Nuor said that the dwarves would do all they had promised, but would not say what that was. Pirvan understood the desire to keep prisoners from revealing dwarven plans to the enemy, but thought they could at least pay him the compliment of assuming he would not fall into enemy hands alive.
All that drew from Threehands the comment, “Dwarves will pay compliments when Dargonesti swim in the desert.”
Belot’s flights brought sightings of the approaching elves, and of the besiegers throwing outposts farther south, as if to watch for their coming. But the pegasus rider could not learn anything from speaking to the elves, even those willing to be polite.
“I’ve told them they owe it to Lauthin’s memory to at least say which side they’ll be fighting for,” Belot said, driven to exasperation after one wearying but futile excursion. “If they are foes, then we can at least arrange to surrender in good order to Migmar!”
“You do not think they come to fight us, do you?” Tulia asked. She seemed to Pirvan to have aged ten years since Lewin’s death-mostly from watching her husband age twenty.
“No,” Belot said. “But if this is my people’s notion of showing friendship, we hardly need enemies!”
Though he’d sworn to turn Amrisha loose to fly to safety, Belot kept scouting and carrying messages. He had just soared out of sight on the seventh day of the siege-engines’ work when they inflicted their first grave loss of Belkuthas.
Krythis was on the walls when the stone soared above the timber palisades protecting the siege engines. He watched it grow steadily larger without turning to either the left or right.
This, he knew, was the sign of a projectile that was going to hit him, if he did not move. However, he had ample time to move out of the path of anything save perhaps flying shards. Compared to arrows from elven bows, the siege-engines’ stones ambled across the sky.
It also seemed to Krythis he had good reason for not moving. He would be mourned, and not only by Tulia and Rynthala. But if a man will be mourned greatly, that is a sign he has lived well and can depart when he feels his work is done.
Krythis thought he had reached that moment. It seemed unlikely the Knights of Solamnia could ignore his part in Sir Lewin’s death, if he remained alive. Even if Pirvan labored to explain or even excuse, there would be knights who would not accept it. Such might become enemies to Pirvan, who needed no more, or seek to strike at Krythis outside the law, endangering Tulia and Rynthala.
It was likely that even the most wrathful knight would pursue the matter beyond the grave.
So Krythis took the opportunity fate had presented him. He stood calmly while the stone grew until he could see nothing else. Then there was a brief, brutal moment of pain, and he saw nothing at all.
Some people had seen the stone coming at Krythis and shouted, even screamed warnings. Then came the thud of the stone striking, and the lesser thud of Krythis’s broken body flung to the paving of the courtyard.
Then came a fearful silence.
Without a word, Rynthala walked across the courtyard, stepping as prettily as a doe in the spring over the shards of the stone and the splatters of blood. She knelt beside her father’s body and closed the one eye that the stone had left intact.
This done, she stood. “Lay him in an honorable place, but with the other dead,” she said in a voice that rang like the trumpet played beside a knight’s pyre. “He would not wish to be apart from them.”
Then she turned and walked away, toward Sir Darin.
If Rynthala wept for her father, she let no one know it-again, save perhaps Sir Darin. Others who witnessed Krythis’s death lacked his daughter’s self-command.
Pirvan remembered particularly seeing Eskaia with her face buried in Hawkbrother’s shoulder-and Hawkbrother’s own broad shoulders shaking as he held his intended. It took much to make a Gryphon warrior shed tears in the light of day, but Krythis’s death sufficed.
It did not, however, take the heart out of the defense. Pirvan never feared that. What he began to fear within hours was defenders so determined to glut their vengeance with the besiegers’ blood that they would in rage leave themselves vulnerable to a cooler opponent.
Tarothin and Nuor together finally explained to him what the plan was for the day of the assault. Pirvan decided his fighters would not be facing a cool-headed opponent at all-at least not for long.
Gildas Aurhinius reined in as his mount approached another curve in this downhill trail. A cloud of dust ascending the trail proved to be Nemyotes, much as he had expected.
They had watered their mounts only an hour ago, so Nemyotes did not bother dismounting. “The going is easier, from another half league onward,” he reported. “Also, we saw a pegasus with a rider.”
“Did they see you?” Aurhinius asked.
With both hands, Nemyotes made his impossible-to-say gesture. He could now control a cantering horse with his knees, whereas ten years ago he had been hard put to stay on a trotting one.
“More, please. If you wish to keep your own counsel, become a spy. If you wish to serve me, speak.”
“The pegasus was staying low above the trees. Within arrow range, which I judge means the rider thought the forest was held by friends. I am sure the rider was a scout, and there have been so many tales of a pegasus at Belkuthas that I doubt we need ask for whom.”
Aurhinius also doubted. He had learned a good deal about the situation at Belkuthas in the last few days, mostly from deserters. The deserters in turn were mostly from Zephros’s companies, one and all half starved, half naked, and less than half armed.
His way of dealing with them was to offer them food, arms, and clothing, in return for information and joining his colors. If they would not join his colors but would talk, he would give them a pardon, but no more.
The few who would neither talk nor serve now decorated pine trees higher up the mountain. Only a few examples had been enough to encourage the rest to be more forthcoming.
“Best we pick a flying column and send it on ahead,” Aurhinius said.
“Indeed,” Nemyotes said. “Floria Desbarres suggested that very thing this morning.”
“She did, did she?”
Aurhinius was hardly surprised. He had come to feel Desbarres was about the best of the sell-swords under his command, and worthy of high rank in the regular host. Not that she would ever receive it-that was not for women-but he could give her something she would value almost equally.
“Tell Floria to pick three other companies besides her own, no more than five hundred horsemen in all, and take them forward to Belkuthas. She suggested it; she shall do it.”
“Yes, my lord.” Nemyotes was grinning as he rode off.
The sun did not write in the dawn sky, in letters of golden fire, any such message as TODAY THE ASSAULT COMES.
It would not have been necessary. The defenders of Belkuthas needed help from neither gods nor men to know what they faced this day.
The walls of the citadel showed two breaches in the walls, each surrounded by barricades and entrenchments against those attackers who might break through. Both breaches were “practicable,” according to the conventions of siege warfare.
Also according to the conventions of such warfare, Belkuthas had been summoned to surrender, or face being stormed and sacked. Pirvan had been allowed to reply to the herald, as he was the one most trusted to keep his temper.
“We have no quarrel with the men of Carolius Migmar, or indeed with anyone else who is lawfully besieging this citadel,” he said. “As we have no quarrel, it is your duty to depart, bringing peace to the land.
“If, however, it is the wish of Carolius Migmar that his honorable soldiers fight shoulder to shoulder with rebels, mutineers, and common thieves, these good men shall pay the penalty for keeping bad company. We shall regret having to administer it, but administer it we shall.”