Night Winds (29 page)

"For all things there must be an ending," croaked a grotesque voice from the shadows.

Sesi screamed. Kane whirled in the direction of the voice.

The creature on the stones had once been a man--though it took imagination to recognize that. He had no more legs than Byr but enough of his arms remained to make stubby flippers. Wrapped in a shaggy fur sack, he scooted over the stones like a seal. His jaws had been torn away, and in answer to some morbid whim he had had the broken mandibles fitted with snoutlike jaws of razor-fanged steel. There was blood on the polished fangs.

"The Crawler is back!" shouted the armless man called Ghost. He ran out of the temple to help the steel-jawed amputee--pushing him with his foot as the Crawler rolled up the low steps.

The other half-men emerged from the sanctum. "What is it, Crawler?" Byr demanded.

"The roadway is guarded, but they never saw me," the Crawler announced in his barely intelligible voice. "I came as fast as I could ' but they'll be here any minute. Jeresen and Masale agreed to a truce after only a skirmish.

Word came down of our presence here from one of Jeresen's men you let get away. He was scared out of his wits--enough to convince them. Jeresen and Masale had a council, and when I left Masale was arguing final terms to hire Jeresen and his mercenaries to help him storm Lynortis. Instead of fighting it out, they're going to attack together!"

Byr yelled frantic orders. The half-men rushed about to prepare their defense.

"That does it," Kane said grimly. "Let's try to get out of this."

"Kane, I meant what I said. I'm staying with them."

There was that set to her jaw he admired. Kane shrugged. "All right, then. I'm not."

Sesi started to call out to him as he turned. The words would not come.

Kane leaned against the merlon of a deserted bartizan atop the fortress wall. At a distance much farther down, the half-men were preparing to defend the broken portals of Lynortis. In the darkness he could only glimpse vague shapes scurrying around the plaza before the barbican. Below he could see the line of torches writhing like a serpent up the spiral road to the citadel.

He knew he should be going, finding cover until this was over, until there was a chance for escape. Kane cursed the girl's stubbornness. He might have been able to win free with her. By himself he was confident of escape; Sesi was the only one they wanted--to lead them to a treasure she could never find. Kane regretted her loss. But this way was best. He'd have taken any risk for the secret of treasure, but one piece of gold would buy a bedmate more accomplished than Sesi. He should be going.

From the distance echoed a clashing roar. Kane knew the sound. Boulders hurled down the steep grade of the roadway. He could vaguely make out struggling knots of half-men rolling the huge stones onto the road--like ants swarming over a beetle. Once started down the slope, boulders plummeted downward with gathering speed--striking sparks as they caromed from the face of the mountain, glancing from the outer wall with sharp thunder. There was no room to avoid their avalanche for those on the roadway.

But Masale had endured two years of countless attacks and counterattacks along this bloodstained road--and he knew to expect resistance from the ruined citadel. Like phantom echoes through the night came the shouts of men, the splintering crash of falling boulders--then the brazen clangour of stone against armor. Masale advanced behind a mantlet hastily pieced together from relics strewn over the field below.

Men yelled, horses screamed as the avalanche of boulders struck the armored framework of the mantlet. Kane could see nothing of what took place on the road. Listening to the cries and crashes, watching the torchlit line waver and fall back, seeing rows of torches suddenly snuff out and fall spinning into the night, he could envision the chaos below. Rocks bounded over the wall to plummet down upon those on the tier below. Boulders smashed into the advancing mantlet, splintering hastily repaired timbers, flinging shards of stone and broken armor over those who crouched behind. And when the rumble of the rockslide echoed away, the line of torches continued its advance.

Masale's troops were closer now. Kane heard the clatter of hooves, the roar of warcries. Then the creak of ancient siege machinery. The springald smacked viciously, and Kane knew its heavy bolt was arching downward. He heard the rasp and recoil of an onager, flinging its basket of fist-sized stones. Against one torchlit barbican be saw an archer firing into the advancing line. More stones rattled down the slope from the mangonel on the opposite barbican.

