A Dragon at Worlds' End (45 page)

Guard officers were at work, forming up fresh troops in a phalanx with overlapping shields and long spears, ranked five deep. Pikeman would work along side, ready to drive home against the kebbold if it showed itself.

The Ardu met them with sword and club once more. But now it was the Ardu who took the heavier initial casualties, for the guards worked together well in the phalanx system, the first man wielding spear and shield, the second throwing a spear over his shoulder and then fighting with sword and ax.

Each Ardu fighter found himself engaged on two fronts at once. Edwal fell, speared in the groin. Then down went Yimt and Gadda. Then more fell; the spears were deadly. The Ardu could not stand against this well-organized attack.

Seeing their peril, Bazil roared his challenge and swung out to engage. Ecator flashed down and took a guard's head. Instantly arrows feathered his upper torso. A pike flashed in the torchlight as it drove in at him, but he parried with Ecator and spun the pikeman around before cutting him down. Another pike came from the other side, but too slowly. He dodged away while bringing the sword around in a backstroke that clove the point man of the phalanx and then continued on to slice through the pikeman, too. Bazil Broketail did not have to prove his skill with the great sword, but it was always manifest in battle.

The guards bolted back, but more arrows struck home before Bazil could get behind the gate.

He breathed a sigh of thanks for the toughness of leatherback dragonhide. That and the remains of the joboquin, which had stopped a few on its own. He had arrows sticking out of his shoulders and one was even embedded on the top of his head, but his eyes were all right and nothing had gone very deep.

It appeared that the attackers had gained a short respite. Bazil knew, however, that the guards would reform the phalanx and return.

Close to the equator, dawn came as swiftly as the night, and its first light fell across the land. Now the archers would have a plain target if he stepped out of the gate.

Lumbee came to him and began to remove the arrows, or at least to cut off the shafts if they were in too deep to be removed easily. Fortunately, none had struck through to an artery. Several were pretty painful, however. He leaned back against the wall and worked at overcoming the pain, using the technique Relkin had taught him. He took deep breaths, centered his mind on the battle situation, and ignored the physical sensations. Lumbee worked with knife and fingers. The light was not good, but she was deft.

He had not imagined this predicament. The lack of a shield was telling against him here. Occasionally a whistle escaped him as Lumbee cut and tugged. She wasn't clumsy, though, almost as good as a dragonboy, and she'd had no training.

He noticed that she had tears running down her face as she worked.

"Are you in pain, Lumbee?"

She looked up at him with eyes swimming. "No, I cry for the pain I must be causing you."

The wyvern put out a huge hand and let it rest for a moment on Lumbee's shoulder. "You do good job. Lumbee is dragonfriend, I know this."

Lumbee wiped away the tears with the back of her hand. "One of the men, Yord—he is of the Heather Hills, my kin—he is making the hand grip bigger on one of the captured shields. It might help a bit."

Bazil considered for a moment. "Any shield better than none in this kind of fight. And they don't have troll."

Lumbee did not understand the reference, or the word, for there was no Ardu equivalent, but before Bazil could begin to explain, Norwul came to speak with them.

He had a plan.

"Their archers are too dangerous. We have to pull back, make then fight us in here, inside the gate."

The wyvern clacked his jaws a moment. "Good idea," he said. "Pity we didn't bring Ium and Wol. They were getting pretty good with those crossbows."

"They could not swim that well. They went to aid the attack on the city gate."

"Now we fight inside the pyramid gate. But we need to draw them in, so Ardu must show themselves briefly, then retreat."

"Yord is adapting one of their shields for you."

"Lumbee told me. It is a very good idea."

"Yord is very skilled at such things."

And indeed, a few moments later a tall Ardu with a heavy beard came over with one of the captured shields. He had cut away the original hand grip and made a new grip from a doubled leather belt. It was nailed to the wooden backing with fasteners teased out of a wall panel in the gatehouse.

"Yord could have career in the Legion. Be dragonboy."

Yord bobbed his head nervously, overjoyed to have been of service to the forest god.

