The alarm was ringing across the pass. Torches flared all over, as men sought targets and shouted questions and challenges.
A sergeant pounded by the steps below Markus, carrying a torch and holding his sword at the ready.
“General! What’s going on?” he cried.
“Up here!” Markus cried. “Two hundred men, maybe more, have gained the north parapet-right outside this door! Get reinforcements up here on the double!”
“Yes, sir!” The veteran soldier sheathed his sword and sprang down the stairs, his torch flaring. Markus still had his hands on the locking bar, but he grew more and more unsettled when there came no attempt made to force the barrier.
A moment later the general heard dozens of boot steps pounding up the stairs. He went to an arrow slit and looked out, wondering why none of the attackers had started to pound on the door. Markus could only hope that fresh troops arrived in time to help him make a desperate stand.
But when he looked out the arrow slit, he saw why the attackers weren’t pressing the attack there. The reason was clear and astonishing: they weren’t trying to batter down the door because they were simply flying away, soaring through the air to attack another position.
Hoarst and his flying company struck three different parapets, all positions high up on the north wall. In each place they killed the posted guards and created such commotion that additional troops from the tower’s limited garrison were dispatched to the critical juncture. And by the time the reinforcements reached each scene, the attackers were gone. Soon the whole tower was ablaze with torches and littered with dead bodies.
The High Lookout bristled with archers, and arrows were launched against bats, clouds, and imaginary targets in the sky. Hoarst would send his men against the lookout soon-they had about an hour of time before the potion of flying wore off-but first he had an even more important objective.
The Gray Robe’s advance company swept downward, off of the high wall, toward the north gate. Only about a dozen of his men had been lost in those initial skirmishes, and Hoarst took the rest in a long, sweeping descent from the lookouts and into the courtyard that was just within the fortress’s northern gate.
There they found several dozen guards, and there the flying soldiers of the Black Army attacked ruthlessly. Half the defenders fell even as the attackers were dropping to the ground, swords extended and chopping. For a few moments, a melee swirled in the courtyard, blades clashing and men shouting, screaming, and dying.
Hoarst saw a knight rushing toward the massive rolled chain of the portcullis. He knew that if the man released the chain, the heavy barred gate would come crashing down, and it would take at least an hour for his men to hoist it up again.
The wizard pointed his finger and spat a word of magic. Arrows of light and energy, deceptively beautiful yet terribly lethal, shot from Hoarst’s fingertip. Two, four, six of the magical arrows seared into the back of the running knight, dropping him to the ground, his body blistered and bleeding. The stricken man reached out a desperate hand toward the chain release, but another attacker was there. The Black Army man crushed the knight’s hand with his heel of his boot then stabbed him through the neck with his sword.
The Thorn Knight was pleased. As the last of the defenders were dispatched, he looked up at the massive gates, studied the mechanisms, and spotted the great capstans that would pull the portals open.
“Go there, men!” he cried, highlighting the machinery with a ghostly spell of brightness. “Turn the winches!”
“Charge! Double time, men-to the gates!”
Captain Blackgaard was leading the attack on foot-the steep and rocky slopes were not fit for horses-and the bulk of the Black Army surged after him in a long file. The nine companies on the ground swept around the base of the great fortress, which was protected by the cloaking shadows in spite of the torches flaring all along the high parapets.
As the alarms spread above them, they emerged from the shadows and raced toward the great barrier of the north gate.
Finally they came around the last corner of the bastion to see the great gates looming before them. Blackgaard felt a momentary panic when he saw the impassable barrier still blocking them. There came a creak of sound followed by a first tentative movement-and then he thanked his gods and all those who would make him rich, as the mighty portals began to swing open.
Hoarst had done his work well.
Markus looked down to see thousands of men, all clad in black, pouring through the open gate. The advance guard of flying soldiers, meanwhile, had claimed the gateway into the central part of the tower, forced an opening, and slain the few defenders who blocked their path.
The general took a look across the courtyard toward the redoubt known as the Knights’ Spur. It was a side tower separated from the bulk of the fortress by a deep channel, which was crossed by a single bridge. If the defenders could get across there…
The thought died as he saw fifty black-dressed soldiers already patrolling that rampart. The small bridge was being raised; the Knights’ Spur was soon closed to the defenders.
Clashes raged throughout the great fortress. Outnumbered and surprised, most of them awakened from a sound sleep, the Knights of Solamnia nevertheless gave a good account of themselves. They fought in twos or threes, each man watching his comrade’s back. The attackers were cut down by the score. More by instinct than anything else, however, the knights were gradually retreating toward the southern end of the fortress.
Already the attackers, with so many gates opened by the flying advance guard, were pouring around every wall, tower, and courtyard on the north side. They swarmed through the central courtyard. The great tower in the center of the fortress had fallen, and enemy archers had replaced the knights on the High Lookout, raining their deadly missiles down on the defenders.
Here and there a sergeant organized a counterattack, or a dozen men burst through an encircling line of black-clad attackers. The Solamnics fought bravely and died, falling back steadily. The fortress was too big, had been breached in too many places for them to try to hold more than a small corner of it against the overwhelming numbers.
“Rally to me, knights!” cried Markus to his surviving men. “We’ll hold them at the south gatehouse!”
His men arrived in pairs and trios, a pathetically small number, all of them fighting their way to the general, many dying in the attempt. Dressed in silver mail shirts or even silken pajamas, they stood back to back when they could find companions, dueling-and dying.
Still, the Solamnics took a terrible toll on the attackers. They knew every nook and cranny of their great fortress and had the advantage of lethal traps that had been carefully laid over the years. More than two hundred of the attackers perished under a crushing rockslide, triggered when a sergeant released a trapdoor over a constricted corridor. Dozens of black-clad soldiers fell as they pressed through darkened hallways defended by unseen knights. A whole company of the Black Army-three hundred men-died horribly when they were trapped in a courtyard that was flooded with oil and subsequently ignited into a cauldron of screaming men and stinking, burned flesh.
But in the end, the overwhelming number of attackers simply had to prevail. When a hundred men were slain charging across an exposed courtyard, two hundred survived the charge to sweep the beleaguered defenders from their positions. When a corridor floor dropped away, spilling two hundred Black Army soldiers into a subterranean aqueduct and certain death by drowning, four hundred replacements took a new route and massacred the knights who had sprung the trap. Wherever the defenders met with a momentary success, the attackers changed tactics, came around from a new direction, and carried the fight.