Feathered Dragon - Douglas Niles [58]
Hal turned back to the pressing numbers there. Daggrande, his crossbow slung over his back, now hacked with the keen blade of his battle-axe. Jhatli, following the orders of the two soldiers, had fallen back, and now sent his arrows arcing over their heads into the monsters that crowded the bottom of the narrow ravine.
Halloran didn’t have time to see if Erixitl and the two old men had disappeared from view. A heavy club descended toward his skull and he skipped to the side, striking off the arm that bore it. A green – taloned troll lunged for him, and he sent the beast crawling, legless, back to its compatriots.
Daggrande hacked into the leg of another troll, crippling it. The stocky dwarf ducked nimbly away from yet another of the creatures, springing up beside Halloran to drive a third monster back with sharp chops of his own dripping blade.
“Can’t… hold out… much longer,” he gasped.
The bands of pluma around Hal’s wrists sustained him, driving his blows with tremendous force. The magic couldn’t overcome his own rapidly growing fatigue, however, but he roughly forced it away from his awareness. Hammering his weapon with brutal, mindless strength, he
bashed and hacked and crushed the attackers in the apparently endless horde.
“Go,” he panted. “Take the kid… see that others get to safety! I’ll hold them off… as long as I can!”
With the fury of desperation, Halloran suddenly attacked, driving the whole pack of beasts away from him with a whirlwind series of blows. One troll, too slow to retreat, howled in agony as Helmstooth sliced open his gut. Daggrande, following, silenced the brute with one chop of his
axe. “Can’t leave you now,” growled Daggrande. “Not when we
just got back together again!”
“We’ve had some good fights, eh?” Halloran fell back slightly, catching his breath while the monsters recouped their courage. His throat tightened at the evidence of the dwarf’s loyalty.
“ None better than this one.” The dwarf, too, gasped for air, then raised his axe in the face of renewed attack.
A trio of massive trolls forced their way to the front of the monsters packing the ravine floor. Each held an obsidian-studded maca, and they loomed high over Halloran even as they crouched and advanced.
A sudden shower filled the air over the ravine as shapes darted through the air like locusts, or driving rain… or arrows! Soundlessly, a volley of sharp missiles dropped from the high ground into the close-packed ranks of the trolls. The unseen archers launched another volley, and the attention of the monsters immediately shifted to this new threat.
“Where are those corning from?” demanded Daggrande,
astonished. “From our friends, whoever they are,” Hal answered,
equally dumbfounded.
The beasts howled in pain and chaos, turning their faces skyward in time to receive another volley of dark, stonetipped missiles. As the trolls plucked the arrows free and the bleeding wounds slowly closed, yet another shower sent stone tips digging painfully into monstrous flesh. The arrows came from the shoulder above the ravine floor, but still the archers remained unseen.
Then the narrow gulley resounded with fresh, hearty whoops of combat. Growling and cowering, the trolls raised their weapons and gaped upward, confused and frightened.
“Look! Here they come!” Halloran pointed upward as the
fringe of the ravine suddenly shifted into movement. Their
rescuers, they saw, had lain in plain sight on the slope above
but were so effectively camouflaged that they had been
virtually invisible.
They saw a swarm of small figures pouring into the ravine from the rim of the gulley to their left. Howling with instinctive fury, the new attackers descended upon (he creatures before Hal and Daggrande, striking them with sharp, brutal strokes of their stone axes.
“I can’t believe it,” Daggrande declared, lowering his axe and watching the light, too astonished and too exhausted attack.
“They’re dwarves.’”
From the chronicles of Coton:
In the light of