The Battle of Ebulon (6 page)

Jenner opened his mouth to
reply, but whatever words he intended to speak were lost as Malik
attacked another display case and filled the room with the sound of
breaking glass.

***

When Malik returned to the
gate, he was pleasantly surprised. About a hundred men had been
organized into small groups and were receiving some basic
instruction from Stern's Guardsmen. Beyond the gate, Malik could
see the builders erecting the wooden beams at regular intervals as
he had requested.

“It's looking better,”
Malik said to Jenner and then lifted his voice. “Who among you
needs a sword?”

Several confused faces
looked up from their drills and turned to face Malik. Malik stood
beside the cart the old man from the museum had obtained. The cart
was overflowing with weapons, and at the front there were two large
barrels filled with highly flammable oil.

“Form an orderly line,”
Malik said, and gestured to the back of the cart.

The men came trotting
over. Malik reached into the cart and handed the first of them a
rather elegant, slender blade. The man took it, started to move on,
and then stopped in his tracks.

“This is the sword of
Perocles, the first defender of Ebulon,” he said in awe.

“What's your name?” Malik
replied.

“Auryn,” the man
said.

“Well, now it's the sword
of Auryn, Ebulon's last defender.” Before the man had a chance to
reply, Malik turned to Jenner.

“Make sure all these
weapons are are distributed, then meet me on the wall.”

Jenner nodded.

“Make sure to grab a sword
for yourself,” Malik admonished.

Glancing around, Malik's
gaze fell across Old Ives who was swinging his broken bottle in
slow, obviously non-lethal arcs.

“Ives,” Malik
said.

The old man looked around
in confusion for a moment before his gaze came to rest on Malik. He
smiled and came stumbling over.

“Where did your bottle
cart go?”

The old man gestured to
the cart which had been pushed into a small alley out of the
way.

“Perfect,” Malik said. He
took Ives by the elbow and then helped him bring the bottle cart
next to the barrels of oil.

“I have a job for you
Ives.”

Ives smiled a toothless
grin.

“I need you to fill up
these bottles like this,” Malik said as he poured oil from the
barrel into the bottle. “Then I need you to soak a rag and stuff it
into the bottle's mouth.” Malik performed the task and held forth
the bottle with the oil soaked rag dangling out along its
side.

“Can you do
that?”

“Sure,” Ives said with a
smile. He then deftly set about the task and had three of the
bottles done in the time it had taken Malik to do one. For the
first time since he had come to Ebulon, Malik was
impressed.

“Ives,” he said, a touch
of affection entering his voice, “what's your family
name?”

“Molotov,” Ives
replied.

“Perfect.”

***

By the time night fell the
numbers guarding the wall had swelled to around five hundred. There
were some grumblings, but Malik was satisfied at the production on
such short notice.

The grumbling continued
until a single voice gazed over the wall and noticed something
strange in the distance.

“What's that?”

Malik squinted his eyes,
but experience revealed more to him than his vision.

“It's a column of
torches,” he said, and though he didn't put any force behind his
declaration, he knew the words carried along the wall.

Silence descended, and the
men watched as the approaching column grew larger and
larger.

Time passed, and Malik
could feel the nerves of the protectors of Ebulon harden to a
razor's edge.

Finally, a single Orc
emerged from the shadows to stand at the edge of the clearing
before Ebulon's gate. He held a torch and sniffed the air, turning
its body this way and that. Malik sneered at the sight of him, for
he was pig like and brutish. He stood taller than a man, and his
body rippled with muscles that seemed more fitting for a beast of
burden than a creature that walked upright.

All too soon, another
creature appeared, then another, until the whole clearing was
infested with growling, snarling beasts. They stood beyond the
wooden beams that rose out of the earth and seemed to confuse the
Orcs as to their purpose.

Malik waited.

More and more of the
creatures arrived, and the ones from the back began pushing the
front lines forward. There was no logic to the approach, just a
mass of muscle and rusted steel.

Malik watched it all, and
had just about given up hope that any organization would emerge
from the chaos, when the attacking force suddenly went silent. The
massing throng of bodies separated, and a white skinned beast
stepped forth from the crowd.

“It's their tribal
leader,” Jenner whispered.

“Let's get an idea what
we're dealing with,” Malik said to Jenner, throwing him a wink. He
then lifted his voice so that it echoed across the
clearing.

“Orc army, as you can see
we are heavily fortified here with sufficient forces to repel your
attack. However, there is no need for you to charge forward and
throw away your lives needlessly. From what I understand, Ebulon
has many gates, and some of them are guarded by singular heroes who
feel the greatest nobility can be found by perishing alone on a
battlefield in defense of the weak. Why not pass this gate by and
assist your brethren in the eradication of such fools? I'm fairly
sure you'll find less resistance there than here.”
Jenner snapped his head around to regard Malik with an incredulous
look at his semi-treasonous remarks. Malik chuckled as he noticed
the reaction was shared by nearly every figure all the way along
the line.

“Relax,” Malik said with a
smirk, “it was worth a shot, but it's not going to
work.”

In answer, the white Orc
lifted his arm and roared a beastly cry which incited all the
creatures beneath his command to charge forward in a frenzied
rush.

Malik felt the small
contingent of archers he had put together tense, but he lifted his
arm to calm them.

“Wait until the ladders
come, then send your arrows far out into the throng. We need a
barrier of bodies to inhibit their retreat when it starts raining
fire.”

