Stop that, he told himself firmly. It’s not going to happen. And even if it does, there isn’t much you can do about it unless you want the lad to go hide somewhere in the rear ranks, and you know how well that suggestion would work!
“’Fraid you’re probably right about the bows in this stuff, Milord,” he said glumly, after a moment. “Still and all, it’ll take their javelins out of it, too.”
“You are determined to find a bright side, aren’t you?” Trianal’s tone was sour, but he gave Sir Yarran a smile to go with it. Then he sobered and turned to one of his aides. “Head back along the column, Garthian. Tell them it’s going to be lance and saber, not bows. And”-he held up a restraining hand as the courier started to turn his horse’s head back towards the rear-“tell them anyone I see charging ahead without somebody to cover his flanks is going to wish he’d never been born…assuming he survives long enough for me to rip his head off, at any rate. Clear?”
“As crystal, Milord!” Garthian replied with a broad smile.
“Then go. And keep your voice down while you’re passing the word.”
“Aye, Sir!” Garthian slapped his chest in acknowledgment, turned his horse, and went briskly cantering back along the mounted column.
“Think Yurgazh and Sir Vaijon will hold to the schedule, Milord?” Yarran asked more quietly as the spattering thud of muddy hoof beats faded.
“I’m sure they will,” Tellian replied. “Trust me, Yarran,” he turned and looked into his henchman’s eyes levelly, “one thing they aren’t going to do is leave us hanging out here in the fog by ourselves.”
“Don’t suppose you could have a word with Scale Balancer about this fog, Sir Vaijon?” Yurgazh Charkson grumbled, waving one hand in front of his face like a man trying to brush away a fly. It made him look a little silly, Vaijon thought, not that he intended to say anything about it.
“I’m afraid weather is Chemalka’s jurisdiction, not Tomanak’s,” he replied.
“Pity,” the Bloody Sword general half-grunted. He started to add something more-probably something fairly biting, Vaijon thought-but he stopped himself, and the champion smiled crookedly.
Yurgazh was one of the hradani who still had remarkably little use for any gods, Light or Dark, Vaijon reflected. From what he’d learned of the hradani’s struggle to survive for the last twelve centuries, Vaijon couldn’t really blame them for holding to the opinion that no gods had done them any favors during the process. Tomanak had always had a certain grudging acceptance among them as the one God of Light a warrior could truly respect, although (much as it dismayed him to admit it) Krashnark had enjoyed almost as much respect. The balance had tipped in Tomanak’s favor when He revealed the truth about the Rage to all hradani through Bahzell, but it probably would have been demanding a bit too much to have expected all hradani everywhere to immediately embrace the Gods of Light after so many centuries.
Not that he could disagree with Yurgazh’s fervent desire that some god would take it upon himself or herself to dispel the unexpected fog. If there’d been some way to get word to Trianal, Vaijon would have been tempted to suggest they call off the attack entirely until the weather had cleared. Unfortunately, there wasn’t any way to get word to the Sothoii-not without risking having any courier go astray and probably ride smack into the enemy, in this fog-which meant they were committed.
And wasn’t that going to be fun?
Ghouls were nothing anyone in his right mind, even a hradani, wanted to engage in hand-to-hand combat. They were constructs from the Wizard Wars which had doomed Kontovar, and no one seemed to know how any of them had made the journey to Norfressa. They weren’t the only…less than desirable echoes of the Fall which had washed up in Norfressa, unfortunately. In fact, until very recently, no Sothoii had made much of a distinction between ghouls and hradani, and in some ways-especially considering the way in which arcanely enslaved hradani had served as the Carnadosans’ shock troops during the Wizard Wars-it wasn’t that hard to understand. But even the Sothoii at their worst had recognized that ghouls were far more dangerous than the hradani, and not simply because they had even more objectionable personal habits.
Unlike hradani, with their low fertility rates, ghouls had been specifically designed to reproduce quickly and mature rapidly, which meant even a relatively small infestation of them could grow to frightening size with dismaying speed. They weren’t precisely what anyone might call fastidious eaters, either, and any given band or village of ghouls had no friends, even among their fellow ghouls.
Physically, ghouls resembled trolls. They were a bit shorter-few of them stood much over eight and a half feet in height-and more lightly built, but their frames were deceptively powerful and their reflexes were unbelievably swift. According to Wencit of Rum, who certainly ought to know, that speed had been arcanely engineered into them along with their reproduction rate, and they paid for it with ravenous appetites and shortened lifespans. It was unusual for any ghoul to attain as much as forty years of age, and most of them died before they were thirty-five, which was no more than half the lifespan of a troll. They were almost as hard to kill as a troll, though, and like trolls, they recovered with almost unbelievable speed from any wound which didn’t kill them outright. Indeed, they healed much faster even than hradani; it wasn’t unheard of for a troll’s or a ghoul’s blood-spouting wound to close itself and actually begin healing in the course of the same battle in which it had been inflicted. The only way to be certain of killing one of them was to take its head; otherwise, what a warrior might have been certain was a corpse was all too likely to recover and rip his head off from behind.
What made ghouls even worse than trolls was threefold. First, their greater speed made them far more dangerous in a fight, far more difficult to outrun, and far more difficult to run down if they tried to evade. Second, unlike trolls, ghouls used weapons other than their own admittedly efficient talons and fangs. They were crude weapons, fashioned out of stone and wood, not iron or steel, but a chipped flint javelin head could kill a man just as dead as one forged from the finest Dwarvenhame steel, and the sawlike obsidian teeth which fringed their wooden war clubs might be fragile, but they were also razor-sharp. And third, and worst of all, they were smart.
The one true blessing about trolls was that they were stupid, little more than mobile appetites. That had its downsides, since it meant they were unlikely to recognize times when discretion was the better part of valor, but it also meant every small band of trolls operated entirely on its own. The idea of cooperating with anyone outside the immediate family group simply didn’t occur to them.
Ghouls understood the advantages of cooperation. Like trolls, they were egg layers, and-also like trolls-they were carnivores. The one good thing about their intelligence (from anyone else’s perspective, at least) was that they understood the value of raising their own meat animals, and as long as there was sufficient chicken, mutton, goat, or beef from their own flocks and herds, they were content to stay home. Unfortunately, it took a lot of meat to keep a village of ghouls fed. Even their willingness to eat their own eggs-or their own young-often failed to keep their populations down to something their herds could support, and when that happened, they went raiding.