He took the hint, though, and later sent the witches around breaking spokes and cutting ropes. The Ksinallionese army’s financial records were found with a seal on them, and a messenger was sent home to fetch another copy, since no way could be found to open them without incinerating them.
Two more tents were sealed and had to be taken down and detonated.
All in all, Annara was earning her keep. So were the witches who helped her.
Emner, with his levitation spell, had provided excellent scouting reports, locating the enemy’s headquarters tents and counting the soldiers present, which turned out to be about three hundred, not the full four hundred and fifty. He had stunned a few sentries, when the witches needed a distraction, and had made life miserable for a few of the enemy for several hours by enchanting a cockroach to sing “Spices in the Hold,” an old sea chanty, loudly and off key for hours on end. That had only stopped when one of the soldiers, more by luck than skill, stamped on the roach.
That the roach was dead, Emner explained, made no difference, as far as Galger’s Singing Spell was concerned, but a hard tap on the enchanted object was the signal to stop. If somebody happened to step on the dead insect again later, it would start singing again.
Unfortunately, nobody happened to step on the dead roach.
In addition to helping the wizards, the witches had pulled off several little tricks of their own. Shenna had spoiled a hundredweight of meat and a wagonload of vegetables, so that at least for a few days the besiegers ate less than the besieged. Sentries had acquired the habit of disappearing, then turning up dead in entirely the wrong place, so much so that for the last three nights there had been no sentries at all.
Only one water cart’s load had been poisoned; Shenna found it to be far more difficult than she had thought. Furthermore, the result had a discernible odor and a nasty taste, so that no one would take more than a tiny sip before spitting the stuff out.
The warlock had not worked closely with the others. He preferred to slip away by himself and pick off random enemy soldiers. He did not need them to be nearby and isolated, as the witches did. Also, where the witches’ victims turned up strangled or stabbed, the warlock’s simply fell over dead, without warning, without a mark on them, in the midst of their friends and companions.
This had created a good deal of near-panic. The witches reported picking up snatches of conversations about curses and demons.
Unfortunately, the enemy officers had not allowed this to get out of hand. They had even launched a counterpropaganda campaign, arguing that this demonic activity indicated that the evil Semman king had joined forces with powers of darkness and had to be stopped before he became more powerful.
The success of this argument was in doubt, but as yet the invading army seemed to be holding up. Sterren had no reports of desertion or mutiny.
There were certainly casualties, though. All in all, Sterren counted forty-one dead and seven injured among the enemy as a direct result of the magicians’ efforts, and in addition they had created considerable disorder. He was pleased. Forty-eight men were a significant part of the besieging army, and Sterren had not lost a single person! His people had been spotted, on occasion, but so far they had always escaped.
He had managed to establish communication with the inhabitants of Semma Castle, too. Although the warlock could not lift or push a person that far, and the witches could only do so by utterly exhausting their reserves, the warlock could, and did, send messages written on parchment sailing over the enemy’s encirclement and into the castle, to drop into the courtyard there.
In reply, the people in the castle would run a green banner up on the west ramparts and hang their own message beneath it on a string. The warlock could usually retrieve this without too much trouble.
Thus, Sterren knew that the castle’s inhabitants were far from comfortable. They were horribly overcrowded, as over a hundred peasants had taken shelter within the walls when the invaders arrived, in addition to the usual dense population, and those peasants also added heavily to the food consumption, of course, since none of them had brought any significant amounts of food with them.
Fortunately, the winter stores had been safely inside the walls when the invaders came. Even with all the additional mouths to feed, the castle had plenty of food and water, enough for at least another month.
In addition to the crowding and worry attendant upon any siege, the attackers had siege machines in use that dropped flaming bundles into the castle every so often, and at other times hurled heavy stones through windows or even through roofs. The stable in the western courtyard had been burned to the ground one night when a watchman dozed off at his post. A dozen windows had been smashed, and holes punched through three roofs. Five people had been killed outright, a score injured, and a great many were ill, overcrowding made isolation impractical and hygiene more difficult, and diseases of various sorts were getting out of hand. Lice were a nuisance, too.
Sterren’s three officers were apparently unable to organize a very coherent defense, and any thought of a sortie was abandoned when they could not agree on who would lead it.
That, somehow, did not surprise Sterren in the least.
And finally, the enemy was trying to undermine the castle walls, and the defenders could not agree on what to do about it. A few hastily trained Semman archers had forced the attackers to stay under shelter, but that was easy enough, given the village outside the gate; crude galleries had been built connecting some of the houses and shops, so that enemy sappers could approach without exposing themselves to arrows.
With all this in mind, on this particular day, the twenty-first of Midwinter, Sterren had resolved that it was time to do something about the siege machines. The sappers were a more serious problem in the long term, but the siege machines would be easier to get at and were doing more harm to the morale of the besieged.
Their shelter, at the moment, was a partially burned farmhouse to the northeast of the castle, and it was there, on the morning of the twenty-first, that Sterren gathered his entire band into a circle on the floor of the main room.
“Emner,” he said, “tell me about their siege machines.”
Emner shrugged. “What can I tell you? They’re siege machines.”
Sterren glared. “How many are there? What kinds? Where are they?”
Emner coughed, embarrassed. “Oh,” he said. “Well, I’d say they have about half a dozen in all, mostly trebuchet catapults, but also a mounted ram. The ram’s in the village; the others are arranged in a ring around the castle, spaced out pretty evenly.”
“What’s a trebuchet?” Annara asked. Sterren was pleased, partly because it meant she was paying attention, but mostly because now he didn’t need to ask himself and show how little he knew.
“Well, it’s like a big lever on a frame; there’s a heavy weight on one end, usually a big box filled with rocks, and on the other end is a sling. There’s a rope attached to the sling end, and the rope winds around a drum at the bottom of the frame. You wind the rope around the drum, and it pulls the sling down and the weight-box up. You load whatever you want to throw into the sling, release the rope, the weight falls, and whap, the sling flies up and throws whatever you put in it. Depending on what weight you use, it can toss up to, oh, three hundred pounds, I’d say, over a castle wall from safely outside archery range. Anything heavier than that and the frame’s likely to break.”
Sterren nodded; whatever his other faults, Emner was good at descriptions. Sterren felt he had a good, clear picture of how these catapults worked.