"Stan Nicholls - Orcs First Blood 03 - Warriors Of The Tempest" - читать интересную книгу автора (Nicholls Stan)

Coilla ran a palm over her cheek, wiping blood. тАШThought so.'
Their opponents were working themselves up for the final assault.
At Coilla's shoulder, Alfray said, 'We got a good few.'
'Not enough,' Haskeer responded gruffly.
In undertones, some of the grunts were calling on orc deities to guide their blades. Or to make their deaths
suitably heroic and swift. Coilla suspected the humans were appealing to their own god in similar vein.
The custodians began advancing.
There was a keening sound in the air. A fast moving shadow passed over the Wolverines. They looked up and
saw something like a swarm of elongated insects sweeping across the sky. The dark cloud had already
reached its apex and was curving down towards the enemy.
It fell upon them wrathfully. The forefront of the custodian line was riddled with lethal bolts. They bored into
upturned faces and chests, arms and thighs. Their velocity took them through the paltry defences of helmets
and visors. Shields could have been made of paper for all the good they did. Peppered with numerous shafts,
men and horses succumbed wholesale in a struggling, bloodied mass.
A large force was riding, hell-bent, from the direction of the forest, and even as the band spied them they
unleashed another deadly cloud The arrows' great arching path was well above the Wolverines, yet still they
instinctively ducked. Once more death rained mercilessly on the heads of the humans, bringing further
mayhem and chaos.
As their allies approached, the band began to make them out.
Squinting at the reinforcements, eyes shaded with a hand, Alfray exclaimed, 'Keppatawn's clan!'
Jup nodded. 'And well timed.'
The small army of centaurs at least equalled the humans in strength of numbers. And they would reach the
fray in minutes.
'Who's at their head?' Alfray wondered.
Knowing him to be lame, the band didn't expect Keppatawn himself to be leading the offensive.
'Looks like Gelorak,' Jup reported.
The young centaur's muscular physique and distinctive flowing chestnut mane were now plain to see.
Haskeer finished wrapping a piece of dirty cloth around his wound. 'Why talk when there's killing undone?' he
grumbled.
'Too right,' Coilla agreed, breaking ranks.'At the bastards!'
They weren't slow in following her lead.
The custodians were in bedlam from the arrow blizzard, their dead and maimed littering the plain. Loose
horses and walking wounded added to the anarchy, and those custodians still mounted milled in a
directionless daze. They were easy pickings for a vengeful warband.
No sooner had the orcs waded in and commenced their slaughter than they were joined by the troop of
centaurs. With clubs, spears, short bows and crooked blades they assured the rout. The rump of the
cus-todian force soon turned and fled, chased off by a knot of fleet-footed centaurs.
Exhausted, battle-grimed, Coilla surveyed the aftermath. The aux-iliary chief of the Drogan clan trotted to her
side and sheathed his sword. He pawed the ground a couple of times.
'Thanks, Gelorak,' she said.
'Our pleasure. We have no need of such unwanted guests.' He gave a flick of his plaited tail. 'Who were they?'
'Just a bunch of humans serving their god of love.'
He smiled wryly, then asked, 'How went your journey to Scarrock?'
'Well and . . . not so well.'
Gelorak cast his eye over the warband. 'I do not see Stryke.'
'No,' Coilla replied softly. 'No, you don't.'
She stared at the darkening sky and tried to hold back her despair.

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