Free Bloodstone by Karl Edward Wagner

mercy--the hornets stung us all! We're all dead men!" moaned a Wollendan mercenary, as panic claimed the watchers.
    "No, you're not! Stop your damned yelling before you shake the wall down!" ordered Kane. "Those hornets haven't poisoned the lot of you, or you'd all be flopping off the wall with him! I've seen this before--some freak of their blood makes a few people react like this to any harmless sting! Now get back and let me see to him--there's an off chance I can save him still!"
    Pushing them away, Kane knelt beside the stricken soldier and whipped the dirk from his boot. Swiftly he felt along the spasm-knotted throat below the Adam's apple, sliced through surface tissue, and made a careful incision into the exposed cartilage of the windpipe. "That's putting him out of his misery," commented someone. "Only you missed the big veins."
    Kane gestured impatiently. "I cut open his windpipe so he can suck air. See... his chest is trying to pump air, but his throat's clamped shut with poisoned humors. If I was able to bypass the constriction, he can keep breathing until his breath blows off the poisoned humors, and the airways will reopen. I've seen this work a few times when a man was strangling from something within."
    His men looked on dubiously, still uncertain that the hornets had not doomed them all. Although comatose, the victim's chest heaved more regularly now, and breath could be heard rushing through the wound in an eerie, bubbling rasp.
    Kane watched the object of his handiwork with the inspired interest of experimentation. "Couple of you bring up some of that cane we've been chopping through all day," he ordered. "I think I can get a hollow tube down his windpipe an inch or two maybe. Ought to hold back the constriction and keep the hole open."
    Two of the men disappeared down the stairway. The rest remained grouped around the victim, watching with interest. A few bets began to be offered as to his chances.
    Howls of death and booming croaks rose like gobbling thunder from below and shattered their absorption with their unconscious fellow. Crawling from the cover of the swamp- a horde of Rillyti erupted onto the causeway. Their number may have been a hundred or a thousand--the computation was pointless in view of the handful who stood against them. Rising from the morass wherein they had stealthily gathered force, they swept onto the high ground like an obscene tidal wave of misshapen flesh and gleaming bronze. Their rush was irresistible. Even as those on the wall turned in horror, the second soldier was shredded under a dozen blades; his companion had utterly disappeared. In an instant the bufanoid army had bounded across the intervening space to storm the walls atop which the interlopers made a hopeless stand.
    "We'll try to drive them back!" shouted Kane without conviction. "We've got the obelisk to our backs--that leaves only the one direction they can rush us from! They'll charge the stairway we've cleared for them, or one farther down--either way, that bottlenecks their attack! Bows ready! We'll pick them off as they come up the stairs! Shoot well if you'll live! There's a chance to slaughter enough to discourage their charge!"
    And every man there knew that chance to be infinitesimal, and their prospects should they miraculously break the Rillyti onslaught even bleaker. To stain these stones with batrachian gore might make death sweeter, but no less final.
    The Rillyti threw themselves at the wall, springing up the partly cleared stairway at as frantic a pace as the congested passage would permit. At close range, the archers fired into the foremost ranks. Roars of pain and rage boomed from the swamp creatures' throats as the powerful shafts skewered vital targets with withering accuracy. With each mortal wound, an amphibian pitched writhing into space and tumbled flailing against those behind. Their agonized contortions dislodged the others and checked their rush until the slain could be thrown over the