Fortress Draconis (29 page)

The afflicted section of the wall sloughed and sagged to the level of the cliffsides. What had made Vilwan unassailable bare moments before now had a gap that could not be plugged. Heat radiated up from the fluid stone, but quickly enough a black crust hardened over it. The powerful sweep of the dragon’s wing sent a gust to cool it, and buffeted back the first of the defenders to reach the gap.

The dragon soared into the air with fiery gold glinting from its scales. It twisted and rolled through the night sky.

The motion corkscrewed through its tail, snapping the last of the energy out through a flick of its pointed tip. It let playful gusts of fire jet from its nostrils.

Will looked at Jarmy. “Do something!”

The human mage shivered. “I could live to a thousand years and could do nothing against that.”

Out in the night, on the wall, Will picked out Crow’s silhouette on top of a tower. And moving toward the breach, there was no mistaking Resolute and Dranae beside him. Beyond the breach, the first of the gibberers showed up. They did not so much as hesitate, despite the howls of the first to step on smoking rock.

“Then all the dragon has to do is come back, sweep the walls …” Will’s stomach doubled back in on itself.They’re gone, my friends are gone.

“Not that fast, Will.” Jarmy’s eyes hardened. “That dragon’s a bit young and flew here. That blast of fire tired it. More mature, better rested, what you fear would be true.”

“So we do nothing?”

The combat Adept looked down at him. “One rule of warfare, Will. The side that commits its reserves last wins. That time is not yet come.”

And our reinforcements are powerless against her reinforcements, young and tired or not.Will wrapped his left fist around the hilt of his longknife. “I have to go out there.”

“So anxious to die?”

“Anxious to kill, to help my friends.”

Jarmy rested a hand on Will’s left shoulder. “Your chance will come.”

The dragonels boomed again. Some shots slammed into the walls, shaking them. Others had shifted from using a single heavy iron ball to a flight of smaller balls. They ricocheted within the fortress, with one clicking sharply off the stone near Will. Blasting through bodies seemed to spend their momentum, but not quickly, leaving ranks decimated and black blood spilled on the courtyard.

Resolute and Dranae had moved to the breach, flanked by men andmeckanshü. The Vorquelf’s twin blades flashed silver in moonlight, then became washed in ebony as his attacks punctured and slit. He’d moved far enough into the breach that his boots smoked, and the gibberers who fought him fell with their blood boiling on smooth rock.

Dranae had been given a mail surcoat that hung to his knees like a skirt. In the fight he wielded a warhammer, with its flat head on one side, and a wickedly curved claw on the other. A stout two-handed blow with the thing drove gibberers to the ground, then the claw would punch through armor or skulls. Even the steel butt-cap on the end of the haft proved deadly as he flicked it out, crushing a throat.

Despite their heroic effort, and the cadres of archers shooting from above the gap, inch by inch the defenders were driven back. More boats landed, disgorging legions of gibberers. Shots from dragonels raked the walls, cutting huge swathes through archers. Other shots caromed around in the courtyard killing ballistae crew and shattering at least one barrel ofnapthalm. It caught fire and quickly ignited the siege machine onto which it had been mounted. The rope restraining it burned through, launching the leaking barrel and painting a stripe of fire across the courtyard and wall.

Above it all, the dragon cavorted lazily, swooping back and forth. Then, as Crow hefted and hurled a barrel ofnapthalm into the breach and the torch that followed it started a blaze, the dragon ceased its play. It glided down low, causing all but Resolute and Dranae to duck. The grand beast came up at the end of the descent and over in a loop, then beat once with its wings and came back to clear the gap.

An earsplitting shriek sliced through the din of battle, drowning out even the dragonels’ thunder. The golden dragon twisted upward, but a black shadow hit it hard from above. The gold dragon slammed into the ground—hard, very hard—making Will grab for the wall to stop himself from falling as the earth quaked from the impact. The shadow launched itself upward, its angry shriek becoming a triumphant bellow.

The gold dragon came to its feet beyond the gap and shook itself as a wet dog might. Mashed gibberer parts sprayed off it, while wet stains streaked its sides. It answered with a challenge of its own, then beat its wings once to soar above the walls.

