From below, a shrill altercation burst suddenly into the rest of the noise. After a moment Pirvan recognized the kender, speaking their own tongue.
It might be well to learn it. The kender went everywhere, saw or heard everything, and would not discuss most of it if they had to use the common language.
Too late for that tonight. Too late for anything except a few hours’ sleep. Don’t call it the last sleep, he thought, even in your mind, you fool! In Haimya’s arms, and then a battle for justice and against-what?-in the morning.
Pirvan hoped Zephros’s men would lose their way and not come until after lunch tomorrow. He wanted to sleep late.
The first warning, birds flying up and deer running out of the forest, had long since come. From the walls, Rynthala saw nothing else moving. The enemy must be arraying their men under cover of the trees, or else, they had fulfilled Sir Pirvan’s wish, and gotten thoroughly lost.
A pity this is all rocky ground, Rynthala thought, with no bogs for them to fall into.
She watched Eskaia leave Pirvan’s side and descend the stairs, toward the healer’s station. She was plainly going to spend some of the waiting time with Hawkbrother.
Eskaia was a lucky girl, with no men to command today-although Hawkbrother’s own followers clearly saw her as their chief’s lady and were careful to stand between her and strangers. Also, she was lucky in knowing that her man knew he was her man.
If Rynthala or Sir Darin fell today, neither would ever be certain what there had been between them. Certainly warriors’ mutual respect, and that from the beginning, but this was not entirely what Rynthala had in mind.
At least they would be fighting side by side. If it came to counterattacking outside the walls, Darin and Rynthala’s men-at-arms would mount up and ride out. That would be her third battle in six days, all three fought under the eyes of Knights of Solamnia.
She was learning war at a frantic pace.
Now all I have to do is live long enough to use the knowledge, she thought dryly.
The sound of axes and saws drifted from the forest on the hot wind. Siege engines? Too late, and the ground too rough on that side. Probably scaling ladders-and it said much about the enemy that they were only now making this vital provision for the final assault.
Granted, scaling ladders were clumsy things to haul through woodland. But five hundred men with shields and ladders, advancing at a run and covered by five hundred archers-they could have had Belkuthas in the time it took a posset cup to cool, knights or no knights.
She wanted to take that thought to heart, to let it warm her and make her believe the battle would be no harder than chasing gully dwarves out of the midden heap. She could not. She had heard too much, seen enough-and besides, this was her home.
Any battle here was accursed by the True Gods.
From the forest, the woodworking din continued, but now a horn blared above it, and drums answered.
Well over a thousand men advanced in three columns through the woods. The largest column was Zephros’s, with his own men, the recruits from the march, and assorted men who had come in numbers too small to have their own captains. Zephros was not such a fool to be ignorant of what that meant about the men. He merely hoped they would be the first to fall.
Zephros led on the right, with Luferinus in the center. He was a captain that many lesser captains would follow, either out of respect or out of hope of gaining favor in the eyes of the kingpriest.
To the left rode assorted men, watched over, rather than led, by the two knights and their men-at-arms. That position had been negotiated between Zephros, Luferinus, and Sir Lewin. This left-hand column was to march around the citadel, keeping out of bow shot, and bar escape for refugees and counterattacks by dwarves. These orders would preserve the lives of the men and the honor of the knights without much risk of bloodshed. Neither refugees nor dwarves were witlings enough to roam around a battlefield.
The army was now just outside bow shot of the outermost wall, or at least the pile of rubble where it had once stood. Zephros studied the successive barriers lying between his men and the inner citadel, looking for hidden archers.
He signaled to Luferinus, and the two captains put their horses to a trot. The laws of war demanded that a fortified place be summoned to yield; Zephros was not ignorant of what it would mean to break that law before the eyes of Knights of Solamnia.
Legal niceties never helped once battle was joined, and this particular law made difficult Zephros’s best chance of victory-swarming the citadel so quickly that no one need be spared to tell tales. Then anyone who objected to its change of ownership would face an accomplished fact, needing a host of his own to unaccomplish it.
“Unaccomplish.” Zephros savored the word like wine as he rode forward at the head of his men. It was a place he once expected never to find himself in again, after Aurhinius’s wrath at the end of Waydol’s War.
As Zephros reached the outermost wall, someone hailed him from the inner citadel.
“Who comes here in arms, where no enemy exists and peace is the wish of all?”
That sounded like a herald rather than a knight. A pity Sir Lewin was off to the other flank. He might recognize Sir Pirvan’s voice.
“I am High Captain Zephros of the host of Istar, lawfully come to make of this citadel a bastion of virtue. We wish it to serve our host, while it brings the Silvanesti to their proper relationship to Istar.”
The reply to that was a good deal of laughter, and several voices speaking a tongue Zephros did not know. It sounded like Silvanesti; it also sounded rude.
“How do you answer?” he called.
“I answer that you have no lawful business in this citadel. It is already host to an embassy of the king of the Silvanesti. If you are empowered to meet with the High Judge Lauthinaradalas to discuss all the outstanding matters between Istar and the realm of the Silvanesti elves, you may enter, with such persons as you wish, and with the same rank as the high judge.
“Otherwise, we must ask you to camp without, and if you seek entry by violence, be warned you shall be treated as enemies.”
“Confident, aren’t they?” Luferinus said. “No water, a mob of peasants on their hands, an elven noble to keep from getting pricked in his bony arse, and they still wish us to the Abyss.”
Zephros tried to find a suitably eloquent way of phrasing his own reply. The silence dragged on, until Zephros realized he would look a fool if it continued longer.
Zeboim drown the knights, he thought. The law is upheld and waiting gives time to our enemies.
Zephros rose in his stirrups. “The citadel of Belkuthas refuses to yield to the hosts of Istar, fighting in the name of virtue. Let all who stand in their path beware!
“Storming parties, forward at a run!”
Pirvan had gone two walls outward from the inner citadel to hold the parley. When Zephros-easily recognizable from the kender description-ordered the attack, Pirvan and his men-at-arms had to retreat with as much haste as was consistent with dignity.
They could have crawled on their hands and knees. The attackers’ idea of a run could hardly have overtaken a child of four. Pirvan rather regretted he had not posted a few bands of archers among the outer ruins. They could have given the attackers a bloody nose some two hundred yards sooner, perhaps stopping them beyond bow shot of the courtyard where the refugees huddled.
“Ought to have” are words that every captain has thought, but the victory goes to those who do not let it unman them. Pirvan had forgotten where he read that, but remembered the good sense it made then-and now.
Honor demanded that the men-at-arms with him climb the ladder first. As he, last, was scrambling up it, an unexpected face appeared on the wall. It was the sell-sword Rugal Nis.