Her Majesty's Wizard #1 (34 page)

   "Archers! Loose!" the abbot cried, and the courtyard was suddenly filled with arrows. Matt turned away, sickened by the slaughter, looking out at the tunnel for an excuse. The sally-party was doing very well; the tunnel roof was fallen,-and the framework halfway to kindling. While the laborers hacked at oak, the knights and infantry hewed at soldiers. It was all over in ten minutes, and the barons and their liege men pulled back to the sides just as the few surviving attackers poured out through the gate. The barons and their men chopped at them as they came; only a handful were left to stagger back into the enemy line.

   "In!" the abbot cried, for a regiment was finally pulling out of the enemy line for a counterattack. The barons bawled orders; knights and footmen alike leaped to catch up their wounded and dead, then rushed back in through the gate. The huge doors boomed shut behind them, and the great oak bar dropped into its brackets as an exclamation point.

   "Let them learn from this," the abbot growled; but there was no joy in his eyes, for the talus slope outside the gate was filled with dead and moaning bodies.

   "Hold fire!" he bawled, as a small running party charged up the slope from the enemy line. "Let them recover their wounded!"

   They took care of their wounded, all right-with quick, sharp, sword strokes.

   The abbot shrugged. "Their comrades' swords or ours-what matter?" But his face was long, and he made the Sign of the Cross over the dead, muttering the Latin words of conditional absolution.

   The inhumanity of the spectacle was clawing at Matt's brain, trying to paralyze him, and he couldn't quite shake it off.

   "Wizard," hummed the Demon by his ear, "I sense expending of- some force beneath us."

   "Probably just the brown-robes, coming out to pick up the dead," Matt muttered.

   "Nay; I mean beneath the ground, within this mound of earth beneath us."

   "Down inside the motte itself?" Matt looked up, a surge of adrenaline banishing the tendrils clinging to his brain. "Check for miners, will you? Sappers, men trying to dig a tunnel under the battlements and up into the courtyard. If you find them, bring the roof down on them."

   "And how shall I do that?" From its tone of voice, the Demon knew quite well, but wanted to make sure Matt did, too.

   "Weaken the bonds between molecules, of course!"

   "There are few men within this world who'd know such things," the Demon chortled. "I go to search the underground."

   It winked out. Matt stood scowling. The Demon was testing him, trying to find his limits. Why?

   "Malvoisin!"

   Matt looked up at the cry. The siege tower was rolling again, without horses. Faintly, he could hear a heavy work-chant. "They're pushing it from behind," he growled. "What can you do about that, Lord Abbot?"

   "I can-Ho!"

   Fog, sand, and a tidal wave of dust hit the battlements, churning so thickly that Matt could scarcely see the abbot, ten feet away. Men shouted, startled and frightened; then they began to cough all along the rampart, hacking and wheezing.

   "Let fly at the malvoisin!" the abbot cried in despair, then broke off in a coughing fit. The archers began their chant, with many breaks for coughs and wheezes, loosing their arrows blindly into the dust.

   This was a real emergency, Matt realized. The enemy could roll up their malvoisin under cover of the storm and send their men in, ready and equipped for dust.

   "Use your power, Wizard," the abbot managed between coughs from somewhere near. "Banish this fell storm!"

   Matt nodded, forcing his voice to be steady.

   "To remove this rain of dust, Let there be a steady gust, Blowing from the west with force Toward the foeman's foot and horse!"

   The western wind howled in. Men shouted; all about him, clanking spoke of knights clutching one another, to brace themselves against the blast ... But the dust thinned with amazing speed and blew away. Matt turned, looking up, and saw a mammoth slab of whirling dust, its front as flat as if it had been planed, standing like a wall between the monastery and its enemies. That wasn't going to help much; it could still hide the malvoisin till it was too close to stop.

   A knight howled as the wind hurled him before it, toward the outer edge. His comrades dived and caught his arms just in time. They hauled him back onto the parapet.

   "Secure yourselves!" the abbot bellowed, then turned to Matt. "Wizard, this is your doing! Can you stop this wind?"

