A Sword for a Dragon (42 page)

Paxion ran to his tent, pulled on his sword and coat, and hurried outside. A moment later, a massive rock landed on the tent and smashed it to the ground. Paxion was left staring, gulping for air. The rock was as big as he was. If he’d stayed in the tent another second, he would have been mashed to a pulp. He felt a cold sickness in the pit of his stomach.

All around him the legions were in motion, men, boys, and dragons thundering up the steps and ladders to their places on the walls.

The command tent was coming down, the staff were hurrying toward the Fatan Gate. They would reestablish the command post in the courtyard there.

Another great rock hurtled over and landed in a muddy slough on a vacant lot. Men nearby were galvanized to swifter movements.

Paxion hurried toward the gate tower.

Officers came flying down the lines, yelling into the tents.

“To the walls!”

The legions convulsed.

“The siege towers are rolling.”

In frantic haste, dragons were strapped into armor and joboquin, and ordered up the steps to the walls. In truth, they needed no orders. They were in a fighting mood, eager to take out on some unfortunate their rage over the short rations of the past week. Someone would discover that it was a serious mistake to starve a dragon!

Relkin had had to tighten the straps on the dragons’ joboquins, they’d lost considerable weight. They were slim, hard-fleshed, and they seemed battle ready, but he wondered if they’d also lost endurance.

On the wall, the scene was familiar enough. Arrows sleeted overhead, and the rising arms of the trebuchets below launched rocks by the dozen high into the air.

Relkin found his place. Swane slid in beside him.

“How’s the broketail dragon today then?”

“Hungry and ready to kill someone. How’s Vlok.”

“The same. They scare me when they’re like this.”

“Yeah, they scare me, too. I’m glad I don’t have to fight ‘em.”

“Hah! You’re dead right about that.”

There was something different in Swane’s voice, a tone was missing. The bigger youth wanted to say something.

“Look, uh, Relkin, I got to get something off my chest. If we don’t make it out of here, I just want you to know that I was wrong about you. Thought you were a bag of wind, all boasts and no muscle, I was wrong.”

Relkin stared at Swane for a long moment. So now the boy from Revenant wanted to bury the battle ax. “Well, Swane, I hope you’re right about that, I think this fight’s going to test us all.” Relkin preferred his hand, and they shook on it.

A huge rock bounced off the parapet five feet away from them and caromed high over the wicker and disappeared, heading into the city. Powdered brick dust blew over them. Swane coughed and spat.

“Yeah, I know what you mean.”

The bombardment was intensifying, and all they could do was huddle close to the lee of the parapet and pray that they didn’t get hit by one of these whirling boulders. In a zone about one hundred yards distant from the walls, there was a solid line of trebuchets and catapults, their arms rising and falling steadily as they hurled their missiles at the wall.

A rock crashed down and demolished a section of the wicker barricade. A dragon bellowed with pain, and Relkin looked back with a tremor of sudden fear, but his dragons were alright. In fact, the wounded beast was Kasaset, a freemartin in the 66th dragons. Her leg was smashed, and she was down rolling in agony.

Another rock bounced off the bricks, powdering them as it did so. They ducked and crouched and prayed that they wouldn’t get hit while dragonboys in the 66th did what they could to aid poor Kasaset.

The siege towers were already very close to the walls, and now Hatlin ordered the dragons to take up the poles. Arrows came over thickly and began to stud the dragons like feathers, mostly sticking in the leather of the joboquin, but here and there getting through to dragon hide. The dragons hissed with barely suppressed rage during this.

The siege tower accelerated. The dragons rammed their poles against it and heaved. For a moment it stopped dead, but then the imps below put on fresh teams of slaves and drove them on with their whips. The siege tower shuddered and shivered as the two forces strove, and then with a groan of tortured timbers, it forced its way past the dragon poles.

With oaths and hissing rage, the dragons scrambled back and reorganized themselves. Once more they set their poles against the side of the tower. They planted their massive feet and heaved hard. The tower shuddered and began to tilt, the dragons thrust again, but the towers had been weighted down with ballast in the bottom level. They did not tilt as easily as before.

