Pirvan was silent a trifle too long. To do him justice, Threehands only frowned. He did not glare, let alone curse.
“What cause must knights have before they can draw sword?” he asked. “They certainly found enough when Istar commanded them to fight us. Has not Zephros given at least as much offense?”
Pirvan knew he did not dare reply with silence a second time. He also did not dare tell the truth, which was that at the command of Istar, the knights did not recognize the land rights of the Free Riders. It was expedient to leave them in peace, but if an Istarian chose not to do so, that was between him and the desert-dwellers.
Which left Pirvan squarely in the middle.
“Zephros is a man of hasty temper,” Pirvan said. “If he has not broken the peace yet, he will surely do so before we are much older. But until he does, he is not a lawful foe for the knights.”
“Who still suck from the paps of the kingpriest,” Threehands said, but so quietly that only his bitterness reached Pirvan. The knight had no easy answer to that, so they rode on in silence.
The pen wall across the forecourt of Belkuthas now rose to the height of a man’s waist. That would not keep in horses, but would do well for most other beasts. It would also keep either horse or foot from coming at archers behind it.
That it was even this high so quickly was a tribute to Gran Axesharp and his family. What mysterious messenger had reached them and with what tale, Krythis doubted he would ever know. But twenty dwarves had appeared outside the gate the morning after the warning came, and offered all the help their arms and tools could give.
For the sake of not appearing a witling, Krythis ordered them to start building a pen for the fugitives’ animals. One of the dwarves spat openly on the ground, and several muttered, “Baby tasks.”
But they turned to with a will, and also with hammers, mauls, chisels, wedges, and tools Krythis did not recognize. Half of them worked on the pen; the others started collecting stones of suitable size to repair the gaps in the walls.
It was now the fourth morning since the dwarves’ coming. The pen would be done by sunset, and five of the gaps in the wall could only be found by a sharp-eyed watcher who knew where they had been before. The new stonework might not stand up against a battering ram, but would certainly do more than keep cattle out of the kitchen garden!
The matter of payment had yet to arise, and Krythis decided to wait for the dwarves to speak first. It helped that Axesharp was related in some vague way (dwarven genealogies all being vague to Krythis) to the House of Lintelmaker, who had been one of the two dwarven clans to raise the orphaned Tulia and Krythis.
Perhaps the whole matter was a further coming-of-age present to Rynthala, in honor of her dwarven-fostered parents?
Two dwarves were now raising both din and dust, splitting larger rocks into slabs and then chiseling an edge on each slab. As the sharpened slab landed on one end of the pile, two more dwarves would pick up another from the other end and wedge it firmly into the wall, sharp and upward.
Krythis still marveled at what the dwarves could do without mortar. He had asked once why they were not using it, and received in return such a frigid silence that he expected his fingers and toes to turn blue. He had not asked again.
But the pen would now be proof even against animals that wished to jump out, as well as warhorses whose riders might wish to jump them in. This was just as well, because the first herd of cattle being bought for slaughter and salting down must be on the road already. If Nektoris and his sons had not lost their beast-craft-
A dust cloud on the south road told Krythis that something was already on the move toward Belkuthas. He had just formed the thought of riding out to meet them rather than stand around and watch dwarves fling stones, when two specks in the southern sky caught his attention.
Both were winged, and both had to be large to be visible from such a distance. Now he saw one dive steeply toward the earth, and the other dive even more steeply, as if seeking to get below the first and come up underneath it.
In its blind spot, under its vulnerable belly.
Krythis cupped his hands and shouted:
“Archers! To the high points!”
He then realized that the order would have made more sense if he had not left his own bow in his chambers.
As the citadel’s fighters darted out of doors and scrambled up stairs and ladders, the two flying newcomers became recognizable: one as a gryphon, the other a pegasus with a rider on its back. Gryphons’ lust for horseflesh was notorious. They did not scruple whether the horse had wings or not, but crunched down everything, even the frail wing bones and feathers.
Krythis wondered if he should climb up and hope someone would lend him a bow, but most archers were about as ready to lend their wives as their bows.
Fortunately one of the archers responding to the call was Rynthala. She ran out of the hall with her own bow slung over one shoulder, her quiver over the other, and her father’s bow and quiver in her hands. Her long-legged stride ate up the ground to Krythis. Long before the flying battle came within bow shot, Krythis was as well-armed as he needed to be.
“Where’s Mother?” Rynthala asked. “She wouldn’t want to miss this, I know.”
Krythis thought Rynthala rather overestimated her mother’s lust for battle, though Tulia was no mean archer herself and a respectable swordswoman as well. But Rynthala was born a good warrior and had made herself a better one. She had not years enough to understand that not everyone was made as she was.
Krythis direly wished to know what a pegasus was doing flying toward Belkuthas as if the fate of Krynn depended on it. Or perhaps it was only the gryphon’s pursuit that had the pegasus flying this way, to avoid ending its life as the gryphon’s dinner.
The pegasus had contrived to dive so low that the gryphon now had no hope of attacking from below. But gryphons were not stupid, in spite of their insensate appetites. The gryphon flung itself into a furious climb, wings thundering, as it rose screaming with a cry that tore at the ears.
Then, as the pegasus slowed to pass over the walls of Belkuthas and land, the gryphon stooped and dived.
The descending gryphon met more than a score of ascending arrows. Amid the fainter twangs of longbows, Krythis heard the sharp metallic snik of a heavy crossbow. As soon as he’d shot three arrows, he looked down.
Two of the dwarves were holding a huge fortress crossbow, one of those cocked with a geared crank and capable of sending its bolt through a half-grown oak tree. The lord of Belkuthas had just time to wave to these welcome allies when arrows, bolt, gryphon, and pegasus all came together in the same space of air.
The gryphon took a dozen arrows and the crossbow bolt. If it had been armored like a knight, it would still have suffered mortal wounds. But with arrows in eye, throat, and belly, it still had the strength to claw open the pegasus’s flank and break one wing.
Pegasus and gryphon crashed into the courtyard together. The winged horse’s rider jumped before his mount landed, and Krythis thought he saw elven agility in that leap. But the gryphon’s thrashing tail swept the rider off his feet, and after he fell he did not rise again.
For a moment, he was in further danger, from both the dying gryphon and his wounded, panic-stricken mount. But it was a short moment. Everyone with a weapon was already running toward the gryphon to finish it off. The swiftest runners, Rynthala and one of the archers, reached the rider and snatched him to his feet so violently that Krythis hoped they had not worsened his injuries.
Then everyone else hacked, thrust, slashed, and kicked at the gryphon until it not only stopped moving but was hardly more than a bloody mass of flesh and feathers. By then, Krythis had scrambled down from his perch and was hurrying across the courtyard.