"I thought I told you …" he began, but she only said:
"Curse it, have you nothing I can use as a bracer? The bowstring is cutting my arm to ribbons."
Conan turned away with a baffled sigh and resumed shooting his own bow. He understood the celerity with which he and his men had been trapped when he heard Olgerd Vladislav's voice lifted like the slash of a saber above the clamor. The Zaporoskan must have learned of Virata's death within minutes and taken instant command.
"They bring ladders," said Antar.
Conan peered into the dark. By the light of the bobbing lanterns he saw three ladders coming towards the tower, each carried by several men. He stepped into the armory and presently came out on the balcony again with a spear.
A pair of men were holding the base of one ladder against the ground while two more raised it by walking toward the tower holding the ladder's uprights over their heads. The ends of the ladder crunched against the lattice.
"Tush it over! Throw it down!" cried the Zuagirs, and one started to thrust his sword through the lattice.
"Back!" snarled Conan. "Let me take care of this!"
He waited until several men had swarmed up the ladder. The top man was a burly fellow with an ax. As he swung the ax to hack away the flimsy wooden latticework, Conan thrust his spear through one of the holes, placed the point against a rung, and pushed. The ladder swayed back. The men on it screamed, dropping their weapons to clutch at the rungs. Down crashed the ladder and its load into the front ranks of the besiegers.
"Come! Here's another!" cried a Zuagir, and Conan hurried to another side of the balcony to push over a second ladder. The third was only half raised when arrows brought down two of the men raising it, so that it fell back.
"Keep shooting," growled Conan, laying down his spear and bending the great bow.
The continuous rain of arrows, to which they could make no effective reply, wore down the spirits of the throng below. They broke and scattered for cover, and the Zuagirs whooped with frantic glee and sent long, arching flights of missiles after them.
In a few moments, the garden was empty except for the dead and dying, though Conan could see the movement of men along the surrounding walls and roofs.
Conan reentered the armory and climbed the stair. He passed through several more rooms lined with arms, then came to the magical laboratory of the Magus. He spared only a brief glance at the dusty manuscripts, the strange instruments and diagrams, and climbed the remaining flight to the observation platform. From here he could take stock of their position. The palace, he now saw, was surrounded by gardens except in front, where there was a wide courtyard. All was enclosed by an outer wall. Lower, inner walls separated the gardens somewhat like the spokes of a wheel, with the high outer wall taking the place of the rim.
The garden in which they were at bay lay on the northwest side of the palace, next to the courtyard, which was separated from it by a wall. Another wall lay between it and the next garden to the west. Both this garden and the Garden of the Tower lay outside the Paradise Garden, which was half-enclosed by the walls of the palace itself. Over the outer wall that surrounded the whole of the palace grounds, Conan looked down on the roofs of the city. The nearest house was not over thirty paces from the wall. Lights blazed everywhere, in the palace, the gardens, and the adjacent houses.
The noise, the shouts and groans and curses and the clatter of arms, died down to a murmur. Then Olgerd Vladislav's voice was raised from behind the courtyard wall : "Are you ready to yield, Conan?"
Conan laughed at him. "Come and get us!"
"I shall … at dawn," the Zaporoskan assured him, "You're as good as dead now."
"So you said when you left me in the ravine of the devil-ape, but I'm alive and the ape is dead!"
Conan had spoken in Hyrkanian. A shout of anger and unbelief arose from all quarters. Conan continued: "Do the Yezmites know that the Magus is dead, Olgerd?"
"They know that Olgerd Vladislav is the real ruler of Yanaidar, as he has always been! I know not how you slew the ape, nor how you got those Zuagiri dogs out of their cells, but I'll have your skins hanging on this wall before the sun is an hour high!"
Presently a banging and hammering sounded on the other side of the courtyard, out of sight. Olgerd yelled: "Do you hear that, you Cimmerian swine? My men are building a helepolis … a siege tower on wheels, which will stop your shafts and shelter fifty men behind it. At dawn we'll push it up to the tower and swarm in. That will be your finish, dog!"
"Send your men on in. Tower or no tower, we'll pick them off just as fast."
The Zaporoskan replied with a shout of derisive laughter, and thereafter there was no more parleying. Conan considered a sudden break for freedom but abandoned the idea. Men clustered thickly behind every wall around the garden, and such an attempt would be suicide. The fortress had become a prison.
Conan admitted to himself that if the Kushafis did not appear on time, he and his party were finished despite all his strength and speed and ferocity and the help of the Zuagirs.
The hammering went on unseen. Even if the Kushafis came at sunrise, they might be too late. The Yezmites would have to break down a section of the garden wall to get the machine into the garden, but that would not take long.
The Zuagirs did not share their leader's somber forebodings. They had already wrought a glorious slaughter; they had a strong position, a leader they worshiped, and an unlimited supply of missiles. What more could a warrior desire?
The Zuagir with the sword cut died just as dawn was paling the lanterns in the garden below. Conan stared at his pitiful band. The Zuagirs prowled the balcony, peering through the lattice, while Nanaia slept the sleep of exhaustion on the floor, wrapped in the silken sheet.
The hammering ceased. Presently, in the stillness, Conan heard the creak of massive wheels. He could not yet see the juggernaut the Yezmites had built, but he could make out the black forms of men huddled on the roofs of the houses beyond the outer wall. He looked further, over the roofs and clustering trees, toward the northern edge of the plateau. He saw no sign of life, in the growing light, among the fortifications that lined the rim of the cliffs. Evidently the guards, undeterred by the fate of Antar and the original sentries, had deserted their posts to join the fighting at the palace. But, as he watched, Conan saw a group of a dozen men trudging along the road that led to the Stair. Olgerd would not long leave that point unguarded.
Conan turned back toward his six Zuagirs, whose bearded faces looked silently at him out of bloodshot eyes.
"The Kushafis have not come," he said. "Presently Olgerd will send his slayers against us under cover of a great shield on wheels. They will climb up ladders behind this shield and burst in here. We shall slay some of them; then we shall die."
"As Hanuman has decreed," they answered. "We shall slay many ere we die." They grinned like hungry wolves in the dawn and thumbed their weapons.
Conan looked out and saw the storming machine rumbling across the courtyard. It was a massive affair of beams and bronze and iron, on oxcart wheels. At least fifty men could huddle behind it, safe from arrows. It rolled toward the wall and halted. Sledge hammers began to crash against the wall.
The noise awakened Nanaia. She sat up, rubbed her eyes, stared about, and ran to Conan with a cry.
"Hush up. We'll beat them yet," he said gruffly, although he thought otherwise.
There was nothing he could do for her now but stand before her in the last charge and perhaps spare one last merciful sword stroke for her.