David Zindell - The Lightstone

But many of the Librarians along the walls had less success than Kane and I. Many had fallen, hacked apart, bleeding and crying out their death agonies. Fifty yards down the wall to the left, a squadron of Blues had broken through their defenses.

They were rampaging about the battlements, swinging their axes at anything that moved and howling hideously.

'How are we to kill them if they don't know themselves when they are already killed?' a Librarian near me cried.

From the tower high above the batdements, Lord Grayam's strong voice suddenly called down to us: 'Atara Ars Narmada! Our archers are fallen! Come up here now!'

Atara wasted no time in hurrying up the tower stairs in response to his summons.

From this vantage high above the walls, she could shoot her arrows down at the Blues who now held an entire section of the wall.

Now, to the left and right, two of the great siege towers had nearly been brought up flush with the walls. And one of the battering rams already had. A hundred yards from us, Count Ulanu's warriors had positioned it in front of the centermost of the west wall's gates. It looked almost like a small chalet, with its steeply pointed triangular frame covered in a housing of wooden planks and wet hides. Inside it, hung on chains from the sturdy frame, was a great tree trunk whose head was black iron cast into the shape of a ram. The men inside the housing swung the log back and forth so that the ram's head struck the wooden gate, again and again, back and forth, threatening to shatter it into splinters.

DOOM! two, three, four, DOOM! two, three, four, DOOM! two, three. ..

'Oh, my Lord!' Maram said beside me. 'They're going to break in!'

He positioned his red crystal beneath the rays of the waning sun, but nothing happened.

'What's wrong with this stone!' he wailed out And then, in a much softer voice,

'What's wrong with me?'

And still the great ram beat against the gates, DOOM! two, three, four, DOOM! two, three, four…

From the left came the yowling of the Blues, and from above us in the tower, the twang of Atara's bowstring as she fired arrows over our heads at them.

OWRRULLL! OWRRULLLL!

There is no pain, I told myself, hacking apart a young knight who had won through to the battlements. There is only killing and death. 'I'm out!' I heard Atara call down to someone in the street below the walls.

And then someone else cried out, 'More arrows! Send up more arrows!'

One of the city's tradesmen, climbing halfway up the wall's steps from the street below, heaved a sheaf of arrows up to me. I grabbed it by the binding cord, and ran up the tower steps to deliver them to Atara.

'Are you all right?' I said to her, looking her over for wounds.

'I'm fine, Val,' she said. Then she looked at my blood-spattered surcoat and mail and asked, 'Are you all right?'

'For now,' I said, cutting the cord around the sheaf of arrows.

As she fit one to her bowstring, Lord Grayam came over to me holding a long bow.

He asked, 'Can you work one of these as you wield your sword?'

'No,' I said, 'but I can shoot.'

'Good – then aim your arrows at those Blues on the wall!'

For a moment, I turned to look at the battalions of Count Ulanu's men far below us crashing against the city's walls like steel waves. They stood bravely beneath the hail of our missiles, their shields held high, waiting to take their turns ascending ladders and die upon our swords – or deal out death themselves. A great many of them were massed beneath the section of wall that the Blues had taken. They were pouring up the numerous ladders there, trying to turn the stream of men that had topped the wall into a flood.

From the tower's vantage, Atara began shooting her arrows into the Blues with a deadly accuracy. I did, too. Where I had once pulled aside my bow to keep from wounding a deer, I now found myself firing feathered shafts into men's naked bellies and throats. Astonishingly, many of the Blues fought on even with half a dozen arrows sticking out of them. If it hadn't been for the valor of the Librarians on the wall, braving the Blues' ferocious axes as they counter-attacked them along the battlements from the north and south, that section of the wall might have been lost to the enemy's assault.

'Push them off!' Lord Grayam called down to his knights. 'Push them off and they'll lose heart!'

A hail of arrows aimed at the tower – at Lord Grayam and us – struck against its battlements, sending up chips of stone. And then a great boulder, hurled by the mangonel, nearly found its mark. It crashed into the wall just where it joined the tower, and broke a hole there. When the dust had settled and the tower stopped shaking, I looked down to see that the boulder had destroyed the stone stairway leading from the tower down to the walls.

DOOM! two, three, four, DOOM! two, three, four, DOOM! two, three

…

And still the battering ram worked against the city's gates. I heard Maram gasp out a curse from thirty feet below me. Then I watched as he leaned out of a vacant crenel near Kane and held his crystal pointed toward the ram. A red fire that quickly built into swirling crimson flames leapt out from it. The flames fell upon the ram's housing like the breath of a dragon. In only moments, the wet hides nailed to the ram's frame steamed and began burning away as the wood beneath ignited in a great torment of fire. Screams split the air as the men inside it began burning, too.

'Ai! Ai! Ai!' they cried. 'Ai! Ai! Ai!'

More than one of Count Ulanu's men, upon witnessing this horror, turned to flee from the wall. Then ten more broke, and twenty, and soon whole companies from Aigul and Inyam were turning and running. Count Ulanu and his captains rode upon them, striking them with the flats of their swords and trying to turn back the tide of this uncalled retreat. But when men lose the courage to fight, there is little their leaders can do to make them.

'I'll give them fire!' Maram called out from the wall below the tower. 'I will!'

Just then his crystal flared a bright ruby red as a shaft of fire shot forth. It struck the siege tower, which had just been hooked onto the wall. Flames enveloped it, trapping fifty men inside its great height of crackling wood. I tried not to listen to their screams.

Suddenly the enemy's bugles along the burning pasture sounded a loud tattoo as Count Ulanu finally gave the order for a retreat. His men, who had mounted their ladders with so much bloodlust, now couldn't be kept from practically flying back down them. They left the companv of Blues stranded on top of the wall. Although these nearly nerveless men fought valiantly, Atara's and my arrows picked them off one by one, and Lord Grayam's knights quickly finished them, closing in from north and south along the wall as they retook this blood-slicked section of it.

For the moment, the enemy's attack failed and the world seemed to stand still. All I could hear was the cries and pleading of the wounded, and the long, dark, terrible shrieking inside me. Then I took note of a tremendous clamor coming from the south of the city. A knight on top of a wounded horse came galloping through the streets from that direction. He stopped just beneath our tower and called up to Lord Grayam.

'My Lord!' he gasped, 'the Sun Gate is broken! Captain Nicolam is holding the entrance, but we are too few! He begs you to send more men!'

It took only a moment for Lord Grayam to call down to his son, Captain Donalam, to lead half a company of knights to this new crisis along the south wall. Kane, who had a sense for where the battle was to be the fiercest, looked up toward me and smiled savagely as he favored me with a quick nod of his head. Then he gripped his bloody sword and joined Captain Donalam's knights. They climbed down the wall to the street and began running behind the knight on his wounded horse. I would have gone with them, but the tower's steps were broken, and I had no good way down to them.