Coilla used it to try picking off some of the enemy before they reached her. She flung her knife at the nearest human. It smacked home in his windpipe and he plunged from his mount. Quickly snatching another blade, she pitched it underarm at the next foe, spiking his eye. Her third throw was wide of its mark, and proved the last. Now they were too close for anything but hand-to-hand. Shrieking a battle cry, she brought her sword into play.
The first warrior to reach Jup paid for it dearly. A blow from the dwarf’s weighty axe split his skull, showering blood and bone shards on all in range. Two more custodians waded in. Dodging their blades, Jup sent out a wide horizontal swing that severed the hand of one and stove in the other’s chest. There was no pause. More opponents replaced the fallen. His weathered, bearded face straining with effort, Jup laid into them.
Haskeer’s savage rain of blows downed both his initial attackers. But the second took the blade with him as he fell, leaving Haskeer to face his next assailant bare-handed. The man had a pike. They wrestled for it, knuckles white, the barbed spear jerking back and forth. Plumbing all his strength, Haskeer drove the butt into the man’s stomach, breaking his grip. With a dextrous flip, the weapon was delivered to its owner’s innards. Prised free, it served again on another custodian. But this victim’s writhing snapped it, leaving Haskeer with a useless length of shank.
Then two things happened at once. Another human moved in on him with flashing sword. And a lone arrow zipped from the scrum to pierce Haskeer’s forearm.
Howling more with fury than pain, he wrenched out the gory shaft. Brandishing the arrow he lurched forward and employed it like a dagger, stabbing at the custodian’s face. The distraction let Haskeer snatch away the wailing man’s blade and gut him. His place was instantly taken. Haskeer fought on.
Favouring a hatchet over the spar for close combat, Alfray wielded it with deadly precision. But in truth it was all he could do to hold back the storm. Though he had an orc’s lust for bloodletting, his years were beginning to tell. Yet despite his waning stamina he matched any in butchery. For now.
He scanned the mêlée and saw that he wasn’t the only one overextended. The whole band was on the point of being overwhelmed, with fighting especially brutal at the wings, where the enemy was trying to outflank them. The Wolverines may have had little option other than a stand, but it was proving too bold a move. They were taking wounds, though so far none of them had gone down. That wouldn’t last.
Though only a corporal, Alfray was on the point of ignoring protocol and shouting the order himself. Jup beat him to it, yelling words that stuck in an orc’s throat.
“Fall back! Fall back!”
The instruction spread along the besieged line. Grunts hastily disentangled themselves and withdrew. The face-off became a rearguard action. But the custodians, suspicious of a feint, were wary of going after their quarry with any zeal. The band knew their reluctance was temporary.
Arms aching from the exertion of slaughter, Coilla retreated with the rest, reopening the gap between the lines. The Wolverines moved closer together.
She came to Jup. “What now? Run again?”
“No chance,” the dwarf panted.
Coilla ran a palm over her cheek, wiping blood. “Thought so.”
Their opponents were working themselves up for the final assault.
At Coilla’s shoulder, Alfray said, “We got a good few.”
“Not enough,” Haskeer responded gruffly.
In undertones, some of the grunts were calling on orc deities to guide their blades. Or to make their deaths suitably heroic and swift. Coilla suspected the humans were appealing to their own god in similar vein.
The custodians began advancing.
There was a keening sound in the air. A fast-moving shadow passed over the Wolverines. They looked up and saw something like a swarm of elongated insects sweeping across the sky. The dark cloud had already reached its apex and was curving down towards the enemy.
It fell upon them wrathfully. The forefront of the custodian line was riddled with lethal bolts. They bored into upturned faces and chests, arms and thighs. Their velocity took them through the paltry defences of helmets and visors. Shields could have been made of paper for all the good they did. Peppered with numerous shafts, men and horses succumbed wholesale in a struggling, bloodied mass.
