The Hour of the Howling Basilisk
Precisely at moonrise, the invasion began. The first currachs were pushed into the water by the Painted Men. They paddled furiously, for the river was wide and the current strong. More and more pushed off behind them until the surface was covered with tiny boats.
Once on the other side, the warriors splashed ashore and headed inland while the boatmen turned about to fetch another load. More boats arrived with the long ropes that would bring over the heavy rafts. All was going according to plan.
Hundreds of painted warriors made their way toward Gorgonholm’s city walls. Skilled climbers all, they would storm over this barrier by means of grapnels fixed to rawhide ropes. They would be the first to enter, so the richest pickings would be theirs. Designated groups would seize and open the south and west gates, while others spread death and terror amongst the inhabitants.
Unfortunately for Fergis and his warriors, Lady Fortune hates a well-executed plan. Too much order breeds complacency. A bit of chaos promotes awareness and innovation. She smirked and gave her famous wheel a spin.
The Painted Men were denizens of the deep woods, so none had ever seen a city before. They could not envision the sheer size of Gorgonholm, the enormity of the gates, the loftiness of the towers. Thus, when the walls of the Grayfriar’s monastery loomed before them, they naturally assumed it was their intended target.
The Painted Men were amazed by the carelessness of the laigi—they lacked the sense even to mount a guard on their city. The uproarious laughter and roaring songs from within testified to woeful lack of discipline and fortitude. Such people obviously deserved to die.
The Painted Men scarcely needed their ropes and grapnels to scale the monastery’s modest walls. The first dozen warriors were over in an eyeblink. They opened the gates and started killing. The savage fighters slashed into the unarmed crowd of drunken revelers, the vast majority of which—taken completely by surprise—could do little except stand and be slain.
A few held out for a while, barricading themselves in the stable and holding off the attacks with shovels and pitchforks. The invaders, however, had no time for such nonsense, not when there was such rich booty to be had, so they set a torch to the stable’s thatched roof and let fire do their work for them.
Then the pillaging began. The invaders looted the dead woodsmen of their woolen caps and leather belts. They snatched up clay cups and iron cooking pots, pulled curtains from the windows, fought over spoons and eating knives.
Storming into Ubo’s sleeping chamber, the Painted Men were awestruck by its lavish appointments—the carved escritoire, the canopied bed, the embroidered hangings—all of which had, until recently, belonged to Abbot Festus. The warriors assumed that only a great king could enjoy such opulence. This must be, they reasoned, the private apartment of the Ard Righ of the laigi.
They discovered their mistake soon after when scouts brought word that the city—the real city—was still half a league to the north, that they had captured nothing more than an outlying fortress. They quickly abandoned their fun, coiled their rawhide ropes, and set off to complete their real mission.
The Adventurers arrived at the monastery while the butchery was at its height. The air was rife with the screams of the dying and the victory shouts of the painted invaders. Flames from the burning stable cast weird shadows and lent the scene the red glow of Hell.
They were too late—the invasion had already begun! Their objective was already swarming with enemy warriors. A score stood armed and ready at the gate. Others moved to and fro along the battlements.
Thurmond whispered in Sarah’s ear.
“Illusion spell?”
“Nay, there’s too many of them. And they’re too spread out. It wouldn’t work.”
“Invisibility?”
She had once used such a spell to invade a goblin lair.
“Nay, I’ve not the power.”
There was nothing to do but hunker down in the weeds and wait. Any attempt to enter the monastery now would mean immediate death.
Sarah scanned the night sky with growing anxiety. The Drowned Cockerel was high in its nightly orbit across the celestial sphere. When it reached its zenith, The Howling Basilisk would appear on the eastern horizon. She had very little time.
As they waited, the screams grew louder, the flames higher. More warriors pranced on the monastery’s battlements, bellowing, leaping, shaking their spears. The minutes continued to creep by.
A solitary figure emerged from the dark and addressed the contingent at the gate. He was highly agitated, gesticulating wildly as he pointed in the direction of the city. The entire group disappeared through the gates.
To the Adventurers’ great relief, his arrival brought the pillaging of the monastery to a halt. A horn sounded, causing the raiders to immediately cease their whooping and prancing. They poured from the monastery’s gates and loped off to the north.
Thurmond led the way through the now deserted gates. On the other side, he confronted a scene far worse than Malachai’s heads in jars. Sprawled, gutted, mutilated bodies. Deep puddles of blood. Brains splattered on walls. The nauseating stench of death. Everything appallingly still and silent.