Frantically the half-men worked over the few light siege weapons they could bring to bear at this close range. Masale's column pressed inexorably upward, although time and again sections of torches were swept away to oblivion. Kane felt admiration for the half-men's determination--a handful of cripples fighting with a few pieces of outworn weaponry. Given enough men and weapons to defend the entire perimeter of Lynortis, Masale would never have a chance. As it was, the half-men were forced to concentrate all their defense on the section of the mountain directly below the gateway. Thus, as they advanced upward on the spiral road, only a fraction of Masale's troops came under attack at one time. There was no stopping his ascent to the open portal.

Now they were within a hundred yards of the gateway, and Kane could make out white smears of faces in the flaring torchlight. The smashed mantlet had been discarded, and they advanced in testudo formation--foot men in the van, mounted farther back. In minutes the van would force past the empty gates, and the horsemen would sweep through to annihilate all in the plaza. Arrows and rocks still rained on upraised shields; a springald bolt tore a path through their ranks. But now they ad advanced at a run, and Masale's archers were raining death amidst the city's defenders.

Farther back across the plaza a scorpion recoiled with a deadly slam--the heaviest siege engine Kane had noticed that was still operational. Daylight suddenly burst over the steep slopes before the citadel's gates. Kane threw up his arm, dazzled by the white-hot blast. A phosphorus bomb--the half-men had uncovered an unexploded shell somewhere. Spewing tentacles of incandescent death blossomed over the roadway. Where it struck men flamed into cinder. Searing fragments reached out like lethal fingers, burning all they touched. Men and horses shrieked in pain and terror, bolted over the outer wall in blind panic. Flaming bodies pitched over the edge, falling like stars into the darkness far below.

The advance was broken. The scorpion bucked again, and another phosphorus bomb spread searing hell across the slope farther down. Masale's troops milled in terror. Another few bombs and their assault would be routed.

The scorpion lashed out a third time, but Kane saw no sunburst below. Far at the end of Masale's column, a score of torches were snuffed out. From cries in the night below, Kane guessed that a gas shell had struck there--too far down hill for the heavy vapor to have reached the main force.

Masale's troops were disciplined. Death before and beside them, they regrouped in the shelter of the far side, beyond the range of the defenders. Again they advanced--now in a headlong rush over the blackened bodies of their fellows.

The half-men waited with their last shell until the first Masale's troops burst past the open portal. The phosphorus bomb exploded full in their ranks--turning the gateway into a screaming hell of death.

For a moment the gateway was blocked with charred writhing bodies. Then the rest of the column surged over the fuming barrier, carrying the battle to Lynortis's last defenders. The phosphorus flames died, and darkness swallowed the final battle.

But Kane no longer watched the death struggle before Lynortis's gates. He stood frozen, looking out over the crenel, his eyes seeing a battle of three decades past.

He saw Lynortis before the fall--ten thousand men defending its walls against ten thousand more who struggled up the road to reach the citadel above them. He saw a hundred siege engines fire at once, hurling death down upon those below. The night was alight with starbursts of phosphorus flaming across the forests thousands of feet below. And from the attackers arched missiles and stones to smash through the towers of Lynortis and crush those who could not hide.

Nowhere was there a place to hide.

Fire raged across the city where flaming balls of pitch and naphtha splashed. In the valley below, lethal clouds of black vapor drifted, slaying all in their breath. Women and children fought in the streets for the pitiable rations of food and water that were spared them. Plague stalked them all, in the valley and on the pinnacle. And the cries of the maimed and the dying were as a ceaseless moan of wind.

On and ever on the nightmare continued, while days of horror merged with nights of terror like the flapping of batwings. Death glutted himself here, taxing even death's insatiable greed, and the breath of corruption was scented with the acrid perfume of burning. In high Lynortis and on the plain below, hundreds of thousands died in fear and violence, and death was the only peace in this endlessly vision of hell.

At last all was quiet. The flames, the cries were no more. A dead city looked over a dead valley, where only those moved who sated themselves among the endless rows and piles and pits and mountains of the dead.

