Dragonhammer: Volume I (6 page)

“Not back to the river,” Percival concludes.  “Wouldn’t want to contaminate it.”

“So it must come out behind the mountain,” I finish.  “It lets out somewhere in the Wolfpack Mountains.”

A voice behind us startles us.  “Oi!  What are you doing?”  It’s a guard, staring at us suspiciously.

“Exploring,” I respond matter-of-factly.

“This place is off-limits,” he says.  “I’m gonna have to ask you to leave.”

Within the hour, both I and Percival have forgotten the whole ordeal.  I do, however, agree to go back up to the training grounds with Percival.

Nathaniel has tired of the archery range and is now training with his warhammer.  I join him, as well as the others who are still up there.  It does me little good.  We do not see Gunther.

That night I have difficulty sleeping.  I get up to cool my head, but just before I open the door, I hear voices in the hall.

“What do you think the outcome of this battle will be?”  I hear.

“I don’t like to ponder such things,” says the second voice.

“So you think we’ll lose?”

“Not necessarily.  I just don’t want to entertain the possibility.”

“But you think it likely,” the first voice retorts.

“I think we’ve given a bunch of farmers swords,” growls the second voice.  “What good are people who don’t know how to use a sword?  They’ll be fighting trained soldiers!  It’s not enough to simply fight off of will to retain their homes!”

The first voice doesn’t respond for a moment.  “So you think Terrace is lost,” he concludes.

Hesitation.  “Yes.  I think we will lose,” says the second voice.  “But I have been wrong before.”

Having had enough, I go back to bed with my head spinning in turmoil.  The exact thoughts had been hurling through my head only minutes before I heard them spoken.  To hear them spoken breaks me.

Within the next few minutes, I somehow find sleep.  My dreams are of chaos and mayhem, so rest brings little consolation to my weary mind.

The next morning I am awoken abruptly by the deep blaring of a war horn. 

The Battle Begins

E
very one of us dons our armor in frenzy, strapping on swords, shields, and quivers.  At the last minute I decide to bring my bow, strapping it to my back and simply carrying my warhammer.  We burst out of the bunkrooms and into the hall, where every man is running towards the front gate of the Keep.

Somehow in the chaos we manage to stay together as a group:  my father and Nathaniel, Percival, James, Jericho, their fathers, Leon, and Bownan.  In what seems like seconds we rush over the steps out of the Keep and into the streets of Terrace, where we continue until we reach the front gate of the city.  The warhorn blares the whole time, until this point.  The enormous torches are flaring brightly, casting orange light all about the cliff sides.  The sun has yet to rise.

My group stays down, behind and to the left of the gate.  Nathaniel salutes to us and says, “I’ll see you later.”  Then he runs up the stairs onto the wall, and then into a doorway that leads through the mountain and into the left Clifftower.

It only takes another minute for all the other men to take position.  Then all stand silently at their posts, waiting for it to begin.

Suddenly there is a warhorn.  It’s different from ours; it comes from the other side of the gate and has a harsh, straight tone.  The yells and cries of many men follow it, creating a horrible roar.  Then suddenly it stops.

“What’s going on?” somebody behind me whispers.

Then it begins.

We unleash a volley of arrows from the wall and towers.  Their archers retaliate, but I’m assuming with much less success.  I see very few bodies drop from the wall.

My thoughts turn to Nathaniel. 
He’ll be fine
, I convince myself. 
He’ll be fine.

At this point there’s really not much I can do.  I just wish that I could see what was going on outside the gate.

“Shoot down the ram carriers!” I hear.  Then, above the shouting, I hear a sharp
CRACK!
  The gate budges inward slightly, but springs back and bounces slightly.  “Brace the gate!” I hear.  Then a swarm of men crowds against the gate, pressing against it.  The sharp noise comes again and the gate shakes.  The crowd of men is pushed back by the force, but they rebound.  All the while arrows zing from the wall and the Clifftowers; we are receiving fairly few arrows in return.

“I have to see,” I mutter to my father.  Before he can stop me I run up the stairs to the top of the wall.  The sight is chilling.

The army stands on the enormous bridge connecting the city to the rest of the world.  Most of them have large rectangular shields held above them to block arrows.  A great many of them lie dead in front of the gate, though there are plenty to take their place.  Arrows pierce them where there armor is weak:  at the neck and armpit.  Some standing on the sides of the bridge are hit with such force that they fall over the edge to the river far below.

