The RuneLords (65 page)

The hedge wizard muttered and cursed.

The flameweavers' magics took more than the mere light from heaven. For minutes now, the air had been growing colder. Tempest saw that a rime of frost began to cover the castle walls, and the haft of the warhammer in his hand had gradually become stinging cold.

Frost formed along the ground--heaviest near the bonfire, and fanning out over the fields and all around the army, as if this otherworldly fire drew heat, rather than gave it off. The flameweavers were drawing the energy from the fire so efficiently now that Tempest imagined that even he could have stood in those emerald flames, walked through them unburned.

Tempest's teeth chattered. It seemed that the very heat of his body was beginning to be sucked from him. Indeed, he could see the salamanders more clearly in the flames now--ethereal beings with tails of flame, leaping and dancing about, staring at the men on the castle walls.

"Beware the salamander's eyes. Don't look into the flames!" the hedge wizard began to shout. Tempest recognized the danger. For when his eyes met those pinpricks of flame that formed the orbs of a salamander, though for only a flickering instant, the salamander grew more solid in form while Tempest's blood ran all the colder. Men averted their gaze, studied the Frowth giants or the mastiffs or the Invincibles in Raj Ahten's army--anything but the salamanders.

In the foreboding gloom, the bonfire grew surreal--became a green flaming world of its own, its walls decorated in fierce runes, the creatures at its heart growing in power with each passing moment.

The clouds above had become so cold that a thunderous hail now began to fall lightly, bouncing like gravel from the battlements, pinging against the helms and armor of the castle's defenders.

Tempest felt frightened to the core of his soul. He did not know what the flameweavers might try. Would they simply suck the life heat from the men on the walls? Or would they send gouts of fire lancing into the ranks? Or did they have some scheme that was even more nefarious?

As if to answer his question, one flameweaver suddenly stopped his gyrations among the heart of the emerald flames. For a long moment, ropes of green energy coiled from the skies, falling into each of his hands. Now, the skies all around grew blacker than the darkest night. Distantly, thunder grumbled, yet if lightning flashed, Tempest never saw it.

In that moment, it seemed as if all time, all sound, suddenly stilled in expectation.

Then the flameweaver compacted the energy in his hand, as if he were forming a snowball, and hurled a green bolt of fire toward the castle walls. Immediately the flameweaver dropped back, as if spent.

The green bolt exploded into the drawbridge with a sound of thunder, as if answering the heavens. The castle rattled under the impact, and Tempest grasped a merlon for support. The ancient earth spells that bound the oak planks and stone of the bridge were supposed to resist fire. Even the touch of the elemental some fifteen minutes earlier had only barely charred the wood of the bridge.

But never was anything made to resist an accursed fire like this. The green flames smote the iron crossbars on the bridge, then raced up the metal, burning the iron with a fierce light, racing up the chains that held the drawbridge closed. Wondrously, the flames did not scorch the wooden planks of the bridge, did not burn the stone casements around it. Instead, they ate only the iron, burned only iron.

In horror, Cedrick Tempest imagined how the touch of that flame would have affected an armored warrior.

With a creaking sound, the bridge fell open.

Tempest shouted, ordering defenders down from the walls, to bolster the troops behind the ruined bridge. Three hundred knights were down in the bailey, mounted on warhorses, ready to issue out to attack if needed. But carts and barrels were also crowding the bailey, forming a barricade that would not be enough. In the hail and darkness, men struggled for better positions. Some knights were shouting, wanting to charge out now, attack while they might be of use. Other defenders on the ground sought to further barricade the gates. Warhorses were whinnying and kicking, and more than one knight fell from his charger and was trampled.

Overhead, the whole sky went black again while ropes of twisted energy began to feed a second flameweaver. A long minute later, the flameweaver hurled a great ball of green flames at the east tower, which overlooked the drawbridge.

Instantly the flames raced in a circle all about the base of the tower, so that for a moment it looked like a green ring upon a stone finger. But these flames were alive, seeking entry. They seemed to squirm through archery slots and up the kill holes. They flickered and licked the dull stone, limning the mortar that sealed the tower closed, then raced into windows. If anything, Tempest realized with mounting horror, this flameweaver's spell was more powerful than the first's.