He stepped gingerly over gashed bodies of the woodsmen, fighting down an urge to retch. He heard Sarah’s sharp intake of breath as she followed him through the gates and beheld the hideous destruction. She carried the instrument in its wooden chest. It was heavy enough to require both her hands. Roscoe and Torgul came next, fanning out slightly on both sides, weapons poised, alert for attack.
Malachai’s instrument seemed to be growing heavier and heavier as she moved along. At one point, she had to pause and rest her arms. A few minutes later, she let it sag to the ground.
“Thurmond, could you carry this thing for a while. Something’s making it get heavier and heavier, or maybe I’m growing weaker. I can’t be sure.”
With a word, the young man raised it to his shoulder.
“Not heavy at all, I think it’s you.”
“Then the damned thing is stealing my energy. It knows we’re getting close.”
They passed the still blazing stable. Though the stone walls remained, the interior burned as hot as a blacksmith’s forge and filled the air with an obscene, oily smoke. Beyond that, more bodies, more blood. A man face-down in a watering trough. Another with neither hands nor feet. The dismembered remains of a dog. A shaggy human head impaled on a post.
They found the Black Stone on an earthen mound in the center of the monastery’s grounds, a place of prominence where a statue of Allfather Charon had once stood. A dozen bodies lay stretched out before it, as if Ubo’s doomed followers had fled to it, seeking its succor. The face carved on its surface seemed to bear a self-satisfied smirk.
By now, Sarah’s head was reeling, her breath coming in short, hard gasps.
“I’m sorry to ask this, Thurmond, but would you stay and help me? I’m feeling so drained, I’m going to need you. I think you’ll have to pull me away when the operation is over. Would you, please?”
“Of course, say no more about it.”
Roscoe also stepped forward.
“Torgul and I are here, too. Just tell us what to do.”
“You and Torgul must go out and wait by the gate. There’s nothing more you can do. Just help us afterwards if you can. And Thurmond, don’t get close to it, don’t touch it. I can feel its power even if you can’t. Just stand over there away from it unless I need you.”
Torgul and Roscoe required no further urging—they left for the gate at once. Thurmond retreated until his back was against the wall of an adjacent building. This had, he knew, been Sarah’s job all along. When Malachai gave them the instrument, he had touched her forehead, tasking her with this vital responsibility.
The young witch paused to remove her helmet. Casting spells was difficult enough without having one’s head strapped into an iron bowl. She looked at the sky. The Drowned Cockerel was almost directly overhead, the Howling Basilisk just beginning to appear on the horizon. Its hour had come. It was time to begin.
With the tip of her sword, she traced a line in the sward until the Black Stone was enclosed in an unbroken circle. She added names of power and symbols of warding. She then knelt and unlocked the wooden chest. When opened, a powerful magic barrier would be removed, and she would be far less shielded from the baleful entity that lay within. She whispered a charm against evil and lifted the lid.
Inside, thick black velvet cushioned an oblong object wrapped in heavy woolen cloth. This she unwound, revealing a smoky gray crystal as long as her forearm and as big around as her fist. It had become so extraordinarily weighty that she could barely lift it from the box. Sarah was as ready as she would ever be. She took a deep breath and began the Incantation of Release.
As he waited against the wall, Thurmond kept his gaze riveted to the hell-stone. Suddenly he grew intensely cold, and all vision was blocked by a darkness so complete that it engulfed the light of the moon and stars, and even the furious glare of the burning stable. Through the gloom, he heard Sarah’s voice raised in an inhuman shriek.
He stumbled forward, groping in the dark toward where she must be, not stopping until he tripped and fell over her recumbent form. She clutched at him with desperate, frantic fingers.
“You must finish…carry it…I can’t…can’t. Don’t look into it…don’t….”
Sarah lapsed into a swoon. He tried to rouse her, but failed.
What was he to do? He had no idea. She told him he had to carry it. She obviously meant the instrument—but to where? The only place he could think of was to the Black Stone, which was now becoming visible as light began to seep back into the monastery.
He took up the crystal from where Sarah had dropped it and walked carefully toward the Stone, stopping abruptly when he saw the lines cut in the sward. He knew better than to enter a magic circle. What now?
He looked down at the thing in his arms. What was the other thing Sarah had muttered just before passing out? Don’t look into it.
Too late. A little face stared out from the depths of the crystal, a face so hideous that Thurmond’s knees began to give way. His will oozed away like melting ice, and he felt himself being drawn irresistibly out of himself.
