Table Of ContentGreyhawk Adventures
Book 2
Artifact of Evil
E. Gary Gygax
Chapter 1
Horns bellowed in answer to the screaming trumpets
that sounded from the high towers of the concentric castle.
The starless night was suddenly bright with globes of
glowing light, radiance that shed betraying illumination
behind the lines of besiegers outside the fortress. Men and
machines were moving across the trampled ground toward
the great stone walls. Arrows, quarrels, and streaking
missiles of magical origin flew toward the encircling
soldiers. Some arrows and quarrels lodged in wooden
mantlets or struck into shields, but others sank into flesh.
The magic missiles, blazing fireballs, and crackling bolts
of lightning were far worse. Bodies were tossed high by
roaring blasts; wheeled shelters were split and broken by
the flashing strokes of electricity while metal-clad men-at-
arms behind them became charred corpses. Varicolored
darts sped unerringly into hapless targets who screamed
and died. Torrents of flame erupted from the sky to set
siege towers blazing, giant torches that added a hellish
light to the scene, while raging fires swept over the
advancing lines or made curtains of flame that seared their
flesh.
From these conflagrations sprang huge, manlike
forms. The very flames formed them, and these great
things strode forth from the fires to further wreak death and
destruction on the attacking army. Glowing tentacles
sprouted up from the earth itself and wrapped their fiery
coils around war machines and men. Flesh and blood could
not stand such an inferno. The lines of soldiers quickly
became scattered, fleeing men seeking escape from
flaming death, their ranks decimated, all cohesion gone.
Arrows and buzzing crossbow bolts sought out the
retreating attackers and exacted further toll, while chains of
blazing, blue lightning leaped among them, slaying and
completing the devastation.
The battle was not all one-sided, of course. While the
defenders in the great castle wrought their destruction, the
ringing soldiery had countered with showers of arrows, but
parapet and merlon protected the defenders, and bolt and
shaft most often splintered harmlessly against stone. Rocks
and boulders smashed into bartizan and tower, impacted
wall, or arced over into the courtyard, before fire silenced
catapult and trebuchet. Thick, spearlike missiles flew also,
until, likewise burned, the ballistae that shot them forth
were blazing bonfires. There were a few, pitiful spells cast
too - silvery darts and opalescent rays of cold light, even a
few blasts of fire - but these had slight effect. It seemed
that the spell-casters of the besieging force were unable to
withstand those within the great fortress, for the former had
to work relatively unprotected, while those within were not
so exposed. Abruptly, the scene changed.
Almost simultaneously, the bright spheres of light that
revealed the attacking army went out. In turn, the sky
above the castle was bright, and the place was illuminated
with something that resembled the light from a full moon,
while the area round about its walls was dark, save for
burning equipment and fiery elementals still delivering
death. As all this occurred, drenching bursts of rain issued
forth from directly above the huge fire elementals, while
gentler precipitation fell upon burning wood. The fire
elementals, four in number, hissed and roared their anger
and pain as the pelting drops of water vaporized upon
them, sending forth steaming clouds and cooling the
monsters' flames.
One of these glowing elementals was near the partially
filled moat. A pillar of water suddenly arose, formed itself,
and grappled with its fiery counterpart. Even as the two
giant elementals struggled, a new sort of elemental creature
arose from the rain-soaked earth, this one formed of damp
dirt and stone and clay. Earth and fire contested, as did fire
and water. Men watching from the castle or the
surrounding camp of the besiegers saw the blazing fire
elementals' flames become smothered and wink out.
Bass twangs and thumps came from the encircling
force, and arcing boulders and massive spears again rained
upon the curtain walls, the towers, and the castle courtyard
and buildings inside it. The radiance illuminating the
fortress was extinguished but almost immediately replaced
by globes of light such as those that lit the scenes behind
the attacking forces. Some hung above the place; others
seemed to emanate from turret top, bartizan, and tower.
The contesting spell-casters seemed to be playing a game,
for globes of utter darkness would intermingle with the
bright spheres and neutralize each other, while yet fresh
lights would spring up elsewhere.
As this all occurred, the defenders on wall and tower
were plain to see, and sniping fire from longbow and heavy
crossbow began to score successes. Here and there, men
dropped after suddenly sprouting a clothyard shaft or the
feathers of a thumb-thick crossbow bolt.
The rumbling and murmur of advancing troops were
again discernible to the castle's defenders. Despite the
terrible punishment dealt to their initial foray, the troops
were again advancing to storm the walls. Somehow, the
soldiers had been rallied, reinforced, and sent back.
Trumpet and drum sounded within the fortress, calling
every possible defender to man the walls for a last
defensive effort. Their magic-users and clerics had spent
their powers on the destruction of the first attack; the fresh
assault would have to rely on flesh and blood, armor and
weapon, to hurl the attackers back from the stronghold.
The castle's own, smaller versions of the attackers' war
machines were put into play. Springnal and catapult began
working while rocks were readied, cauldrons of burning
charcoal and bubbling oil swung out over machicolated
battlements, and ram-catchers assembled.
A column assembled in the outer bailey. The great
gates of the fortress were opened, the iron portcullis
winched up, and the oaken drawbridge let drop with a
clatter and a bang. Out into the pale morning came a
swarm of hulking, mailed ogres brandishing huge morning
stars, six-foot swords, and other massive weapons.
With them were even more malign creatures - a score
or more of hideous trolls, monsters needing no weapons
save their iron-hard talons and teeth. Their stooped,
shambling gait made the trolls seem smaller than the
thicker ogres, but occasionally one would stiffen and stand
upright to peer ahead. Then their height, more than half
again man-size, and a full head taller than their ugly
companions, could be seen. Huge trolls and great ogres,
nearly a hundred in total, issued forth, crossed the oak of
the drawbridge, and fanned out. These were the terrible
advance guard of the castle's sally.