Their ram is doing little damage.  Those who carried it in are now buried underneath their fellow soldiers.  Many are being shot down, but the ram is always picked up and hurled back into the gate.

Then I notice that our arrows are not only coming from the tops of the wall and towers, but from inside of them as well.  Tall narrow slit-like windows line the Clifftowers and the wall.  Enemy arrows clack harmlessly around them, but our arrows shoot with deadly accuracy from within.  Similarly, our archers on top take cover behind crenellations.

Two objects at the other end of the bridge part the enemy army.  The men move aside, cheering and shouting as they pass them.

As the things come closer, I realize they’re each being pushed by two large humanoid creatures. 

“Where did they get trolls?” I hear someone mutter.

They’re about ten or eleven feet tall, even though they’re hunched over to push the dark shapes.  In the dim light of dawn, I notice they’re muscular and have long, lanky arms, though they must be brutishly strong.  Their skin is scaly and some arrows merely skim over them, but they seem unaffected by those that do puncture their skin.  One of them takes an arrow just under his right shoulder and rears with a roar of agony.  His face is long, as are his teeth.  Large bat-like ears flap behind his bald head.  The noise he emits makes the hair on the back of my neck stand on end:  it’s much like the snarl of a mountain lion mixed with the screech of a hawk.  Despite his wound, he takes hold of the object and continues to push it forward.

They objects are wheeled, like carriages, but instead of seats and doors, they each have a mechanism of some sort lying across them, with some gears and levers and springs.  Only when they reach the wall and activate them do I realize what they are.

“Ladders!” someone yells.  Men holding ropes pull with all their might as others release the mechanism.  A thirty-foot ladder unfolds from each of the contraptions and each of them comes into contact with the wall with a
clang!

Here we go,
I think.

Within moments soldiers are coming up the ladders.  The first few are simply shot down to the ground, but then they reach the top.  With roars they greet us and the first swordplay of the battle commences.

I am filled with adrenaline.  As an enemy swings his sword at me, all that I had learned about swordplay the previous day clicks into place.  My hammer quickly parries his blow and smashes into his chest, throwing him backwards off the wall.  Once again I am almost overcome with disgust at myself, but shake it off and say silently,
That would have been you
.

My hammer begins swinging almost of its own accord.  I lose track of the number of lives I take, though it cannot be more than five.

A horrific clang sounds from the right ladder.  In only moments I see the source of the sound.

One of the trolls, now carrying an enormous spiked club, throws himself onto the walkway and roars maliciously, throwing spit and showing his sharp yellowing teeth.  With a single blow from his club, he throws three men from the wall and down into the crowd below.  He seems completely oblivious to his bristling coat of arrows.

His legs are short, though his arms are much longer than I would have expected.  He wears only a loincloth and an iron breastplate, but his abdomen remains uncovered to maintain mobility.  In the late moonlight, I can see that his skin is a dull grayish-green, and his neck is long and thick.

He charges forward, swinging the vicious weapon with another roar and sending men to their deaths.  I dive backward, hoping desperately to avoid his blows.

“Aim for its eyes!” someone screams.  “Aim for its eyes!”

Arrows begin to fly at the terrible beast once again, most from down below.  He angrily raises a six-fingered hand to cover his face and roars at the crowd. 
He’s going to jump!
I realize. 
If he does, he’ll kill many more men before we can bring him down.

Adrenaline pumps through me and just before he jumps, I do what I can to keep him here.  I hammer his big toe.

He howls and swings his club furiously at me, but I drop to the ground and evade it with inches to spare.  The club smashes through the stone crenellations of the wall and damages the left ladder, throwing it and all of its climbers back down onto the bridge.  His beady bloodshot eyes narrow as they focus on me and he raises his club.

I dive between his legs as the club comes down with a crash.  A terrible shriek tears across the mountain as he flings his club over his head to smash me into the stone, but I roll to the side and stand, barely dodging the weapon before it decimates the brick where I had been lying.  I duck and feel the whoosh of air as his club swings just over my head and destroys another crenellation.  Then, before he has the time to swing again, I bring my hammer down with all my might on his foot.

The howl he emits is excruciating.  He recoils and brings up his injured foot, but stumbles onto his knee, one hand with the club on the ground and the other gripping the side of the wall tightly.  Then I summon all my strength and smash my hammer into the side of his head as hard as I possibly can.

