The pale werewolf's eyes grew as large as fists when he heard this order. But he nodded, and with a few high-pitched barks rallied the wolvish thugs and led them in a wedge into the chaos of the battle-torn smoky chamber.
Rokhlenu hoped they wouldn't all be absolutely killed, but there was only one thing he could do and he did it. He turned his back on them and swarmed up the rope ladder. The day-shape thugs followed him up.
If Morlock had been able to dream anymore, he would have thought it was a nightmare. The tunnel was darkish, lit only by a few torches. There was a mass of guards there, in wolf form and man form. The men were armed, and even some of the wolves were armored. The air was dense with smoke and heat and the stink of shed blood.
Morlock and his irredeemables killed their way into the tunnel. But there came a time when they could not advance farther. The press of bodies among the guards kept the dead guards standing in place three deep. The men at least were dead, and the wolves lifeless: there was no moonlight in the dark tunnel to feed their renewal. Morlock and those with him on the front line could not reach past the dead to get at the living. Nor could they retreat: there was a flood of escapees behind them also, forcing them forward.
The layers of dead surged back and forth between the competing sides, like the border of an uncertain empire.
It was strangely, dreadfully quiet in the dark tunnel. The only sounds were the labored breathing of the opposing mobs and the scratch of booted or clawed feet on the tunnel pavement.
From time to time some armorless werewolves would try to creep forward among the thicket of dead legs and snap at the knees of Morlock and his irredeemables. But their own wolves stood ready to counterattack: Morlock saw with surprise that one of those at his own side was Hrutnefdhu.
Morlock wanted to call back down the line for a spear or a bow and arrow or some kind of distance weapon. But he hadn't the words for this, in Moon speech or Sunspeech: weaponry had rarely come up in his discussions with Rokhlenu and Hrutnefdhu. Besides, he was tired, desperately tired, and it was almost impossible to breathe in the stinking smoke-laden tunnel.
If he lost his footing and tumbled backward, it would begin an avalanche that would end with a victory of the hated guards. He remembered hating the guards without actually hating them so much: the whole world was growing as dark and hazy as the evil tunnel's air. But he clung to the memory of hate like a faith; he braced his feet against the tunnel pavement and pushed back against the dead body in front of him.
He didn't think he could sustain the counterweight of the enemy line much longer.
He reached out with his right hand and stabbed experimentally with Tyrfing. If he could crack the enemy line somehow, cause one guard to give way, maybe the avalanche of bodies would fall the other way and the guards would flee or fall.
He couldn't reach anyone.
There was a wound on his arm, and it seeped blood onto the wolvish corpse in front of him. The corpse began to smolder, adding a reek of burning hair to the poisonous fog in the tunnel.
Morlock reflected faintly that if he bled enough, the corpse would burn away entirely. Then he would be that much nearer the enemy, near enough to strike a blow.
An idea occurred to him. Keeping the tension on the corpse in front of him, he slashed down at the corpse in front of that, hacking away at it until part of it fell away to the ground and the rest was crushed between the two battle lines. He was too startled when the moment came to press forward, but the enemy line lurched nearer to him. He tried reaching over it and stabbing at the werewolf on the far side.
The wolf first cowered low, losing the precarious purchase his shoulders had on the corpse in front of him. Then he leapt back to escape being crushed.
There was a tiny breach in the line of battle. Morlock let the corpses fall and leapt over them. Wielding Tyrfing with both hands, he cut a brief swathe of death, piling corpses all around him.
He turned to fund the gorilla-like red werewolf grinning beside him. He had imitated Morlock's tactic, with equal success.
"We do it again," he said to the other, hoping he would understand. "Again and again, until we break the line."
The red grinning shadow beside him made a wordlike sound, and they both turned to the task.
More of their comrades followed into the wedge they were digging into the guards' line; it grew wider, flatter, as more of them attacked enemies who had suddenly come into reach.
Morlock was wearier than ever, but when he looked up now his heart was gladdened by the sight of moonlit ground. This was bad in a way: the wolvish guards would take strength from the moonlight. But it was the way out, and they were nearer now.
Then he saw shapes he had been dreading step out of the light: werewolves in the day shape with bows, their arrows nocked and ready to shoot. They could devastate the irredeemables from a distance, and there was nowhere to turn, no way to protect themselves.
Morlock nearly groaned. But if he was to have only one more utterance, he didn't want it to be a sound of despair.
"Khai gradara!" he shouted, greeting the moonlight that had recently given him such hope. "Khai gradara! Khai, khai!"
The werewolves with human faces took up his cry behind him. The irredeemables wearing the night shape sang their own bitter triumphant song. The smoky air of the tunnel rang with it as the shadowy archers took deadly aim and shot.
Rokhlenu didn't know what he was expecting on the balcony, but he was disgusted with what he found. The balcony had been thick with soldiery when the prison break began, but no guards were there now. If they had held their post and fired a few arrows at escaping prisoners, the escape might have ended in utter failure. But because it was New Year's Night, they were smoke-drunk on duty when the alarm came; they had panicked and fled their post, leaving their weapons behind them. So Rokhlenu read the chaos of broken smoke-bowls, of quivers heavy with unshot arrows lying alongside unstrung bows.
"Everyone grab a bow," he said, "and a quiver-two if you can carry them."
He followed his own order and then ran along the balcony until he reached a portal to the outer rampart. He rushed out onto the rampart, hoping it would be as empty as the balcony.
It was, and he was delighted to discover the cowardly guards' escape route: a ladder of hooked-together guard harnesses, dangling over the edge of the rampart halfway down the wall.
"They must have loved their families," remarked the thug who first followed him out onto the rampart. He was a fur-faced, one-eyed son-of-a-brach, and he didn't seem to think much of families.
Rokhlenu waited until all his thugs were present and then explained his plan.
"All right, Dragon Slayer," said the one-eyed semiwolf "You go first. Watch out your hands don't slip on that armor: I guess they moistened it some while they were still wearing it."
Rokhlenu climbed down the makeshift ladder as far as it went and then dropped the rest of the way; arrows clattered out of his quivers as he struck the ground. He was stooping to pick them up when he discovered that not all the guards had abandoned their post in the crisis. There were a dozen of them, men and wolves, grinning at him from the shadows of a recess in the prison wall.
He grasped at his sword …and realized he had left it on the ground when he was gathering his bow and arrows. He seized the bow and started wielding it like a club. He had little hope his thugs would follow him: they would hear the fight and take a more advantageous escape route.
But they surprised him. He was kicking a wolf who had attached himself to his right knee when the wolf was abruptly cut in two by a broadbladed axe. He looked up to see it was wielded by the one-eyed semiwolf His other thugs were dropping down like hail from the rampart.