The War of the Moonstone: an Epic Fantasy (7 page)

Only when the rout was complete did
the victorious armies return to the fields occupied by the Borchstogs, take
down the men and women tied to poles, find the young girls and boys tied by
chains to the ground in the Borchstog captains’ tents, and begin the process of
gathering and sorting the dead. The Borchstog dead were thrown into a huge
mound, doused with oil and burned on the spot. The stench was awful, but at the
same time sweet, and the Illiana priestesses said prayers over the burning to
drive away the taint the creatures had left behind them. The flames were still
licking high into black night as Giorn and his men were led inside the thick
walls of Hielsly.

A mug of ale was shoved into
Giorn’s hand, and he laughed and drank even as he climbed down from his mount. They
were in a crowded courtyard dominated by a tiered fountain spurting
crystal-clear water—spring water, Giorn knew—high into the chill air. The
spring was hot, and steam rose off the water in misty curtains. He appreciated
its warmth in the cold night.

Baron Hysthir, a barrel-chested man
with a thick beard and a booming laugh, embraced Giorn tightly. The Baron,
though hardy, was missing his left arm—lost to Borchstogs in some battle long
ago—but his hug nearly cracked Giorn’s ribs.

“Thank the Omkar you came! I feared
the ‘stogs had intercepted all my messengers.”

“A few got through,” Giorn said. “Brave
men.”

“Bless them! And you! Without you
we would have been overrun.”

“Fiarth would never have let that
happen.”

The Baron’s expression sobered,
even as men laughed and celebrated all around. “I heard about your father. How
does he fare?”

“The healer tells me there is
little hope.”

“That’s terrible. But—and don’t take
this the wrong way—he’s an old man. He’s led a good life, and a full one. We
should all be so lucky. Hopefully he will join his bride beyond the Lights of
Sifril. He deserves the rest.” Hysthir clapped Giorn on the shoulder. “Now
come. I will set you up at the castle for the night.”

“No, I’ll stay with my men. We’ll
camp outside the walls.”

“Nonsense! I won’t have our city’s
heroes so treated.”

“You haven’t enough space, and our
horses . . .”

Lord Hysthir’s eyes shone. “Hielsly
may look cramped, my friend, but we’ve found ways to fill every nook and
cranny, and there are many of those. It’s near an art with us. Now come! We’ll
feast and celebrate. You’ll be our guest of honor.”

So it was. There was singing and
merriment, and Giorn enjoyed the hospitality of the Baron and his people. The
warrior-priestesses of Illiana, so valuable in times of war, came round and
gave kisses on the cheek to Giorn’s men, and their kisses renewed the soldiers.
Some said the priestesses’ power came from the Moonstone, but even if the Stone
did exist Giorn half believed those tales were more myth than fact—useful in
keeping the superstitious Borchstogs at bay but no more. Still, he accepted his
kiss when it came, and felt lighter and more peaceful after.

And these priestesses, he reminded
himself, were fully human and not blessed with traces of elvish blood, as was
Niara; nor did they possess the numerous small charms that Niara’s sisters
bore.
Something
had to give them such
power. Man was fallen and without Grace, the high arts of the elves denied
them.

Thinking on it, he ate and drank
and allowed himself to be light of heart. That night after the feast he danced
with one girl after another in the grand courtyard before the castle. Statues
of ancient barons on rearing horses loomed all about, as well as fair maidens
standing tall. His soldiers drank and danced, too, and music drifted through
the night. It was a gay time, and he was content.

But just as he was thinking about
retiring for the evening, denying the invitations of the Baron’s youngest
daughter, warning horns sounded from along the walls, and Giorn’s blood froze.

“Borchstogs!” soldiers cried out. “The
Borchstogs are attacking!”

Giorn, half-stumbling, met up with
the Baron and together they mounted the south-facing arc of the wall beside the
South Gate. Side
by side, they stared out at the night.

“There!” Giorn said, pointing.

A roiling dark mass swept up
through the forests that marched south of the city, disturbing the trees as
though a great monster were climbing toward Hielsly. And presently Giorn saw
that this was so. It was not one monster, but many: the Borchstogs rode their
great Serpents, the massive eel-like creatures known as gaurocks that could
stretch a hundred yards long and more.

