Firehurler (Twinborn Trilogy) (67 page)

Fool. You did it to yourself again. At least this
time, you did not burn yourself unconscious
.

Brannis gritted his teeth in frustration, wishing his
friend had learned better control over his power, or was at least more
judicious with it.

“Catapults, all fire!” Brannis shouted back to the
siege crews.

The infantry was in range, and he could not let the
opportunity pass as he checked on whether Iridan would be in any condition to
rejoin the battle.

Crrrk … Thgggthggthgg.

The catapults loosed sacks full of gravel from the
mines, left open such that the gravel lofted free as the sacks arced through
the air. The crews were supplied with countless sacks of the stuff, a waste
product that was built up and eventually hauled out of the city to be dumped.
Brannis had just ordered the process be carried out by catapult and had
designated the goblin army as the dumping ground. Much of the gravel was
landing on the lower portion of the road as well, possibly impeding the goblin
advance.

As Brannis looked to the west, he saw an absolute sea
of goblins. More and more emerged from the fog, which had persisted all the way
to sunset. The estimates from the survivors of Illard’s Glen had been woefully
inaccurate. There were likely already sixty thousand goblins upon the plain,
and who knew how many more yet to emerge. Yet even with the walls in ruins, the
city was defensible, and the humans still held advantages in reach and strength
when the battle was joined in hand combat.

“We have waited out their bombardment. We have forced
them to face us. Now is our chance to drive them back and throw them off the
mountain as they try to take it from us!” Brannis shouted, trying to steel the
courage of men who had never seen real combat.

He glanced down the lines, spearmen four deep, archers
still picking their shots as the dwindling pack of wolf riders grew closer.
None had broken yet and fled in the face of the enemy. None were crying—at
least audibly—or talking of retreat, but there were dark looks among those who
stood with Brannis; haunted eyes, muttered imprecations, and a few seemed to be
catatonic. They might feign bravery well, but Brannis mistrusted them until he
saw whether they held against the first charge.

When the wolves were nearly upon them, Brannis took up
a position at the fore. Avalanche in hand, he stood out among the grim and
dreary mail of soldiers and unarmored winter clothing worn by the militia. The
sorcerers had the sense to dress in black for battle, and the knights’ bright
steel and green-on-black livery shone, but Brannis Solaran looked every bit the
commander of an imperial army in his gold-and-quicksilver armor, the polished
surfaces reflecting the last moments of sunlight.

The wolves came across the rocky ruin at the approach
to the wall, fanning out and making a break for the interior of the city.
Wolves as large as mules danced like mountain goats across the uneven terrain,
few even missing a step as they leaped and sprang from boulder to flat spot to
fallen masonry. The growls and snarls as their prey stood waiting were
fearsome, and the wolves fearless, and they plowed heedless into the waiting
line of spears, trained to trust in their frilled helms and leather armor to
keep death from finding them before they dealt it.

A golden statue amid tin soldiers, Brannis was sought
out by several wolf riders eager for the kill of an obviously important
commander. The goblin spears deflected harmlessly off his armor as they charged
him, not even connecting with enough force to rock him backward, as Rashan’s
demonstration had. Avalanche swept through the air like one of the
goblin-swords the Kelvie expedition had brought, but unlike those wisps of
steel, his enchanted blade moved with the force of a mountain behind it.
Neither wolf, nor armor, nor goblin rider impeded its path in the slightest.
Brannis could only even tell he was finding his target by the sound and the
mess. Wolves were cloven in twain, strikes that hit flat-bladed sprayed buckets
of blood and gore across the crushed rock hilltop they defended. Men who had
previously bunched close to defend their commander now offered him wide space.
Brannis retreated only against the onslaught of carrion that was piling in
front of him.

All down the wall, the defenders held their ground.
The wolf riders were brave and foolhardy, seeking out the well-armored knights
in search of trophies rather than probe for weakness among the lines. But their
charge had bought time for the infantry behind them. Unlike their mounted
comrades, the infantry were climbing the rock faces and heading directly up the
side of the mountain toward the fortifications.

Brannis and the rest of the Kadrin defenders had no
way to know that the whole of the goblin infantry wore special climbing gear.
Crude brass claws, cast by the score in the goblin forges, were strapped to the
backs of their hands, and toothy spikes dug down from the tips of their boots,
giving them bite into the loose rock of the mountain bottom, and—should they
reach that far—the masonry pile higher up. Thus they surprised the defenders
with the speed at which they ascended, making time up the mountainside quicker
than even the wolves had, running fast but needing to follow the road until
nearly at the top. The goblins were light, fragile creatures, but what there
was of them was mostly muscle and sinew. They were able to pull their own
weight up easily as they climbed, and it fatigued them little. Their short,
razor-sharp spears could even be clutched in one hand while the claw strapped
to its back held their grip on the rocks.

Brannis saw it and knew there was going to be a
slaughter the likes of which he had never witnessed. The goblins knew that many
of them, perhaps even most of them, had little chance of surviving the earliest
phase of the assault, but they knew that their brethren would follow behind,
and trusted that the humans would wear down and eventually succumb. Brannis
could only hope that they were wrong, and that, with magic and stamina, they
could withstand the onslaught.

RrrrrrrrrrrOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAR!

The battlefield stilled as the goblins paused in their
ascent. Goblin and human alike turned to find the source of the great bellow
that sundered the air and shook the ground beneath them. Lesser slopes to the
north and south of Raynesdark, with no wards to stop them, saw avalanches begin
due to the noise. The fog over the goblin campsite dissipated rapidly as a rush
of massive wings flapping created a tempest near the Neverthaw River, where it
seemed that the command tents were pitched.