As it rose past the walls, Will got his first sense of its true scale. For a split second he saw a man disappear into the black slit that was the creature’s pupil as the beast flew into the sky. Gold scales the size of the shields warriors bore covered it, and its paws were as long as a dray wagon, horse-hitch and all included. On the downstroke the tip of the right wing hit an archer on the wall, breaking him as if he were some child’s toy made of dry twigs.

From nose to tail the creature dwarfed the largest of the ships on the sea, yet the dragon it rose to fight was larger still. Covered in midnight scales save where curved scarlet stripes curled up from its belly, the second dragon had a greater bulk. Not fat, just muscular, as Dranae was in comparison to Crow.Massive and powerful, very powerful. Despite its greater size, it twisted out of the gold dragon’s reach as the smaller creature rose. Then, with a quick strike, the black dragon nipped at the gold’s left haunch, tearing a dark wound on its hip.

The gold dragon shrieked yet again and rolled through the air. It dove, twisting, then tried to level into a glide. A wingtip slashed through the rigging on a Wruonan ship. The dragon wrenched its body around to free the wing, but that smashed its tail through the ship’s sides with a great snapping of timbers. The ship twisted awry, the aft going one way, the forecastle dipping toward the dark sea.

Beyond it, the dragon’s tail dragged like an anchor through the water. The golden beast contorted itself and tried to roll onto its back to free its tail. It succeeded, but at the cost of enough speed that it could no longer fly. It splashed down heavily, crushing one ship beneath it, and sent out a wave that lifted some ships and swamped others.

The wave reached the shore, boosting grounded galleys higher up, then clawing away the dead on its return to the sea. Still other galleys raced forward, beaching themselves. At least one came down on the shoal that had snared others, snapping the keel and spilling its contents into the angry water.

From Crow’s tower there arose a blue fireball that streaked high into the sky. Jarmy stripped his robe down to his waist and knotted sleeves around his waist. “Now, Will. Now is our time.”

As Jarmy accepted a blackened staff worked with runes and sigils from another wizard, yet a third stepped to the wall and pressed his hand to it. A bluish light flowed through the mage’s flesh and into the stone, tracing every seam and line throughout that small section of wall. A chill ran through the air, then the wall exploded outward. The various blocks in it arched out and hung in the air in pairs, with ten feet of nothing but a nearly transparent rainbow light between them. Other similar bridges—some tall arches, and others serpentine courses—connected the fortress to the walls elsewhere.

Before Will could ask what had happened, Jarmy and a half-dozen other Adepts dashed out onto the rainbow bridge. Most had arrayed themselves for battle as Jarmy had—including one dusky-skinned woman. Their staves began to glow with an internal light that shifted from blue to a white so bright it hurt Will’s eyes. Only the symbols incised into the staves did not lose their nigrescent color and Will shivered as he recognized some of them from the tattoos on Resolute’s flesh.

From one mage’s staff sprang dark green creatures that appeared to be nothing but a sharp-toothed mouth with two spindly, claw-capped arms for moving its spherical body around. They bounced from the walls as had the dragonel’s projectiles, then fell to devouring gibberers.

Other mages sped fireballs into the milling mass of invaders. The sorcerous missiles burned swathes through the invaders until some vylaen countered that spell. Still other of the mages dueled with vylaens, snuffing their spells and quickly fighting back with others.

Jarmy moved from the head of the bridge and leaped down into the gap at Resolute’s left. He whirled his staff as might a stickfighter, then let it graze the stone around him. Where the staff touched, blue flames guttered, describing a circle he clearly intended to hold free of gibberers. His challenge did not go unanswered. The staff spun with supernatural speed that let the blunt wooden rod slice through limbs as if it were honed to a razor’s edge, or smash skulls with the weight of a sledge.

The Adept who had created the bridge looked at Will. “Go now, or remain here. I can hold this only so long.”

Will nodded, then streaked out onto the bridge. He sprinted as fast as he could along it, for with each footfall it seemed to sag a little. Nearing the wall, he leaped the last ten feet. As he soared through the air, he saw the last of the blocks fall away and his illuminated path vanish.

