Elliott, Kate - Crown of Stars 1 (63 page)

"You can't!" Liath cried. She took the reins of Sanglant's horse out of the hands of a Dragon, as if by holding his mount's harness she could control the prince's decision. "Count Hildegard isn't out there at all. It's an illusion. There's magic
—

Sanglant was off his horse at once. Without waiting for her or anyone, he ran to the wall and took the steep steps three at a time to the lookout over the gate. She scrambled after him. Manfred stood here with two Dragons and a cluster of city militiamen. He motioned the others aside so the prince could come forward. Liath

pressed up beside Manfred; surely he would believe her, if the others could not see. There, on the parapet, protected by a timber wall covered by animal skins soaked in water, they stared out at the far shore.

She saw so clearly now. There must be more than a thousand Eika, two thousand perhaps, a vastly greater number than those who defended Gent. The barbarians jogged forward at a steady trot, the banner swaying in their midst, a prize of war. Their enormous dogs loped beside them, muzzles lifted to the wind. There was rank after rank of blue and yellow shields with their menacing red serpent blazon, the dark line of their weapons, held at the ready; their bone white hair gleamed in the new sunlight as the fog dissipated along the shore of the river. How could anyone see this as the remnants of Count Hiidegard's army? The Eika called out, too, in words she could not understand, only that they sounded like taunts in her ears. The dogs ran silently which was, perhaps, worse. The river streamed on, oblivious. Drums beat to the time of running feet.

They came closer, and closer. Liath could make out the details in the green and white banner: a boar on a white field. She could see the long flanks of the dogs, saw their tongues lolling out. The Eika had come so close, first rank almost on the bridge itself, that the prince had possibly twenty breaths to make a choice.

"Don't you see?" she cried.

Sanglant narrowed his eyes.

"Manfred!" She grabbed Manfred's arm and shook him, hard. "It isn't Count Hildegard at all! It's only Eika! Look harder. You're an Eagle. You must be able to see with true sight."

"There!" called Sanglant. "In the fourth rank. There is Count Hildegard and her brother!" He pushed away from the wall.

The banner and the first of the Eika troops hit the bridge. Their footsteps sounded like the hollow tramp of doom on the stone and timber structure. A shrill keening rose from the front ranks of the Eika, as if they had
king's dragon
caught the scent of their quarry. As if they had seen Sanglant's dragon helm on the walkway above and knew he was waiting for them.

"The Eika are almost upon them!" cried Manfred, jerking his arm out of Liath's grip. He shot her a single glance, as if to say he was sorry.

Sanglant looked then, piercingly, at Liath. He wavered. Clearly he did. He wanted to trust her that much. But then he looked back. Howls rang from the bridge, a chorus of them, dogs and Eika joining in strength until they deafened her. The faces of those watching, those whose faces she could see, went white with horror. Liath could no longer imagine what they saw, or what they thought they saw. She couJd only see the Eika army almost upon them.

"Open the gates!" Sanglant commanded. As he pushed past her, she grabbed his arm. The Dragons nearest him swore and lunged for her. The great wheels that controlled the gate began to creak and roll, and the doors swung outward.

"Close the gates!" she yelled, but no one listened. Below, the Dragons parted, half to each side, making room for the flight of the count and her retainers into the city. "It's an illusion. Its a trick."

All she could see of Sanglant's face was his eyes, jade green, staring hard at her. He shook his.head. Then he was gone, down the steps.

The gates creaked farther open, gaining speed. Mirroring them, the Eika in the front ranks broke into a dead run.

"Manfred!" she screamed, grabbing his cloak, shaking him. "Can't you
seel
Manfred! Trust me!"

But it was too late.

The gates opened. Count Hiidegard's banner passed the last pylon, crossed over the transition from bridge to land. And Eika poured through the open gate into Gent. Sanglant, caught on the ladder, could not reach his horse or his men.

The square below boiled into chaos. Their howling reached a peak, so sharp and high it hurt her ears. Manfred gasped aloud and then he shoved her along the walkway.