“KNEEL DOWN, HUMANS, AND FACE YOUR DOOM. I AM
JADEFIRE, GODDESS OF THESE, MY LOYAL FOLLOWERS, AND YOU DIE AT MY COMMAND!” a
mammoth dragon bellowed in excellent Kadrin, going so far as to use the name
that humans knew her by, or at least once did some centuries past.

With a great beating of wings, the monstrous dragon
took to the air. The massive silhouette as she ascended was awe-inspiring, even
at the great distance separating the defenders from her. Scale was difficult to
judge, but it was so far away … and still looked so large …

“Fall back! Take up defenses of the streets. Use the
houses. Keep the houses between you and the dragon’s fire,” Brannis ordered.

His troops needed little prompting to abandon the wall
and the scant cover it would offer against an aerial assault. His challenge
would be to get them to stop and fight rather than head for the undercity.

Iridan, still weak enough that he needed help being
moved, fumbled inside his tunic for the stone Rashan had given him, fighting
against the two soldiers who had lifted him up and carried him from where he
had taken respite at the base of one of the fallen towers.

*
* * * * * * *

Juliana heard the dragon’s roar and thought that the
wall she had just finished sabotaging was about to give way beneath her. The
wall held, but just barely. Its sturdy stone construction was enough, even
without the aid of the wards, that it held the advance of the ice against the
disruption cause by Jadefire’s bellow. She watched as the dragon took wing, and
two hints were quite enough for her to decide to take leave of her vantage.

She looked down from the wall to the city streets far
below. The wall rose a hundred and more feet above the top of the cliff wall,
which itself stood forty feet from the level ground of the overcity. The gate to
the undercity was directly beneath her, and there was no provision for getting
from where she was to where she was going.

She jumped.

Her unbound hair streaked behind her as she plummeted,
a pennant of reddish-gold announcing her own charge toward the ground. The
frigid air was both exhilarating and numbingly cold at the same time and she
relished it. To all appearances, she slammed into the cobblestone path to the
undercity with force enough to splatter her body like the unfortunate wolves
that crossed the path of Brannis’s sword. Instead she spiked down onto the
street on one knee, with a hand out to steady herself. Magic had cushioned her
fall, of course, a spell she knew well enough to trust to it mid fall and
silently cast.

She considered joining the fighting, but thought
better of it.
I am no warlock. I can keep my head on my own shoulders if it
comes to a fight, but in a war, I am not prepared to stand out there amid the
chaos and trust my magic to keep me alive.

Instead Juliana contented herself to loiter in the
gate area. She was still undercover in case the avalanche wall gave way, but
had a view of the streets of Raynesdark and enough of a view to know if the
army was being routed or not. She would also be able to hear any further
proclamations from the dragon.

*
* * * * * * *

“If any portion of the claim is called into question,
you have but to request my presence and I will appear with all haste,” the
knight spoke.

He wore no armor and carried no sword within the
emperor’s audience chamber. Sir Kaelar Montagu wore his family’s coat of arms
upon his tabard, green swords crossed facing north and west, upon a white
shield, and the fashions of a court dandy about the rest of him. Wide sleeves,
green hose, and pointed shoes that turned up slightly at the tip. Rashan was
disgusted by him.

Sir Kaelar had just spent half the morning delivering
the claim of his lord’s cousin, sired by Emperor Dharus’s uncle Maolen. They
had brought birth records, accounts of interviews with the lord’s staff, the
travel itinerary of the emperor’s uncle on and around the time of the
conception, and sketches drawn by some artist that Lord Avewind sponsored that
purported to be both hauntingly lifelike and clearly show the resemblance to
the boy’s supposed sire.

Rashan had stood next to the emperor’s throne, a
position he had attended on more court audiences than he cared to count. As
regent, he felt it unseemly to take his seat upon the vacant throne,
particularly as he heard one among the dozens of claims that were beginning to
flow in from across the Empire. He was frankly astonished at the lengths the
nobles went to document and verify their ruttings, both legitimate and
otherwise. Astonished and sickened. They took no pride in their breeding,
leaving to chance what sorts of nobles they ended up with as the generations
passed, to say nothing of the emperors it engendered, when tragedies such as
this occurred.

The knight’s claim on his master’s behalf was at least
well presented, if not wholesome and reassuring. Rashan suspected that there
may have been dark dealings in the deaths of those who may have been able to
present more legitimate claims. The Inner Circle had likely been taking its
time and slowly culling the royal line out of the nobility, but he could prove
nothing. His general calling for all claims on the throne was trouble from the
start, as he knew it would be. He promised that no claimant should face
retribution for bringing their case, however tangential, so long as they made
no false representations to him. He also promised protection of all claimants,
in the form of a
personal
investigation of any strange deaths.

An army arriving at one’s castle gate and demanding to
conduct an investigation was wholly anathema to a noble house. It affronted
their dignity and took the shine from their reputation, guilty or not, and
there was nothing to be done about it save meeting the army in the field. A
warlock arriving at one’s castle gate and demanding to conduct an investigation
was, if possible, less welcome. Whereas armies tended to be subject to
misdirection, bribery and a rather unfortunate reputation for rigid thinking,
warlocks were notoriously difficult to persuade to any path but the one they
had chosen, and saw through ruses too often and too easily.

“Very well, Sir Kaelar, I accept your claim as truth
until such time—”

“DRAGO—”
a
voice in Rashan’s head screamed, interrupting his thoughts, before being
abruptly cut off.

Curse that shoddy stone. I ought to have put more time
into its crafting.

“—as I have reason to believe otherwise,” Rashan
finished his previous sentence after a brief hesitation. “I am afraid I must
attend to an urgent military matter. I will hold audience in three days’ time.”
Rashan figured that would be enough time to deal with whatever had befallen at
Raynesdark.