Stormed Fortress (35 page)

* * *

The citadel
'
s outer defences were decisively overrun. Alliance captains from fifteen allied garrisons strutted on the high ramparts. Already, they prepared
to extend their advance into the trade precinct, laid open before them. The triple gates with their steel grilles were smashed down, the flanking keeps stormed and occupied. If the Sunwheel standard did not yet acknowledge their easy conquest, the oversight was being remedied. The duke
'
s empty flagstaff had been abandoned with the halyard cut down. An eager boy now shinnied up to thread a replacement line.

The contest had yielded no other resistance. Men stood on their hollow victory. No drawn sword was blooded. The handful of injuries had been caused by falls, the penalty of a careless ascent, or raw luck, when an ill-set grapple had failed to support an over-zealous campaigner. Troops milled on the ramparts with no task at hand. The absence of crowing triumph all but stung, while the taintless sunlight rinsed barren stone, and mild winds fanned sweaty faces.

The flush that expected a battle held on: a froth that was granted no action to dissipate, upon tempers unfit to be tamed.

The Alliance captains needed direction to muzzle their manic troops. Handed a town that seemed emptied before them, they knew little of value would be left to loot. If their green recruits swaggered, the veterans viewed the tranquillity with foreboding. The houses with their locked shutters and doors, and the barred gates on the idle craft yards, yet posed them an unknown risk.

Alestron
'
s aggressive resistance was legend. The vindictive citizen who might have stayed mewed up inside; the hidden squad of defiant archers; or the sharp probability that enemy snipers might lurk in sly cunning with cross-bows could not be discounted. Against such surprises, the attackers had profligate numbers to spare: too many restive troops to keep penned without laying claim to their due reward.

Lysaer
s
'
Ilessid
sat his splendid white horse before the mounted lancers holding rear-guard on the field outside. He raised his right arm. His sent beacon speared the heavens and signalled the horns of the priests. The readied columns of mailed infantry tramped forward and funnelled in columns through the flattened gate. Smart companies re-formed atop the secured battlement. Yelling, they poured into the lightless stone stairwells that accessed the ward-rooms and barracks. Other squads formed up at the crenels and lowered their scaling ladders to storm into the vacated streets.

The second wave of the advance surged in to occupy their breached prize.

Pikemen charged down the thoroughfares and flooded the shaded byways. The roar of their incursion echoed off the shop-fronts and emptied houses. Sloped lanes split their forces into small groups and isolated their wary commanders. The eager, dense packs of front-running skirmishers plunged ahead, and the narrow streets hemmed them. They could not swerve when the first mishaps struck; as the waiting, cocked trip-wires unleashed concealed deadfalls, or the crudely set barrier
that
blocked a steep lane, trampled down, freed a rumbling avalanche of propped barrels. Such rolling bludgeons mowed through screaming troops. Staves struck and burst
disgorging chipped stone that smashed bones, and clubbed armoured men senseless.

High over the roof peaks, the eagle
'
s eye view exposed the unravelling disaster: the snares that erupted one after the next in diabolical timing. The ropes that dropped nooses and snapped men by the neck, or spilled hammering cascades of loose tiles; the hammering falls of knife-edged slate that sliced through boiled leather and stabbed flesh, or else viciously blinded. The darkened houses provided no haven. Plank floors caved into root-cellars planted with stakes. Sawn beams in the attics became jerked awry by blocks and tackles nailed to the forced doors. Invaders were crushed under lintels that fell. They died without screaming as cleavers whumped down from rigged traps in the overhead balconies. Wounds took them as quarrels hissed from cocked crossbows, set off as barred shutters were bashed open.

The boisterous shouts changed to a wounded roar as the Alliance forces jammed into bloodied recoil. Rank chaos, and the sprawl of the maimed fouled their efforts to stage a retreat. Reverse movement snarled into the press of the rear-guard, who came on, unaware of disaster. While the gutters ran red, the deadly havoc continued. Horns wailed. Captains harangued to rally their men and dispatch help for the injured, when a revetted wall tumbled into collapse. Rolling logs scythed down parties of rescuers, and pummelled the already prostrate. Screams shrilled over men
'
s furious shouts. Frantic sergeants snatched bugles off their fallen officers and struggled to withdraw their lacerated ranks and regroup in the deserted markets.

The harried troops lifted their groaning casualties. They bunched into knots, driven into a wary rout by trapped ground and treacherous mishap.

Even in escape, they found themselves beset. In the sills of the dormers, nestled amid oiled thatch and board kindling, the clay pots with their crafted witcheries sparked vicious explosions. Flame and clouds of unnatural smoke hazed the soldiers to panicked flight.

Pelting downhill, the confused lost their way. They stumbled and crashed on oiled cobbles, or blundered, yelling, into blind alleys, where Sidir
'
s ugly handiwork waited. Victims died disembowelled, or stabbed through the viscera. They fell, choking on their spilled brains, with shattered skulls crushed to fragments.

In shocked disarray, the Light
'
s war host pulled back, without a s
'
Brydion casualty.

There would be redress.
No life-dedicate officer in his sullied white surcoat harboured doubt. While the survivors consoled their dazed comrades, and bound up the lucklessly broken, that sullen promise sustained them. Their blessed avatar would unleash his god-sent gift. Grim-faced, the troops kept their pride in defeat. For the cold-blooded slaughter laced through the craft quarter, Lysaer could raise a cleansing by Light fit to scour Alestron to the foundations.

Yet by righteous mercy, not before every live soldier marched out, and the litter-borne wounded were packed off to safety beyond the trampled front gate.