What happened next, Cedrick Tempest did not want to know, yet he could not help but watch.

The stones of the tower seemed to wail in pain, and a rush of wind and light escaped all the holes in the tower from ground to rooftop as every piece of wooden planking or shield, as every wool tapestry, as every scrap of hide and hair and cloth on every man in that tower all simultaneously burst into flames.

Fierce lights raged from the windows, and Captain Tempest could see his warriors trapped inside, lurid dancers shrieking in horror among the inferno.

There could be no fighting such magic. In despair, Tempest wondered what to do. No charge had begun, yet already the castle gates were down, and half-undefended.

Before the castle gates, with a shout that seemed to echo from the sky, cutting through the blackness and the curtain of hail, came Raj Ahten's voice: "Prepare the charge!"

Somehow, in the past minutes, Tempest had lost sight of the enemy commander. Now he saw Raj Ahten on the hillside, standing among his men, staring toward the castle with an expression of apathy.

The Wolf Lord's well-trained troops knew what to do. His artillerymen began to feed iron shot into the baskets of their engines, send it hurling high against the walls.

All along the walls, Tempest's men hunched behind the battlements, and now the hail that fell from the skies grew deadly to the castle's defenders. An archer next to Tempest took a ball to the head, was swept from the castle walls. Men raised their shields high for protection.

Tempest looked to the hedge wizard, but now the wizard was crouched behind the battlements, eyes filled with terror.

Wind buffeted from the south, and for a few seconds there was light as the flameweavers took their rest. Tempest saw Raj Ahten's spy balloon, which had been moored a moment earlier, suddenly lift like a graak, despite the battering hail. Four balloonists began emptying sacks of arcane powders into the air, powders that floated down toward the castle in dirty clouds of yellow, red, and gray.

Tempest gaped, wondering where King Orden might be, whispering under his breath for the King to come, to save them all. Longmont is a great castle, protected by earth runes, he told himself. Yet already the gate was down, and Raj Ahten had not even begun his attack in earnest.

Now, seeking power once again, Raj Ahten's flameweavers began grasping ropes of fire from the skies. Green walls of flame shone like emerald around the great bonfire, bedazzling, their intricate runes gleaming. The blackening trees within the wall were a bizarre sight, like twisted fingers and arms in an enormous heap of burning body parts. Or like scraps of iron in the forge. Everything became luminous in the heart of the inferno--flameweavers, fiery salamanders, dancing among the logs at the fire's center.

As the flameweavers stole fire from heaven, darkness deepened, making the battlefield a garish, flickering, half-glimpsed sight. The hail fell heavier for a few seconds then, and the air froze in a cloudy fog before his face as Cedrick Tempest breathed.

In that flickering darkness, Tempest glimpsed giants gathering their ladders, men on the battlefield drawing weapons.

"Bowmen at the ready!" Tempest shouted. He watched the track to the north, hoping Orden would appear.

Yet he now feared it would not happen, feared that Orden still lived, and that the serpent ring had not broken. Perhaps Orden had never met up with Raj Ahten, and was even now racing off on some fruitless hunt. Or perhaps Orden was incapacitated.

Tempest's heart pounded. He needed a protector. There was only one thing to do--call upon the knights in the ring to form a new head. But no, he realized, that would not do. The Dedicates in the castle were widely dispersed. He did not have time to find them, speak to them all.

He needed to break the serpent ring, slay a Dedicate so that the serpent would form a head.

Across the hill, Raj Ahten made a pulling gesture with his hand, as if to yank clouds from the sky. Hundreds of mastiffs began racing for the castle in a black wave, their red masks and iron collars making the mastiffs a horrendous sight, their commander barking in short yaps.

Now the Frowth giants hoisted the great siege ladders, two giants to a ladder, and loped for the castle at a seemingly slow pace, yet covering four yards to the stride. Black behemoths struggling in the night.

Tempest did not have time to explain to another what needed to be done. He turned from his post above the gate, and ran for the stairs.

"Captain?" one of his men cried, as if worried that Tempest had become a craven coward in that moment.

