Death of the Dragon - Ed Greenwood [89]
As a dark head twisted upward in puzzlement at the sudden lack of sunlight, a war wizard roared in pain, falling heavily to his knees. The two rocks seemed to leap to meet each other.
There was a wet sound from between them, and war wizards all along the battlements reeled and fell. The boulders promptly tumbled from view, to strike the orc-flooded square below with a mighty crash.
"Impressive," Alusair murmured, picking herself up from where the impact had hurled her, "but look! Another comes."
The old war wizard didn't bother to rise from his hands and knees beside her. He merely bent his head, growled something, and the air suddenly held what had to be most of a toppled city house. It smashed into the second ghazneth and hurled it helplessly sideways in the air, crumpled and broken, into the nearest building that was still standing.
As the crash shook the very citadel, the battering stone broke apart into its smaller blocks and rubble and fell away, leaving a bloody smear of ghazneth down the cracked and teetering walls. The building groaned as if it was an old man, then slowly sighed into ruin, spilling down into dust.
"We can't kill the ghazneths like this," the war wizard gasped, "but we can certainly slow them."
Alusair looked down at the dust rising from the square, and half-crushed orcs screaming under scattered stones, and could see no hint of dark wings. "You're restoring my regard for wizards, I'm afraid," she said slowly.
The old mage chuckled. "Think of us as big swords who talk back to officers," he said, his voice still raw with pain, "and you may yet learn to work with us quite easily."
Alusair shook her head in amusement, then asked the smoke-filled sky in mock despair, "I had to lose a city to learn this?"
"Well," the wizard gasped, his eyes scouring the sky for more ghazneths, "you could listen to Vangerdahast a little more closely."
Alusair looked at him sweetly, then uttered a stream of oaths so colorful that the old mage winced and turned his head away-which was when another ghazneth burst out of the smoke.
* * * * *
Guldrin Hardcastle screamed as the curved orc blade burst through his fancy armor, under his right armpit, and thrust up and out of his throat-then he was gurgling forth his own blood too swiftly to scream any more.
Choking, he struggled to cry out to his brother, knowing already he was doomed and furious beyond all imagining that he was going to die here, unpraised, never to claim Hardcastle House as his own and stride into court as the head of-
"Rathtar!" at last he managed to find breath to cry.
"Rathtarrrr!"
He'd never felt such pain-a sickening, wrenching burning that threatened to overmatch even the fire of his fury. It was tearing at his guts, it was-
He hacked and kicked, and screamed in pain at what that did to him, even louder than the orc he'd just hewn down… his slayer, dying now as surely as he was. Red-eyed, raging… and fading, fading into a deep purple dimness…
"Die, tuskers!" the Steel Princess roared, her voice as raw and deep as any man's, her sword and dagger dripping black with orc blood.
She was everywhere along the line, her blade leaping like a fang over the shoulder of this cursing, reeling Purple Dragon, and that blood-drenched, exhausted man of Arabel. Where she went, her hair streaming out behind her, men shouted their exultation and hacked and slashed with renewed vigor. It had been hard, brutal work, cutting their way out of Arabel step by bloody step with the orcs roaring all around them and the dragon swooping down time and again to spew flame or just rake away heads with its claws, as it swept past so low overhead that the wind of its passage made men stagger or crash face first onto the heels of those staggering just ahead.
The king strode into their midst, and his warden led the men and women of Arabel. Many of them were content to carry wounded fellows or the exhausted war wizards who'd worked to hold open the magical gate that had taken so many Arabellans to distant