Samual (48 page)

“You should have bowed to me soldiers!” Heri shouted at the dead men, a feeling of triumph overcoming him. “This is what happens when you fail to acknowledge your king!”

Heri would gather his strength. Rebuild his armies. Take back his throne. And once he had rebuilt his castle and his kingdom he would find a wizard and have this hideous compulsion removed from him. Then he would arrange to have Samual slaughtered. And all the rest of the accursed elves with him.

He might even mount Samual's damned head on a wall!

Sam walked the last few dozen paces to the Council meeting, choosing to leave Tyla behind to graze. The horses tended to wander a little when the elders were meeting, sometimes intruding on what was being discussed as they hunted out the best grass.

He had hurried here. Today he had the feeling that there was something important to be discussed. Mostly because of the way in which the messenger had spoken to him as he'd brought him word that his presence was required. The man had seemed somewhat anxious and been insistent that he hurry.

Sam was happy enough to comply. After another long morning of doing nothing more than reshaping the great trees so that the artisans could start working with them, he was bored. It was work that he could almost do in his sleep. And he still had no great love of heights.

But as he approached the meeting he understood some of the messenger's insistence. This was no normal meeting of the Council. The Fiore Elle was full, and not just with elves.

The Shavarran Ruling Council was there as he'd expected, along with an assortment of other elders, wizards, warriors and sages. But they were far from alone. Mixed in among them were dwarves. By the looks of things a scout party had arrived, and were decked out in their solid steel plate and sporting battle axes as large as any he'd ever seen.

Standing proud among the elves, none of them over five feet in height but all well over two hundred pounds in pure muscle and bone, they looked distinctly out of place. But for all that Sam knew that they were supremely confident in their physical prowess, to the point where every one of them would have believed himself the equal of at least a dozen elves in a fight. And they did love to fight. They would never have considered themselves as being out of place even in an elven land. Rather, for them it was the elves who were far from home.

The dwarves weren't alone. Also among them were a group of humans, all dressed in rough sewn outfits of leather and fur with riding boots and leather gloves. Judging by their outfits he thought they had to be hillmen, and if the dwarves were many leagues from their home the hillmen had come from even further afield. Hillmen were often called rangers or mountain men, and their truest home was always on horseback, riding the alpine lands furthest from civilization. It was a very long way from this new Shavarra.

For them to be here, in the lowlands as they called them – and moreover in the midst of a forest instead of wide open mountain steeps – meant that something had to be wrong. Very wrong. They weren't traders, and they weren't great explorers of other lands. Moreover, they had hurried here. He could see that when he saw they hadn't packed for the trip. Instead of dressing for warmer climes, they still wore their shaggy pelts proudly, despite the fact that they had to be melting in the warm sun. The worst of winter was passed, and though it wasn't yet spring, it was still far warmer than the alpine lands. Their horses also looked to be carrying few provisions in their empty saddle bags, and the animals themselves had obviously been run hard for many days. Despite their natural fitness, they were tired.

All of that together could only mean one thing: The enemy had struck again. That understanding came with a whole new set of questions, since the hillmen didn't live anywhere close to the sea. Their lands, wherever they were, were always a long way inland. So if he had struck them, he had changed his pattern. But how? Where could he have landed his ships? Or had he marched his army over league after league of inhospitable terrain just to reach them? And why?

Walking quietly Sam joined the group, wondering if his presence was required simply for protocol or if something more was required of him. Naturally no one was going to tell him if it was, and by the look on his face Elder Bela standing to one side didn't look like he knew what was going on either.

“Good. All are here now for the telling.” War Master Indolan acknowledged Sam's arrival.

Sam gained the distinct impression from the War Master's tone that not only had he and the rest of the elders waited for him, but that he was late, though how he could have come any quicker was beyond him. He nodded politely but said nothing, knowing there was nothing he could say that wouldn't sound like some sort of excuse.

“This is Lochar Stonewright of the Bronze Mountain Clan to the south east of us, and Halibur Swift of the Straight Arrow Pride, their neighbours these past many years. They have a tale to tell.”

Lochar launched into his tale a moment later, automatically assuming the position of the leader as was his people's nature. For their part the hillmen stood around, watching, listening and waiting patiently, apparently completely unconcerned by having a dwarf speak for them. But then they were nomads by nature, all their worldly possessions and their homes carried on horseback, and fixed to no particular place or allegiance. As such they were always remarkably calm about all things that couldn't be changed according to the tales, choosing to leave rather than argue when things became difficult. There was always another mountain range to settle. But apparently they couldn't do that any longer. In fact if Lochar was correct, the hillmen were just as trapped as those who had built great cities or fortresses, bound not by their own walls, but by the enemy's armies.

It seemed the enemy had changed his approach with the hillmen, very likely after having had his conversation with Sam. Gone were the sailing ships. Instead he had found great ships of the air to carry his armies. Balloons. Great black bags of gas that held aloft baskets in which the rats could be carried. And instead of worrying about the vagaries of the wind, he had the balloons tethered to one another and towed a dozen at a time by a steel drake. It was a frightening development. And it was new. He hadn't read that in the histories of the Dragon Wars.

