Shaun was stationed at another part of the wall, about two hundred yards from where Thomas’s archers were waiting to be resupplied with arrows. He had a longbow and a quiver of arrows slung over his shoulder and was looking down at the wasteland below to see if there was anything worth shooting at.
In some places, living human and sholog Shadowsoldiers were attacking the walls; pounding it with catapults or flying overhead on the backs of wyverns and hippogriffs. Below Shaun, though, there were only zombies. Milling around aimlessly, occasionally picking up a ladder, leaning it against the wall and climbing it whenever one of their living controllers arrived to give them orders. Shaun remembered when he'd been terrified of the undead horrors, but he'd seen so many of them now that the shock had long since worn off and all he felt now was revulsion. He, and everyone else on the walls, had learned how to deal with them, how to disable them by hacking off their limbs, and had now become so good at it that the only way the creatures were still a threat was if they attacked in a mass of overwhelming numbers. Shaun searched among them for a living zombherd he could shoot at, but he failed to find any and so saved his arrows.
Most of the living enemy, the humans and humanoids, were camped safely beyond bowshot in a vast field of tents that stretched all the way to the horizon. They attacked in shifts, there being enough of them that there wasn't room around the city for them all to attack at once, which meant that the city was continually under attack from enemies freshly rested from a good night's sleep. The defenders, however, being heavily outnumbered, were almost dead on their feet, being forced to fight in an eighteen hours on, six hours off shift pattern, and even while they were off, the noise of battle meant they weren't able to get much rest.
It had been three days since Shaun had gotten any decent sleep, and the former woodsman, now a soldier, was virtually a zombie himself as he gazed out across the devastated countryside, exerting all his willpower to keep his eyes open. The temptation to close his eyes, just for a moment, was almost overpowering, but even as he watched he saw purposeful behaviour down among the enemy. Living Shadowsoldiers had just arrived, or a zombie herder was giving orders to the undead horrors. He called out a warning to his comrades in arms and put an arrow to his bow. "Here they come!"
He rubbed his eyes and slapped himself a couple of times in an attempt to wake himself up. He envied Matthew, who’d breathed poison gas the day before and had been carried off coughing his lungs up. At least he’s getting a bit of rest, he thought. He’s probably lying in one of the temples right now, chatting with the bandage maids, having a great time. He refused to contemplate the possibility that he might be dead.
The bone whistles of the zombherds could be heard above the sounds of battle coming from further along the wall. Under their direction, the zombies stopped milling about and turned to face the city while living Shadowsoldiers formed ranks and files behind them. Then they began marching forward in unison, the zombies shielding the living enemies from the defenders’ arrows. A few arrows were shot anyway, until the Sergeant shouted at them to stop. Over the past few days, they’d worked out that the best way to combat this form of attack was to wait until they were close enough for their archery crackshots to shoot between the zombies and hit the living Shads behind. Anything else was just a waste of arrows.
When they were thirty yards away, the command was given and the arrows flew, bringing down several Shadowsoldiers. The enemy then broke ranks and ran for the wall, to be killed in greater numbers by the less skilled archers, of whom Shaun was one. He looked down through the arrow slit by his feet, where the floor he was standing on overhung the wall below. At first he could only see decomposing body parts, the remains of zombies that had been dismembered by the defenders. He no longer noticed the putrid smell that rose from them.
Then the first Shadowsoldiers appeared and the defenders shot their arrows down at them. Shaun heard cries of jubilation when one of his fellow defenders scored a hit, foul curses when they missed. Shaun shot his own arrow, but it glanced off the wide brimmed bronze helmet the Shadowsoldier was wearing. The Shadowsoldier looked up, and Shaun saw near insanity in the man’s grimy face. The fanaticism of a man who knew he was almost certainly going to die in the attack but who had been promised eternity as a powerful undead being if he fought well enough. Damnation if he didn’t. It was a terrifying face, because it told all who saw it that there would be no reasoning with him. No taking of prisoners, no civilised rules of warfare. Nothing but war, until he was dead or found himself with no more enemies before him.
The Shadowsoldier aimed his own bow up at him and Shaun ducked to the side. The hole was narrow, though, and the enemy arrow failed to find the tiny gap. A moment later the Shadowsoldier fell as another defender's arrow found a gap in his armour and Shaun fit another arrow to his bow.
The base of the wall was solid rock; the lowest of the three corridors running through it being eight feet up. As soon as the howling Shadowsoldiers were close enough to the base of the wall, they raised hundreds of wooden ladders, most of which weren't long enough to reach the top of the wall. Their targets were the arrowslits through which the defenders were shooting at them. As soon as a ladder was in place a Shadowsoldier would scurry up it, usually to die from a defender's arrow. Zombies then dragged his corpse away to be reanimated by the enemy wizards and sent back into battle as a walking corpse.
Occasionally, though, a Shadowsoldier would live long enough to reach the top of his ladder, and then he would throw a tiny, burning ball of wax through the arrow slit. The ball released clouds of poisonous gas as it burned, gas that was confined by the stone walls of the passageway. Shaun heard cries of alarm from further along the wall as the deadly enemy weapons were delivered, and men ran past him, some of them coughing foam from their lungs as they desperately searched for clean air to breathe.