There were four of them, and each
bore at least fifty Borchstogs. More Borchstogs came up behind. Thousands. Giorn
could see the starlight glinting off their helms as they poured like a foul
tide past the bases of towering eucalyptus.

“How?” the Baron said. “The
mountain walls’re too steep for gaurocks.”

“This is no idle attack, then,”
Giorn said. This is what he had feared, what he had known in his heart since he
had first heard the news of Borchstogs claiming that the Time of Grandeur was
approaching.
Raugst
, he thought.
This all has to do with Raugst.
“They’ve
planned this,” he heard himself say. “They must have erected cranes, scaffolds,
slings . . .”

The Baron’s voice came in a hoarse
whisper, and he spoke like a man in a dream: “Yes, sentries have gone missing
lately. I suspected an attack was brewing, but this . . . they could destroy
us.”

“Vrulug has wanted it for ages, I
know.”

The Serpents drew closer. Giorn heard
drumbeats from the Borchstog host.
Boom. Boom.
Boom
. Steady, rhythmic, inexorable. There was something in that drumming
that sapped the strength, drained the will.

“Aye,” the Baron was saying at his
side. “But Vrulug knew it would be too costly for him. He might break us, but
we would cripple him in the doing.” The Baron’s eyes flashed with heat. “And we
still shall, by the gods.”
“Vrulug must have received reinforcements from Oslog.”

“If that’s true, lad, if the Dark
One has turned his gaze our way . . .”

As the enemy neared, Giorn saw that
each of the giant gaurocks wore an iron helmet with three long iron spikes on
the end.

“They’re going to ram the walls!”

He braced himself. All around him,
soldiers cried out in alarm. The screams of women and children echoed off the
buildings behind. Lord Hysthir’s curses filled the air.

The gaurocks charged, shaking the
earth with their passage. Moonlight glimmered off dark green scales and on the
hunched armored figures that clung to their ridged backs. The Borchstogs
howled, eager for blood, rape and ruin. Giorn remembered the one who had ripped
off its arm to beat him with and knew they were devoted utterly to their
Master. They considered themselves mere extensions of His will.

The Serpents lowered their heads,
and the iron spikes glinted by the light of the pyre even then roasting the
bodies of the Borchstogs slaughtered in the first battle. The spikes would
crack even the thick stone of the Hielsly wall. The gaurocks drew nearer, and
Giorn could see the red eyes of the Borchstog riders. Any second now—

The Illiana priestesses stepped
forward. Mixed among the soldiery upon the wall, they now summoned unearthly
strength. A white glow suffused them—like angels, Giorn thought. And yet they
held no gem, no elvish artifacts.
They
must be channeling power from the Stone
. He spared a moment to glance over
his shoulder to the great Temple of Illiana and its central spire; as the priestesses
upon the wall began to glow, the light emanating from the Temple’s central spire waned, just slightly. He
turned back.

The priestesses stretched out their
hands. White light burst from their palms, lances of energy that struck the
gaurocks full in the head.

Smoke rose from the beasts’ skulls.
They shrieked—a sound that raised the hairs on the back of Giorn’s neck—and
slowed. The Borchstogs prodded them on, lashing them with whips and sticking
them with barbed lances.

The priestesses pressed their
attack. The white beams intensified. Flames licked from the gaurocks’ heads. Several
shrieked and thrashed—dying. Giorn allowed himself to hope that Hielsly might
yet be saved. In their death throes, the Serpents’ dark green coils roiled and
heaved, crushing the Borchstogs that rode them like vermin. The ground shook
and dust obscured the stars.

One got through. Huge, monstrous,
the gaurock actually blasted through the mountainous bonfire that was roasting the
bodies of a thousand Borchstogs, spraying fire and burning corpses everywhere. A
flaming Borchstog sailed right over Giorn’s head, and he had to duck. Even so
he felt the heat of its passing.

The gaurock rammed the wall with
such force that its iron spikes broke from the impact.

The wall heaved. Fifty yards away,
Giorn was pitched off his feet by the concussion. Stumbling, cursing, he
climbed back up, as did the Baron and the soldiers around them.

“Hells!” snapped Lord Hysthir.

The dust from the impact was just
clearing, but even so Giorn could see what Hysthir meant.