Far below the wall, the imps screamed in rage and lashed the slaves beneath them. Once again the tower shuddered, fell back on both wheels, and rolled forward past the dragon poles.

The siege tower was in range of the wall. With a screech of chains, the drawbridge came slamming down on the parapet and across it stormed a line of the giant mud men. They pranced in unison and raised their hammers in a line. Then the dragons struck them and all unity vanished in a melee of shield and sword and clamoring steel.

In the thick of it was Relkin of Quosh, firing as fast as he could load his bow, trying to keep the enemy archers on the tower above under cover.

The dragons hewed through the mud men and kept them off the walls. Sephisti soldiery got through, however, and kept the dragonboys and the legionaries busy preventing any attacks on the dragons’ backs.

The fighting went on and on, and then came terrible news from the wall above the East Gate. A Kadeini unit there had broken and fled. The dragons were overwhelmed, three slain and the rest driven from the wall. An army of Sephisti soldiers had begun entering the city and attacking the East Gate from the rear.

The 109th fought on, there was no choice, because more giants were tramping forward across the ruined mess of their forerunners. The great swords rose and fell, tired dragons reached within themselves for reserves of strength, but now the poor diet of the preceding days began to tell.

The dragonboys ran out of arrows and frantically searched around them for usable ones from the enemy. Their rate of fire slowed drastically, however, and now the surviving enemy archers atop the tower began to assert themselves. This descending fire soon took an effect. Shim of Seant went down with an arrow through the throat, and he was dead before they turned him over. Big Likim, the brasshide, would need a new dragonboy when this was over, and little Shim would never see his beloved hills of Seant again. Krusp of Aubinas was next, an arrow in the chest and another beside it in the next second. Once down, he lay still. Now Berholt, the youngest leatherback, would need a new dragonboy. The dragons, too, were taking their share of this deadly rain of arrows. The Purple Green had a dozen shafts sticking out of the neck protector that Relkin had insisted he wear. It was only leather, but it provided a thick collar beneath the rim of the helmet and above the joboquin. Dragons disliked wearing them because they restricted movement, but they did stop arrows. All the dragons were studded with arrows now, but their swords continued rising and falling as they fought on.

Still, the situation was dire and growing worse with every moment. And now came the final torment. The trebuchets opened fire again, dropping their rocks on the struggling host, not caring whether they struck their own forces or not, as long as they might strike down dragons.

Big Kibol of Blue Hills was killed outright by a rock that shattered his skull. Rupp, a green from Montok Hills, was struck on the shoulder and lost the use of his arm. Then Berholt, the young leatherback who had already lost his dragonboy Krusp, was struck in the middle of the back as he bent over a mud man to pull out his sword. Berholt went down with a fractured spine. He could not move. The mud men beat him to death with their terrible hammers.

A man in black Sephisti garb dodged through a gap and into Relkin’s zone. Relkin met him with an arrow that stuck on the fellow’s shield, and a furious attack with sword, knee, and fist. The man was too big for Relkin and absorbed his blows and shoved him back to arm’s length to gain a little room to wield his own sword. It would have been the end of the orphan from Quosh, but Swane struck in from the side and distracted him, and Relkin got clear of the sword stroke in time. Relkin notched his last arrow, aimed, and fired. The shaft sprouted from the man’s face, just below the eye. He did not fall, however. Instead he gave a scream of rage and pain, and charged at Relkin, his sword ready. Relkin threw himself forward, rolling into the man’s legs trying to knock him off his feet but came up short when the Sephisti stopped him with a heavy sandal in the chest, knocking the wind out of him. The man was standing on him, and the sword was rising. And then the Sephisti was suddenly gone, crushed by another great boulder dropping out of the sky, which landed so close to Relkin that he bounced several inches into the air.

Swane helped Relkin to his feet. Both were splattered with the crushed man’s blood.

“That was too damned close.”

