The Battle of Ebulon by Shane Porteous Read Free Book Online

men came trotting
over. Malik reached into the cart and handed the first of them a
rather elegant, slender blade. The man took it, started to move on,
and then stopped in his tracks.
    “This is the sword of
Perocles, the first defender of Ebulon,” he said in awe.
    “What's your name?” Malik
replied.
    “Auryn,” the man
said.
    “Well, now it's the sword
of Auryn, Ebulon's last defender.” Before the man had a chance to
reply, Malik turned to Jenner.
    “Make sure all these
weapons are are distributed, then meet me on the wall.”
    Jenner nodded.
    “Make sure to grab a sword
for yourself,” Malik admonished.
    Glancing around, Malik's
gaze fell across Old Ives who was swinging his broken bottle in
slow, obviously non-lethal arcs.
    “Ives,” Malik
said.
    The old man looked around
in confusion for a moment before his gaze came to rest on Malik. He
smiled and came stumbling over.
    “Where did your bottle
cart go?”
    The old man gestured to
the cart which had been pushed into a small alley out of the
way.
    “Perfect,” Malik said. He
took Ives by the elbow and then helped him bring the bottle cart
next to the barrels of oil.
    “I have a job for you
Ives.”
    Ives smiled a toothless
grin.
    “I need you to fill up
these bottles like this,” Malik said as he poured oil from the
barrel into the bottle. “Then I need you to soak a rag and stuff it
into the bottle's mouth.” Malik performed the task and held forth
the bottle with the oil soaked rag dangling out along its
side.
    “Can you do
that?”
    “Sure,” Ives said with a
smile. He then deftly set about the task and had three of the
bottles done in the time it had taken Malik to do one. For the
first time since he had come to Ebulon, Malik was
impressed.
    “Ives,” he said, a touch
of affection entering his voice, “what's your family
name?”
    “Molotov,” Ives
replied.
    “Perfect.”

    ***

    By the time night fell the
numbers guarding the wall had swelled to around five hundred. There
were some grumblings, but Malik was satisfied at the production on
such short notice.
    The grumbling continued
until a single voice gazed over the wall and noticed something
strange in the distance.
    “What's that?”
    Malik squinted his eyes,
but experience revealed more to him than his vision.
    “It's a column of
torches,” he said, and though he didn't put any force behind his
declaration, he knew the words carried along the wall.
    Silence descended, and the
men watched as the approaching column grew larger and
larger.
    Time passed, and Malik
could feel the nerves of the protectors of Ebulon harden to a
razor's edge.
    Finally, a single Orc
emerged from the shadows to stand at the edge of the clearing
before Ebulon's gate. He held a torch and sniffed the air, turning
its body this way and that. Malik sneered at the sight of him, for
he was pig like and brutish. He stood taller than a man, and his
body rippled with muscles that seemed more fitting for a beast of
burden than a creature that walked upright.
    All too soon, another
creature appeared, then another, until the whole clearing was
infested with growling, snarling beasts. They stood beyond the
wooden beams that rose out of the earth and seemed to confuse the
Orcs as to their purpose.
    Malik waited.
    More and more of the
creatures arrived, and the ones from the back began pushing the
front lines forward. There was no logic to the approach, just a
mass of muscle and rusted steel.
    Malik watched it all, and
had just about given up hope that any organization would emerge
from the chaos, when the attacking force suddenly went silent. The
massing throng of bodies separated, and a white skinned beast
stepped forth from the crowd.
    “It's their tribal
leader,” Jenner whispered.
    “Let's get an idea what
we're dealing with,” Malik said to Jenner, throwing him a wink. He
then lifted his voice so that it echoed across the
clearing.
    “Orc army, as you can see
we are heavily fortified here with sufficient forces to