"Run! Run along the wall until it's safe. Find Wolfhere!"

She stumbled and went to her knees just as an arrow thudded into the militia man standing, still in shock, behind her. He grunted, more surprised than pained, and tumbled slowly to his knees. Gripping the arrow as if to his chest, the man fell forward to the edge of the walkway and over as she grabbed for and missed him. He landed atop two Eika warriors just as they hacked at a Dragon cut off from the others. They went down under his weight, but more came behind them, many more, like the unstoppable waters coming up the river at flood-tide. Then the dogs found him; some ran on, but others began to feed. Liath gagged, bile rising in her throat.

A mailed hand yanked her to her feet. She came up hard, jolted against a tabard
—a black dragon sewn with silver.

It was Sanglant. He did not speak. He pulled her along the walkway behind him so fast her feet barely touched the ground. She could not even look back to see what had become of Manfred. She was too numb even to feel fear; she felt completely paralyzed.

Two arrows stuck out of Sanglant's back, quivering, points embedded in mail. One shook loose and fell harmlessly away. Militia men knelt, shooting with their bows, aiming out over the wall toward the bridge where Eika crowded in from the eastern shore. It was too confused in the square fronting the gate to hope to shoot Eika safely without chancing to hit Gent's defenders.

The defenders were hopelessly outnumbered. Already the Dragons had been borne back by the force of the unexpected assault and the sheer weight of numbers and ferocity. The Eika gave no quarter. Beyond that, she could make out no pattern to the battle swirling at the gate except that of iron-helmed Dragons fighting desperately to form back into ranks.

She heard, distantly, the creak of the wheels that moved the gates. Then screams. She smelled smoke.

In a staccato pattern arrows thunked into the wood just behind her, like a sudden spatter of drum beats, sharp and final. Sanglant grunted and swore and stopped. She turned her head. An arrow stuck out from his left leg, just above the knee. As she watched
—as if time obeyed different laws here—a drop of blood welled up through leather and leaked out, following by a second and then a third, sending a trail of red down the curve of the knee. Red blood, just like her own, like any human's blood
She could not get any breath in to her lungs. She was going to choke.

"Break it off." Sanglant let go of her. Obedient, she gripped the arrow, one hand braced against his leg, the other clamping down over the fletching. Blue, she noted idly; the feathers were stiff as metal, digging into her skin. The shaft was strong. Somehow, she snapped it in two and tossed the end away. He grabbed her and tugged her on. "My lord prince!" A militia man called to them from the safety of a lookout post built into the wall. Sanglant pulled her inside, where the white-bearded militia man threw back a hatch to show a trapdoor beneath.

"This way, my lord," he said. Liath was unable to catch her breath. She stared at the man's brown cloak, strangely fascinated with its plain weave and ordinary texture. It had been patched on one shoulder with a piece of material that did not match in color, as if taken from a different batch of dye.

Sanglant leaned against the closed door, panting, for this moment safe from arrow fire. Liath heard the sounds of the battle, swords chopping at mail, at iron-rimmed shields; the alarm, a thin horn rising like a clarion again and again, alerted the people of Gent.

Sanglant pushed away from the door and crossed to an embrasure. He had not let go of Liath, so she perforce had to follow. The archer standing there moved aside instantly. Together, she and Sanglant stared out the thin slit of a window toward the eastern shore of the river.

The angle of the lookout post was such that the embrasure's line of sight took in the river's bank where the bridge touched the eastern shoreline. Eika poured onto the bridge, but even as they watched the tide slowed, stemmed by the half-closed gates, by the resistance from within the city, by the narrow path itself, the roadway and bridge, that forced the Eika warriors close together. But although they slowed down, they still moved inexorably forward, howling and keening like wild beasts. On the eastern shore, swathes of fog concealed patches of field. A shadow lay over the land, wreathed with mist, there on the far shore.

Neither fog nor mist. Something about it: a pattern, a shifting, the way her eye wanted to slide away from it. It was an enchantment. She forced herself to look hard at it, to
not
believe it was shadow and fog but rather concealment.

