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So many! So many! When three were killed, thirty took their place. Against such force of numbers, even dragons were helpless.
The dragon-ships, filled to capacity with the barbarians, crept south.
To DharSii, by all rights half their company should be sunk and dead. They’d seen a burst of heavy weather coming and tried to make landfall, but the storm caught them just ahead of the surf.
Which was a tricky enough barrier. They lost one back-bourn boat, and the barbarians—rather cheerfully, to Wistala’s idea of dutch—switched over to another dragon’s overcrowded back. Someone might have asked first; they weren’t oxen with longer tails, after all. Still, they found room for a few more in the manner of rabbits in a winter den.
At DharSii’s signal, the groundeds heaved themselves up and out of the water along a pleasant stretch of Hypatian riverbank park. Shadowcatch shook seaweed from his limbs. The barbarians clinging to his back returned their round shields to their arms and slipped off the cargo netting tied across his back from tail-vet to neck. Someone had cut himself on sharp dragon-scale sliding off his back. Shadowcatch risked his throat to arrows and raised his head high to bellow orders to his dragons.
The dome of the Directory and NoSohoth’s palace could just be seen over the hill in the distance. Hypat was unimaginably vast—unimaginable, that is, until you tried to cross its twisty streets and muddy lanes without being assassinated.
DharSii led them up to a wide, column-flanked avenue leading to the Directory. Ignoring javelins and arrows fired from rooftop and window, the mass of dragons and barbarians followed. Sensibly, the human warriors sheltered behind the dragon’s scale-wrapped bulk.
DharSii wanted room to maneuver. The demen were born tunnel-fighters, experts at lunging out of an alley or doorway and then retreating. The dragons had their flame, and could lay many enemies low with a long sweep of the tail or a plunge-and-roll. The barbarians liked to see their enemy at a distance, too. They would begin to sing and chant and shove each other as they jostled to be at the forefront of the battle. Then, when every face was red and the eyes wide and fanatic, they charged forward as a mass.
His best guess was that Wistala would be helping defend the Directory. That seemed more likely than that she would let others do the fighting while she aided DharSii. The two of them were obviously in love and neither wished to step on the other’s toes.
“Tooth line,” DharSii called, using the one formation they’d had time to practice. The dragons staggered themselves in two lines, so the rear dragon looked through the wingtip-to-wingtip open line of the rank in front. The front could deploy their fire, and in the confusion and destruction the rear rank would dash forward and become the front rank. They could then add further terror by loosing their flame on whatever part of the enemy was still capable of resistance.
Then and only then could the howling barbarians be released, to leap through the pools of dragon film and bring axes to the heads of their enemies.
Warfare wasn’t meant to be sporting—it was meant to be won.
The dragons advanced from Falnges, looked around anxiously. One overzealous member who’d either never or not recently seen a battlefield had sprayed fire at the sudden rise of a flock of pigeons and seagulls, feasting on the pile of garbage waiting to be scraped into the bay.
“Uff tha?” one of the barbarians asked. Off now?
“No!” DharSii snarled, quieting the youth who was seeing his first real battle.
“Wait until we see them close enough to make out fingers,” DharSii called to his battle line. He repeated it down the other end.
War makes strange back fellows, DharSii thought, glancing back at the barbarians on what was left of a barge. Wistala would have liked this, the challenge to carry more than any other dragon.
The demen did them no favors. They did not come out to join battle, instead retreating into the city, where they clustered in the alleys, doorways, and rooftops.
“Bad-mannered of them,” DharSii said to no one in particular, but a barbarian who understood some Drakine translated it, and soon the men were shouting it up and down water-dripping vessels.
“We’ll have to improvise. Form head-to-toe lines. Let’s try to keep our warriors above them. We’ll never fit down some of those streets, so we’ll have to disembark some of the barbarians, but only once battle is joined and they’re good and keyed up.”
“Formation coming in from the left,” Thunderwing reported.
DharSii lifted his head. He did a double take. The hominid forms wore ordinary Hypatian rain-cloaks, a cheap and oil-clothed tight weave favored by lumberers and miners. But he saw green and flowery colors about their brows. Either they were men garlanded for a summer solstice baby-counting festival, or they were . . .
Elves? Elves coming to the aid of Hypat?
In such numbers, too. By the hundreds, formed into the traditional swan-wings of the northern Hypatian coast, with two companies in front, spread in open-order carrying bows, the traditional groups of unbonded males and females, and a more tightly packed set of male spearmen behind, the battle-givers.
They flowed over the fields and pens of the outskirts of Hypatia like a wind.
The elves fired a volley of arrows into the joined wall-faces of the city proper, dropping some gathered demen trying to set up a dragon-killing lance-thrower on the main avenue. Other arrows rained down on carts, paving-stones, signs, and barrels that had been wedged together as a roadblock.
“To the Directory!” DharSii called.
“Which one is the Directory?” Thunderwing asked, having already forgotten the council of war at the tower.
“I’ll go first,” the Blind Ripper roared, starting a dragon-dash that threatened to spill his warriors out of the vessel on his back like a pail of water carried by a running child.
The warriors from the barges behind formed into the usual barbarian mobs, order and chaos in one. The warriors with the biggest roundshields and small axes formed the first two ranks, spear-carriers behind, and the swordsmen behind them, ready to be vaulted into action up over the backs of the shield-men when the fighting grew thick.
