaard. Three hundred ogres formed a square in the center of the melee. All around them, the troops of the horde were dropping back, sometimes with good order, in other cases in full rout.
The separated companies of the White Riders gathered. Knights lowered their visors and took up such lances as had survived the fray or drew their heavy, bloody swords. The ogres alone stood before them as the Crown Knights rolled forward in the battle’s final charge. The clash of steel against steel rang out once more, mingling with the shrieks of wounded horses and the cries of bleeding ogres and dying men.
When the last of the riders finally limped away, not a single ogre remained standing.
“We’ve turned the flank, my lord,” General Dayr reported. He tried to maintain his detachment, but the fierce elation of battlefield success flared in his eyes, gleamed in the momentary glimpse of his teeth. “They’re running for the fords to the south of here.”
“Well done, General,” Jaymes said, nodding toward the dust marking the enemy’s retreat. “Let them go for the time being, and see to your wounded.”
“The Clerists are already at work with the other healers. There remains only one stumbling block.”
The lord marshal arched his eyebrow, thought for a moment, and nodded. “The company in the gorge, down at the river?”
“Yes, my lord. I have sent scouts to bring me reports on them. But it looks like they can’t pull out safely; Ankhar has enough ogres left to shower them with boulders if they try to move out.”
“All right. Let’s have a look,” the lord marshal acknowledged. He nudged his horse in the flanks and-accompanied only by the two dozen knights of the Caergoth Freemen-set out to inspect the battlefield.
CHAPTER TWO
The two armies, like exhausted wrestlers, had separated and now lay prostrate, gasping for breath, thirsty for cool drink. The plain around the Narrows was no longer a place for the living, but for the dead and the doomed.
To the latter end, men and monsters had done their work well. The evidence lay all around, first indicated by the sweeping shapes of the vultures and crows circling overhead. The scavengers swirled downward like dark, macabre snowflakes to settle among the lifeless forms scattered across a mile or more of the plains just to the west of the deep gorge. Here and there the shape of a great war machine, a catapult or a ballista, was discernable through the soot and ash that caked the charred timbers; this was all that remained of the lethal devices. Smoke still spiraled upward from the large fire pits where shot had been heated. In one place barrels of oil had been cracked open to soak into the dry ground. Fire burned over the very plain itself, marking the place with a thick, smudgy pillar of black smoke rising into the otherwise cloudless skies.
Nearby lay more than a hundred dead horses, a fabulous buffet for the scavengers. Amid the slain beasts, with their torn saddles and once-grand regalia, lay a great number of goblins and more than a few ogres, proof of the charge that had, at last, broken the ranks of Ankhar’s hordes. Many knights had perished here as well, but their bodies had been removed for-unlike the beasts of the half-giant’s horde-the humans gathered up their slain and gave them burial or cremation.
A kind of silence had descended over the field, filled just hours before with the clashing of steel and cries of pain and exultation. Nevertheless, a listener would have heard a keen, almost mournful wailing in the wind that scoured this dusty ground. Occasionally, too, was heard the raucous protests of the birds, as crows were forced to yield to the great beaks and crushing wings of the vultures, and the ravens, in turn, were driven from their morsels by greedy crows. The black-feathered birds gave the scene a life of its own, a shifting pattern of movement overlaying the great sprawl of the dead.
Accompanied by the two dozen riders of the Caergoth Freemen, Jaymes rode across the field at an easy gait, though his sturdy roan showed signs of trepidation. She tossed her head about, veering away from a slain ogre. Her ears stood upright, quivering.
The riders made their way through the detritus of battle until they came to the rim of the precipice. They peered down into the river gorge, where the waters of the Narrows churned and plunged in the deep channel. Eyes narrowed, the lord marshal took in the situation.
Two companies of warriors were visible on a flat shelf of land beside the rapid flow, facing each other in lines ranked behind poised spears and shields. One group consisted of humans, men in leather armor and metal caps, formed around a pennant displaying the sigil of the Crown. The other was a band of goblins, ragged but fierce, with shaggy cloaks and long, wicked-looking pikes. The surface upon which both companies stood was low, barely a few feet above the water; the river beside them was deep, dark, and moving rapidly. The shelf of level ground was perhaps a quarter-mile long, but only ten yards wide. On the side away from the water, sheer cliffs swept upward hundreds of feet, leading to the rider’s vantage.
The warriors in the gorge seemed evenly matched, perhaps two hundred ofn each side, and they faced each other in the center of the little swath of level ground. Even with his first quick glance, the man took in how those companies arrived at such a place. The humans had descended through a narrow ravine, a passage barely wide enough for single file, that snaked up to reach the plateau nearly a mile away from the river gorge. The goblins had marched down a narrow trail carved out of the very side of the cliff. That path twisted out of sight to the man’s right, but he could clearly see the lower half and imagined that it continued up to reach the crest of the bluff some distance up the gorge.