There’s a sickening crack.  He groans and tumbles to the right, and then topples off the wall and down into the Tygnar army below.

There are cheers and shouts below me, but there’s no time to glory in my victory.  Men are still climbing up the remaining ladder.

I punch aside two enemies with my hammer and knock the third backward, almost all the way into the mountain tunnel.  Once I reach the ladder, I pound my hammer viciously into the vertical bar of the ladder.  It bounces, but stays on the wall.  An arrow sprouts from the chest of an oncoming soldier, and he falls back down the ladder.

Quickly I ram the spike of my hammer between the wall and the ladder and push, using it like a lever.  Men beside me see what I am doing and push on my hammer, and slowly the ladder is pushed away from the wall until it collapses over backwards, crushing soldiers beneath it.

There’s more cheering and shouting, but as I look across the bridge I realize it’s not over.

Trolls push another machine, but this one is bigger.  It’s a wonder they’ve been able to get it here through the forest; it’s a siege tower.

“Aim for the trolls!” I yell, because I know that once it gets here, there won’t be any tipping that thing over.

As it nears I notice it has ladders going up the back, into the top of the tower.  The base is composed of wheels and the trolls that push it.  Above the base swings a battering ram, hanging on enormous chains.

Its advance is slow, but certain.

Arrows continue to fly.  A troll falls to the side having been hit fatally, probably in the neck.  Another takes its place.  Every so often a soldier falls from the top of the siege tower.

An arrow zings a foot from me and I take cover behind one of the intact crenellations.  Staying underneath, I crawl to the left tunnel into the mountain and enter.  Inside, I peer out of one of the narrow slit windows to watch the lumbering advance of the siege tower.

As soon as it reaches the wall, its front comes down with a crash, creating a bridge between the tower and the wall.  Soldiers rush through and onto the wall, and the fight recommences.  What I’m worried about, however, is the gate.

Trolls pull on long thick ropes tied to the back of the hanging ram.  Once they have pulled it as far back as it will go, it drops and swings into the gate with a devastating
CRASH! 
The men holding the gate are thrown backward, and it takes all the speed they can muster to brace themselves before it hits again.

The men on the wall begin to fall.  Tygnar’s soldiers trickle through the siege tower at a constant enough rate to force more of our men to the top of the wall.  Then the ram hits again.

The gate cracks.  The wooden beams begin to split, despite their steel reinforcement.  I leap down the stairs into the plaza, next to my group, and prepare myself to face their entire army.  Percival gives me an amazed smile and faces the gate with furrowed eyebrows.

Another crash, and the wood in the center splinters.  The head of the ram becomes visible:  a large iron block, designed with ridges like a mace.  We see it retract, and then suddenly the gate bursts as it hits again.

Tygnar’s soldiers flood through the gate like water through a funnel into the city.

“The city is breached!” someone cries.  “The city is breached!”

We fight like madmen.  After felling yet another soldier, I turn to fight the one I know is behind me.  His sword is already raised, and I know it may be too late.  Then he falls over dead, and Percival nods to me as he pulls out his sword.

A roar sounds from the gate and two trolls smash their way through, each wielding a spiked club.  A third and fourth follow after, screeching, swinging their titanic crude broadswords.

“Come on Kadmus,” says James.  “You took on the last one fairly well.”

“Yeah but I had the wall to throw him off of.”

“Well, we’d better come up with something quick!”  Then we both turn to take on our approaching enemies.

The trolls crash through our forces like an unstoppable wave.  Many men fall before their crude weapons, and too many of them are without much of a fight.  One man jumps and grabs hold of the loincloth of one, and then climbs up the troll’s back to his head.  The troll angrily bucks about, trying to reach the man.  He manages to grab the ankle of the soldier and throw him, but not before the man’s sword has found a place in its back.

The troll roars and flails about, and then charges directly at me.  Never have I reacted so quickly.

My hand dives to my belt and comes up with a throwing knife.  The troll can’t be more than fifteen feet away when I throw it, but when the knife pierces his neck he crashes forward and I am forced to dive to the side and out of the way.  As I get up to face him again, he twitches and a revolting gargling noise emanates from his long mouth.  Then he lies limp.

“I’m going to start calling you Trollslayer!” jokes James.

“There’s three more,” I say grimly.  “And I’m afraid that was a bit of luck.  He was already going down!”