Hideous trolls, spectres, manticores, shambling dark presences seized the soldiers in spine-crunching embraces, sank fangs into unarmored throats, even rent men limb from limb. Some of the exotics were capable of flinging bolts of psycho-energy that broiled troops in their bronze cuirasses like lobsters in the shell. Other Firvulag harassed with sheets of astral fire, streams of nauseating ichor, or brain-crippling illusions. The great hero Nukalavee the Skinless, wearing his aspect of a flayed centaur with blazing eyes, howled until enemy soldiers fell writhing to the ground, eardrums split and minds reduced to near-idiocy. Another champion, Bles Four-Fang, invaded the headquarters of the garrison, caught up the silver commander named Seaborg, and appeared to devour him, armor and all, while the dying officer calmly broadcast final telepathic orders to his subordinates directing the troops now making a last stand at the gate opening into the inner city. Seaborg’s aides blunted their vitredur weapons against Bles’s scaly illusory hide, only to be eaten alive in turn for their temerity. By the time the monster had downed the last adjutant, the headquarters building was afire and the invasion force swarmed in Finiah’s streets. So Bles withdrew in good order, picking his teeth with a silver spur. His appetite had only been whetted, and the morning was young.
Vanda-Jo was still overseeing the last wave of volunteers embarking from the staging area when Lord Velteyn and the Flying Hunt took to the air. Shouts of fear came from the crowd as they saw the glowing knights mount up from the city across the water. One man yelled, “The bleeders’re coming for us!” and jumped into the Rhine. A fiasco was averted when Vanda-Jo tongue-lashed the outlanders for their cowardice, pointing out that the Hunt was circling high above Finiah, bent on some more urgent objective.
“So into the boats and quit farting around!” she bellowed. “You don’t have to be afraid of Velteyn and his flying circus any more! Did you forget our secret weapon? We’ve got iron! You can kill Tanu now, even easier than you can kill those traitor human torcers that do their dirty work!”
Eyeballs rolled anxiously in the half-light. The Firvulag skipper in the two-masted shallop nearest Vanda-Jo glowered in dwarfish impatience. “Hurry it up, spiritless earthworms, or we’ll sail to the war without you!”
Suddenly a column of emerald light stabbed down from apparently empty sky in the axis of the wheeling Hunt, striking a low knoll within the city across the Rhine. Orange-and-white fire fountained up at the point of impact, and seconds later, the sound of a rolling detonation sped over the river.
“The mine!” somebody shouted. “The barium mine’s blowing up too, it looks like a volcano erupting in there!”
As if the bombardment had been a signal, another gout of flame belched up from the farthest reaches of Finiah, back where the peninsula narrowed to a small neck connecting the city to the mainland.
“See that?” Vanda-Jo was exultant “The second wave of spooks have landed opposite our main beachhead! That female Firvulag general named Ayfa is attacking from the Black Forest side. Now will you shitheads get a move on?”
The men and women on the dock hoisted their iron-tipped spears into the air and yelled. They pounded down the spindly gangplanks into the waiting boats so eagerly that the small craft rocked and nearly swamped.
On the other side of the Rhine, flames made a scarlet track on the dark water. The faerie lamps of blue and green and silver and gold that had outlined the splendid Tanu City of Lights began to wink out.
Velteyn, Lord of Finiah, pulled up the reins of his chaliko and hung in midair, shining like a magnesium flare. The nobles of his Flying Hunt, eighteen male and three female knights, all glowing red, drew in their mounts to surround him. His thought-thrust was nearly incoherent with frustration and rage:
Gone! The flying machine is gone… and yet my lightnings surely penetrated its belly. Kamilda! Send your farsense seeking it.
…It recedes from us Exalted Lord. Ah Tana at a speed unprecedented! It drops behind the brow of the Vosges and beyond my perception. My Lord if I ascend to a great height…
Stay Kamilda! More urgent threats confront us below. Look all of you! Look what the Foe has done! O the shame the pain the havoc! Down to the ground all of you. Each to command a mounted party of chivalry in defense of our City of Lights!
Na bardito taynel o pogekône!
The fighting moved steadily inland from the Rhineside break. Two hours after dawn, the western front was strung through the gardens of the pleasure dome, on the very outskirts of the Tanu quarter.
Moe Marshak had reloaded his quiver several times from those of fallen comrades. He had wrenched the gaudy crest from his bronze helmet early on and then rolled in filth to camouflage the shine of his cuirass. Unlike certain of his luckless fellows, he had deduced quickly that the Firvulag would be able to detect telepathic communication, and so he made no attempt to contact his officers for orders. Maintaining a quiet mind, he went his lone way, keeping out of monster range as he skulked Finiah’s byways, potting Lowlives with cool economy while dodging hysterical ramas and noncombatants. Marshak had already taken out at least fifteen of the enemy, plus two bareneck civilians he had caught looting a gray-torc of its weaponry.
Now Marshak slipped into the long porch that formed the perimeter of the pleasure dome. Hearing one of the distinctive Lowlife yodels, he concealed himself behind thick ornamental shrubs and nocked one of the serrated war arrows in his compound bow.
In the next instant an unexpected diversion came from within the building. The stained glass from a pair of French doors perhaps five meters away from the soldier shivered to atoms from the impact of some heavy object. There were screams and a rumbling sound. Long hands all adorned with rings fumbled with the jammed catch. Other hands shook the bent framework. The angle was such that Marshak could not clearly see the people trapped inside, but their cries of terror and dismay reached both his mind and ears, as did the uncanny warbling of the thing pursuing them.
“Help! The door’s struck! And it’s coming!”
Help us! Helphelphelp us! HELP US!
The blanket coercive summons of a Tanu overlord clutched at Marshak’s consciousness. His gray torc compelled obedience. Forsaking his hiding place, he ran to the door. On the other side, pressed against the mangled copper fretwork, were three female denizens of the pleasure dome and their tall Tanu client, whose handsome violet and gold robes proclaimed him an official of the Farsensor Guild. He presumably lacked the coercive or psychokinetic potential to fend off the apparition that was now poised in an inner doorway, ready to strike.
The Firvulag wore the appearance of a gigantic hellgrammite, a larval water insect with clashing razor-sharp mandibles. The brute’s head was nearly a meter wide, while the long segmented body, slick with some stinking secretion, seemed to fill the corridor behind it.
“Tana be thanked!” cried the Tanu. “Quickly, my man! Aim for its neck!”
Marshak raised his bow, shifted position to avoid the struggling women, and let fly. The glass-tipped shaft sank for most of its length between chitinous plates behind the creature’s scissoring jaws. Marshak heard the Firvulag utter a telepathic bellow. Without hurrying he drew two more arrows and sent them into the hellgrammite’s glittering orange eyes. The insectile form wavered, became insubstantial… and then the awful thing was gone and a dwarf in black obsidian armor lay dead on the floor, throat and eyesockets transfixed.
The soldier used his vitredur short sword to pry open the ruined latch. Pleasure surges engendered by the grateful exotic throbbed along his pelvic nerves in the sweet, familiar reward. When the nobleman and his disheveled companions were freed, Marshak saluted, right fist pressed against his heart.