The next moment, there a loud thudding noise like a hammer striking an anvil. Bardow saw soldiers on the ramparts thrown off their feet as a glowing green web of jagged cracks suddenly appeared halfway up the inside of the city wall. The glowing lines faded to dark and down on the streets people were running in panic while Bardow could only stare in dread, his remaining hope resting with the shining sword which sat in its case in his chamber.
* * *
Alael was in the High Spire's fourth floor library, seated under lamplight at the great horseshoe-shaped table, poring over books of legendary tales, when she heard the impact. It was like a far-off, muffled boom, followed by a tremor that came up through the tiled floor. Suddenly she had to find a window to look out of but there were none in the library, whose many delicate documents had to be protected from dampness and sunlight. But she knew that a door on one of the library's upper floors led to an outer passage with arches that opened onto a sheltered balcony.
Quickly, Alael rose, crossed to a spiral staircase, hurried up two flights to a dark and musty-smelling floor whose shelves were crammed with leather volumes. A door at the far end led through to a bright corridor and moments later she was leaning over the balcony rail to see what was happening. The balcony was a little higher than the palace's Silver Aggor and afforded a good view of the city wall. It was snowing quite steadily now and soldiers were running away from a section of the ramparts directly before the palace while shouts came from below. Alael had noticed the dark fracture lines on the inner face of the wall and was wondering what they were when there was a thunderous crash from the other side. Dazzling light flared along the dark lines and chunks of stone fell along with great shattered sheets of mortared facing. She cried out in shock, scarcely believing that such destruction was possible. She would have to find Bardow, but she knew he was in the Vantage Chamber a full five floors up. First she would return for her notes and pens, then go and seek him out.
She dashed back along to the library door, stepped back into the quiet gloom and began to descend the stairs. Only when she reached the intermediate floor did her gaze chance to alight upon her place at the great table where all her books and neatly-piled notes now lay scattered across it and the floor. Alael halted, staring, her momentary confusion displaced by a deepening unease. Then she heard a footstep.
From the floor above.
And from below came a voice, casual and mocking.
“Ah, lady Alael, at last we can renew our acquaintance.”
A tall figure cased in brown-black mask and armour, his shoulders draped with a night-black cloak, stepped out from behind two of the shelf stacks. A mailed hand came up and tugged off the mask, revealing the colourless, pale-eyed visage of Ikarno Mazaret. Except that she knew this was one of the rivenshades, on whose armoured hands and chest she could now make out splatters of blood.
She met that chilling empty gaze and for a moment or two listened to the slow footsteps heading towards the staircase. Then she whirled and dashed over to the door which led out of the library, though where it went she knew not.
* * *
Nerek was standing on the threshold of a room full of dead guards when she heard the first impact, a deep muffled boom that reverberated throughout the immensity of the High Spire. The sound faded away and through the quiet came a sussurrus of hurrying feet and lowered voices as people sought windows to look out of. On the floor of the second floor guard room, however, the blood of eight men lay in smears and darkening pools. No alarm had been raised and Nerek knew that she had reached the room only moments after the killers had left.
Then she heard the crash of weapons and a scream from beyond an archway where a narrow side-stair led up to the third floor. As she ducked through the arch and ran up the steps, she reflected on the many passages and stairs that honeycombed the great tower, and the ease with which the enemy intruders had gained entry. But then, if the tower had not been stripped of most of its garrison to man the city wall, cornering them would been straightforward.
The stairs came up in a servants' dining room where two armoured knights lay sprawled in their own blood while a third was on the floor by the long table, propped against a chair and gasping his last. She went over to him but quickly saw from the blood he was losing that there was no helping.
“Up….” he whispered. Blood was weeping from between the finger he had clamped to his throat. His other hand tremblingly pointed across the room to a plain arched doorway. She nodded, strode to the archway and another flight of stone steps which she took two at a time. She was half way up when the boom of the second impact reached her ears, along with a tremor that she could feel underfoot. But she did not pause at all.
* * *
Yasgur's hopes had gone from ashen grimness to sudden elation when the Mogaun Host charged in from the north and scattered Byrnak's careful formations across the snowbound fields. Then the elation collapsed back into ashes when a strange darkness poured out from behind a wooded rise almost half a mile to the west and seemed to race across the ground. His suspicions were too terrible to put into words but the Nightrook had no such reservations.
“Ah – eaterbeasts,” she said casually. “Such a savage weapon, effective and terrifying but also a little...unpredictable.”
Eaterbeasts were bred from the twisted, malformed seed of predators long-since extinct from these lands. No two were completely alike, yet they all had a lust for pursuit and slaughter which the tinemasters played upon with confinement and starvation. As Yasgur watched, the great mass of creatures swarmed across fields and hillocks, darkening the whiteness, guided by a few riders on the edges. The Mogaun horsemen had seen the onrushing menace and were already galloping away from the scene of their surprise attack, heading northwest. Some eaterbeasts on the easterly edge of their horde must have caught a whiff of the blood from the carnage there for a long limb of them split away and raced off to glut their bottomless hunger. The rest followed the Mogaun.
