Robert Adams - Champion of the Last Battle

“Nor can I really persuade myself to credit even the biggest wolf’s being able to jump high enough to get onto our walls, even at their lowest points. Much less can I persuade myself to credit that this huge creature has been able to transverse those heavily guarded, torchlit walls four times in two nights unseen by any officer or sentry of the wall watches.”

Sir Yoo Folsom’s face had suddenly become as white as curds. “You mean ... Duke Bili, you don’t think that critter is denning up right here among us, do you?”

“Yes, that is just what I do mean, Sir Yoo,” said Bili solemnly. “It makes more sense in my mind than does the thought of a four-legged predator—be it wolf, bear, cat or whatever—that can scale sheer rock cliffs and jump up onto thirty-foot walls without being seen by multitudes of alert, keen-eyed men.”

“But, dammit, Duke Bili,” Fil Tyluh burst out, “where, pray tell? With the influx of fighters and dependents, every single habitation in all the lower town is occupied. As. for this palace and the citadel, there’s at least one noble officer in every room, suite, nook or cranny and ... Oho, your grace is thinking of the magazines, back in the core of the mountain, I take it?”

“Just so,” Bili agreed. “We two think much alike, Fil. It’s late in this day to do much, and this night I want large, well-armed patrols walking every street and alleyway of the lower town from dusk to dawn. Reinforce the usual wall watch—I want every running foot of those battlements within sight of someone throughout every hour of every watch.

“Whitetip will have to forgo his customary nightly meal of Skohshun beef. I want him to stay in the palace and sleep well, this night, for tomorrow morning, he and any available Kleesahks will accompany me and several strong search parties back into the unused parts of the tunnels and chambers within the mountain. I mean to not only find and slay that strange man-eating beast, I mean to find just how it got into King’s Rest Mountain, lest it be followed and succeeded by another of its unsavory ilk.

“And strengthen the guards within the palace and the keep, too, Fil, except for the Kleesahks’ section, for I doubt one of them would have any trouble barehandedly dispatching even a beast of this size. Which means that we need not waste men guarding the king, for those Kleesahks would never allow him to be harmed by anything or anyone.”

The young commander turned to Sir Szidnee Gawn, the royal castellan. “Sir Szidnee, have your folk see to it that every single door that lets into the mountain passages from palace, keep or stables is closed and solidly secured before nightfall. Also, every door connecting the various wings and those letting onto the walls or the outer courtyards. Understood?”

Before Bili could issue further orders to those present, however, he was recipient of a far-beaming from one of the younger Kleesahks, Lehnduhn. “Lord Champion, I am just above the area that cannot easily be seen from the walls or the keep, just below the first stretch of the ascending roadway, and I think I know why the man with that strange, long-distance killing thing was sent to where he is.”

With that, the Kleesahk opened his mind that Bili might see through his hominid eyes. Some fifty or sixty feet below the watcher, on the last level stretch of the plain before the precipitous cliff, scores of Skohshun artisans were hard at work at siege carpentry. Obviously, one or more buildings out somewhere upon the plain had been wholly or partially demolished and the long, thick, strong, well-seasoned beam timbers from that destruction were being worked and joined end to end—slotted, dovetailed, augered and tree-nailed. At regular intervals, shorter timbers were being used to connect each of the three pair of uprights, with wooden latticework meshes lashed across the spans and wetted green hides stretched atop all. One of the giant devices lay almost complete, and the two others were nearing completion.

Seated at table in the hall of the palace, Bili felt his nape hairs all a-prickle. Those Skohshun leaders were clearly no fools, tyros or incompetents. Faced with a fortress-city so cunningly designed and situated, so massively constructed and stubbornly defended as to render frontal attacks so hideously expensive in terms of casualties as to not bear repetition, a city so well supplied and watered as to be capable of outwaiting even the most determined armies, a city that could not even be undermined, they had rightly concluded that new and extreme tactics were required.

Every officer in the city was aware that the Skohshun army vastly outnumbered their own trained fighters, but secure in their stonewalled, well-supplied and elevated fortress, they still could have probably held the foe at bay with half their present numbers. Since the very inception of the siege, no single Skohshun foot had ever rested for even a moment upon any portion of the walls, and damned few had ever achieved so far as within spear cast of them.

But this advantage rested upon the sole fact that the city could be approached and, therefore, attacked by any numbers only from the front. Of the two sides, one was at the edge of a high, sheer cliff made even more treacherous by being almost constantly wet and slimy due to the fact that all the city drains exited at the base of that stretch of wall; the opposite side overlooked some hundred and fifty yards’ expanse of a steep, shaly slope, broken by another, lower cliff, then extending on for several hundred more yards of loose, treacherous footing beyond. The rear of the fortress-city was unwalled—there was no need for any other defense than the mountain into which it had been built. So the front wall and its gates, alone, were vulnerable to the attack of enemies unable to fly.

“Those damned Skohshuns have a running mile of guts,” Bili thought, “I have to give them that!”

Early on, the besiegers had essayed not just one but two full-scale frontal assaults, with their thousands running up the inclined roadways and scrambling up the exposed slopes and taking dreadful losses from the accurate loosings of engines, bows, crossbows and, as the few survivors got closer, staff slings and darts. Only the luckiest or the hardiest had gotten close enough to die under the walls of the barbican, and Bili and his officers had seriously doubted that the aliens would try such suicidal bravery again.

But they had! Only a week later, the Skohshuns had marched out of their camp, bearing short polearms and long scaling hooks and clumsy, two-men-abreast ladders. The parties carrying the heavy ladders had headed up the roadway and the rest had poured up the flanking slopes to face the large and small stones, the pitchballs and pots of flaming oil, the arrows and bolts and engine spears which were capable of piercing through three or four men in a row, steel breastplates and all.

Also, on that ill-fated day for Skohshuns, a stray splash of burning oil from one of the pots flung by the wall engines had ignited the pitch-soaked, oakum-stuffed wooden corduroy of the roadway. It had not been intentional, for the garrison was holding the attackers off, executing terrible amounts of death and maimings within their ranks, without it. But when the highly flammable stretches once were fired, there had been no stopping the ensuing fires, and all of the environs had stunk unto the very skies of charred, overdone meat for long days, and then of the sickly-sweet stench of rotting flesh until at last the carrion birds and beasts and insects had accomplished their grisly but necessary purposes.

The Skohshuns had seemed to have learned their lesson, a hard, very bloody lesson. After that second attack they had limped, hobbled, crawled or been carried or dragged back within their stockaded camp; there had been no more attempts on the front wall and barbican. The third attack had come boiling up the slippery, uneven and terribly exposed shale slopes to the east of the city-fortress. But such had been the losses on the lower slope that the assault had been wisely aborted before a single man had reached the upper slope.