Relkin nodded and struggled for his breath. He saw Ecator rising and falling in the dragon’s hand. The dragons were undoubtedly tiring. There seemed an endless supply of the mud men. They were still pouring across the drawbridge in line after line, waving those hammers. It seemed the very crack of doom had opened beneath the fighting 109th.

Unfortunately it seemed that way to others, including General Paxion. The situation had reached a crescendo of events and now there was too much to absorb, too many orders to be given, and Paxion couldn’t concentrate, the panic was taking over.

He had not become ineffective, however, he was still trying to keep control.

To deal with the break-in north of the East Gate, he’d sent messages around through the city to the units on the far side ordering them to press hard on the flank of the break-in. Meanwhile he’d sent orders to another Kadeini unit, posted just to the south of the East Gate where there was little pressure, to leave the wall and clear the enemy away from the rear of the East Gate.

Then came the news that a battering ram had been brought up and set to work against the East Gate itself. A moment later it began pounding, a persistent vibration that shook the whole gate structure.

Another siege tower had been wheeled up beside the first on the breach, and now the flow of the enemy across the walls was doubled.

Paxion was in an agony of suspense. What was happening to the north of the break-in? He’d lost communications, but clearly the efforts to compress the enemy and stem the breach had not succeeded yet. He sent Captain Kesepton to try and restore contact with the forces in the north, and Kesepton rode away at a gallop and disappeared.

And then came the dire announcement that the mob had set the granaries on fire. Frustrated by the stout defense of the gates, the rioters had thrown torches through the windows and ignited the grain dust inside. Some of the chambers had exploded, and a conflagration was consuming all the remaining grain.

A tired, disheveled officer from the Kadeini appeared to announce that the effort to clear the rear of the gate was going very slowly. There were simply too many Sephisti, and they had been reinforced with mud men who were now getting down from the wall itself. With mud men in the fray, the troops could only stop them if the dragons could hold them, and the dragons were tiring.

Another man popped up to announce that columns of the enemy were marching away into the city; they were deep into the Norit Quarter and were starting to attack the support stations behind the wall farther north.

Paxion clutched at his head. They were lost. They could not close the breach, and they could not stem the enemy now pouring through it. They would be surrounded on the walls, doomed to be eventually pulled down and slaughtered.

“Withdraw,” he mumbled. “Withdraw to the Imperial City, at once. That’s our only hope.”

The order to abandon the wall came down to the 109th during a short lull. The dragons had pushed the mud men back onto the drawbridge and a brave engineer had died setting the drawbridge timbers alight with oil. While they blazed, the mud men were reluctant to step forward, the first indication Relkin had seen that they were anything more than automatons.

There was a moment’s indecision. They were supposed to retreat? To where? How could they just let the enemy take the walls? But the cornets were blowing insistently and ingrained habits of discipline set their feet in motion and thus they left the wall, climbing down the dragon stairs and destroying them behind them to keep the mud men at bay.

On the ground, a general retreat was in progress; men, wagons, horses, dragons all caught up in a confused tangle were heading down the Fatan Street, straight into the rising murk from the inferno at the granaries.

The 109th formed up and marched. Dragoneer Hatlin sent Relkin running ahead down the column to scout out conditions.

After getting through a mass of men from the Eighth Regiment, Relkin came upon some wagons. Among them he found the one he’d hidden Miranswa in.

He ran up and jumped onto the back. Inside were wounded men, a dozen or more. He ran along the running board and found Miranswa herself holding the reins. Her jaws were clenched tight with concentration, and she barely glanced sideways at him.

She let out a whistle.

“You? By the breath of the goddess, I should have known it. I should have known you’d survive.” She gave a bitter laugh.

“You don’t seem to have needed any help.”

“Of course not.” She pulled hard on the reins. “Mind you, I haven’t done this kind of thing since I lived on my family’s summer farm. I’m a little out of practice.”

Relkin marveled. Miranswa did seem to know what she was doing. He was impressed.

“What happened on the wall?” she said.

“I don’t know. We heard that they got in down by the East Gate. We had pushed them right back onto the siege tower when they told us to retreat. It seems crazy.”