   Matt shook his head. "If I do, the dust will come pouring back in. It's up to the enemy sorcerers to make the dust disappear; then I can stop the wind. What hour is it?"

   "Midnight," the abbot shouted. "Five more hours till the dawn; and my men cannot hold against this wind!"

   A roar, like a dozen subways homing in, filled the valley. Matt froze, startled. Then he ran to the wall, more blown than running, brought up sharply against the stone, hung on for dear life, and dared a peek out.

   The roar was fading. A huge trench had opened in the field, arrowing from the wall straight back into the dust-wall. Dirt was still pouring in all along its length, along with an avalanche of enemy soldiers and knights from the bottom of the dust-wall.

   "What means this, Wizard?" Sir Guy called.

   "Sappers," Matt shouted back. "Miners. They were trying to dig their way under the wall."

   "But how knew you..." The abbot's face froze; he shook his head sharply. "Do not say; I do not wish to know."

   The dust began to thin.

   "Ready your archers, Lord Abbot!" Matt called. "The enemy's realized he has to dump the dust! I can stop the wind in a minute or two!"

   The abbot bawled orders as the dust dissipated; the last few tag ends disappeared. Matt heaved a sigh of relief, and called,

   "The dust is fled, our soldiers chilled; The howling wind our ears has filled. Let us have a bit of peace; Let the western wind now cease!"

   The wind slackened and died-and fog rolled in, worse than London with a three-day calm. Thick, opaque fog settled over the battlements in a few seconds, hiding Sir Guy five feet away. Matt froze, alarm thrilling through him as he saw it hit. A freezing thought nudged his brain. Just before the fog wrapped around him, he took the deepest breath he could and hid his face in the crook of his arm. Around him, he heard men shout, then the clank and thud as bodies hit the stonework. Men choked and hacked as if they were trying to cough up their entrails. This fog wasn't just water vapor; it was a gas attack.

   Matt spent all his breath in four lines:

   "Western wind, return to save us! Restore the breath you but now gave us! Blast this fog from off our wall! Rid us of this reeking pall!"

   Then he clamped his jaws shut, trying not to breathe, as the Western wind howled in, hurling the fog out toward the enemy, and revealing the malvoisin, only a few yards from the wall. A knight stood in the doorway at the top. His knees buckled as a tag end of fog coiled into his helmet, then he fell forward, hurtling down. The enemy line filled with a single, roaring cough as the gas attack hit. But even as it struck, the fog thinned, faded, disappeared-and the malvoisin rolled forward the last few feet, almost touching the wall itself.

   The boarding ramp fell down, and arrows began to plummet from the top. Swords rang, footmen fell, and the parapet ran red.

   The defenders were forced onto the defensive, being driven back toward the stairway, though every inch was bought with blood.

   Now, what would stop these enemy soldiers? Most of them were here only because they'd been forced to it. What could buy them off?

   Gold, of course. Matt shaped his spell on that idea.

   "For our foemen, I am told, All that glitters now is gold. Oft a man his life hath sold One doubloon but to enfold. Monkish knights, of virtue bold, Swords and armor still may hold!"

   The attackers shouted in horror as every, bit of steel and iron about them turned to gold-pure gold. The Moncairean knights and soldiers shouted triumph as their steel cleaved through golden armor like hot knives through margarine. The attackers howled and turned, trying to jam back into the malvoisin en masse. But the ramp was narrow, and there were six feet of open space between malvoisin and wall, enough for ten or twenty men to plummet screaming to their deaths before the last footman could scramble back over the ramp. Footmen braced their pikes and heaved, pushing the malvoisin away from the wall; and knights stalked the battlements again, intoning conditional absolution and plunging their swords into the wounded.

   The sounds of a howling, cursing brawl came from the malvoisin, like a congregation of fishwives. The whole structure trembled.

   "What broil is that?" the abbot growled.

   "The enemy." Sir Guy grinned. "They squabble over treasure. Yet 'ware; look down." He pointed. Matt, and the abbot craned their necks, looking down over the wall, to see fresh troops running into the bottom door of the malvoisin.