A large force was riding, hell-bent, from the direction of the forest, and even as the band spied them they unleashed another deadly cloud. The arrows’ great arching path was well above the Wolverines, yet still they instinctively ducked. Once more death rained mercilessly on the heads of the humans, bringing further mayhem and chaos.
As their allies approached, the band began to make them out.
Squinting at the reinforcements, eyes shaded with a hand, Alfray exclaimed, “Keppatawn’s clan!”
Jup nodded. “And well timed.”
The small army of centaurs at least equalled the humans in strength of numbers. And they would reach the fray in minutes.
“Who’s at their head?” Alfray wondered.
Knowing him to be lame, the band didn’t expect Keppatawn himself to be leading the offensive.
“Looks like Gelorak,” Jup reported.
The young centaur’s muscular physique and distinctive flowing chestnut mane were now plain to see.
Haskeer finished wrapping a piece of dirty cloth around his wound. “Why talk when there’s killing undone?” he grumbled.
“Too right,” Coilla agreed, breaking ranks.
“At the bastards!”
They weren’t slow in following her lead.
The custodians were in bedlam from the arrow blizzard, their dead and maimed littering the plain. Loose horses and walking wounded added to the anarchy, and those custodians still mounted milled in a directionless daze. They were easy pickings for a vengeful warband.
No sooner had the orcs waded in and commenced their slaughter than they were joined by the troop of centaurs. With clubs, spears, short bows and crooked blades they assured the rout. The rump of the custodian force soon turned and fled, chased off by a knot of fleet-footed centaurs.
Exhausted, battle-grimed, Coilla surveyed the aftermath. The auxiliary chief of the Drogan clan trotted to her side and sheathed his sword. He pawed the ground a couple of times.
“Thanks, Gelorak,” she said.
“Our pleasure. We have no need of such unwanted guests.” He gave a flick of his plaited tail. “Who were they?”
“Just a bunch of humans serving their god of love.”
He smiled wryly, then asked, “How went your journey to Scarrock?”
“Well and . . . not so well.”
Gelorak cast his eye over the warband. “I do not see Stryke.”
“No,” Coilla replied softly. “No, you don’t.”
She stared at the darkening sky and tried to hold back her despair.
He was in a narrow tunnel that stretched endlessly before and behind him
.
His head almost touched the ceiling, and when he extended his arms he could lay his hands on either wall, which felt cold and slightly clammy. Ceiling, walls and floor were made of stone but the tunnel seemed to have been bored rather than constructed because there were no joints or sign of blocks having been fitted together. There was no illumination of any kind either, yet he could see quite clearly. The only sound was his own laboured breathing
.
He didn’t know where he was or how he came to be here
.
For a while he stood quite still, trying to make sense of his surroundings and uncertain of what to do. Then a white light appeared far ahead. No such light showed in the other direction, so he assumed he was facing the tunnel’s exit. He began walking towards it. Unlike the slippery smoothness of the walls and ceiling, the floor was rough in texture, giving him purchase
.
It was hard to keep track of time but after about ten minutes, as best he could reckon, the light didn’t look any nearer. The features of the tunnel remained absolutely uniform, and the silence was unbroken save for his footfalls. He pressed on, moving as fast as he could in the confined space
.
His lack of a sense of time became timelessness. All notion of the passing of minutes and hours deserted him. There was only an endless now, and a universe consisting solely of his pursuit of a light he could never reach. His body became a trudging automaton
.
At some indefinable point in his monotonous journey he was roused by a fancy that the light had grown brighter, though not necessarily larger. Soon he found it hard to look directly at it for more than a few seconds
.
With each step he took, the pure white light grew stronger and stronger, until walls, floor, ceiling, everything was obliterated. He closed his eyes and still saw it. Keeping on, he clamped his hands to his face to shut it out, but that made no difference
.
Now it pulsated, throbbing to a beat he could feel pounding at his chest, tearing at the very core of his being
.
The light was pain
.
He wanted to turn and run away. He couldn’t. He was no longer walking but being sucked into its blinding, agonising, searingly cold heart
.
He cried out
.
The light died
.
