Richard Byers - The Captive Flame

“Present!” he snapped, and, acting as one, his men leveled their spears over the top of the makeshift fortification. Khouryn hoped the martial precision of the action-and the rows of rocksteady, razor-edged points reflecting Selune’s light-would give the insurgents pause.

He climbed up on top of the barricade. “You see how it is,” he called. “We’re trained men-at-arms, and we’re ready for you. Go home, or you’ll wish you had.”

“Give us the wizards!” someone shouted back.

“Go home,” Khouryn repeated.

“The spears don’t matter!” cried another voice. “There are only a few of them, compared to all of us! Just get them!”

The mob didn’t respond with an eager shout. Instead, it gave an odd collective sigh, as though accepting a wearisome chore. But then it charged.

“Clubs!” Khouryn bellowed, because the spears had been a bluff. Aoth said they had to protect the wizards’ precinct without killing too many of those who hoped to butcher the residents. Khouryn understood the reason, but even given the Brotherhood’s advantages of training, discipline, and armor, it was going to make the job a lot harder than it should have been.

He jumped back down behind the barricade, unsheathed his truncheon, and settled his shield more comfortably on his arm. Then the first howling rioters tried to scramble over the barricade. It was tricky for a dwarf to fight behind an obstruction as tall as he was, but he stabbed up with the end of his club and caught an attacker in the mouth. Broken teeth pattered down on his hand.

To his irritation, Gaedynn’s archers were still climbing onto the rooftops when the mob-or mobs, really, since they didn’t seem to be acting in a coordinated fashion-converged on the wizards’ precinct from three directions. The bowmen could have formed up on the street, but then it would have been difficult to obtain a clear shot at the rioters.

A pair of hands reached up from below the eaves to grip the edge of the roof, and then, as the sellsword started to clamber up, the left one slipped. Gaedynn dived down the pitch and grabbed the loose, flailing arm, risking a fall himself to keep his man from plummeting.

Well… boy, actually, for when he pulled the lummox up, it turned out to be Yuirmidd, a half-grown, pimply youth who’d joined the Brotherhood during their brief time in Aglarond. As usual, Yuirmidd wore a tawdry assortment of trinkets in seeming imitation of his superior’s fondness for adornment.

“How difficult is it to climb onto a roof?” Gaedynn asked.

“I’m a bowman, not a mountain goat,” Yuirmidd replied.

Gaedynn suspected he might be the model for the lad’s impudence as well, and he had yet to make up his mind on how he felt about it. “You’re not much of anything yet. Perhaps after a few more years’ campaigning, in the unlikely event you live that long.”

“It’s starting!” someone shouted.

Gaedynn scrambled up and looked to see for himself. Sure enough, rioters were rushing the barricades Khouryn’s spearmen had erected across the streets and alleys leading into the precinct. It was an idiotic, suicidal thing to do-but then, this was the City of Madness, wasn’t it?

Aimed in a sensible way, a few volleys of arrows would do wonders to blunt the mob’s enthusiasm. Such a tactic would also slaughter them by the dozen.

“If it looks like they’re breaking through anywhere,” Gaedynn shouted, “kill them! If you see someone who looks like a ringleader, kill him! Otherwise, discourage them! Put your shafts into the ground in front of their feet or the walls above their heads!”

“You’re joking,” growled Orrag, a half-orc with the hulking frame and jutting lower canines characteristic of his kind.

“Just do it.” Gaedynn nocked an arrow, pulled the fletching back to his ear, and let it fly. It punched deep into a rioter’s torso, and he dropped.

“You shot that one,” Orrag said, his tone accusatory.

“He had a torch.” Gaedynn laid another shaft on his bow. “If we let them set fire to the wizards’ precinct, they win. Now, are you going to start fighting, or are you waiting for the captain himself to pay you a call and humbly beseech your assistance?”

Straddling Scar’s back, Jhesrhi wheeled above the wizards’ precinct. Other griffon riders soared to either side.

Most of the rioters probably hadn’t even noticed the sellswords swooping and gliding through the darkness overhead, and the vast majority had no bows or crossbows anyway. The aerial cavalry were relatively safe.

Jhesrhi couldn’t say the same for her comrades on the ground, repelling wave after wave of attackers. Is this my fault? she wondered. If I’d known the right words to say to calm those idiots in the street, could all this have been avoided?

But it was useless to speculate, especially when she had work to do. She hurled spells into the masses of rioters, forcing them to keel over fast asleep or snaring them in gigantic spiderwebs.

Before the mob arrived, Khouryn had hurried from barricade to barricade, overseeing all the warriors under his command. Once the enemy appeared, it had been necessary to stay in one place, even though that limited him to directing the men in that location.

Now he wasn’t leading anyone at all. He was too busy catching blows on his shield and swinging his club, and couldn’t spare a glance or a thought for anything but the next attacker rushing in at him.

Someone on his right yelled, “Watch out!” The men on either side lurched backward, and a bench fell off the top of the barricade to crack down beside his boot. Both layers of the Brotherhood’s defense-the tangled mass of furniture and the lines of sellswords behind it-were giving way before the ferocious pressure of the mob.

It shouldn’t have been happening. Not to expert soldiers. But Aoth had forbidden them to fight to best effect, and perhaps the Foehammer had seen fit to remind them that in battle, nothing was certain.

Dripping sweat, his chest heaving, Khouryn sucked in a breath to bellow new orders. But just then, the barricade shattered. Stools and tables tumbled and slid, knocking soldiers off balance and fouling their legs as they tottered backward.

A wooden box with brass corner guards crashed down on Khouryn’s head. Then he was on his hands and knees amid a scatter of furniture, with a fierce pain under his steel and leather helmet and no recollection of falling down. The mob was racing at him, and his men were nowhere in sight. Because they’d dropped back. Presumably only a couple of paces, but they might as well be sailing the Trackless Sea for all the good they were likely to do him in the next few heartbeats.

He heaved himself to his feet. It made his head throb, and he gasped.

The stains on her leather armor reeking of vomit, a truly enormous woman cut at Khouryn with a short, heavy, single-edged sword. He blocked with his shield, tried to riposte with his truncheon, and discovered his hand was empty. He must have dropped the weapon when he fell.

His opponent attacked again. A well-dressed man armed with a rapier and a mail gauntlet maneuvered to flank him. Other foes, mere shadows in the dark and confusion, were surging forward too.

Khouryn kept warding himself and snatched a dagger from his belt. He would much rather have grabbed his urgrosh, but it took two hands to wield. If he discarded his shield, his foes would kill him in the naked instant before the axe was ready.

They stood a fair chance of doing that anyway, but a warrior could only select what seemed the proper strategy, then fight his best. He sidestepped to keep the enemy from encircling him and looked for an opening that would enable him to shift in close and use the knife on someone.