Crimson Shadow, The - R. A. Salvatore Page 0,173

fast pulling back, understanding that they could not trade volleys with the likes of elves.

Belsen’Krieg remained, statuesque atop his ponypig. The one-eyed general and Luthien stared at each other long and hard. The armies would meet in full very soon, of course, but suddenly it seemed to Luthien as if those forces, all of the men and dwarfs and elves, and all of the cyclopians, were no more than extensions of their two generals. Suddenly, the impending fight for Montfort, for Caer MacDonald, became a personal duel.

Before Luthien could stop her, Siobhan put up her bow and let fly, her arrow streaking across the river to strike Belsen’Krieg in the broad shoulder.

The cyclopian general hardly flinched. Without taking his unblinking stare from Luthien, the brute reached up and snapped off the arrow shaft. He nodded grimly, Luthien answered with a similar nod, and then Belsen’Krieg wheeled his ponypig and galloped away, riding through a hail of arrows, though if any hit him or his mount, it wasn’t apparent.

Luthien stood silent on the bank, watching the monstrous brute depart. The enemy was real to him now, very real, and as awestricken and afraid as he had been when first he glimpsed the black and silver swarm that was the army of Avon, he was even more so having looked upon the powerful leader of that force.

On the western bank, it was over in a matter of minutes, with less than four-score casualties to the raiders, mostly wounds that would heal, and more than three hundred cyclopian dead littering the snowy and muddy field.

A complete victory for the rebels, but as the Avon army flowed away from the bridge, toward Felling Downs and Caer MacDonald beyond that, Luthien wondered how much this minor skirmish would ultimately affect the final outcome.

Later that morning, Oliver and Katerin and the force from Port Charley, still many miles to the west, saw the plumes of black smoke rising in the east, as Felling Downs was consumed by the fires, the rage, of the cyclopian army.

The sight was bittersweet, for the marching force had heard from the independent bands of the ambush set at Felling Downs that the fight went well. Still, those plumes of smoke reminded them all that the war would not be without cost, and on a more practical and immediate level, that they still had a long march ahead of them and a long fight after that.

As twilight settled in deep over Eriador, the folk from Port Charley set their last camp before the fight. Oliver rode out alone from their ranks, prodding Threadbare across the ghostly gray fields. He came up a hillock—a high ridge for this far north of the Iron Cross—and he saw the fires.

Hundreds of fires, thousands of fires, a vast sea of cyclopians. More enemies than boastful Oliver had ever seen gathered in one place, and the halfling was sorely afraid, more for Luthien and those in Montfort than for himself, for he understood that no matter how hard they marched and how early they left, the force from Port Charley would not come on the field until the end of the next day.

“Luthien will hold,” came a voice that startled Oliver, nearly dropping him from his mount. Brind’Amour walked up beside him.

Oliver looked all about, but saw no mount nearby, and he understood that the old man had used a bit of wizardry to get out here.

“Luthien will hold for the first fight,” Brind’Amour assured Oliver, as if he had read the halfling’s every thought, every worry.

The words were of small comfort to Oliver as he continued to scan that vast encampment to the south and east.

Those cyclopian campfires were visible from the high towers of Caer MacDonald as well, and Luthien and Siobhan, atop the Ministry’s highest platform, marked them well and watched them for a long time in silence.

They knew, too, that if those fires were visible to them, then Caer MacDonald’s dark walls were visible to the hungry and angry cyclopians.

The city was quiet this night, deathly still.

CHAPTER 13

AGAINST THE WALL

THE NEXT WAS NOT A BRIGHT DAWN, the sky hazy gray with the first high clouds of yet another gathering storm. When shafts of sunlight did break through, the fields sparkled with wetness, as did the helms and shields and glistening speartips of the Avon army, forming into three huge squares, four to five thousand soldiers in each.

Luthien watched the spectacle from atop the low gatehouse of the city’s inner wall. He and his