Then the first hammerblow fell, a deep resonant crash that Yasgur felt in the pit of his stomach. He whirled round and grabbed hold of one of the tower roof supports as he leaned out and stared along the outside of the western section of the city wall. Byrnak's war machine had reached the wall and its massive arm with its spiked stone head was being wound back on taut hawsers by some unseen means hidden beneath a long wooden shell.
He felt a hand on his shoulder. The Nightrook.
“Zanser says that the enemy is charging to attack the south wall once more.”
As expected, he thought. “He is to tell the wall captain that reinforcements will be sent but he must hold the rampart.”
She only nodded and turned away, just as a group of panicky runners arrived with messages. Yasgur swiftly despatched them with orders moving units from the seaward defenses along the wall to take the place of others being sent round to the southern stretch. And all the time he was trying to keep an eye on the war machine while wondering if his disguised team had survived the fleeing infantry and the swarming eaterbeasts. But ultimately the wall, twenty paces thick and built from huge blocks of Arengian granite, was impregnable in the face of a solitary sledgehammer, even one as prodigious as this…
The spiked arm swung up and struck for the second time, and this time Yasgur was watching. This time he saw the flash of dazzling green an instant before the deep crack sound reached his ears. He saw dust and fragments spraying from the point of impact, and pieces of stone and mortar tumbling from the inner face of the wall and down into the street below.
Suddenly the impossible seemed possible and utter ruin loomed closer, like an onrushing threshold of darkness.
* * *
Byrnak's fury at the treachery of the Mogaun, followed by the rout of his leaderless infantry, demolished his composure and left him ranting and raging for long, incomprehensible moments. Then fearful self-awareness reasserted itself as he felt a long-dormant darkness stir within.
Fool. That inner voice was quieter and calmer
than before but no less menacing. You seek to control too many…
Angry at himself for losing control, Byrnak drew on the Wellsource to shut the presence away behind a barrier in his mind. Then he extended his being along the web of soul-binding to the tinemasters who were tending the vast eaterbeast herd in a dale to the west. Into the mind of the chief tinemaster he placed a brief but specific set of orders then quickly returned to his own senses in time to see the Shadowclaw, as he had named it, hammer into the wall of Besh-Darok for the first time. He also saw it with the eyes of the commander who had steered the warwagon through the snow, and laughed out loud, feeling a thrill of pleasure as the strengthened flare-iron spike, drenched in Sourcefire, buried the first third of its length in the wall, splitting one of the granite blocks. Byrnak's exultation spread to those around him as well as the soul-bound who were scattered across the field of battle.
“Let us approach this instrument of my will,” he told those about him. “And watch it carry out my judgement.”
So saying he led his entourage of followers, adepts, standard bearers and bodyguards down from the high ridge, an intricate panoply in shades of grey, black and funereal bronze. At a trot they crossed snow-laden fields which lay between two great phalanxes of infantry who were preparing themselves for the next assault on the walls. They were less than a hundred yards away when Shadowclaw struck its second blow. Byrnak could almost taste the fear and unease of the men on the wall, and grinned.
Now you know that destruction is at hand, he thought. At last you recognise that this is your final day, from which a new world will be born…
The arm of the Shadowclaw machine was being slowly winched back down against a retaining force provided by the huge musculature that was hidden by the long wooden carapace. It was a singular device concocted a few months ago by one of Byrnak's Wellsource adepts in alliance with one of the tinemasters. With a little encouragement from their master, they had arrived at the idea of an irresistible siege machine and work had commenced.
And now, as the mighty arm gradually came down, the four Wellsource adepts crammed into an armoured compartment at the wagon's rear began drawing together a knot of Sourcefire to be poured into the spike and its keystone just prior to the next unleashing. Simultaneously, the scaling squads were charging towards the south wall in advance of the infantry, while the bow companies sent a withering hail of arrows up at the ramparts…
Alarmed warnings flickered along the web of the soul-bound. He quickly looked round and saw a large boulder come flying in to strike the ground a score of yards away. The falling snow swirled in its hurtling wake as it gouged a dark wound in the earth. Rocky soil sprayed out as it bounced onwards, spinning from the impact but now diverted from the course that would have sent it into the Shadowclaw device. Instead it landed amid a cluster of panicking spearmen and crushed half a dozen of them. Before it had come to a rest, Byrnak's angry presence was already spreading itself along the web of his soul-bound servants, searching for the origin of the missile, staring from the eyes of -
A commander of the ladder crews, scanning the snow-veiled western fields from half– way up the city wall;
A blade-captain of the 3rd Talon Warriors, who had seen the boulder's descent;
A captain of bows near the now-demolished ridge fort, whose keen vision had tracked the trajectory back to the other end of the ridge;
A cavalry officer up on the ridge who, looking east, could see one of the catapults out on its own, its crew working frantically at the winch…
Ride forth! Byrnak ordered. Slay them!