He landed on both feet, but skidded and went down on blood-slicked rock. He slid to the wall and huddled there with his back to the stone. The dragonels boomed, their light flashing over the fortress’ seamless face. The impact of a ball against the wall pitched Will onto his face. Smaller balls clattered off the walls and a man fell thrashing in front of Will, half his skull missing and leaking brains.

The thief scrambled back away from the corpse, but before he hit the wall again, a hand closed on his tunic and dragged him to his feet. Crow pulled the youth back to the shelter of the tower. “You shouldn’t be here, Will.”

“But Jarmy said …”

The way the flesh puckered at Crow’s scarred cheek hardened his expression. “Come on, up to the top.”

“But I want to fight…”

“You can help in other ways.”

Crow gave him a shove up forward, so Will ascended the tight, circular staircase on hands and feet like a dog. He rose through the trapdoor, then involuntarily ducked down as the dragonels roared once more. A tremor ran through the rock and Will found himself face to face with a woman whose leathery skin had only begun to show her age.

“I’m Will.”

“You’re willful, to say the least.”

She rose and Will did as well. He peered out from between merlons at the long, thick line of invaders snaking its way up the cliff face. From his previous vantage point he could only see some of the landing area and realized only now that Chytrine had brought in far more in the way of troops than he had previously imagined. Greenish fire sparked here and there, marking the locations of vylaens. They traded spells with Vilwanese defenders and, more often than not, the gibberers around them would fall to arrows the archers shot at the vylaens.

Out on the dragonel ship, oars started appearing and a crew worked a winch to pull up the fore anchor. “Crow, they’re going to move the ship.”

The white-haired man nodded. “Bring it around to shoot at the gap.”

“Can we do anything to stop them? Magick? Something?”

The sorceress snorted. “I’ll give you a dagger if you want to swim out and hole the hull.”

Will frowned. “Can you just magick it?”

“Watch.” She gestured dismissively at the ship with her left hand, launching a blue spark that shot in toward it. When it neared the ship, it hit something that shimmered. Color bled through it, at first blue, then slowly fading into green. As nearly as Will could see, some sort of bowl covered the ship.

“You can’t get a spell through?”

“That’s just the outer layer of many, I suspect. Icould get

through, it would just take a lot of time.“ A snarl lit her features as she cast a spell with her right hand that lanced blue fire through the chest of a vylaen. ”The enchantments Chytrine has worked on that ship are as tough to break as are those animating themeckanshiu‘

Will nodded thoughtfully, as if that meant something to him, then deepened his scowl. “If we don’t do something, the dragonels will clear that breach.”

“Which is why you’re here and not down there.” Crow nocked an arrow and drew. He let fly and a gibberer folded around an arrow through his belly.

“Can’t you shoot a fire arrow at it?”

“It’s out of my range, as well as that of our ballistae.”

Another blast from the dragonels clattered shot off the walls. A few men went down, but others had taken to ducking when the dragonels’ light flashed, allowing them a chance to find cover. This set of shots swept closer to the gap. The next would certainly be able to shred the defenses and while many gibberers would die at the same time, more than enough were set to pour up the beach and flood through into the fortress.

They will die.Though Resolute, Dranae, and Jarmy were holding their own, even their most heroic effort would not protect them against the dragonels’ devastating power.They will die well, and so we will sell our lives soon after.

The black dragon eclipsed the moon and sailed past the dragonel ship with the casual ease of a seagull drifting above a fishing boat. Wings outstretched and sweeping stars up like nets, its tail out and shifting to steer, the dragon did a lazy circle around the Aurolani ship. It dipped its head toward the ship and up from the deck came a quick lance of green fire. The magickal strike splashed over the creature’s right forepaw, trickling verdant lightning along scale edges and sparking off the tip of a long claw.

If the sorcerous bolt hurt the dragon, it gave no sign. The black did pull its head back up, then canted it to study the ship again with its right eye. The dragon’s head jerked up and down three times, and at the end of the third, it spat out a roiling ball of golden fire.

The ball fell through the sky like a fiery comet, then hit the bowl protecting the ship. The fire spread slowly, like honey poured over a dumpling, dripping down the sides. The fierce light from dragon’s fire brought a premature dawn to the north coast of Vilwan, yet Will got no warmth from it at all.