Dave Smeds - The Schemes of Dragons

HIEPHORA AND A DOZEN of her minor queens, hidden in the trees near Lord Puriel's fortress, watched Omril's cohort of men ride out through the barbican. The little people remained motionless, quiet as the flutter of butterfly wings. It was said that a rythni could stand on a man's shoulder and the man would be unaware of it. The riders crossed the moat, turned down the fork of the road leading along the shore of Rock Lake, and vanished into their own dust. If all went well, the wizard would not realize he had been tricked until it was too late. The rythni waited until the horizon concealed first the light of little Urthey, and, soon after, the bright glow of the Sister. Motherworld hung low in the sky, preparing to follow, displaying only half her face. The shadows grew long and dark.

"Now," Hiephora sang in her lilting, melodic mother tongue. Her queens darted off on gossamer wings, leaving her with her handmaiden, Cyfee. After exchanging a nervous glance they, too, launched into the air.

They circled three times, and in response, the leaves shook and fluttered. Hundreds upon hundreds of rythni women flooded out of the trees, a queen leading each wave. Carrying coils of rope, they sped into the open air above the moat, the twilight obscuring them to human eyes. They staggered their formations so that their flitting shapes would resemble the bats that dwelled among the corbels and rafters of the fortress.

The castle loomed, high and intimidating, full of stone and tile and mortar, emanating none of the sweet, nurturing music of the forest's living wood. Hiephora pierced the structure's sphere of influence and faltered, suddenly weak, pitched from straight flight. Many of her subjects, unable to endure the bitter kiss of the air, turned back, terror-stricken, including one of her queens.

"Courage!" she cried. "It fades!" Already the initial shock was lessening, as with the waters of a pond-cold on impact, but increasingly tolerable as one continued to swim. The edifice would do no permanent harm to her people, as long as they did not linger within it. The queens echoed her words of encouragement.

Two-thirds of her women, though they veered and emitted tiny cries, continued gallantly on.

Hiephora and Cyfee landed on a battlement, slipping into an embrasure in order to hide from the sentries. They commanded a view of the entire landward side of the fortress: the moat below, the desolate swath of land beyond that, the trees in the near distance. The last of those who had been daunted vanished into the foliage. She couldn't blame them. They had not been present when she had prophesied this battle a quarter century ago; they could not directly feel, as she did, why it was necessary to risk taboo, and aid Alemar and Elenya.

As Motherworld dipped sedately out of sight, reducing the night to as near darkness as Tanagaran ever saw other than on Dark Night, the cadres of rythni took their ropes and began looping the nooses around the merlons of the battlements, draping the free ends into the moat.

It was a dry moat, lined at the bottom with shattered rock and sharpened stakes, designed to thwart war mounts and siege engines, but negotiable by foot soldiers. One by one, men snaked across the swatch of cleared land, darkly clothed, faces smeared with black grease, their weapons tightly bound and padded, to join a handful of scouts who had come earlier. They rappelled down the embankment at preselected locations, crossed the moat, and fanned out to seize the ropes the rythni had just planted. Soon there were dozens of men scaling the stone walls.

The majority of the rythni vanished from the battlements, for violence was imminent, and the emanations from that would be far harsher than the kind they had already endured. Hiephora, Cyfee, and the queens remained, along with a few of the very brave, whispering guidance to the climbers, letting them know the exact position and number of the guards. The fastest scaler was over half way up when one of Puriel's men noticed a rope. He shouted and drew his sword to hack at the noose.

Cyfee cringed as the blade struck stone, casting sparks, biting into the thick, resin-hardened fiber. Hiephora called for her flyers to warn the climbers. By the time the guard's chops severed the line completely, the men had shifted to other ropes. They continued to ascend.

Someone reached the alarm bell. Lantern glow beamed out of the barracks and from the windows of the keep. The fortress awakened.

The guards on the battlements, badly outnumbered, seeing death rising up at them, cut at the ropes with frantic haste. Two climbers did not shift quickly enough and fell, breaking legs on the jagged rock of the moat. A third landed on one of the sharpened stakes. Then the leaders vaulted the top and drew their swords. The courtyard rang with the sound of steel meeting steel. The first dribbles of reinforcements issued out of the buildings.

Hiephora darted toward the barbican, leaving Cyfee to assist with the high battle. Those rythni who could tolerate the psychic onslaught of men dying continued to replace ropes. As she glided, she saw the main mass of the rebel army bolt from the forest onto the roadway.

So many of them! The houses and farms of the region around Old Stump must have completely emptied, the residents rising to the cause of the Elandri prince and princess. Hiephora herself would have doubted it possible to gather so many, had she not foretold it.

She wished that she could determine the outcome of the battle, but the leaves of meditation, as with all oracles, had sung a twisted tale. She knew only what would happen if Gloroc were not stopped. He would rule for five thousand years. The land would be raped, the forests cut down within a few human generations. The rythni as a race would fade into history. Alemar and Elenya might be the only hope. That was why she had tipped over Lerina's cup of amethery twenty-five years earlier, and why she had committed her people this night.

But at the moment, the screams of men and swords tore at her determination, making her want to fly far away.

She propelled herself into the barbican just as the guard released the lever that would lower the portcullis and seal it off from the rest of the castle. His brow furrowed when the iron failed to drop. He strode to the portal, gazing up in perplexity, and cursed. The top of the portcullis had been bound into its bracket by hundreds of tiny, rythni-sized cords. He cast a worried look at the fighting on the battlements, then rolled a barrel under the archway, seized a pike, climbed onto the barrel, and began slashing at the cords with the pike tip.

Hiephora whistled, and dozens of her women appeared from their hiding places. They swarmed around the spindle at the center of the chamber. Their combined weight and the rapid beating of their wings were enough to spin the gears. The drawbridge began to lower, just as the first of the main throng of invaders reached the far side of the moat.

The guard shouted and leaped off the barrel. The rythni melted away to the far corners of the room. The man reversed the spindle's action. Meanwhile, some of Hiephora's minions tipped over the barrel and sent it rolling out the archway.

The last of the sentries on the battlements screamed as they were run through or flung from the heights. Dozens of the invaders were already rushing down the stairs. Not enough soldiers had emerged from the barracks yet to foil them from charging the barbican. The guard hissed and ran for the barrel, replaced it, and hacked at the cords again.

The rythni streaked to the spindle and began lowering the drawbridge.

The guard screamed and flung the pike. The rythni darted away, quick as wasps, avoiding injury. The guard abandoned the portcullis and returned to the spindle-permanently, since he knew that allowing the drawbridge to lower would mean at least ten times as many people to fight.