Slowly, he lowered his hands and opened his eyes
.
Before him stretched a vast barren plain. There were no trees, no blades of greenery, nothing he could equate with any landscape he had ever seen before. It resembled a desert, though the sand was pewter-coloured and very fine, like volcanic ash. All that broke the desolate scene were numerous jagged, ebony-hued rocks, large and small, strewn across and partly buried by the sediment
.
The atmosphere was tropical. Tendrils of yellowish-green mist crept sluggishly at ankle level, and there was an unpleasant odour in the air that reminded him of sulphur and rotting fish. Way off in the distance towered black mountains of impossible height
.
But what shocked him most was the sky
.
It was blood red and cloudless. There were no stars. But close to the horizon hung a moon, and it was vast. He could see every pockmarked, scarred detail of its glowing, tawny surface. So large and near was it that he half believed he could pierce the great globe with an arrow. He wondered why it didn’t fall and crush this forsaken land
.
Tearing his eyes away, he turned and looked behind him. The view was exactly the same. Silver-grey sand, craggy rocks, distant mountains, crimson sky. There was nothing that could have been a tunnel mouth
.
Despite the moist warmth, an ominous thought chilled his spine. Could he have died and gone to Xentagia, the orcs’ hell? This certainly looked like a place of eternal purgatory. Would Aik, Zeenoth, Neaphetar and Wystendel, his race’s holy Tetrad, descend on fiery war chariots and condemn his spirit to everlasting punishment?
Then it occurred to him that if this was Xentagia it appeared sparsely populated indeed. Was he the only orc in history to deserve being consigned here? Had he alone committed some crime against the gods, of which he was unaware, that warranted damnation? And where were the tormenting demons, the Sluagh, that some said inhabited the infernal regions and whose single pleasure was making misery for errant souls?
Something caught his eye. Across the blasted expanse there was movement. He strained to make it out. At first he couldn’t. Then he realised he was watching a cloud of the yellow-green, all-pervasive smog. Only this was thicker and travelling with purpose. His way
.
Had he been right? Was he about to be judged? Denounced by the gods? Horribly tortured?
His instinct was to put up a fight. On second thought, how futile a plan that would be if he really was going to be confronted by the gods. The idea of running seemed just as stupid. He determined to face whatever it was. Whether deity or demon he wasn’t about to betray his creed with an act of cowardice
.
He squared his shoulders and readied himself as best he could
.
There wasn’t long to wait. The cloud, which billowed but somehow remained compact, rolled directly to him. There was no question of it being blown by the wind. It moved too precisely for that, and there was no wind anyway
.
The cloud settled in front of him, perhaps a spear’s measure short. It continued to spin, and he would have expected to feel the misplaced air, but didn’t. This close he could see there were uncountable numbers of golden pinpoints woven into the swirling smoke. He was less sure of what the cloud contained. But there was a shape of some kind
.
Almost immediately the sphere’s rotation slowed. The dense mist began stripping off, layer by layer, and melted into the air. The darker form it surrounded gradually started to reveal itself. It became obvious that it was a figure
.
He tensed
.
The last wisps dissolved and a creature stood before him
.
He had imagined many things, but not this
.
The being was short and stocky. It had green-tinged, wrinkly skin and a large round head with spiky, projecting ears. Its attenuated, slightly protruding eyes had inky orbs with yellow-veined white surrounds and pulpy lids. No hair covered the pate or face, but there were bushy, reddish-brown sideburns, turning ashen. The nose was small and pinched, the mouth had the quality of hardened tree sap serrated with a file. Its clothing consisted of a modest robe of neutral colour, held with a cord
.
The creature was very old
.
“Mobbs?” Stryke whispered
.
“Greetings, Captain of the orcs,” the gremlin replied. He spoke softly, and a faint smile lightened his face
.
Myriad questions filled Stryke’s mind. He settled on, “What are you doing here?”
“I have no choice.”
“And I
do?
Where am I, Mobbs? Is this some kind of hell?”