There were shouted commands coming from outside the gate.

"Here they come again," said someone.

The shield was small for a wyvern battledragon, but it was well made and the grip, though crude, was serviceable.

The guard phalanx stamped across the platform and bunched in the gate where the Ardu met them. The phalanx thrust on, the Ardu retreated, and the phalanx entered the gate. Now Bazil could engage and he swung, over the heads of the Ardu and down into the ranks of the phalanx behind them.

Ecator sundered several men from the world, but the phalanx did not break. Spearmen thrust up at his breast. Bazil shuddered away from the spears, felt something jab hard into the joboquin, and heaved himself back. A spear thrust into his tail as he turned, but it came loose a moment later and did no serious harm.

Norwul and the Ardu hurled themselves forward and grappled with the phalanx line just in front of the dragon. They used shields to sweep away the spear points and allow them to strike with sword or club. Such blows did they strike on the phalanx shields and helm that it fell back a step, giving the dragon time to get ready. Then the Ardu fell back, dodging low in terror of Ecator.

Bazil swung in and cut through the spears as if he were using a sickle on wheat. He lashed out with his foot to kick disarmed men out of the way. They fell back into the ranks behind them, and the whole phalanx was stalled and jammed up tight.

A guard hurled his spear at close quarters, but the borrowed shield deflected it into the wall. Another spear, however, sank into his leg and it went deep. Bazil knew at that instant that it was a bad wound.

Then Ecator was at work on the guards and since they were pressed together and unable to so much as duck, a swift, terrible carnage ensued. Within less than twenty seconds the phalanx of guards was a shambles, and the remainder had fled back through the gate and down the steps in complete panic.

A score of corpses lay mounded up in pieces around the blood-spattered figure of the dragon. Norwul's eyes were staring wide as he recalled what Relkin had told him, of how in Relkin's homeland they employed these giants in battle in groups of ten, hundreds at a time. It came home to him what it would mean to go up against such a force in battle.

The Ardu had regained control of the gates. But they had paid for it. A quarter of their number were gone, others were wounded. Arrows kept zipping in, occasionally finding a target. Still, they retrieved many more shields. Everyone had a spear, plus a sword now.

A study of the situation on the plaza revealed that the elf lords and the guard officers were arguing at the base of the staircase. The guards were massed behind them, except for the archers, who were lined up along the top stair shooting into the open gates. Arrows whipped in, ricocheted off the walls, and went on into the atrium.

For now they had a standoff. But for how long could they hold this place?

As long as the dragon could hold a sword and the Ardu could fight.

Just then there came a screech of metal on stone from inside the atrium. Heads turned.

One of the portcullises was rising.

Bazil gave a hiss. "They have a weapon," he said.

The portcullis jammed about halfway. For a moment nothing happened, then a shadowy shape appeared in the passage behind it. A huge hand reached into the portcullis and heaved it up with a fearsome screech of metal on stone. When it was high enough, a massive bulk slid through underneath.

The Ardu gasped. The gray thing was vaguely manlike in general proportions, except that it had no visible head and stood about eight feet high. It had enormous shoulders, massive arms and legs, and a torso ribboned with thick muscle. In one hand it bore a heavy double-edged sword, and in the other it carried a round buckler. Beyond that it appeared to have no armor, nor clothing, nor sex organs, nor tail.

It came straight toward them. Bazil took a deep breath. This attack on the pyramid seemed to have been a mistake. As the thing came closer, he saw that the barrel-shaped torso had a top like that of an onion. Around the top was a ring of round red eyes, with black pupils. It could see in any direction all the time. If it had ears, they were hidden. Perhaps the slits below the eyes were the ears. There was no mouth.

It stepped forward with a ponderousness that told Bazil that it was heavy, at least his weight, probably more. The question would be, how fast was it? And the other question would be, how fast was a wyvern dragon that had already been through a fight and was pretty cut up? The spear head jammed in his thigh hurt wickedly when he moved his right leg.

