Gods forbid anything hit him, Clay worried. One unlucky strike and the wizard would go off like spring fireworks. And us with him, probably.
Gabriel had been spot-on about one thing during his speech back in Kaladar: the Horde was a nightmare made real. Every heinous and hideous thing you could imagine was present. There were goblins and rock-hulks, wild orcs, uncountable thousands of yapping kobolds, and rune-broken golems with glowing green eyes. There were horse-headed ixil and horned hoary murlogs, skeletons rattling in rusted armour, and way more giant spiders than Clay was comfortable with.
There were scorpions the size of horses, lanky trolls with eyes like smouldering pits, firbolgs in soiled loincloths swinging spiked clubs, and ogre-mages hurling bolts of lightning from brandished bone totems. Great shaggy treants roamed the battleground, their twisted boughs home to spriggans firing tiny barbed arrows into the crowd below. There were burrowing wyrms that swallowed men whole, and drakes breathing everything from fire and ice to clouds of noxious gas.
There were battalions of black-scaled lizard-folk carrying wicked billhooks, scores of gibbering grimlocks with clammy white skin and round iron helms pricked with tiny holes to shield their eyes from the light of day. There were direwolves, bloodboars, and plate-armoured death knights on the backs of mammoth bears.
There were witches with curling nails and filed teeth, and warlocks who’d carved runes of vile power into their very flesh. There were great apes like the one he’d seen back in Conthas, striped like tigers in colours so vibrant they looked unreal. These ones were a touch more savage, however; Clay saw one tear a woman into halves like she was a loaf of warm bread.
Which was not to mention the big boys: A pair of giants roamed unchallenged, levelling a dozen warriors with every step. Several cyclopes waded knee-deep among the mercenary ranks, so hideously deformed they’d have made Dane look like Gabriel in his golden prime. They swung flails and broad-bladed axes that cut bloody arcs through anyone in their path. Clay had seen a swarm of scuttling ankheg and known that somewhere in their midst would be a queen, bloated with the next clutch of mindless drones.
The sky belonged almost solely to the enemy. Clouds of giant bats swept down with razor claws, rot sylphs belched streams of acid bile, gargoyles plunged like stones upon unsuspecting heads.
There was another creature—Clay hadn’t even known what to call it—that was some kind of enormous plant. When it wasn’t spewing acid all over the place it was hoisting mercs into the air with its tentacle limbs and dropping them into what looked, disturbingly, to be a mouth inside of its mouth.
But then another monstrosity arrived: An argosy armoured in metal plates and powered by what looked like a pared-down tidal engine came roaring from the Threshold. The plant-thing’s acid splashed harmlessly over its iron-plated carapace, and the massive war wagon responded by blasting liquid fire from a spout at its front before running its adversary down beneath nail-studded treads. The mercenaries rallied around the rolling behemoth as it ploughed into the mob.
Clay saw pale-skinned necromancers hovering above plagues of living dead, their frayed cloaks billowing on deathly currents. Demons wreathed in boiling smoke cackled like madmen as they struck down would-be heroes with blades of blistering fire.
One of them stood out from the rest, and not just because it was several magnitudes larger. Well, mostly because of that, but also because it bore a whip that instantly froze whatever it touched and carried a sword as long as a ship’s mast, which it used to smash frost-rimed mercenaries to bloody fragments. The thing looked like a man-shaped mountain of jagged ice, its limbs encased in scraps of dull black armour. A pair of iron-sheathed, front-facing horns curved from its head above eyes like charnel pits.
Clay knew it for an Infernal the moment he laid eyes on it. He’d never seen one before—not beyond the confines of paintings or tapestries, anyhow—but he recognized it nonetheless.
Clay remembered Shadow, the druin claw-broker, mentioning that Lastleaf had spent years rallying the horde, traveling the breadth of the Heartwyld, rousing the beast-tribes of Endland, brokering pacts with some of the forest’s most corrupted inhabitants. Judging by the size of the force he’d managed to assemble, Clay was surprised there’d been anything left to haunt the Wyld on their way through.
“Look alive!” Gabe called as a clutch of urskin jumped them.
Clay deflected a spear thrust and drove his shield into his attacker’s froglike face. Ganelon plucked one of the things off his back and slammed it onto the ground at his feet. Matrick took a tongue thrust to the face and reeled as though punched, but before the creature could finish him Moog tapped it with a wand.
“Kaza!” yelled the wizard. The frogman stopped short, bewildered. Before it could recover Matrick jammed his knives to the hilt in its chest.
“What spell was that?” Clay asked.
“Spell?” Moog brandished the wand. “You mean this? It’s just a stick,” he said, and tossed it away.
The world’s a changing place, Matrick had told him back in Fivecourt, and Clay knew he was seeing the fallout of that change all around him. Because so many bands had sought the artificial glory of the arenas instead of venturing out in search of the real thing, the denizens of the Heartwyld had been granted time to repopulate, to nurse their hatred of human civilization, the whole forest festering like an untended wound gone septic.
And potentially fatal, he thought, as Gabriel led them into the body-strewn wake of the armoured war wagon. The closer they got to the city the more evidence they saw of the Horde’s months-long occupation: bodies impaled on blood-sheathed spears, fire pits and trenches heaped with bones. The enemy had constructed a number of shoddy siege engines, Clay noted. Nothing they could hurl would have done much harm to Castia’s spell-warded walls, but as they passed near to one he saw the bucket was stained with gore, and he shuddered to imagine what these machines had launched in place of stones.
They were nearing the thick of it now: the chaotic centre of the miles-long battlefield. He had been involved in enough petty wars to know that battles like this were won and lost on the wings, but Gabriel seemed dead set on driving like a blade toward the heart of the Horde, and Clay thought he knew why.
If we can find Lastleaf … if we can somehow kill him, then maybe we can end this.
With only a shield to hand, Clay did his best to keep his bandmates from harm. When a gargoyle dive-bombed Matrick, Clay pushed him aside, planting his feet and slanting his shield so the thing didn’t crush him. Thanks to the impenetrable Warskin, Clay shrugged off countless sword and spear thrusts meant for Moog, and Blackheart’s mottled face was spiked with splintered arrows. He hauled Ganelon from the rubble of a vanquished earth elemental, and even found time to step between Red Bob and an ankheg’s gnashing pincers.
The mercenary murmured scant thanks and rushed off, only to be crushed a moment later by a giant’s pounding foot. Bob’s bard turned and fled, wailing and clutching his harp to his chest like a scholar saving a single book from a burning library.
Clay gazed up at the colossus. It hadn’t taken notice of them yet, but a giant hardly needed to see you to kill you, did it? It stalked across the battlefield like a child treading over grass, wreaking unwitting devastation with every step.