A semblance of efficient handling returned as the sea-wind cleared off the thick smoke. Midday glare unveiled horror
'
s wake. Every man limping, every man bloodied, and every one of the prostrate too mangled to walk passed beneath the Blessed Lord
'
s view. His steadfast gaze did not flinch from their suffering. His calm acknowledged, but did not deride their shamed tears. The dead, by strict orders, would stay where they fell. A shattered city would become their monument.

The living who filed by walked assured of Lysaer
'
s punitive judgement. Their suffering would be answered measure for measure, to the last atrocity served upon their hapless flesh by vile tricks fit to snare wild animals. When the rear ranks had passed, and the last, moaning casualty, the avatar sat his white horse. He regarded the rammed maw of Alestron
'
s front gate. Then he spurred his mount face about. His raised fist was offered in lordly salute to honour his standing war host.

His other hand tightened upon his held rein. The rowel at his heel moved and flashed. Gilt in sunlight, he wheeled his stallion again; gold on snow, the wind-ruffled flutter of silk, and the bullion tassels adorning the magnificent animal
'
s caparisons. Lysaer
'
s arm, still upraised, held poised for the strike to enact divine justice.

High above, an eagle
'
s eye, circling, noted the flash of a mirror from inside the keep by the Wyntok Gate. The signal was dispatched by one of four men, doomed as they held to their station. Their unobscured vantage exposed Lysaer
'
s move, which could not be observed from the promontory. The winking flare was caught by the Mathiell Gate
'
s watch, and passed onward the instant before the Light
'
s retribution unleashed.

Then the bolt crackled and burst from the avatar
'
s fist and bloomed into howling vengeance. Hurled power roared out, an unstoppable wave that consumed sky and earth without quarter. Shattering, bright heat and destruction unfurled with the force of a whirlwind. Walls and buildings exploded. Air shrieked with blinding flame. Stone screamed, flared to ruby, and boiled to slag. The conflagration crested and burned every structure that stood in its path.

Farthest up on the rise, the Wyntok keeps torched and crumpled. The insatiable holocaust hissed over the tidal chasm, while the eagle that circled the ripple of fumes beheld what no living mortal had witnessed: the protective response evoked by warded stone, raised to strength by Paravian builders.

Lysaer
'
s raw power clashed against Alestron
'
s innermost bastions. A quartz-bearing granite laid down and fused by the endurance of Name, the conscious grace holding the citadel
'
s heart spanned the veil and invoked the spiralling arc of eternity. The presence that answered knew itself
as itself,
a foundation of being, inviolate.

The howl of light element fashioned to harm was turned in midstrike and deflected. The back-lash whipped skywards. Raging curtains of flame shrieked into a towering ring, slammed against arcane shielding. The pillar knifed towards the zenith, a perfect, drilled vortex, with the citadel left untouched at its centre. The roar of its passage trampled all sound; ate the wind; consumed by thunder the cries of men
'
s voices.

Yet the mirror-flash from the Wyntok Gate, last dispatch from a captain scorched dead at his post
had been sent in time.
The critical signal already unleashed the poised line of s
'
Brydion defence.

Trained troops responded. Trigger lines were cut free as the light flared, a murderous act of drilled timing: from their bedded platforms set high on the cliffs, the massive trebuchets tripped into release. One after the next, their slung missiles were launched, to the ponderous creak of their throwing arms. Load upon load of hurled boulders sliced into the dazzling sheets of the false avatar
'
s unnatural assault. Their whistling passage creased the stressed air, shot into torched light that obscured the view.

The hard-bitten captains howled against pummelling winds, and spurred on their sweating crews.
'
Reload and fire!
'

Even deafened by the unbearable noise; even with their watering eyes masked with wet rag, the trained squads cocked back the huge engines. They shot by rote, well-primed to seize their moment to enact their duke
'
s desperate strategy.

Only the eagle observed the course of the missiles
'
trajectory. Mage-sight sensed the moment, as hissing, flung rock dissolved into spattering magma. The oblivious ranks of the Alliance war host received no second of warning. No moment in which to pull back. The barrage from the promontory burst through the white sear of Lysaer
'
s light and sliced havoc across their drawn lines.

S
'
Brydion were unparalleled masters of warfare. Ruthless practice perfected their tactics. The first impacts struck down their standing marks with diabolical accuracy.

The molten splashes set fire to scaling towers; whumped into the squat frames of the mangonels and shattered the poised rams. Others whipped like a scourge into rows of armed men and dropped them screaming, aflame. Order dissolved. Shocked devotees scattered. The planked frames for the sappers and the piled oil casks for the fire-arrows splintered and ignited, and sowed mayhem. Phalanxes unravelled in panic as their officers fled for their lives. Underfoot and around them, the fallen still thrashed, scalded to agony inside their heated armour: and still, without cease, the impacts hissed down. Death slammed in their wake, stones melted to slag by the intensity of Lysaer
'
s raised offensive. Other loads became fire-balls that streamed poisoned fumes and volcanic cinders.

The false avatar doused the white blast of his gift, but too late. His elite honour guard were already broken, half their number cut down. His priest acolytes pelted and scattered. While the white charger bucked, singed mad by flung slag, its rider was forced to take charge to avoid being tossed from the saddle. If his elemental strike left a vista of ruin, and the smoking shells of wracked buildings, the retort from the citadel did not let up.

The hail of flung boulders continued to fall, ripping down camp tents and tearing through horseflesh and men, and smashing the stragglers who carried the wounded. No retaliation could answer, uphill. The high keeps of the citadel lay beyond range. Red bull banners still streamed from the watchtower.

No rag remained of the Sunwheel blazon strung up in premature triumph. No man strutted, before gutted walls. No horns blew, and no trumpet flourished. Only the cries of the wounded and dying lifted above drifting smoke. For the wreck of their craft precinct, Alestron
'
s defenders exacted their bitter price: a rout in let blood that might force back the lines, but that could never concede them a victory.