Kane could see the dead stirring now. See the smashed and burned and torn and fever-pocked and famine-eroded bodies rise from the moraine of unnumbered bones. See their spectral hordes march across the war-blasted forest rise from the talus of broken bones below, drift through the shattered towers and rubble-choked streets, dance a writhing spiral about the obelisk of Lynortis.

Kane moaned and shook himself awake from his trance. He stared about him in a daze. The night was still, close and cold in the darkest hour before dawn. The battle was over, then. Masale's men had overrun the last defense. It was time to be going.

Kane moved like a ghost through the empty streets of Lynortis. His stealth was needless; there were none to bid him halt. The gates of Lynortis were guarded only by the slain. His path to escape was open, but Kane paused on the threshold.

The half-men had fought well, and in the end had died well. Masale had lost heavily on the assault up the roadway; scores more lay dead upon the stones of the plaza. With nothing to live for, the half-men had slain without fear for their lives. The price of Masale's victory had been costly, and from the strewn corpses of both his soldiers and the mercenaries not many had won past the plaza.

The Crawler lay smashed like a slug, his ghastly steel jaws still clamped in a throat. The blind giant Semoth sprawled with his face over a heap of Masale's soldiers. The others were there, too. Kane didn't see Byr at first, until he heard his name whispered.

Kane turned. A heavy bolt from the springald had been rammed butt-first into a mound of rubble. The leader of the half-men was impaled on its iron head.

"No! Don't touch me!" Byr warned him when Kane wanted to lift him free. "I'm bleeding inside. Only have a few breaths left to me."

Kane stood back and gazed at the carnage.

"So you came back," Byr said.

Kane studied his drawn face and knew what the man meant. "So you know me, then."

"I know you. None of us ever knew for certain, but I guessed."

"You fought well here."

"Not well enough. Masale and the Waldann captain fought past, with maybe ten or fifteen of their men. They have Sesi."

"I'm sorry for that."

"Why, Kane?" Byr whispered "Was it for gold?"

Kane shrugged, his face hidden in shadow. "The gold had long ago been spent--even Reallis's necklace. I grew tired of the senseless slaughter... I wanted it to end."

Byr coughed a frothy beard of blood. "For me it ends now. But the war that has festered here for thirty years still goes on. Kane, bring to us now an Ending."

He lived just long enough to see Kane walk past him, away from the open gateway.

A pair of guards lounged at the entrance to the Temple Of Peace. They mistook Kane for a Waldann straggler until it was too late. Kane let their bodies fall quietly, then walked into the torchlit sanctum.

Sesi hung naked from an overhead support--a dozen merciless faces intent on her. Her wrists were tied behind her back, and her arms drawn over her head by a rope thrown over the roof support. When the full weight of her body pulled down, the agony was excruciating and in time her shoulders would be torn from their sockets. A second rope made a noose about her throat, slowly strangling her whenever the rope that held her wrists was allowed to go slack. Her tanned flesh was crisscrossed with livid welts.

Jeresen was drawing up the slack on her bound wrists when Kane entered. One of Masale's men was carefully paring resinous splinters from a torch. Sesi stared down at Kane through pain-glazed eyes.

The Waldann captain was first to see him. His face twisted into a sneer. "You got balls coming back now, Kane! I know all about how you tried to steal this little bitch for yourself."

Masale started at his words. He spun and stared at Kane in wonder. "You!" he shouted.

"That's right." Kane smiled coldly.

The would-be conqueror touched his scarred and lined locks of hair. His hooked nose had always made him look like an eagle, but he was an old and tired eagle now. His eyes were rimmed and haunted; his warrior's body showed the effects of dissipation beneath his splendid mail.

Masale shook his head in disbelief. "You amaze me, Kane. After thirty years you stand before me once again--yet on my oath, you haven't aged a year since that night you disappeared after leading me through the mountain passage into Lynortis!"

"By the Seven, that fits with some of the tales I heard about Kane when we fought together under Roderic!" Jeresen growled. "Some whispered he was a sorcerer--or demon--a deathless bringer of doom whose name figures in a hundred legends! Kill him I say!"

"I give orders here!" Massie snarled. "Kane has served me well in the past. If he serves me again, he'll share in the gold."