“No, I suppose not,” Kelthys said from his other side, raising his bow but not yet drawing it. “I agree with Brandark though. It offends my sense of the way things are supposed to be.”
“I’ll not argue with you there,” Bahzell conceded. He hadn’t raised his own bow yet. The targets he was waiting for had not yet put in an appearance, but for others in the army “Arbalests ready!”
Only a hradani’s bull-like voice could have produced that thunderous bellow, and the strange, singing tension of the Rage’s steely purpose rang through it like a bell. Bahzell felt his own Rage stirring, raising its head as he summoned it to him, and the front rank of arbalesteers seemed to shiver as the weapons were raised, butt stocks pressed shoulders, heads bent so that cold, focused eyes peered over their sights.
“ Brace! ” platoon leaders and sergeants in the foremost rank of infantry shouted, and the kneeling hradani leaned forward, driving their shoulders against their close-spaced shields.
Drums thundered beyond the the ridge. A vast, bestial, yelping chant rose from thousands of ghoulish throats in a massed warcry no human or hradani had ever before heard. And there was something else behind it, a howling something, a sound that was both more and less bestial than the ghouls themselves. Bahzell had heard its like before, and so had Walsharno, and Vaijon, and Brandark, and Hurthang. Not exactly the same thing, of course, for this one was deeper, a vehicle for commands and not simply an undifferentiated howl of elemental fury and hunger. Yet there was no mistaking it.
‹ Strange how much like demons devils sound, isn’t it?› Walsharno said calmly in the back of his brain. ‹ Given how much they’re supposed to hate each other, you’d think they’d at least try to sound different.›
“I’m none so sure we sound any different-humans from hradani, I’m thinking-in their ears,” Bahzell replied.
‹ Probably not. But I don’t think it’s quite that complicated, Brother. When you come down to it, evil only has one voice.›
Bahzell flicked his ears in agreement, and then the ghouls came spilling down the western side of the ridge, waving their crude weapons in a flint-edged tidal bore of hate. Those who’d hesitated hesitated no longer. They raced forward with the loping, deadly speed of their kind, screaming their hatred…and their hunger.
“Arbalesteers!” The deep voice bellowed once more as the ghouls foamed down the long, gentle slope. Five hundred yards separated them from the waiting army. Then four hundred. Three hundred. Two “ Looooooose! ”
KEERRWHUNNNG!
Two hundred steel-bowed arbalests fired as one, driving their flat, lethal quarrels into the ghouls’ faces. Those diamond shields were little more than woven wicker, covered with leather. They didn’t even slow the steel-headed shafts, and deeper, bubbling shrieks-of agony this time, not simply hate-erupted in sprays of torn flesh and blood. Scores of ghouls went down, many of them tearing at the wounds those quarrels had ripped through them before going on to strike yet other targets, somewhere behind them. More of the creatures, coming on behind them, stumbled and fell, and any ghoul who fell in the face of that swarming avalanche never rose again. Its own companions’ taloned feet trod its shredded corpse into the mud.
The first rank of arbalesteers stepped back through the open gaps in the second and third ranks behind them. They slung their arbalests across their backs and picked up the pikes stacked ready between the infantry and the horse archers.
“Second rank- loose! ”
A second deadly volley sleeted into the ghouls, tumbling still more of them, caving in the front of the charging horde like an ocean wave devoured the wall of a child’s castle of sand. But the ghouls were no static wall. For every creature who fell, two more stormed forward across its bleeding body, driven by their own fury and the merciless will of the devils behind them.
Bows began to sing as the range fell and the the mounted Sothoii arced their first arrows up to come driving down deeper into the mass of ghouls like steel-pointed rain. The third rank of arbalesteers stepped forward and fired a third murderous volley while the second rank reloaded. Then it was the second rank’s turn once more. The third. The second. And even as they fired, that arching canopy of arrows slashed down in lethal waves.
Gaps appeared, filled in almost instantly, and still the endless flood swept over the crest, pounding closer, absorbing quarrels and arrows alike. It was like watching a landslide or a tidal wave, not flesh and blood, however brutish that flesh and blood might be. The ghouls simply absorbed the fire and drove onward, closing the range with all their fearsome speed, getting close enough to bring their enemies into their own reach and force the hradani to abandon their missile weapons.
Showers of flint-tipped javelins hissed upward as they drew closer. Most of them glanced off of the front rank’s shields or the arbalesteers’ breastplates and helmets. But not all of it, and men and hradani grunted or cried out in anguish as sharp-edged stone sheared flesh and muscle. The screams of wounded warhorses added themselves to the hellish din, and Walsharno twitched as one of those javelins hammered off the close-linked chain barding a courser could carry with relative ease.
Sir Kelthys’ bow sang again and again in Bahzell’s ear. Flint spear points and flint and obsidian-edged war clubs thudded against the front rank’s shields. The kneeling hradani thrust upward through the narrow chinks between them, driving longswords deep into the ghouls’ vitals.
The arbalesteers who’d snatched up the waiting pikes stepped forward as their companions filtered to the rear, slinging their own arbalests to take up shields or pikes of their own. Those with pikes joined their fellows, thickening their line to present an impenetrable, glittering wall of pikeheads, while those with shields formed into reserve squads, ready to reinforce the fighting line’s front ranks at need. The pikemen’s weapons reached out above their companions’ shields, punching into the enemy, filling the air with the reek of riven bowels and blood. Some of the ghouls reached across the tops of the front rank’s shields, fastening their talons on the shields’ edges, trying to wrench them away from their bearers…or to drag the infantrymen out of their formation and into the maw of the ghoulish vortex of destruction. Here and there, they succeeded, but the pikemen held the gaps until more shield-bearing swordsmen could fill them. And even as the mound of bodies began to grow before the shield wall, the Sothoii, well behind the vicious melee, continued to send their looping fire far back into the ghouls’ ranks.
Stymied by that wall of shields and stabbing pikes, the ghouls swept around the angle of the army’s formation, flowing down its long western face. Some of them swung in, trying to break the angle itself, but Trianal and his officers had anticipated that. That angle was held by the Horse Stealer warriors of Clan Iron Axe, men of Prince Bahnak’s own household, armed with sword and shield and all the controlled fury of their Rage. They might be killed, but they would not be broken, and their swords reaped a grisly harvest from the ghouls who tried.
Yet if they held, thousands of additional ghouls streamed past and around them, turning in, flinging themselves bodily against the rock-steady line of infantry further south. Arbalest bolts hissed to meet them, pike heads thrust and bit deep, swords sheared and stabbed, yet there were far more ghouls than any of them had truly believed was possible. No one had ever seen-no one had ever imagined — anything which could force fifty thousand of the creatrures together into a single, unified horde. Trianal’s troops were outnumbered by better than two to one by enemies bigger and stronger-and faster-even than Horse Stealer hradani, and these ghouls seemed willing to absorb any casualties rather than break and run even in the face of such losses. They threw themselves bodily against their foes, no longer trying to wrestle the infantry’s shields away from them but content to simply bear those shields down by weight of numbers. To bury them under the massive weight of their own dead flesh if that was the only way to open gaps in that unflinching line.