“The wall,” he said. “It’s
breached.”

The Baron turned to him with eyes
dull and glazed, the eyes of a dead man. “And so ends Hielsly.”

Giorn and Lord Hysthir summoned soldiers from their
respective companies and raced to meet again at the breach. The great Serpent
lay stunned from the impact, and already its head bristled with spears flung by
Hielsly troops. Blood ran in foul-smelling seas down its glistening scales, and
its movements were sluggish and moribund.

The Borchstogs took no heed. Howling,
they surged around the massive body of the leviathan and poured through the
breach.

Mounting his horse, Giorn noticed
the Borchstog standard bearer bore a lance with a human arm impaled on its tip;
it was covered in tar.
Surely not,
Giorn thought.
Surely that can’t be the
Baron’s arm.
It must have rotted long ago, he told himself. Had the
Borchstogs’ arts truly kept it from decay just so that they could torment Lord
Hysthir with it? It
would
be like
them.

Giorn massed his riders and led
them in a charge that broke the Borchstog advance. He cut a bloody swath
through their ranks, riding them down and spearing them with his lance. When
that snapped off, he beat them with it, then drew his sword and hacked off
their heads and arms. Black blood spewed in gory fountains. Borchstog bodies
twitched on the ground.

There were too many. They pulled
his men from their steeds, gutted their horses, slit the men’s throats or kept
them for torture. They pressed in from all sides like ants overwhelming
grasshoppers, and at last Giorn led his riders back through the breach. Calling
for blood, the Borchstogs pursued them, only to be met by Baron Hysthir’s
layered wall of shields and spears. The wall opened to admit Giorn and his band
but closed immediately after.

“I have something for you,” Giorn
called to the Baron as he rode near.

Hysthir arched his wooly eyebrows,
and, smiling despite himself, Giorn lifted his grisly prize.

The Baron’s eyes widened. “My arm!”

Giorn flung it to him. “May it
bring us luck!”

It didn’t. The Borchstogs broke on
the wall of shields like black waves on rocks. Still they came, dogged and
relentless, uncaring of whether they lived or died. They existed only to serve
the Great One and they would gladly perish in His service. Constantly their
cries of
“Roschk Gilgaroth!”
and
“Un crostrig na-Vrulug!”
pierced the
air.

While the greater portion of
Giorn’s and Hysthir’s men gathered to repel those Borchstogs that flooded in
through the breach, still more of the hellspawn stormed the walls and engaged
the soldiers there. Alarm bells rang throughout the city and all able-bodied
men—and even women and children, Giorn was dismayed to see—rushed to reinforce
the troops.

“We’ve never had to repel such a
concerted effort,” Baron Hysthir confided to Giorn breathlessly when they had a
moment to speak. Bloods, black and red, drenched his thick armor and tangled
his bristly beard. His severed arm was strapped to his back. “It makes no
sense! Why waste so many troops on Hielsly? The only thing we have of value is—”

Giorn saw it, too. “The Moonstone.”

“Yes.”

“We must safeguard the Temple.”

The Baron looked around in despair.
Giorn felt it, too. Even then, Borchstogs were pouring over the walls and
setting fire to the buildings of the city to incite chaos and fear. The screams
of women and children rose to a continuous wail. Giorn held no illusions about
what the Borchstogs were doing to the women – and men, too, for that matter.
And boys and girls.

“I’ll see to the Stone,” he told
the Baron. “You hold the demons back here.”

“Illiana be with you.”

“And you.”

Giorn took a thousand riders and
raced through the tight cobbled streets of Hielsly, having to navigate around
swarms of fleeing townspeople and thread through burning buildings. He passed
the great, tiered fountain he had admired before. Now corpses of soldiers and
townspeople glutted the tiered, spring-fed basins, and the hot crystal-clear
water ran red. Steam rose from butchered bodies. Giorn finally reached the
grand courtyard before the impressive edifice of the Temple of Illiana,
with its elaborate bas-reliefs of angels and brides and the Stewardesses of the
Moon. Already a score of priestesses stood on the steps leading up to the main Temple doors, and they
looked relieved on seeing Giorn and his men.

The High Priestess stepped forward.
In her middle years, she still had hair like gold and the body of an athlete.
The work of the Moonstone
, Giorn
thought.