Rabbit muttered a few curses. “He does that every time,” he told Keselo. “Sometimes I think he’s got ice water for blood.”
Longbow waited, intently watching the charge of the hooded enemies. “That should do,” he said, raising his curled horn to his lips.
The single note from his horn seemed to have an almost mellow quality as it echoed back from the far side of the ravine, and then, almost as one man, the archers raised their bows, drew them back, and then waited as the echo from Longbow’s horn seemed to fade on down the ravine.
Then Longbow sounded a sharper note, and the bowmen released their arrows in unison. The sheet of arrows rose up to meet the sheet coming from Ham-Hand’s position on the other side of the village.
Then the arrows fell down on the enemy force, and a vast sigh rose from the ravine as hundreds of hooded enemies let out their final breath and rolled limply down the steep slope.
Longbow’s archers loosed arrows by the hundreds, shooting as fast as they could, even as the Dhralls on Ham-Hand’s side of the village matched them arrow for arrow.
The deadly rain falling on the slope swept the enemy force, and so far as Keselo could determine, there were almost no survivors.
The enemies rushing out of the village, however, did not even hesitate but continued their charge down through the rain of arrows.
“That’s stupid!” Rabbit exclaimed. “Haven’t they got any brains?”
“Evidently not,” Keselo replied. “I think this is what that old shaman told us back in the cave, Rabbit. Those enemy soldiers aren’t really people, so they have no sense of fear. Even when there’s only one of them left, he’ll keep on charging.”
“That’s a quick way to lose a whole army,” Rabbit said. “I hope we made enough arrows.”
“That’s another thing that’s a bit puzzling,” Keselo continued. “I don’t think they really understand how the Dhralls are killing them. They don’t seem to know what our weapons are or how dangerous they can be.”
Rabbit grinned. “Like the old saying goes, a stupid enemy is a gift from the gods,” he said.
The senseless enemy charge continued for almost an hour, but then a hollow-sounding voice thundered from back in the shadows beneath the overhang.
The enemies suddenly veered off in response and charged along the side of the slope toward Longbow’s knoll, and, Keselo surmised, toward Ham-Hand’s position as well.
“It looks like somebody finally woke up,” Rabbit observed.
Longbow’s archers turned and sent a fresh arrow storm into the teeth of the enemy charge, and the dead began to pile up in rows much like freshly mown wheat. The servants of the Vlagh, however, continued to charge, and a few of them even reached the dry creek bed where Hook-Beak’s Maags were concealed.
The Maags came to their feet and met the charge with long poisoned spears.
The mindless charge continued for perhaps another quarter of an hour, and Keselo observed that fewer and fewer enemy soldiers were coming out of the ruins. “I’d say that he’s running out of people,” Keselo said to Rabbit with a tight grin.
“What a shame,” Rabbit said with a smirk.
“That’s not possible!” Longbow exclaimed suddenly.
“There aren’t really very many of them left, Longbow,” Keselo said. “The Vlagh may have more of them, but they’re back in the Wasteland.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Longbow said tersely. “Down there—just above the bench—one of the creatures is moving.”
Keselo shaded his eyes and peered down the slope. “I don’t see any . . .”
“Just to the left of that uprooted tree,” Longbow told him.
Keselo caught a faint flicker of movement, and then he saw one of the hooded creatures crawling very slowly over the limp bodies of the dead.
Rabbit was also staring down the slope. “Oh, there he is,” the little sailor said. “There must have been a weak dose of the poison on the arrow that dropped him.”
“It doesn’t work that way, Rabbit,” Longbow disagreed.
“Maybe he was just playing dead, then—hiding out among the carcasses so that he could sneak up behind Ox.”
Longbow shook his head. “They aren’t clever enough to do that.”
“There’s another one!” Keselo said sharply. “A little to the right of the first one. It seems to be crawling out of some kind of a hole in the side of the hill.”
“And another one!” Rabbit hissed. “They’re coming up all over down there!”
One of the hooded snake-men suddenly dashed down to the bench, ducked under the overly long spears, and bit one of the tall Maags who were following Ox. The sailor stiffened and fell even as the hooded creature slashed another Maag with the stingers along its forearm. It half turned and then collapsed when another burly Maag split its head with a heavy war axe.
“They’re coming up out of the ground all over the slope down there!” Rabbit shouted.
Longbow began loosing arrows as fast as he could, but more and more of the hooded creatures came out of their hidden burrows to rush down the short slope to attack the startled Maags on the bench. The creatures that Hook-Beak called the snake-men did, in fact, behave much like snakes, creeping slowly into positions very close to the north bench and the Maags, and then striking so fast that their unsuspecting victims had no time to react or defend themselves. The deadly venom brought screams from the dying Maags and hideous convulsions as the snake-men struck again and again.
Ox started to bellow orders, and his men began to regain their senses and to form up—in small clusters at first, fending off the attackers with their long spears, and then in more coherent groups, moving purposefully to kill all of the servants of the Vlagh. By then, however, Ox had lost more than half his men.
Then, even as the bull-shouldered Ox and his men cleared away the last of their attackers, another bellow came from the shadows at the rear of the ancient ruin, and the snake-men who’d been attacking Sorgan’s position abruptly turned and ran back to the ruin.
Sorgan, almost inarticulate with rage, came storming up the slope to the knoll, spitting curses with every step. “Why didn’t you tell us about those cursed mole holes?” he shouted at Keselo.
“We didn’t see them, Captain Hook-Beak,” Keselo said. “They’re completely hidden, and we were concentrating all of our attention on the village. We thought that would be the place where the snake-men would be hiding. The notion of burrows never occurred to us.”