Tempest had no time to explain. A shout rose across the battlefield as three thousand of Raj Ahten's archers raced forward, hurrying to give cover fire against the castle walls.

Tempest glanced over his shoulder before descending the stone steps. Raj Ahten's Invincibles raised their shields and charged. At their head, fifty men raced with a battering ram, a giant iron wolf's head at the ram's end. Tempest knew little of siege magics, but he could see that the iron wolf's head was bound with powerful spells. Fire glowed in its dead eyes.

Though the drawbridge had fallen open, Tempest's men had hastily set a wooden mantelet--a frame of timbers--just inside the green. The ram would smash into the inner defenses. Behind those defenses, Longmot's mounted knights had become restive. They held their great lances at the ready, helm visors down. Their horses shifted their weight from foot to foot, eager to charge.

Raj Ahten's Invincibles raced forward, the earth thundering beneath their iron-shod feet, pounding under the hail that began to fall more earnestly. These Invincibles were men with great endowments of stamina and brawn and metabolism.

Giants loped ahead with ladders, Invincibles with their ram. Arcane powders strewn from the balloon hung over the castle gate now, like a gray hand of doom.

For a moment, Tempest hesitated behind the ramparts inside the gate, wondering if he should stand with his men or hurry forward to slay Shostag.

Across the fields, Raj Ahten's artillerymen let catapults fly...

Raj Ahten watched approvingly as the catapults let fly shells bearing mineral powders of sulfur, potash, and magnesium that would mix with other salts in the cloud above the castle wall.

The firing of these shells was timed so that they would stream through the skies at the same moment his battering ram drew within a hundred yards of the drawbridge.

In the darkness and hail, the bowmen on Longmot's walls saw the catapults fly, and dropped for cover, losing the precious second they needed to choose a target from among Raj Ahten's Invincibles.

For long years Raj Ahten had nurtured his flameweavers, feeding them. On the mountains south of Aven, fires burned constantly so they might appease the Power that the sorcerers served. His flameweavers were, Raj Ahten believed, the most fearsome of their kind on earth.

And these flameweavers had made great studies in the use of explosive fires. It had long been known that when wheat and rice were poured into their granaries, the flame of a small lantern could ignite the air with explosive force. Miners pounding out coal deep beneath the mountains of Muyyatin had long known that coal dust would spark at the touch of their lamps, sometimes exploding so ferociously that entire passages within the mine would cave in.

For generations, people had raised borage flowers to give them courage, and children had delighted in throwing the dried stalks into the fire to hear the popping sounds they exuded as they exploded.

But no one had considered how to benefit from the explosive force of such agents. So Raj Ahten's flameweavers studied the phenomenon, learned to prepare and grind and mix the powders.

Now Raj Ahten watched in awe and satisfaction as years of nurturing his sorcerers and financing their grim study paid off. The skies all around went blacker than the deepest night as the final ropes of fire twisted down from heaven. Hail plummeted from the air, and the sound of thunder raged overhead.

The huge bonfire where the flameweavers stood with the beings they summoned suddenly snuffed out like a candle, the green walls collapsing, the creatures within drawing all light and heat into themselves.

The skies remained black, and in that sudden total darkness, no archer could have seen his target to shoot. For ten seconds, the skies gave no light.

Atop the castle walls, Orden's knights performed one last defiant act. They broke into a grim song.

Under the cover of that shadow, Raj Ahten's troops continued to race for the walls.

As the bowmen on the castle rose to shoot at unseen attackers, a blinding light shot from the center of the flameweavers' infernos.

The sorcerous blast roared like a living sun from flameweavers and salamanders, and a green flaming wave of fire swept from the hilltop, raced toward the castle.

In the sudden rush of light, one could see the terrified faces of Longmot's defenders. Brave boys unmanned, brave men trembling but still defiant.

As the wave of flame traveled inexorably toward Longmont, it touched the arcane powders in the sky.

Then the whole arch above the gate roared into an inferno. Raj Ahten's powders exploded in a cloud of fire that rose like a mushroom some hundred yards at the base, slowly ascending a mile into the air. The concussion threw defenders from the walls like rag dolls. Many fell, stunned. Others staggered back in abject terror.