His body reacted without conscious thought. He hurled the crystal at the Black Stone with all his strength. He was vaguely aware of something shattering, a searing blast of heat, and a chthonic stench. Then he was running for the monastery’s gate, sprinting as fast as he could while dragging Sarah by one arm.
He would have dashed straight through the gate, but Roscoe caught him by the arm. He spun about, eyes void of recognition, and jerked his arm in a desperate attempt to get loose. The old Adventurer then clasped him round the neck and held him tight. Even through their armor, Roscoe could feel his young friend’s body quivering with fright. His nose was bleeding, red droplets fell from the end of his chin.
“God’s fangs, laddie, what happened to you? Did you release the demon? Did the instrument work?”
Thurmond remained silent. With desperate fear in his eyes and blood oozing from his nose, he struggled free from his friend’s grip and began once more to pull Sarah through the gates. Roscoe and Torgul could only follow.
The burning of the stable, as tragic as it was for the people trapped inside, was extremely fortuitous for the citizens of Gorgonholm. Alerted by the bright flames, they correctly assumed that the invasion was underway and immediately sounded the alarm. Throughout the city, the cry bills and bows! bills and bows! sent men and women running to their positions on the battlements.
Bartos’s engineers cocked their ballistae and cranked back the throwing arms of their mangonels. Fires were kindled beneath cauldrons of water and oil. Magicians prepared their spells.
Thus, when the Painted Men arrived at the city walls, they found the inhabitants quite ready to receive them. As they charged forward to heave their grapnels, they were struck by the devastating fire of the city’s catapults—great scoops of fist-sized stones from the mangonels, heavy darts from the springalds, ballista bolts so powerful that they could pin one man to another.
As the attacking waves drew closer, archers and crossbowmen delivered a withering barrage from wall, gate, and tower. Illuminated by the bright moonlight, the Painted Men were easy targets, but they pressed forward, regardless of loss, to the edge of the moat.
The city’s moat should have been a formidable barrier, but years of neglect had left it in sad condition. Its banks had broken down in many places, and the filthy green water was only as deep as a man’s knees. Had there been more time, had the city not been so determined to destroy itself prior to the invasion, the civic leaders might have allocated funds for the needed repairs and had it filled with water diverted from the river.
These things, however, had not happened, and the savage invaders, accustomed to splashing through woodlands streams, crossed the barrier without so much as a pause. They reached the base of the wall where they were protected from the terrible arrow storm.
Now the city’s women pelted them with everything they had—stones, heavy wooden timbers, brickbats, chamber pots. When these ran short, they yelled for their children to fetch more. The water and oil, to their dismay, was not yet hot enough to dump.
The Painted Men yowled, bled, and died, but they were many and fearless. Undeterred, they threw their grapnels and climbed up, hand over hand. The men and women atop the walls cut the ropes with axes and thrust spears into their tattooed faces as they appeared above the parapets.
It seemed for a while that the savages would be held off, that they must fail in the face of such determined opposition. But these wilderness-born men were fierce beyond all imagination. They despised death almost as much as they distained the laigi who opposed them. So they climbed on, heedless of their fallen comrades, their one desire being to see the blood of their enemy.
It soon became clear that there were not enough defenders to adequately cover every segment of wall. As soon as they rushed to repel one threat, they would be faced with an attack in a different sector. They fought as hard as they could, but they could not kill the attackers fast enough.
While the fighting raged along the south wall, an especially ferocious band of warriors surged around its end to assault the corner of the west wall. They were the Bad Eyes, a famed warrior society comprised of proven champions. Each sported an enchanted apron endowing the wearer with unparalleled virility and audacity.
The juncture of the southern and western walls was guarded by a mighty tower that gave archers within a clear field of fire along the base of both walls. But unfortunately, there were no archers within—they were all off with Sheriff Brandon and the Trained Bands. A handful of old men had been assigned to the tower, but these had left their posts to join in the defense of the South Gate, where the Keltin attack was centered. Thus, no arrows hindered the approach of the Bad-Eyes warriors.
The adjoining section of west wall was woefully undefended. When the first Bad-Eyes heaved themselves over the parapet, they were confronted by three elderly burghers too lame to do more than shuffle forward to their deaths.
Sadly, these blundering gaffers, in their excitement, neglected to lock the door to the tower, allowing the attackers to access the tower’s interior and the spiral stairs leading to the ground below. Half of the attackers charged down the stairs to assail the South Gate from the inside. The remainder threw open the door to the southern wall walk and took the defenders in the rear.