The first warning was a faint hiss, like a rush of water in the distance, muffled by foliage. There was no clear source for the sound; it seemed to come from everywhere at once. It swelled gradually, then defined itself into a series of clicks and scrapes and scratches, the individual footfalls of many, many twelve-legged horax.
The creatures spilled into the large chamber from all three tunnels, sweeping forward with eyes bulging and mandibles snapping. The first horax reared upward, striking at the dwarves, punching hard against their heavy shields. The dwarves stabbed away, eliciting hisses and shrieks from the stricken monsters. Several arachnoids tumbled over, oozing ichor from the punctures, but others immediately crowded forward to take the places of the wounded.
“Look left!” shouted Brandon, spotting an unusual, red-colored horax rearing up high behind the first wave. “A tangler!”
Even as he shouted the warning, the crimson horax spit a stream of webbing from the grotesque bulge under its head. The sticky strands spattered across three adjacent shields, and the tangler pulled back. Two of the trio of dwarves stood firm, but the one in the middle, whose shield was almost completely covered by the web, lurched forward, pulled off balance by the monster’s gooey strands.
The fighter let go of his shield but was too late to keep his footing. He tumbled onto his face, and a horax immediately struck at the nape of his neck. One mandible sliced into his flesh while the other bounced off the shoulder plate of his steel armor. Another of the monsters plunged in, seeking to finish the stricken dwarf.
Brandon leaped forward, straddling his felled soldier and driving the Bluestone Axe down in a powerful blow. The keen edge of his beloved blade split the head of the second horax, killing it instantly. Whipping his weapon to the side, Brandon slashed the neck of the next horax. By that time, several of his men had grabbed the fallen dwarf’s ankles and pulled him back behind the safety of the shield wall. The injured warrior groaned, leaving a trail of blood across the floor, and a young cleric immediately knelt to tend to his wound.
The tangler shot a stream of webbing directly at Brandon, but by then his men were set for action. Several held lit torches, standing behind their captain. They waved the sticks in the air, the flames surging, and when the gooey strands came near they touched the brands to the flammable web. Immediately the fire flared along the tangler’s web, and the crimson monster had to recoil-too slowly, as the flames burned up to the horax’s neck and set the segmented creature ablaze. It writhed and shrieked, and its fellow arachnoids quickly skittered away from the dying tangler.
The surviving horax still swarmed in the cavern, climbing up the walls, scrambling across the ceiling. The dwarves stabbed at every clicking head that approached, aiming for the eyes of the creatures. The long awlspikes reached as high as the cavern ceiling, and when a horax tried to approach from above, one or two stabs was usually enough to dislodge it and send it tumbling onto the backs of its fellows down below.
For several long, tense minutes, the terrible fight raged. The horax, as usual, proved to be utterly fearless as they hurled themselves against the wall of steel. Attacking with coordination, employing feints and deception and concentrations of force, they smashed again and again against the dwarf defense. But the Kayolin fighters never wavered, nor did they break ranks or yield to the lure of advancing incautiously when the horax pulled back from the center of the line, presenting an inviting gap that would have quickly exposed charging dwarves to fatal attack from three sides.
Another dwarf fell, his leg badly gashed by a monster’s bite when the shield wall wavered slightly. That gap, too, was plugged immediately and the wounded warrior eased back for treatment that quickly stanched the flow of blood from his severed artery. All the while the dead horax piled up in droves in front of the dwarves, until the mound of segmented, hard-shelled bodies rose higher than the soldiers’ heads.
Finally, the last of the monsters in the cavern was slain. Still Brandon’s men held their formation, watching and listening and waiting to see if another wave of attackers came up. Only when the captain gave the signal to advance did they make their next move, clearing a path through the pile of bodies and cautiously shifting to the far side of the cavern.
“Take the center passage,” Brandon ordered, remembering that place from his earlier ordeal. “It won’t be long now.”
Once again the first rank pressed down the tunnel, which was wide enough for five dwarves to march abreast. A quintet came from the back of the file; they were fresh soldiers ready to take the brunt, giving comrades exhausted from the skirmish a chance to catch their breath in the rear of the formation. They advanced steadily but quickly, with Brandon and all of the others sensing the nearness of their objective.
Then it loomed before them: a widening of the cavern, and a huge, arched entryway leading into a vast, shadowy chamber behind. Perhaps it was the fetid smell or the moist, cloying air, but suddenly Brandon knew that they were looking at the heart of the hive and that, within that cave, the bloated queen sat high upon her mound of white, oval eggs.
“Tighten yer straps, men,” Tankard Hacksaw growled, buckling his own helmet on more securely.
The awlspikes came up, and the line of dwarves headed out. Brandon clapped his sergeant on the shoulder, leaving him in command of the main attack while he jogged back to the nearest connecting corridor, where he had left a team of couriers.
“Any word about the Firespitter? Or anything from Sergeant Morewood?” he asked the first dwarf he met.
“Aye, Captain,” came the reply. “He’s got the machine through the last bottleneck. His men met some bugs, a good nest of them, in the cave, and he’s been busy pushing them out of the way. He hopes to be in position before too long.”
“Good. Send word; tell him the main attack is starting. I need that Firespitter as soon as he can bring it up!”
“Yes, sir!” The courier dwarf, wearing supple leather armor instead of the heavy metal of the combat troops, was off at a sprint even as he finished his salute. As satisfied as he could be, considering that half his troops had yet to reach the battlefield, Brandon turned back toward the hive. The cave widened there, and his nostrils filled with the stink of moist earth and the rancidness of the nearby egg chamber.
Already the infantry was advancing against a seething mass of horax, the bugs hissing and clacking and rearing across the whole of the wide cavern leading into the egg chamber. Some of the bugs were scrambling up the walls, while tanglers in the back spit their sticky strands of webs.
As always, it was the front rank of dwarves, the shield wall, that met the enemy in closest, most dangerous combat. There, in the larger space, the Kayolin troops could better expend their full arsenal of tactics. Ranks of archers carried heavy crossbows. They stood behind the shield wall and fired their deadly missiles against the bugs that attempted to climb above the armored attackers. The crossbow quarrels were not as lethal as the awlspikes, but when several of the bolts struck a single horax, the monster twitched and spasmed and lost its grip on the rough stone wall. A strike in the middle of the head was often enough to kill one of the creatures outright.
Other dwarves wielded torches, and the flames surged and flared behind the front line. Whenever a tangler’s web spewed forth, the torch-bearers raced to the spot and quickly burned away the highly flammable strands. Still more Kayolin warriors stood ready with small kegs of water and used the liquid to douse the flames that threatened to sear their comrades’ flesh. The webs, meanwhile, burned furiously, sizzling like fuses as the flames hissed and crackled their way back to the tanglers themselves. Sometimes the red-shelled bugs managed to break free from the webs before the flames ignited their web glands, but in other instances, the tanglers erupted into churning, oily fireballs that incinerated not only the web-spewing horax, but also those of their fellow arachnoids unfortunate enough to be nearby.