It dissolved, or not dissolved as much as faded from her sight and resolved into four figures. Two of them were Eika warriors painted and outfitted like the rest of their kind, red serpent round shields resting casually against their legs, two-bladed axes cradled like infants in the crooks of their arms. Between the two warriors stood an Eika remarkable for his scrawny stature and his apparent nakedness: He wore only a ragged loincloth and a gold belt. In his hands, he held a small wooden chest. A leather pouch hung from the belt.

But beside these three stood one other, one unlike the rest by stature alone, by some indefinable quality Liath could not name, yet recognized. She could not tear her gaze away; he was a huge Eika whose face and arms and chest had the scaly sheen of a creature clothed in living bronze. He had no tunic, nothing covering his chest
—not even the garish painted patterns sported by his warriors—only layers of necklaces, beads, shells, and bones strung together and mixed in with chains of gold and what looked like gold and silver coins, holes
king's dragon
drilled in their centers and strung on thin ropes of metal. His stiff trousers were sewn of cloth dyed a brilliant blue, belted by a mesh of gleaming gold that draped in delicate folds to his knees. He wore gold armbands, like twining serpents, around each thick arm. His hair glinted bone white in the sunlight, braided into a single braid that hung to his knees.

Beside her, Sanglant sucked his breath in between his teeth.

"There!" said Liath. "Do you see him?"

"I see him." He shook his head as if to shake away anannoying insect. "He is the one whom I felt all along.

His is the power."

"He is the enchanter." She felt the power, just as Sanglant did.

Sanglant leaned forward into the embrasure, suddenly intent, staring hard toward the distant Eika. His lips parted. "Tell me your name," he whispered.

The Eika enchanter shifted, head turning so abruptly that Liath shuddered. It was as if he had heard. He looked around and focused that fast, looking
toward
them although certainly he could not see them, concealed as they were by the timbered walls and the narrow confines of the lookout post. Certainly he could not know the prince watched him from there.

And yet, why not, if he was truly so powerful an enchanter?

She thought, then, that he spoke a word in reply, but she could not see him clearly to guess at the syllables he spoke, and she certainly could not hear above the clash of battle raging in the city beyond.

"Bloodheart," said Sanglant in a low voice, staring out as if the two of them watched each other, tested each other. "We will meet, you and I."

Beyond, on the shore of the river, the Eika tide swelled. The knot shoving forward on the bridge broke loose and Liath tore her gaze away from the Eika enchanter to see the gates shoved open and more Eika flood into Gent.

Jerking back from the embrasure, Sanglant turned to Liath. "Go to the cathedral. Save those you can." The militia man waited, nervous, taut, at the trapdoor.

"Where are you going?"

But it was a stupid question. She knew the answer before Sanglant said the words, although he said them anyway.

"My Dragons need me. We will hold them as long as we are able." He lifted a hand and touched her cheek with his mailed hand
—as she had touched his, in the silence of the crypt.

Then he hefted his shield, raised his sword, and was out the door before she could say anything more. She started after him, back to the wall-walk, only to see him descending an outside ladder. Then he was gone, running into the chaos that raged around the gates as the battle moved steadily outward, farther into the streets of I Gent. A cry went up, a piercing shout, his name called j over and over. Before the militia man grabbed her she saw the overwhelmed Dragons rallying, fighting on horse or by foot toward the lone figure of their prince who seemed to be intent on running alone full into the j force of the Eika assault.

A hand clapped onto her shoulder and dragged her back away from the door just as an arrow thunked into it. A burning arrow. Smoke made her eyes sting. It guttered against the wood; the bearded man slammed the door shut, but she heard more arrows thud into it, an echo of the drums that pounded relentlessly in the Eika camp.

"This way!" he said urgently. "Down two levels to a tunnel beneath. It runs all the way from this lookout post to the mayor's palace. You will meet up with a larger | tunnel, which runs straight. Take no side tunnels, they only lead to other posts. I pray that the Eika have not yet taken the other posts and gotten into the tunnels."