Yet even as the galvanised horsemen thundered down from the ridge, the catapult crew were wrestling another boulder into the big cup at the end of the arm…
Then finally, with his own eyes, he saw the Shadowclaw leap upwards, the glowing iron spike swinging along its inexorable curve to smash into the fractured face of the wall. Sourcefire burst outwards and into the granite blocks, fatally weakening them along hundreds of cracks and fissures. Driven by the weight of the keystone, the great spike clove through, breaking the wall. A huge, oval section simply shattered and collapsed in a roaring torrent of rubble which spilled out to either side of the wall and sent up roiling clouds of dust.
All fighting stopped for a moment of shocked silence. The deserted stretch of wall above the gaping hole had suddenly become a bridge, but the builders had never planned for an eventuality. The long spanning section slumped at the centre, dust and fragments rained from the ragged underside then it gave way and came down in two pieces.
Byrnak could see that the falling debris had half-buried the Shadowclaw machine, but he was unconcerned since it had fulfilled its task. Fighting had resumed along the south wall and it appeared that his men were finally gaining the upper hand. Next would come his personal entry into the city to take possession of the palace and those two fascinating gew-gaws, the Motherseed and the Crystal Eye. A silent command to several unit commanders brought several squads forward bearing many lengths of broad hooked ladders designed to provide a traverse across just a mass of rubble.
The snow was getting heavier, falling already upon the broken blocks and slabs, a slow accumulation of whiteness.
So shall all this be buried, he thought with a savage delight. Soon, twilight itself shall fall.
* * *
In the witchhorse sanctuary, time stood still. The 'innerland' that the spirit of the Fathertree was building was a strange, grim patchwork, utterly different to the comforting illusions which the witchhorses had created for themselves. In depicting the ruin and agony endured by the peoples and their land, the Fathertree spirit had devised scenes so full of horror and tormenting grief that Tauric was unable to look at them for very long. And once it was done, the spirit of the Fathertree showed that it was able to move the entire composite illusion through the witchhorse sanctuary, steering it from innerland to innerland like a vessel leaking its cargo of suffering.
Bright summer days and sweet, eternal sunsets darkened and grew cold. The smoke of burning towns swept over lush hillsides, and grass and leaves withered at its touch. Forests were hacked down, lakes and rivers became poisoned by the corpses that had been left to rot in them. In the blink of an eye farmhouses went from sturdy, thatched buildings to wide patches of charred, smoking debris. Illusory crowds of smiling people succumbed to war and butchery, becoming the dead and the grief-ridden, and everywhere the children, ragged, hollow-cheeked, vacant-eyed…
When at last it was done and the vision of destruction was spread to every corner of every witchhorse' innerland, Tauris returned to the pool at the Fathertree's behest. Ghazrek, now tossing fruit seeds into the silvery waters, looked up.
“That was quick, m'lord,” he said. “Were you successful?”
“I'm not sure,” Tauric said.
It will have had an effect, said the Fathertree in his thoughts. Hopefully, the correct one.
Some moments later, witchhorses began to emerge from the pale, tangled forest in ones and twos, gathering slowly and sombrely at the pool. Tauric could not tell if all were present but Shondareth eventually came forward to stand loomingly over him.
“All our innerlands are no more,” he said. “You have filled our hearts with suffering, and we sicken with sorrow.” The witchhorse paused. “We were wrong to abandon the empire and its people – we would do what you ask and return to join in battle but we have to know the name of the spirit that you carry…”
All were silent for a moment, even within Tauric's mind and he thought that the Fathertree had slipped away. Then that voice spoke in his thoughts and, very clearly, the thoughts of everyone else, including Ghazrek.
You know my name, Shondareth.
The great witchhorse bowed his head, as did all of his companions. Ghazrek stared at Tauric, open-mouthed.
“We thought you scattered and lost to us, lord Fathertree.”
I have been all of that and more. Indeed, a name is almost all that is left to me and that spoken i
n whispers. But it gladdens me to see you willing to pit yourselves against our ancient enemy – I know that it is a hard choice for you.
“We are ready, oh lord.”
Then it is time for us to leave this place. Tauric will lead the way.
Startled, Tauric got to his feet. How do I lead the way when I don't know the way–
Turn right to walk around the pool. The Fathertree's voice was once more confined to his own thoughts. When you reach a sizeable path heading through the trees, follow it…
He nodded and walked on, Ghazrek at his back and the great herd of witchhorses coming after. Just as the Fathertree spirit had said, a broad track curved away from the pool and on through the pale, misty woods. Before they had gone very far, the track split into three. Tauric paused.
Which one do we follow?
It matters little – choose one.
He thought a moment then walked towards the right hand path.
Will we reach Besh-Darok in time to help? he asked. Or are we going arrive days after the battle?
Time as you understand it works differently in the Void, and especially so in the witchhorses' sanctuary. Be assured, however, that we shall have much to do on our return…
The first indications that they had crossed back into the real world were the deepening cold and the large flakes of snow that began fluttering down. At length the trees thinned and they emerged at the edge of a wooded hillside swept by a cold wind. The land was locked in winter's grip, its every dip and rise, every bush and stream masked in whiteness and a soft, muffling silence.
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