This new Dragon was learning. And he would be even more dangerous because of it. If each drake could tow a dozen balloons and each balloon could hold four or five rats, then each landing left fifty or more of the steel vermin on the ground ready to attack, with a drake in the air to rain down fire from above. In that way his armies grew fast.

No more were the steel rats his only soldiers either. At least as far as the open ranges went. Instead, he now had an army of spiders that spat balls of fire the size of a man's head further than an archer's arrow could fly. Worse than that, when the fire balls landed they exploded, spreading fire and fragments of steel everywhere, and taking out as many as a dozen people at once. In short he now had mobile artillery. The same mobile artillery he understood had been used to such devastating effect against Ragnor's Rock.

Infantry supported by air power and artillery. The Dragon had obviously started to improve his tactics.

Against them the hillmen had had their traditional advantage of speed as they stayed in the saddle. They had always thought themselves safe thanks to that. But for once it hadn't been enough. The enemy's drakes were even faster, and could strike silently from above without warning. They would cast great swaths of fire down upon the hillmens' unsuspecting heads, leaving more than a few charred corpses still in their saddles. It was a vicious tactic, but an effective one. The drakes kept the various clans bottled up tight in the forests where their horses' speed was limited, while the rats, the enemy's foot soldiers, made the forests their own, turning them into a series of traps rather than a refuge.

Attacked from the air mercilessly and finding no safety in the forests, the hillmen had been forced to retreat, and for the first time ever, to find shelter from the open skies. It was something they had never done before. Something they had never even considered. Consequently they hadn't been entirely sure what they should do. They had no skills to build great castles, and there were no such structures among their lands. Nor could they flee great distances to those lands where such structures existed. The drakes would have caught them the moment they left the shelter of the forests. So they had found themselves a place among the dwarves of the Bronze Mountain Clan.

And then the enemy had found them there too.

In the tunnels and corridors of their great underground city the enemy's rats had made a reappearance. There they had truly found themselves at home. They loved the dark, and they could squeeze themselves down into the tightest of places, cunningly letting the dwarves pass them by only to attack from the rear. And as before they had numbers on their side. It seemed that however many of them the dwarves killed, they were replaced by dozens more.

But in turn the dwarves had their battle hardened steel weapons and armour, and the archery of the hillmen to call upon. The fight had soon become a pitched battle for the city which nobody could win. Yet. Instead both sides had formed siege lines and established fortifications, and currently they were waging a battle of attrition.

The real danger for them however, wasn't the rats that were already there. The dwarves might even win against them. It was that they were trapped within their underground city. The steel drakes and fire spiders were unable to break through into the city itself, but they stopped the dwarves leaving as they set up a perimeter around it. A barrier that prevented the dwarves both being resupplied and escaping to safety, while the enemy kept growing in strength up top.

As a soldier Sam could see the strategy of the enemy, and even be impressed as he turned his opponent's strengths into weaknesses. It was a well thought out campaign he'd launched and it appeared he'd started studying tactics. But as a man, he found it disgusting. What had happened at Shavarra was terrible, but this was worse. Far worse. It showed the enemy's purpose. It was clear that he wanted no survivors. Then again perhaps he hadn't wanted any at Shavarra either, they'd just fought back a little better than he'd expected. He had trapped the dwarves in their own cities, knowing that they couldn't escape since his drakes would have torn them apart in the open, and then settled back to win a battle of attrition. In short the battle had become a siege, and a siege that the enemy would win.

In time the dwarves and the hillmen would be forced out, slowly but surely as hunger and desperation forced them either to assault the rats, or flee. In both instances the dwarves would come off second best. They weren't suited for a fight out in the open, and the rats had turned their own defences against them.

It was only the construction of hidden entrances to the city that had allowed these dwarves to escape and the speed of the hillmen that had got them through the wilds to the new elven homeland. And all the while as they had desperately made their way to the new home of a people they'd heard had fought a battle against the enemy and perhaps even drawn it, the battle behind them continued towards its inexorable end. Food and supplies were running lower by the day, while ever more rats arrived to replace the fallen.

But the question was what to do about it. Or more accurately what did they want Sam to do about it?

Clearly his fame, or at least the legend of his battle with the rats had made it as far as the dwarves, and they hoped that once more he and the elves could turn the tide. But at the same time, how much could they actually know about the battle he'd fought? Did they understand that it was magic that he'd used? Something the dwarven people weren't especially fond of, except for their own enchantments of course. Did they understand that his most powerful weapon, the fire ring, couldn't be used in an underground city – it would kill everyone out in the open, the dwarves and rats alike. It would also likely smother the dwarves and any buildings that fell as a result, would make barricades for both sides. A siege would become trench warfare. And that was the best result assuming he got into position in time. Long before they got there Sam and any others he travelled with would have to contend with an army of spiders and drakes.

Despite all the problems though, Sam wanted to help. How could he not? He was a man as well as a knight, and he could not sit back and let others die, especially women and children, while he stood back and did nothing. He suspected he wasn't alone either. All around him he could see the soldiers and guards bristling with anger, while the war masters were obviously well into planning their own campaign.

But could they dream one up sufficient to wipe out such a scourge? And was it even a choice?