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.The felled beast noticed another human running past asecond later, then it felt the heavy stomps of dwarvenboots.The last thing the bugbear saw was the swift de-scent of a huge axe.Alarms rang out all through the encampment; the twoside tents opened up, with many bugbears and several gob-lins spilling out onto the grassy hill."More than we thought!" Ivan bellowed.Cadderly held his spindle-disks and his walking stickclose, hoping he would not be forced to use them.Helooked about frantically, expecting and fearing that Dorigenwould make her appearance, and tried to keep the spell ofsilence in his thoughts through the growing tumult aroundhim.Danica and Elbereth widened the gap ahead of Cadderly,and suddenly Ivan and Pikel were fully engaged in combatright behind him.He turned about, then turned back, andlooked all around as the bugbears—even more were pour-ing from the tents—began to surround the small group.Elbereth and Danica paid no heed to the events behindthem.Their goal was in plain sight, and their strides quick-ened when a burly, brutish monster stepped from the finetent.Both knew at once that it was Ragnor come to meetthem, huge and terrible and with that telltale single tusksticking up over his lip.Standing at the very top of the ridge, the ogrillon grinnedevilly and beckoned them on.Danica realized that they would not get to him, though.Agroup of three bugbears closed from the side, and the mon-sters' angle would put them between their leader and theattackers.Danica was confident that she could outdistancethem if she ran full stride, but Elbereth would have nochance of getting to Ragnor."Run on!" she cried to the elf, and she veered to the side to meet the interceptors.She started in high, forcing the monsters to raise theirspears, then dove to the grass and slid sideways, clippingtheir feet and sending all three tumbling down about her.Elbereth's first instincts were to go to her, caught in themiddle of such powerful enemies, but the elf continued hiscourse, realizing that Danica had made the move for hisbenefit and reminding himself that their lives were not im-portant when weighed against the potential gains of de-stroying Ragnor.If the ogrillon was afraid, he did not show it.Elberethcame fast and hard, his sword weaving and thrusting, usinghis momentum to get in strikes too quickly for Ragnor todefend.Blood oozed from the monster's shoulder.Another gashlined one cheek.Still Ragnor grinned, and Elbereth'scharging advantage quickly played itself out.It was the ogrillon's turn.*****Cadderly had never seen such brilliant teamwork before.The dwarven brothers held the higher ground, but that stilldidn't bring them close to eye level with gigantic bugbears,and they were outnumbered two to one.That hardly seemed to matter.Ivan cut a crossing swipe with his axe, not close to hit-ting the mark.A bugbear waded in behind, then Cadderlyunderstood the dwarf's attack to be no more than a feint,drawing the monster in.For Pikel suddenly broke from hisown fight and followed up his brother's swing with a lowthrust from his tree-trunk club.The lunging bugbear's knee snapped backward—-Cadderly thought that it resembled the gait of an exoticbird he had once read about—and the monster fell away,writhing in agony.Ivan, meanwhile, had not been idle.He went with themomentum of his powerful cut, stepping right beside hisdipping brother and taking Pikel's place with the other twomonsters.The surprised bugbears hardly seemed to com-prehend what had happened—the dwarves' movementswere so in harmony—and they did not immediately under-stand the difference in this dwarfs fighting style.They kept their arms extended, a proper style for de-fending against Pikel's wide-armed club swings, but thor-oughly useless against Ivan's sheer ferocity.The dwarfcharged inside their long reach, butting with his antleredhead, biting, kicking with his heavy boots, and waggling hisdouble-bladed axe through a series of short chops.One of them was down, the other running away, beforeCadderly had even remembered to draw breath."Oo!" Pikel howled appreciatively, seeing his brother make such quick work of the two, and purposely turning hisback on his remaining bugbear in the process."Behind you!" Cadderly cried, not knowing that thedwarf was in complete control.The bugbear raised its spear over its head and leaped,but Pikel dipped low and rushed backward, slamming hisback into the monster's knees.The bugbear barely caughtits balance and didn't go headlong over the dwarf, but itwould have been better off if it had.Pikel dropped down toone knee, held his club on its narrow end, and drove itstraight up between the bugbear's legs, heaving the crea-ture from the ground.By the time the bugbear came back down, still standingbut quite winded, Pikel was behind the monster and hadrealigned his grip on the club.The dwarf stepped into hisswing with all his bulky weight, slamming the bugbear inthe lower back.The breathless monster tried to howl, and when thatdidn't work, it settled instead for slumping to its knees,clutching its blasted back and watching the world spin."Wish we had the time to finish a few of these," Ivan grumbled as he and Pikel moved higher up the hill.Manymore bugbears came at them from both sides, and cries ofalarm sounded all about the area now, not just on thegrassy slope.Cadderly clutched his weapons and continued his scanfor Dorigen, though he was beginning to understand thatthe missing wizard was the least of their problems.*****Every bugbear strike seemed to be just an inch behindthe scrambling woman, and whatever contorted positionDanica had to put herself into to avoid the attacks, sheseemed quite able to launch her own.One bugbear yelpedin glee, thinking it had finally caught up to its prey, only to catch Danica's foot squarely in the face.Danica sprang to her feet, a bugbear kneeling before her.She envisioned it immediately as a block of stone andslammed her head into the monster's chest.Ribs—adozen, perhaps—snapped apart, but they did so with a sin-gle sickening crack.Then there were two [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]