Veltan shrugged. ‘The Vlagh doesn’t think the way we do, Keselo,’ he replied. ‘It’ll do whatever’s necessary to get what it wants. Then too, there’s never really been enough food out in the Wasteland to feed enough servants to achieve the Vlagh’s ultimate goal. When you get right down to it, that might just be what this war’s all about.’
‘Gunda!’ Andar shouted from the top of a nearby tower. ‘Look on past the first rank of enemy soldiers. I think we’ve got an entirely different variety of enemies coming this way.’
Gunda peered through the dust rising from the lower end of the slope. At first he didn’t see anything at all unusual, but then his eyes caught a peculiar movement low to the ground. Then a brief gust of wind cleared the air. ‘Turtles?’ he said. ‘Why on earth would the Vlagh want turtles?’
‘They are about ten feet across, Gunda,’ Padan noted, ‘and if I’m counting right each one of them has eight legs.’
‘Spiders?’ Gunda demanded. ‘Part turtle and part spider? That doesn’t make any sense at all.’
‘I’m afraid it does, Gunda,’ Veltan disagreed. ‘I think the Vlagh just stole a very good idea from our Trogite friends.’ He reached out and tapped Gunda’s metal breastplate. ‘This idea, actually,’ he said. ‘Now the Vlagh has soldiers that wear armor.’
‘But why did it use spiders instead of reptiles?’ Padan demanded.
Veltan shrugged. ‘Spiders can move faster, and they can spin webs.’ He frowned. ‘I’m not entirely certain about this,’ he admitted, ‘but I think spider venom is even more deadly than reptile venom.’
‘I think we’re in a lot of trouble,’ Padan said.
The larger variety of snake-men made a few probing attacks along the outermost breast-works, but fell back as the sun settled down towards the western horizon, and Commander Narasan sent out word that it was time for a conference.
‘Definitely time,’ Gunda muttered to himself as he went down the stairs on the backside of his wall to join the others.
‘These ones are at least twice as large as those we encountered in the ravine,’ Keselo reported, ‘but it didn’t seem to me that they were quite as quick or agile.’
‘Bigger has always been clumsier,’ Rabbit suggested. ‘I learned that fairly early in life.’
‘It’s possible - even probable - that this is the first hatch of these larger snake-men,’ Veltan disagreed. ‘It’s going to take them several generations to adjust to their altered size.’
‘Doesn’t that suggest that we’ll win this war before they’ve learned how to deal with their new size?’ Padan asked.
‘I wouldn’t make any large wagers on that, my friend,’ Gunda disagreed. ‘If what happened in the ravine is any indication of what they’re capable of, they might just surprise us, and when you’re fighting things with poisonous fangs, “surprise” usually means dead.’
‘Did any of those larger ones come anywhere near your breastworks, Keselo?’ Narasan asked.
‘No, sir,’ Keselo replied. ‘It seemed to me that all they were doing was watching.’
‘Were you able to get any idea of just how thick their shells are?’ Red-Beard asked.
‘Not really,’ Keselo admitted. ‘They were holding back.’
‘An arrow with an iron tip might penetrate those shells, but I don’t know that I’d want to bet my life on that.’
‘We might want to give some thought to catapults, Commander,’ Andar suggested. ‘If “sharp” won’t do the job on those beasts, then “heavy” leaps to mind.’
‘It has some possibilities, sir,’ Brigadier Danal agreed. ‘A fifty-pound rock would almost certainly shatter those shells, wouldn’t you say?’
‘It’s worth a try, I suppose,’ Narasan agreed.
Then Sorgan Hook-Beak’s younger cousin Torl joined them near the fire.
‘How are things going on down south,’ Veltan asked.
‘Well,’ Torl replied a bit dubiously, ‘we burned all the ships the Trogs had anchored down there, but I’m not sure that did us all that much good. There were some very strange things going on down there.’
‘Why don’t you start at the beginning, Captain Torl?’ Narasan suggested.
Torl shrugged. ‘We burned every one of their ships, but it didn’t mean a thing to them. They’d already left the region by the time we got there.’
‘Left?’ Gunda exclaimed. ‘Where did they go?’
‘I’d say that they’re coming here,’ Torl replied.
‘Do you suppose you could start from the beginning, Captain?’ Narasan asked again.
Torl described a number of peculiar events down on the south coast, and what he called a ‘fairy tale’ was the most peculiar. Gunda couldn’t fully understand what Torl was describing, but Narasan seemed to think that it might be important, so he took Torl on down to where Veltan and his sister were staying. Gunda shrugged. He had other things on his mind just then.
There were several hundred of the enemy bug-bats tangled up in Rabbit’s fish-nets the next morning. Longbow had told them that the flying enemies were in all probability serving only as scouts, but they were still venomous, and that made Gunda go cold all over. He sent a crew of his men armed with long, venom-tipped spears down along the wall to dispatch the helplessly fluttering creatures and another crew wearing thick leather gloves to untangle the dead enemy scouts from the nets and then to dispose of them.
The larger variety of the enemies Sorgan Hook-Beak had called ‘the snake-men’ made a few very tentative approaches to the breastworks on down the slope, but there was nothing even remotely resembling an all-out attack as yet. The huge ones with turtle-shell breastplates stayed quite some distance to the rear, which didn’t bother Gunda all that much, since the crews that he’d put to work building catapults weren’t quite ready yet.
It was about noon when the bleak-faced archer Longbow came up across the grassy basin to speak with Commander Narasan and Veltan. Gunda went on down the stairs at the rear of his wall to join the small group that met with the archer.
‘Are those church soldiers still coming up through those gullies?’ Padan asked.
‘I think they’ve pretty much given up on the gullies,’ Longbow replied. ‘The shepherds showed us every single route that anybody could possibly follow to reach this basin, and there were archers covering them all. It took those soldiers quite some time to realize that they wouldn’t stay alive if they tried to reach the top through those passes, so now they’ve all gathered at the foot of the waterfall.’