AllFreeNovel
Share Us
But some of the troops had been unnerved by Wistala’s cries, and were running for the barges.
“Hold hard there,” the battle commander shouted through a speaking trumpet. “Groundholders, get those skulkers back in line. To the line!”
“Nothing can stop them, Oh, Dhssol!” Wistala said, as a mass of barbarians came up the hill. Many to the front fell as the dwarves fired, but others behind came on. . . .
“Shut up!” the Battle Commander insisted. “Someone muzzle this fool lizard.”
“The Oracle is right,” Lord Lobok shouted, lifting his own speaking trumpet. “They cannot be held here! Back to the barges, dwarves—we must fall back to the city!” He set an example to his soldiers by hitching up his robes and running toward the barges as fast as his legs would carry him.
The dwarves, many untested in battle, agreed with the sentiment, and the lines fell away like laundry carried off by a strong wind. Dwarves of all descriptions ran, even as the more experienced ones at the war-machines shouted and gesticulated at them.
The battle commander reached for his ax, and Wistala thought it best to take wing. Pebbles flew up into the eyes of the commanders and nobles as she took off.
They, too, ran for the barges as the barbarians leaped up the wall with wild cries.
The battle paused for a moment as the barges pulled away, firing crossbows at the barbarians, who fell back from the water to the wall and continued to hoot.
Wistala flew down to Ragwrist’s gargants. She saw Lord Hammar there, in a thick fur coat that hung to his bootheels, helping with the blasting kegs being handed down from gargant back.
“Place them to either side of the spillway, and on those two supporting columns, right where they join the dam,” Wistala said.
“I hope this works, Wistala,” Ragwrist said as the circus dwarves and riggers went forward with climbing poles and lines. “These casks weren’t cheap.”
“And good morning to you, too,” Wistala said. “Would you rather have King Fangbreaker hunting you up and down the Inland Ocean?”
“The risks I run for my circus.”
“Stop running risks then. I give Mossbell to you, if Hammar agrees.”
“Hammar has other matters to attend to,” he said. His beard still looked like the poor effort of a youth, even in the fullness of manhood. “First let us win the battle. Then we’ll divide the spoils.”
The circus folk climbed up each side of the dam and pulled and tied the blasting-casks into place. Wistala plucked crossbow bolts from her scale and nursed her javelin wounds.
“What about a fuse?” Hammar asked.
“I’m the fuse,” Wistala said, licking a spear hole in her wing clean.
When all was ready, and more barbarians had the time to come up the road and array themselves behind the wall, Wistala took flight.
She saw that perhaps half the barges still dueled with the barbarians at the waterside, ready to destroy canoes or any other light boats the savages might have brought up the mountain to cross the Ba-drink. The others, undoubtedly led by Lobok, were almost at the Hardhold.
She saw that the gargants and circus folk were well out of the watercourse down the spillway, and dropped down, summoning her foua.
She loosed it against the dam wall, and it ran down toward the packed and tied kegs. Wistala flew up and out of the way.
The explosions came, a gentle hand shoving Wistala higher—crack crack huhoom!—sending rock and masonry shooting out across the mountainside, along with bits of timber and line.
For a moment after the cataclysm, all was silent, or perhaps it was just that it sounded so to battered eardrums.
Both the masses of barbarians and the dwarves in their barges left off their gesticulations and challenges, insults and catcalls, arrows, sling-stones, and bolts—frozen as though the icy wind carried a spell across all.
It seemed to Wistala that the fate of worlds hung in the balance of those few moments, as the mountaintops tossed the sound back and forth.
Nothing happened. Water still cascaded over the spillway.
Then came more noise, a cracking, crashing sound of rocks sliding, followed hard on its heels, as wagon-wheels follow horse hooves, by the water.
When describing the scene later, Wistala always said there was no word big enough for how the water moved through the gap, opening it wider and deeper as pieces at the edge fell away—a torrent of water, an avalanche, as though the mountain had sprouted a new shoulder falling into a steep cliff.