More trumpets blared, and behind the advance guard
came a force of gnolls - hyena-faced things, seven feet tall,
and armed and armored as men would be. Their great bows
taut, bardiches and glaives ready, they came in hundreds,
barking and giggling as they advanced, lusting for the feast
of battle and flesh to come. If the castle was besieged, it by
no means felt itself at the mercy of the army doing so.
"At last. The filth from below is vomited forth!" Thus
spoke the general commanding the ringing host. As he said
this, he waved his arm in a signal, and the echoing rumble
of kettle drums filled the morning.
Bristling phalanxes of pikemen, supported by mailed
cavalry, moved to meet the ogres and gnolls, while archers
and crossbowmen began to direct a flaming volley of
burning missiles toward the knots of rampaging trolls. The
field before the castle gate was quickly swirled with men
and humanoids locked in mortal combat. Champions and
spell-casters of the attacking army were now engaging the
trolls, immune as they were to most harm that ordinary folk
could cause. These contests were terrible things indeed,
and many men fell before the onrushing green monsters.
This pleased the crimson-robed priests who observed the
melee from the castle's highest tower. The bright light of
the sun climbing higher into the heavens, however, also
revealed a curious fact to these observers. Where ranks of
charred corpses and slain bodies should have been, the
commanders of the fortress saw only slight evidence of the
slaughter which had been wrought by spells and elementals
before daylight. Instead of soldiers slain in windrows and
devastated by firestorms, there were but scores of dead, not
hundreds or thousands.
"This is wrong! Where are the ruins of the siege
towers and war machines?" demanded one of the greater of
their number.
Priests whose vestments were trimmed in fiery orange
or tawny shades, as opposed to the bright gold work on the
speaker's gown, dared make no answer; but one in deep red
and bright crimson replied, "Where indeed?" and, turning
to the huddle of his lessers, commanded one of their
number haughtily. "Go!" he ordered. "Request that the
others hasten here with all speed!"
One of the clerics scurried off, while the remainder of
the group again turned their scrutiny to the fighting below.
The first charge had pushed the attacking forces backward
in a great bow, but their lines of armored men and horses
had not broken. Now it was the turn of the sallying
humanoids and monsters to be forced away, back toward
the castle's barbican and massive gatehouse. The four
companies of hyenalike gnolls were now hard pressed by
infantry, while skirmishing crossbowmen sent humming
quarrels into the humanoid bands' flanks. The ogres too
were being slowly decimated, the survivors shoved back by
pike and pole arm, the towering creatures subject to well-
aimed shafts and bolts from rear-rank fighters. True, both
gnolls and ogres had exacted a great price upon the
attacking soldiers, but the observers in the castle could see
it was a mere pinprick compared to the total force that
ringed the beleaguered stronghold.
Of the three sorts of creatures that formed the
counterattacking force, the twenty or so trolls were fewest
in number and most effective in their devastation. Ten
times their number had fallen to them before the first troll
went down under burning arrows and hacking blades. Its
sundered pieces attempted to rejoin themselves even as the
loathsome monster began regenerating its own wounded
and scorched flesh. A squad of sappers came suddenly to
the area where its throes marked the situation, carrying
with them pots of smoldering coals. Soon smoke and flame
came from their efforts, and the greasy, black plumes
marked the final end of one after another of these oil-
soaked, dismembered limbs. Others of the trolls went to
quicker deaths, struck by lesser magic-users mere evokers
and conjurers, but armed with slim wands that spat missiles
of magical sort and flame as well. It was evident that they
had been saved for just such a purpose, and they now went
about their duties with efficient action, shielded by fighting
men and even clerics in brown or green garments.
The surviving humanoids fell back first, their retreat
toward the castle quickly becoming a panicked route as the
men pressed them. With them went the ogres, now
interested only in saving themselves from sharp pike and
broad-headed arrow. The drawbridge was hauled rapidly
up, however, to shut fast the gate, and gnolls and ogres
alike had no recourse but to turn and fight to the death,
having been abandoned to their fate by the heartless
commanders of the castle.
The trolls, too stupid to fear the inevitable, also fought
until burned to vile ashes or reduced to a welter of stinking
jelly by showers of acid that caused their crawling flesh to
smolder and run. The last of this transpired under the gaze
of the crimson-clad watchers, augmented now by another
handful of men.
"We must get relief soon, or the castle falls!" said the
leader of these clerics. "Where is Horval Crook-finger?"
A tall, thin man, clad in a robe of purple so dark that
only the brilliance of the sun revealed its true shade,
stepped forward at the summons and bowed, his hand held
over the embroidered red trigon on his chest.
"Your command, Elder Brother?" the man asked
meekly.
"You fools were duped by mere phantasms, false
visions!" roared the commander. "The entire dweomer of
our assembled spell-casters was spent on the destruction of
illusions! Why did no one call me forth?"
The magic-user standing before the enraged
commander of the castle's garrison made no answer, nor
did any of the others. Who dared remind the speaker that
he himself had commanded absolute privacy? None among
the assemblage would brave him when he was lost in
poppy juice and lotus smoke.
"Fools!" he repeated, and then took another long look
at the tableaux beneath. The last of the trolls was a
writhing bonfire, the gnolls and ogres were trampled and
dead, and the attackers were storming the gate's outworks,
ladders against barbican.
"Go, Crook-finger! Use scrying to alert those ores that
they must leave off bickering with the Ho-jebli. Both must
