David Eddings: Domes of Fire

‘Right.’

‘But tell them not to move until they hear the signal.’

‘I know what I’m doing, Sparhawk. Quit treating me like an idiot.’

‘Sorry.’

The urgent whisper sped around the battlements. ‘Your timing’s perfect, Sparhawk,’ Vanion said tensely in a low voice. ‘I just saw Kring’s signal from the compound wall. The Atans are outside the gate.’ He paused. ‘You’re having an unbelievable run of good luck, you know. Nobody could have guessed in advance that the mob would start up the wall and the Atans would arrive at precisely the same time.’

‘Probably not,’ Sparhawk agreed. ‘I think we might want to do something nice for Aphrael the next time we see her.’

In the moat below, the barges bumped against the castle walls, and the rebels began their desperate scramble up the ladders towards the ominously silent battlements. Another urgent whisper slithered back around the parapet.

‘The barges are all up against the wall now, Sparhawk!’ Kalten whispered hoarsely.

‘All right.’ Sparhawk drew in a deep breath. ‘Tell Ulath to give the signal.’

‘Ulath!’ Kalten shouted, no longer even bothering to whisper. ‘Toot your horn!’

‘Toot?’ Ulath’s voice was outraged. Then his Ogre-horn rang out its message of pain and death. From around the parapet, great boulders were lifted, teetered a moment on the battlements and then plummeted down onto the swarming decks of the barges below. The barges ruptured, splintered and began to sink. The viscous mixture of naphtha and pitch spread out across the surface of the moat. The spreading slick was rainbow-hued and, Sparhawk absently thought, really rather pretty. The towering Atans rose from their places of concealment, took up the lanterns conveniently hanging from the battlements, and hurled them down into the moat like a hundred flaring comets. The rebels who had leaped from the sinking barges and who were struggling in the oily water below screamed in terror as they saw flaming death raining down on them from above.

The moat exploded. A sheet of blue fire shot across the naphtha-stained water, and it was immediately followed by towering billows of sooty orange flame and dense black smoke. There were volcano-like eruptions from the sinking barges as the deadly, unspilled naphtha still in their holds took fire. The flames belched upward to sear the rebels still clinging to the scaling ladders. They fell or jumped from the burning ladders, streaking flame as they plunged into the inferno below. The screams were dreadful. Some few of the burning men reached the far bank of the moat and ran blindly across the tidy lawns of the compound, shrieking and dripping fire. The rebels who had stood at the brink of the moat impatiently awaiting their turn to cross the intervening water to scale the walls recoiled in horror from the sudden conflagration that had just made the gleaming castle of the Elenes as unreachable as the far side of the moon.

‘Ulath!’ Sparhawk roared. ‘Tell Kring to open the gate.’

Once more the Ogre-horn sang. The massive gates of the compound swung slowly open, and the golden Atan giants, running in perfect unison, swept into the imperial compound like an avalanche.

‘I don’t know how they did it, Sparhawk,’ Caalador replied with a dark scowl. ‘Krager himself hasn’t been seen for days. He’s a slippery one, isn’t he?’ Caalador had come in from the city and located Sparhawk on the parapet.

‘That he is, my friend. What about the others? I wouldn’t have thought that Elron could have managed something like that.’

‘Neither would I. He was doing everything but wearing a sign reading “conspirator” on his forehead—all that swirling of his cape and exaggerated tip-toeing through back alleys.’ Caalador shook his head. ‘Anyway, he was staying in the house of a local Edomish nobleman. We know he was inside, because we watched him go in through the front door. We were watching every single door and window, so we know he didn’t come back out, but he wasn’t inside when we went to pick him up.’

There was a crash from a nearby palace as the Atans broke in the doors to get at the rebels hiding inside.

‘Did your people check the house for hidden rooms or passages?’ Sparhawk asked.

Calador shook his head. ‘They stood the Edomish noble barefoot in a brazier of hot coals instead. It’s faster that way. There was no place to hide in that house. I’m sorry, Sparhawk. We picked up all the second-raters without a hitch, but the leaders—’ He spread his hands helplessly.

‘Somebody was probably using magic. They’ve done it before.’

‘Can you really do that sort of thing with magic?’

‘I can’t, but I’m sure Sephrenia knows the proper spells.’

Caalador looked out over the battlements. ‘Well, at least we broke up this attack on the government. That’s the main thing.’

‘I’m not so sure,’ Sparhawk disagreed.

‘It was fairly important, Sparhawk. If they’d succeeded, all of Tamuli would have flown apart. As soon as the Atans finish mopping up, we’ll be able to start questioning survivors—and those underlings we did manage to catch. They might be able to direct us to the important plotters.’

‘I sort of doubt it. Krager’s very good at this sort of thing. I think we’ll find that the underlings don’t actually have a lot of information. It’s a shame. I really wanted to have a little talk with Krager.’

‘You always get that tone of voice when you talk about him.’ Caalador observed. ‘Is there something personal between you two?’

‘Oh, yes, and it goes back a long, long ways. I’ve missed any number of opportunities to kill him—usually because it wasn’t convenient. I was usually too busy concentrating on the man who employed him, and that may have been a mistake. Krager always makes sure that he’s got just enough information to make him too valuable to kill. The next time I come across him, I think I’ll just ignore that.’

The Atans were efficiency personified as they rounded up the rebels. They offered the armed insurgents one opportunity to surrender each time they surrounded a group, and they didn’t ask twice. By two hours past midnight, the imperial compound was quiet again. A few Atan patrols searched the grounds and buildings for any rebels who might have gone into hiding, but there was little in the way of significant activity.

Sparhawk was bone-tired. Though he had not physically participated in the suppression of the rebellion, the tension had exhausted him more than a two-hour battle might have. He stood on the parapet looking wearily down into the compound, watching without much interest as the grounds-keepers, who had been pressed into service for the unpleasant task, gingingly pulled the floating dead out of the moat.

‘Why don’t you go to bed, Sparhawk?’ It was Khalad. His bare, heavy shoulders gleamed in the torchlight. His voice and appearance and brusque manner were so much like his father’s that Sparhawk once again felt that brief, renewed pang of sorrow.

‘I just want to be sure that there won’t be any bodies left floating in the moat when my wife wakes up tomorrow morning. People who’ve been burned to death aren’t very pretty.’

‘I’ll take care of that. Let’s go to the bath-house. I’ll help you out of your armour, and you can soak in a tub of hot water for a while.’

‘I didn’t really exert myself very much this evening, Khalad. I didn’t even work up a sweat.’

‘You don’t have to. That smell’s so ingrained into your armour that five minutes after you put it on, you smell as if you haven’t bathed for a month.’

‘It’s one of the drawbacks of the profession. Are you sure you want to be a knight?’