He felt his heart hammering, felt sick, soul destroying fear rising within him. This wasn't the kind of fighting he was used to. Give him enemies to face and room to swing his sword and he would do his part, but how did you fight a cloud of gas? On his finger, his Holy Ring of Courage glowed softly as the power of Samnos gave him the strength to stand his ground while others panicked and ran all around him, but Shaun would have sworn that it was doing nothing at all.
He peered through his arrowslit to the left, and saw the tiny green, pointy eared figure of a goblin peering in at him, one of the burning balls of wax on the end of a stick in his hand. Shaun shot an arrow at him, and heard his high pitched scream as he fell to the ground. A few feet away, though, he heard a more human scream and saw another of the defenders staggering backwards with an arrow sticking out of his eye. One of the arrowboys helped him away towards the nearest tower and the steps back down to the ground, and Shaun looked back to his arrowslit just in time to see another goblin aiming another arrow at him. He ducked, and the arrow flew over his head, bouncing off the wall behind him, and by the time he’d got an arrow fitted to his bow the goblin was gone.
Then he heard the nearby chanting of a magic spell, and realised with horror that a Shadowwizard had come. Shaun searched around frantically and saw him less than twenty yards away, standing in the middle of a field of corpses, preparing to cast an attack spell right in his direction. He shot an arrow, but it merely bounced off a magical shield he’d created in front of him. He shouted a warning and ran away down the corridor, desperate to get out of the spell’s area of effect, and only just made it as a whole section of wall thirty feet long vanished, reduced to subatomic dust blowing away in the wind.
The humanoids scrambled up their ladders with cries of excitement and Sergeant Armun yelled to the surviving defenders to fall back to the towers where massive blocks of stone could be lowered into place, sealing off the breached section of corridor. Shaun obeyed and drew his sword, backing away and holding off the huge sholog he suddenly found facing him. Fortunately the corridor was narrow enough that only one humanoid at a time could face him, making it easy for him to hold it off, but if the Shadowwizard disintegrated another section of corridor behind him, he could find himself with enemies on both sides and that would be the end of him.
Then a voice behind him shouted “Duck!” and Shaun instinctively obeyed, not realising until after he’d done it that he’d made a perfect target of himself for the sholog. He started to stand again, expecting the sholog’s scimitar to cleave his head in two at any moment, but before he could do so a bolt of energy hissed over his head, turning the sholog and half a dozen other humanoids behind him into charred, smoking corpses.
He spun around and saw the wizard Lamaniss standing a few feet behind him, a staff of power in his hand and two wands tucked into his belt. “Stand aside,” he shouted as he swept past him, firing blast after blast from the staff until the corridor had been cleared of enemies. Then he stood in the breached section of corridor and fired several blasts out into the battlefield below, spinning around and sheltering behind his black, rune inscribed cape when an answering blast destroyed the wall behind him and part of the ceiling. Shaun saw a soldier in the corridor above almost fall through the hole and pull his legs up to safety just in time as another blast widened the hole and brought a small hail of rubble down on the wizard’s head.
The battle between the two wizards went on for some time, but Shaun had no time to stand and watch as more humanoids kept climbing their ladders and he was kept busy shooting them with arrows. When he ran out of arrows he drew his sword again and he and the other surviving defenders chopped at them as their heads appeared above floor level, all the while dodging arrows shot up from the battlefield. Shaun felt a pain in his leg, just above the knee, but was too busy to pay it any attention at the time.
The attack finally came to an end, along this stretch of the wall at least, when a unit of the aerial cavalry arrived on the scene, the cavalrymen shooting down at the invaders below from the backs of griffins with wands of fire and enchanted arrows. The enemy had no air cover at the time. Most of their own aerial cavalry, sitting on the backs of wyverns, was on the other side of the city in battle with the city’s flying carpet squadron. The enemy was forced to withdraw, therefore. The Shadowwizard was the first to fall back, followed by the humanoids, but they did so with no dismay or regret. They knew that the attack had taken a heavy toll of the defenders and that they would be back as soon as they'd had time to regroup and re-arm. They jeered and laughed as they withdrew, therefore, brandishing their weapons and making obscene gestures.
The defenders sagged in relief, even though they knew that the respite would be short lived. Fresh enemy troops, having just risen from a full day of rest and relaxation, were probably already on their way, while the defenders were almost dead on their feet.
Lamaniss quickly repaired the gaping hole in the wall with a spell that created a wall of stone, putting arrowslits in it with a stone shaping spell, and then he went off to get a few hours of sleep while his body absorbed more magic from the world around him. Shaun, meanwhile, was walking around picking up enemy arrows to use again when a sudden feeling of weakness reminded him of the wound he’d suffered in his leg. Looking down, he saw that there was a tiny dart in it, one of the small arrows shot by the goblins. Suddenly the pain came all at once, making him gasp, and he had to lean against a wall to avoid falling to the ground. It wasn’t a deep wound. The arrow had gone in at a low angle and emerged again a couple of inches away, but the pain was rapidly fading in a way he didn’t like, to be replaced by a numbing coldness that was spreading up and down his leg. Poison! he realised in sudden fear. I’ve got to find a cleric, quickly!
He staggered along the corridor towards the tower, and when the other soldiers saw that he was in trouble a couple of them came over to help. They half carried him towards the stairs back down to ground level, and when he passed out, they carried him the rest of the way.