The archers
nodded.

All too soon the ladders
came rising out of the darkness. Malik dropped his hand, unleashing
the barrage of arrows that provoked squeals of anguish and death as
they connected in the distance. The arrows continued to fly, volley
after volley, as the snarling faces came charging up their ladders
from below.

Malik leaped onto the
wall, swinging his sword downward in a terrible arc that separated
the lead Orc's forearms from his body. Unbalanced, the heavy beast
tumbled backward, knocking several of its brethren from their perch
upon the ladder. The disruption caused the whole structure to fail,
and the ladder went skidding across the wall to dislodge the
adjacent scaling mechanism as well.

Grabbing a torch, Malik
grabbed one of Ive's oil bottles, set it alight, and threw it with
tremendous force down into the surging masses. As the bottle broke
and sprayed oil everywhere, the flames spread with hungry abandon
eliciting more cries of pain along with the sound of sizzling
flesh.

“Ummm, bacon,” Malik said
with a sadistic grin.

Jenner, who somehow had
gotten his fine clothing sprayed by dark, brackish blood, stared up
at Malik in disbelief.

Malik threw him another
wink as he tossed down two more flaming bottles. This time the
resultant liquid fire spread to one of the upright poles, which
Malik had also ordered soaked in oil. Flames erupted high into the
sky, and Orcs were pushed against the burning brand both by the
forces from behind eager for the taste of battle, and those at the
front who were trying to retreat and tend their terrible
wounds.

More ladders thumped
against the wall, and Malik danced about, assisting the Guardsmen
in dislodging them. After less than an hour, all of the erected
beams were alight, and the smell of death and the sound of dying
filled the air.

In a slight pause in the
fighting, Malik found himself alongside Regent Jenner. The proud
man was trembling from head to foot, and black goo had stained half
of his face.

“Not a fighting man eh
Jenner?” Malik said, slapping the Regent on the back in
encouragement. “It appears you're making yourself
useful.”

“It's horrible...” Jenner
could only stutter. “Horrible...”

“Nonsense,” Malik replied,
“this isn't nearly as bad as I though it would be.”

The words seemed to cut
through Jenner's near catatonic state, and he gazed at Malik in
utter disbelief.

“I'm not saying we're
done,” Malik continued, “not by a long way. We're almost out of oil
and arrows, and I'm fairly sure there are enough Orcs left to bash
down the portcullis and get into the courtyard, but we've got a
sizable enough force to meet them there.”

Malik paused to make a
downward swing at the face of an Orc that suddenly appeared on the
wall. The beast's face separated into two equal parts before the
whole body slipped, dead, back down into the dark masses from which
it had crawled.

“By the time the night's
over, I expect we'll have lost about eighty percent of our forces,
but we'll emerge victorious. More importantly, I'm confident I'll
be able to survive this.”

“Doesn't that bother you?”
Jenner replied. “Doesn't it bother you that so many are going to
die?”

Malik shrugged. “I didn't
pick the fight.”

“And what will you do when
it's over?” Jenner continued, an acid tone entering his voice.
“What will you do when Ebulon still stands but all its brave
defenders lie dead in the courtyard to the gate?”

At this, Malik
smiled.

“I'll stick
around for a while and help repopulate the city. I'm assuming there
will be plenty of widows who seek comfort. I intend to put on a
display of heroic swordsmanship the likes of which Ebulon has never
seen. My headache
is
gone after all.”

This Entry Point features
a character or characters from:

The Bone Sword by Walter
Rhein

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Entry Point 3-
by Vanna Smythe

Kae and fifty other
Protectors waited by the doors of the Priests’ Palace. The tops of
the three triangular towers of the palace disappeared in the thick
storm clouds. Kae had the hood of his black Protector cloak pulled
low over his eyes against the rain. This was no day to ride, but
the five corps of Protectors gathered were assembled and ready for
battle. If the pleas echoing in Kae’s mind were anything to go by,
they were to assist the Kingdom of Ebulon.

Fasten the
scarf over your mouth, Kae!
First Captain
Entan ordered on the air. Kae obeyed immediately. He hadn’t spoken
to Entan since the First Captain told him to obey the priests in
all things. Kae had refused. The way he had argued with the captain
shamed Kae now. Yet what was done was done. Entan should not have
asked him to be a coward.

The Kingdom
of Ebulon needs your help, heroes of the lands! Please come
swiftly!

The strange voice drifted
through Kae’s mind again, as it had countless times that morning,
the desperation in the plea hard to ignore. Yet this was fifty
Protectors answering the call, assembled to offer aid. Ebulon only
needed to wait a little longer and all would be well.

Kae’d only been made a
Protector three days ago, and this was already the second mission
they sent him on. If the First Captain led them, it had to be
important.

Ryon, another recently
pledged Protector, nudged Kae and whispered. “If we are to leave
for Ebulon, why must we enter the palace first?”

Kae shared his friend’s
reluctance to enter the palace He had begun to doubt Ebulon was a
real place, feared it was just another test performed by the
priests.

“
Who
understands all the dealings of priests?” Kae said, loudly enough
for all the gathered Protectors to hear. Some grumbled their
agreement, spitting on the ground to better make their point. Entan
looked at him sharply.

A grizzled Protector with
a scar running down his left cheek laughed. “What does a pledge
know of the dealings of priests?”