Word of Traitors_ Legacy of Dhakaan - Don Bassingthwaite [133]
Charging horses hit the ropes hard. The trees to which they had been lashed thrashed violently, and the heavy stakes that anchored them on the battlefield leaped. The long ropes sagged and snapped, but their damage was done. Horses whinnied and fell, tumbling like toys. They screamed at broken and slashed legs, and their struggling bodies brought down more horses that weren’t quick enough to turn sharply or jump high. Some struggled back to their feet. Others didn’t rise at all. The first charge of the Valaes Tairn had been broken. But there would be another.
An outraged voice roared in Elvish for an attack, and those elves who had held back surged forward.
“Form up!” ordered Dagii and the great drum beat the signal. Lesser drums took it up and the Darguul lines folded and split. Seven squares formed up on the battlefield, shields locked together. Dagii snapped more commands, and five of the squares moved to meet the oncoming elves, warpipes wailing in their midst. Archers among the two companies that remained in the rear sent clouds of arrows arcing down ahead of the marching companies. The elves answered with arrows of their own—arrows that rattled as harmlessly as hail on the locked shields.
Above the din of battle, Ekhaas didn’t hear Keraal approach, but suddenly he was there. In his hand was clenched the Riis Shaarii’mal. He dropped to one knee and held it out to Dagii. The warlord clapped a fist to his chest.
“Ta muut,” he said.
Keraal’s ears flicked. He rose and stabbed the banner’s shaft into the soft ground of the earthworks at the brow of the hill.
The first wave of Valaes Tairn closed on the Darguuls. The beat of the drum changed, and the squares stopped, two ahead, three behind. Shields parted slightly and spears thrust through. The armored turtles of the squares abruptly became bristling porcupines. Charging elves screamed and howled, demons in their flying red robes. They slashed at the air with their scimitars. Even on the hill, Ekhaas thought she could feel the earth trembling beneath the driving hooves of their horses. She had heard stories that during the Last War, human armies that had faced a Valenar charge had often crumbled before a blow was struck, their lines broken by sheer terror.
The Darguul lines stood strong. Valenar wheeled away, forced aside by the unyielding spear points. Crowded by the rush behind them, though, they had little room to turn. Many were forced around the two leading squares, splitting like a stream around stones.
The charge of those who swung too wide to the outside foundered as their horses’ hooves found the third trap hidden under the trampled grass: all of the baskets in Zarrthec and all of the cages of willow switches that an army could weave, hidden under all the loose branches that the forest could provide. Sticks and switches and baskets closed around hooves and legs, doing no damage but fouling the charge as surely as pits of mud. And as the charge slowed, more goblin crossbowmen concealed among the autumn-brown trees at the edge of the plain loosed their bolts—not poisoned this time, but enough to bloody the elves and drop them in their saddles.
The Valenar who flowed between the squares fared no better. They found themselves in broad aisles between the forward and back formations with nowhere to go except out to the sides where branches grabbed hooves or onward through narrower aisles between the three rear squares.
So they raced on—directly into the arrows of the two companies that had stayed behind. More elves fell, but others escaped the trap of the squares.
“Cavalry!” Dagii ordered and the command drum changed its beat. The rain of arrows stopped and the Darguul cavalry took the field, sweeping in front of the standing companies to meet the elves that had made it through the gauntlet. The Darguul horse