The Caverns of Kronos

The Battle of the Wilton Bowl - Part 3

     It took them just over an hour to reach the low hills that ringed the plain within which the Shadowarmy was camped, and as they crossed the last couple of miles the army stopped making noise and marched in perfect silence. Disorganised they might be compared to most regular human armies, but they knew how to approach an enemy without alerting them to their presence.

     A wyvern rider flew overhead at one point, silhouetted against the stars. It gave a cry of alarm at the sight of them and turned to flee, but Fangrap raised a hand and casually spoke a word. The wyvern and its rider exploded into a gory shower of blood, scales and bone. They saw two more wyvern riders as they climbed the hills and Fangrap dealt with them the same way, not wanting the enemy to have any warning of their approach. They descended into the shallow valley beyond and climbed a smaller hill just behind that, where they finally found themselves overlooking the Wilton Bowl; an area of lowland that had some of the most fertile soil in the whole country.

     A couple of miles away were more low hills, on the other side of which lay Tatria itself, its location given away by dozens of plumes of smoke. They were lit up red by the fires beneath and merged to form a huge angry orange cloud that seemed to symbolise all the evils that had afflicted the ravaged countryside.

     Directly below them they saw the enemy encampment itself, walled and fortified with stout treetrunks sunk to a third of their lengths into the dark, peaty soil. It was huge, virtually a city in itself, with thousands of grimy grey tents arranged in a haphazard pattern across the muddy, churned up soil, and Drake’s mind spun with disbelief that they’d been able to build it so quickly. Of course, the zombies, he realised suddenly. They had a vast army of mindless, obedient, undead slaves, and it must have been they who’d done all the work.

     Beside the encampment lay the wreckage of two shayen birds of paradise, destroyed by fire and scattered over a wide area by the Shadowsoldiers in their eager search for souvenirs. On the other side of the encampment were five demidrakes, tethered to the stumps of hundred year old oak trees, their huge heads nodding sleepily on the end of their long, serpentine necks. Huge though the flying reptiles were, though, they were dwarfed by the creature that squatted next to them. The animated corpse of a true dragon whose flesh had rotted completely away in places to expose the bleached white bones beneath and which had to keep batting its leathery undead wings to drive away the carrion crows that flocked around it.

     “Zombie dragon!” said Fletcher fearfully. “That’s going to cause a few problems.”

     “Seems pretty quiet down there,” said Drake. “Must be a lull in the fighting. Wonder how things are in the city.”

     “What are we going to do?” asked Fletcher. “Just charge down there and hope for the best?”

     “Let’s wait and see,” replied the young priest. “Fangrap’s in charge, let’s see what he’s got in mind.”

     Fangrap was talking to the other priests of Skorvos, who listened avidly to his words before going off to pass on the orders to their congregations. “Keep yer heads down!” Shragnaz hissed to them as he passed. “Fangrap’s gonna stir ‘em up a bit. Then we charge. Get ready.”

     “Stir them up how?” asked Drake, but the sholog was gone to repeat the instructions to the company of buglins beyond. Murmurs of excitement and anticipation rippled among the ranks of humanoids as their Commanders spread them out into a long, thin line just below the crest of the hill, the shologs and humans making sure that the smaller humanoids were in front of them. Partly so they could shoot arrows over their heads but mainly so that the smaller humanoids could act as a suicide squad of shock troops for their larger comrades following on behind. It seemed to be the fate of all the smaller races of humanoids to act as sword and arrow fodder for the larger humanoids, and the really surprising thing was that they didn’t seem to mind. They knew that they could accomplish much more allied to shologs, hobgoblins and evil humans than they could on their own, and they counted a high fatality rate a small price to pay for this. Besides, if their numbers weren’t kept down in this fashion, the small, fast breeding creatures would overrun the world in just a few generations.