   "Max!" Matt bellowed, and the Demon hung before him in the air. "Aye, Wizard?"

   "Upgrade the entropy on that firetrap." Matt pointed at the malvoisin.

   "Aye," the Demon chortled, and winked out.

   "What was that spell?" the abbot demanded.

   "Watch." Matt's eyes glittered.

   The malvoisin gave a long, preliminary groan; then, with a roar, the whole structure fell apart, beams crumbling into dust as they fell.

   "Dry rot," Matt informed the abbot. "Accelerated."

   A ten-foot heap of wood dust lay before the gate, filled with struggling, shouting troops.

   "Scald!" the abbot called out, granite-faced. "Wash this dust away!"

   Two knights upended a hundred-gallon kettle. Boiling water gouted down into the dust-heap. The enemy soldiers screamed, leaping out of sudden mud, landing running. But some of them only made about ten feet before they fell; and some never even got out of the dust pile.

   "Archers!" the abbot bellowed, and arrows leaped down from the battlements to turn the fallen into pincushions, while the abbot recited the conditional absolution.

   "A horrible end," he growled then, "but we could not have them there, upon our gate. Yet most shall live."

   The last few golden-armored men staggered back into the enemy lines. They'd barely gotten there when knots of howling struggle erupted all along the line as footmen and knights alike fought over golden armor, swords, and pike heads.

   "'Twill be some time ere they restore order." The abbot leaned back, lifting his helmet to wipe his brow. "We have some breathing space, I think. Brother Thomas! What's the hour?"

   "The eighth of the night, milord," a brown-robe shouted back.

   "An hour left till dawn." The abbot secured his helmet again. "Prepare yourselves, good knights! They'll not give us overlong to rest!"

   But it was long-ten minutes went by, then fifteen.

   Matt bit his lip. The enemy only had forty-five minutes left. What were they cooking up that took so long and could be worth the time when there was so little of it left?

   His answer appeared, only a hundred feet away from the wall, diminished by distance-but her body glowed in the dark, and every detail was crystal-clear, the more so because she was nude.

   All the defenders stared, transfixed.

   Matt couldn't see her face too well, but her body was the most voluptuous he'd ever seen, fairly reeking of desire and secret, almost unbearable, pleasures. She stood turned three-quarters toward the monastery, long black hair flowing down over shoulder and breast, looking up at the wall sidelong.

   Then most of the knights tore their eyes away, squeezing them shut, bowing their heads over clasped hands, and mouthing prayers as if they were racing to see who could finish the Rosary first.

   "Lord above!" A black-bearded knight near Matt shuddered. "'Tis Anastaze -- she whom I wronged, who slew herself, ere I came here repentant! Dear Lord, what have I done, to put her in the mouth of Hell?"

   "'Tis not your lass!" the abbot boomed, clasping the man's shoulder. "'Tis a succubus from Hell! Or a foul glamour, made to look like one you knew! Up, away! Get you to the chapel! Pray! You cannot stand 'gainst this enemy!"

   The knight rose and turned, stumbling past the abbot to the stairway.

   "Mother of God!" a young knight at Matt's right breathed. "Lord above, save me!" His eyes fairly bulged.

   "Why, then!" Sir Guy clapped him on the shoulder. "You came a virgin to this place? Nay, be proud! It lends you greater power, in such a war as this! Come, lad, shield your eyes and pray!

   There's nothing nearer Heaven than a true, good woman; but there's nothing farther than yon succubus!"

   Succubi, he should have said-for there were many of them now, sauntering past the wall in a languorous parade.

   The young knight hid his eyes and began to pray.

   "Hold firm!" The abbot clasped his shoulder. "Each temptation refused gives greater strength to withstand the next!"

   Matt looked up; all along the battlements, odd knights were stumbling toward the stairways-more casualties than any other single attack had taken. But most of them watched without flinching, with chilled eyes. Each man's lips moved in silent syllables of prayer; they stood with arrows nocked, or swords half-drawn, charged with tension, waiting for an enemy to strike at.