He scrambled to his feet, screaming, and jumped on the nearest guval, which was busy crushing a helmet in its huge jaws, head included. He grabbed the guval’s neck crest, slipped his sarpan under its chin, and in a broad move, he sliced its throat. He continued to hit it frantically, holding on to its fur as best as he could.
Gurgling loudly, the monster abandoned what was left of the soldier and threw Gill several yards away. With the last spark of life in its bloodshot eyes, it rushed toward him, gasping for air, deciding to drag him into the dark nothingness. Before doing so, however, another rider whipped the monster with his moulan’s tail and threw it back, dead.
The whole hillside was quivering in a furious slaughter. His riders were fighting valiantly against the monsters, even though they realized the futility of their efforts. The guvals were jumping over them, biting and slicing with tremendous vivacity for a species that normally slept for three-quarters of the day. Some beasts mowed down three or four orzacs before being slain.
Only Gill’s presence mobilized them to hold the front line, but he could sense their despair. All they could hope for was to take as many guvals with them as they could.
“Your Greatness!”
A prodac galloped nearby, pulling the reins of a free moulan. Gill jumped on the net, ready to give the regroup order. As soon as the orzacs saw the helmet of the baitar, they formed a wall around him, trying to keep the guvals at bay using the tail spikes.
“Fall back to the hilltop!” he shouted to cover the noise of the battle.
The goal was reached. The poisoned guvals had to be lured uphill to die of overheating, while the arcanian trainers would get a surprise…
He hadn’t even finished the order and the surviving soldiers turned back to the hilltop, the guvals on their tails downing them one by one. It didn’t resemble an organized retreat, but he had no hope that such a thing would be possible.
While climbing the slope, he spotted a cluster of bushes on the left, above the place where his other orzacs were waiting in ambush. Taking advantage of the thicket, he bridled the moulan to the edge of the forest, followed by a small escort. The rest of the orzacs kept running to the hilltop as ordered, followed by the poisoned guvals.
The arcanians hurried through the breach opened by the guvals, taking great care to leave no survivors behind by spearing them with their shtitzes, sharp as the thorns of siclides.
The volley of the tarcaneers took them utterly by surprise; hundreds of missiles, seemingly appearing from nowhere, wreaked havoc in their ranks. Amid the general confusion, they failed to find what hit them until the second salvo, which gave away the chameleons. After a short hesitation, the arcanians turned to face the attackers while the third lethal volley reached them.
The arcanians threw their shtitzes toward the forest, without seeing their targets. Some appeared to have hit flesh, judging by the green phosphorescent blood gushing from the wounds. They pulled their short, curved swords called phaelles and launched an attack. The dwarves, in full accord with their fighting tradition, threw their tarcanes in the grass and ran screaming into the thick of the forest.
The arcanians had no trouble figuring out where the chameleons went, following the trails of blood left behind by the wounded ones. When they reached the earlier position of the tarcanners, they stumbled on the invisible bodies lying on the ground.
Gill knew this was the moment when the orzacs hidden in the woods would launch their attack. He quickly decided to lend them a helping tail.
“Charge!” he yelled to his small escort, and he bridled his moulan to gallop straight at the enemy line.
The arcanians, attacked by an enemy that appeared from a place where none should have remained alive, without realizing the feebleness of the force coming at them, turned hastily to confront the new attack—exposing their flank to the thousand orzacs hidden at the forest edge. Right at that moment, the massive charge broke through the bushes crushed under the feet of the moulans and slammed into them with the force of Belamia’s storm in her good days, throwing their ranks in disarray.
Gill reached the enemies at the same time and engaged them eagerly.
The arcanians’ main weapons were the guvals, which disappeared somewhere on the hill, chasing the orzacs. Their second weapons were the shtitzes, which they had thrown at the chameleons. Therefore, the majority only had phaelles, which were good in close combat but pretty useless against the riders.
The lethal tail spikes wreaked havoc among the arcanians. They had barely started to fight and had already lost their cohesion, attacked from two sides and terrified that the chameleons would return to the battlefield.
Still, Gill’s small escort was in the hardest place, overwhelmed and surrounded from all sides. They had to resist until the help arrived, but it would take time. His riders mowed down the arcanians like an acajaa field during harvest to keep them away from him, but one by one, they were dragged down the nets and hacked to death. With every passing moment, the enemy blades were reaching closer and closer to his shiny armor. Wounded by a phaella, his moulan raised its head, growling in pain. Right then, one of the few remaining shtitzes—most likely aimed at him—speared its mouth, lodging inside the throat. Roaring in agony, the beast fell on its knees and rolled on the ground, dead.
Deciding to avoid any further mishaps, Gill pulled his feet from the net and jumped off before being caught underneath.
The nearest enemy rushed forward, ready to strike. Gill fended his phaella and engaged him, using the sarpan as a hammer to make the arcanian lose his balance. But then, without any reason, the enemy soldier crouched in pain. Looking around, Gill realized that other arcanians were falling as if they were hit by invisible sarpans—big, ugly wounds gushing blood through the joints of their armor or their knees…
The chameleons had returned to the fight! After they ran through the forest around his hidden orzac unit, they came back to raise an invisible wall around him, slicing his enemies with kengo, their ghostly knives!
The resistance of the arcanians collapsed everywhere. They started to run downhill, screaming in terror. Unfortunately, with all their long legs, they couldn’t outrun the moulans. A terrible slaughter followed: the orzacs knocked them down, breaking their backs, while the dwarves behind them hunted the survivors.
Gill jumped onto another stray moulan—the fourth that day—and joined the hunting.
Before long, over half of the arcanians lay dead, and nothing could save the rest of them from the blades of the riders. As the arcanians reached the river, they rushed to cross it without searching for a fjord. The strong currents knocked them off their feet, and many more drowned, pulled down by their armor.
Gill enjoyed his little victory, but he knew all too well that the battle was far from over. It made no sense to chase the arcanians scattered on the riverbanks—he had to help the others to win the battle. At first, he thought of charging along the dirt road to surround the slobberings. But that would be a mistake because they would arrive right in front of the rikanes—which were much deadlier at close range. As long as Voran’s artillery was still intact, he had no meddling in the valley.
“Stop!” he yelled. “Pull back to the hill!”
Without much enthusiasm, the soldiers left the surviving arcanians to escape through their spikes. They spurred their moulans upward to reach the campsite.
A nightmarish sight awaited them around the sleeping domes and the boulders piled for the hakles. It was there where the last moments of the guvals’ carnage had taken place. It seemed that no orzac escaped alive. Here and there, heaps of dead soldiers piled over a slain guval. Even the deep ravine behind the hill was strewn with bodies. All the guvals died—the last of them, no doubt, killed by the unforgiving poison.