Bazil moved out into the atrium, Ecator swinging lightly in his hand. He could sense the unholy excitement that possessed the blade sometimes. The Golgomba thing stepped forward. It was not as tall as Bazil, but its limbs were longer. Warily the opponents circled, then the thing stepped forward, shield raised, and swung its sword.

Bazil parried, there was a flash of steel and he went on and tried a thrust for the monster's torso. It deflected him with the buckler. Its own counterstroke was a little slow and Bazil was able to get back on his hind foot and bring Ecator around to parry. Again the heavy impact. Ecator fairly sang with rage. Bazil felt his arm shake from the blow.

This was like exchanging sword blows with the Purple Green, a giant dragon.

He swung again. The thing defended with its buckler, but this piece of equipment was quickly beginning to disintegrate. Ecator had cut away a third of it already. Bazil felt a surge of confidence. He was the quicker of the two. And Ecator was by far the better blade.

It counterattacked with a waist-high sweep. Bazil parried and struck out with his good left leg. His talons raked down the thing's front. It took no notice. They swung together and he slipped the monster's clumsy sword and flicked Ecator on in a thrust straight for the center of that weird body. This time he was well ahead of the buckler. Ecator drove in but did not stab home, instead gouging along the thing's side. Bazil spun away and parried the enemy's counter thrust hurriedly.

What the hell was it made of? Ecator itself hummed with frustration. There was a long gouge, several inches deep running across its side, but it took absolutely no notice.

They engaged. Bazil checked it, feinted, and then swung down hard over the right shoulder. Ecator sank in halfway and then came free.

The thing staggered momentarily, then rocked back out of range for a moment and steadied itself. Then it came on. Its sword arm was unaffected. No fountain of gore appeared.

Again the question arose. What in all the hells was it made of? Bazil felt a distinct chill in his heart as he maneuvered, his right leg screaming all the time. Any normal living thing would have been incapacitated by that stroke. What was he dealing with here? What was this thing?

The worlds of the Lords Tetraan were works of art on a high order. Most were jewels, designed like sensuous gardens but on the grandest of scales. Incredible artifice was commonplace in the construction of small alps, starkly beautiful canyons, and grottos with dramatic pools and ponds. Mountains and moons were set as decorations.

Homes and palaces for the elf lords were designed in a range of architectural styles. Some worlds had a single, perfectly placed structure, such as Zulbanides' beautiful Lone Tower, famous throughout the Game. It expressed the perfect proportion of pitch and harmony, looming over a subtly shaped grotto, with a single tree upon the opposite crag. When the huge moon rose at night, the tree was starkly illuminated. In its branches could be read a glyph that was Zulbanides' mark.

Many worlds had quite large populations of slave beings in villages and towns that supported the elf lords in their wondrous chateaux. In the hedonic rooms, the lords indulged a furious appetite for the sexual flesh of their slaves.

It was a rare castle that didn't have a combat room, with a pit where men fought each other to the death while the lords bet on the outcome. The lords were casually cruel to their slaves in many ways.

Still, they aspired to an artistic expression in the creation of their worlds. The pleasures these worlds returned to them were all but fractions of that expression. Like the combined flavors and colors of great wine, they sought a complex reward from the building of worldlets.

But then, here and there, among the beautiful, hedonistic worlds there were the other ones. The ones where a perverse cruelty had created an art from monstrousness.

As the Iudo Faex moved from world to world through the dimensions of the Great Game, he found more and more of these perverse horror worlds.

At one he found a flat land where people virtually carpeted the ground. He popped out perhaps a hundred feet above the surface, and he floated there in a bubble. A vast horde of stinking, filthy wretches stretched to the horizon in all directions. They could barely move, there were so many of them. As he watched, a cloud came over and rained down gray pellets and the people ate the pellets. And when the cloud made rain, the people stood there with their mouths open and were watered, like so much grass.

Then he found, to his horror, that was exactly how they were treated. Striding into view came an enormous four-legged creature, bearing on its back a small palace, complete with turrets and silken pennons flying from the tops. With each stride of its vast elephantine feet, the brute trampled a thousand pour souls to pulp.