Crimson Shadow, The - R. A. Salvatore Page 0,359

the rail, cheering wildly.

Ashannon smiled. “You will see,” he said, turning to the north.

By the end of the first volleys, balls of smoking brown earth that exploded when they landed and scores and scores of arrows, most of the cyclopians on those three Avon ships were dead and fires raged on each of the galleons.

Katerin, Dozier, and Oliver snapped blank stares on the duke of Eornfast.

“I have met with Brind’Amour,” Ashannon explained. “Baranduine is no friend to King Greensparrow. Pass the word to your fleet,” he instructed. “I warn you, any of my ships that are attacked will respond.” With a burst of smoke, the man disappeared, and a similar puff of smoke rising from the midst of the Baranduine fleet told the three startled companions which ship Ashannon marked as his flagship.

The fight was over hours later, in the dark, with thirty Avon galleons scuttled and ten others sent running, and a weary and battered, but now tripled, invasion fleet ready to move on. The Baranduiners sent skilled seamen to aid the Eriadorans, and gently passed over some peat bombs, the brown earthen balls that would violently burst apart upon impact.

Katerin and Oliver readily accepted Ashannon’s invitation to board his flagship and sail beside him, the two of them intrigued and full of hope.

The fleet, more than a hundred strong, crossed out the southern end of the Straits of Mann, past the lights of Mannington, before the dawn.

CHAPTER 26

THE NIGHT OF THREE ROUTS

THOUGH HE HAD NEVER BEEN in this region before, Luthien Bedwyr needed no map to tell him which city was next in line. The Eriadoran army had thundered across a hundred miles and a dozen villages since coming out of the mountains. Resistance had been light, even nonexistent in some places, as the cyclopians—particularly the Praetorian Guards who had been routed out of the Iron Cross—continued to flee to the south, pillaging supplies as they went. That rowdy retreat had played well into Luthien’s hands, turning the populace against Greensparrow. And with the help of Solomon Keyes and Alan O’Dunkery and other important Avonese, there had been minimum loss of human life to either side.

But now . . .

Luthien walked Riverdancer to the top of a small hillock. He peered south in the waning light of the day, following the silver snakelike Dunkery until it widened and dispersed into a shining blot on the horizon. There lay Speythenfergus Lake, and on its northern banks, along the strip of land between the Dunkery and Eorn Rivers, sat high-walled Warchester, its militia no doubt swelled by the thousands of cyclopians who had forsaken the villages to the north.

Below him on his right, Luthien’s army plodded along, making steady progress. They would march long after sunset, setting their camp in sight of the mighty city.

How would the Eriadorans and mountain dwarfs fare against the fortifications of mighty Warchester? Luthien and his forces had never laid siege to a city, or tried to battle their way through towering walls of stone. They had won in Caer MacDonald by fighting house to house, but they had already been inside the city’s walls when the battle had begun. They had won in Princetown by deception, luring the garrison outside of the city into a killing valley known as Glen Durritch. But how would they fare against a fortified city that expected them and had prepared for their arrival?

Luthien entertained the thought of convincing Bellick to go around Warchester, flanking Speythenfergus Lake on the east and marching straight out for Carlisle. The young Bedwyr understood the folly of such a plan, of course; they could not leave an entire cyclopian army behind them!

And so they had to go to Warchester, had to lay waste to the fortified city, and perhaps even turn west to the coast and attack Mannington as well. Not for the first time, and certainly not for the last, Luthien considered the apparent folly of their march and longed for the quiet rolling hills of Isle Bedwydrin.

“When Duke Theredon is not here, I am in command,” the brutish cyclopian insisted in its sputtering lisp, poking its fat and grimy thumb into its barrel-sized chest.

Deanna Wellworth scrutinized the one-eye. She had always thought cyclopians disgusting and ugly, but this one, Undercommander Kreignik, was far worse than most. Its bulbous eye dripped with some yellow liquid, caking on the side of the brute’s fat, oft-broken nose. All of Kreignik’s teeth were too long and crooked, jutting out at weird angles over torn and