Chapter three
Of a hillside in HamalAmong the harsh rocks of the Hamalian Mountains of the West a small party of warriors huddled behind boulders or in scrapes painfully dug from the barren and stony soil. There were perhaps twenty of them, twenty soldiers left from the eighty that had formed their pastang. They were tired, thirsty, hungry, bloodshot of eye, striped with wounds, and each one knew that the end could not be far off.
Penning them in, ringing them in a hoop of steel, a horde of the wildmen from the vasty unknown lands beyond the mountains were content for the moment to shoot into the pitiful stronghold, to rush closer in a swirl of noise and action to draw return shots, to drop down — and to wait. Soon the soldiers would have no more shafts to stem the final attack.
This sc
