Twice the Wolves in the camp outside Morina tried an attack on the city walls. The first time the archers were busy inside the city, so the Wolves were able to cross the moat and get a foothold on the walls. Then Zemun Bossir led a counterattack with every man he could scrape together and drove the Wolves back.
After that Blade ordered all the archers back to the wall. «If I see one of you anywhere else tonight, I'll strangle him with my own hands.» The archers obeyed, and when the Wolves came on the second time they were beaten off more easily. The tar barrels gave the archers plenty of light, and even women and children helped push down scaling ladders.
The Wolves continued their attacks until the sky began to turn gray. Then they seemed to accept their defeat and began a slow, stubborn retreat toward the palace. There lay the crystals of the sky-bridge that had brought them in and now would take them out again in safety.
They never crossed the sky-bridge. Duke Efrim's household guards had been willing to let the Wolves in, hoping to he spared along with their master after the Wizard's victory. Now they saw defeat hanging over the Wolves and doom hanging over them. The people of Morina would tear them and their master to shreds long before the Wizard could do anything to save them.
So they turned against the Wolves. The retreating men found arrows hitting them in the back. Those who reached the palace found the gates locked against them. Most of the Wolves died in a final, desperate hand-to-hand struggle under the walls of the palace, attacked on all sides. Blade managed to have a few spared as prisoners for questioning. Then the duke's guards opened the palace gates and the people of Morina swarmed in, howling for Duke Efrim's blood.
They did not get it. Blade and Serana found the duke lying on the floor of the bell chamber, an empty wine cup clutched in one hand. He'd taken a dose of the same poison he'd used on so many of his and the Wizard's enemies.
Blade saw that the duke's wife and children were escorted out of the palace and turned over to Haymi Razence. The innkeeper seemed to be keeping his head. His personal guards could be trusted to keep their prisoners out of sight and safe from the mob.
With the duke accounted for, the search for the sky-bridge crystals began. It ended swiftly and spectacularly. The crystals must have been active when they were found, and whoever tried to smash them wasn't as lucky as Blade. The explosion flattened a whole wing of the palace and buried most of the duke's personal servants in the rubble. «Good riddance to the whole lot,» was Serana's epitaph for them.
By Serana's orders, Duke Efrim's body was placed on one of the new stone-throwers and hurled over the walls, to tell the Wolves that Morina was no longer vulnerable to treachery. His head was cut off and stuck on a spike over the main gate of the palace.
Blade was increasingly glad he would not be staying in Morina after the end of the fighting. Serana was a lovely and gifted woman, but there was a bloodthirsty streak in her that Blade was coming to like less and less. He didn't blame her for having it, not after all she'd been through, but he didn't want to find himself in its path either.
Count Drago Bossir had an arrow wound in his thigh, which was almost a relief to Blade. The wound wouldn't kill the old man, but it would keep him out of the rest of the fighting. Blade found himself increasingly determined that Count Drago should live to see the breaking of the Wizard's power and the destruction of the Wolves who had done so much to him.
Zemun Bossir, on the other hand, had come through all the fighting unwounded, covering himself with glory and other people's blood. If Serana was laying any plots against him, she hadn't been able to do anything. Perhaps that would discourage her.
When all the bodies were counted up, there were more than six hundred dead Wolves, a third of them leaders. That was a loss the Wolves could not afford. There were also more than two thousand dead Morinans, a loss the city couldn't afford. The battle had been a bloody mess; the next battle would be even worse.
Morina would get no reinforcements, but neither would the Wolves. Blade learned that from the Wolf prisoners. The armies of cities friendly to Morina would never break through the Wolves, but they were keeping the armies of cities friendly to the Wizard from coming to join the siege.
Even better news from the prisoners was that the Wizard himself was not with the army. He'd sent two-thirds of his Wolves-four thousand of them-against Morina, but as far as anyone knew he hadn't left his castle since the rebellion began.
Blade was relieved. Now there was no danger of the Wizard's mental powers sowing panic and terror in Morina. He could send messages to individual men over great distances, but not terrorize thirty-five thousand people.
Almost as important, his own job would be easier, once the Wolves were defeated. Behind the walls of his castle, the Wizard was safe from the Rentorans, who would gladly cut him into small pieces with dull knives. Whether he would consider returning to Home Dimension with Blade, after Blade had led the Rentorans in smashing his power, was another question. At least the Wizard would be alive for Blade to ask him, and that was something. Blade wasn't particularly optimistic about getting the Wizard back to Home Dimension alive and sane, but he knew he had to try.
Freeing Rentoro from the Wizard's grip was a great accomplishment, but it could not do as much for Britain as the Wizard's secrets.
Chapter 22
Now all at once it was summer. One blazing hot day followed another. The moat with its load of dead Wolves, the garbage heaps in the back streets of Morina, the latrine pits in the enemy's camp-all sent up into the windless air a smell that grew worse with each passing day.
The smell itself didn't worry Blade. What did worry him was the possibility of disease that smell implied. Thirty-five thousand people were now crammed inside walls that normally held twenty thousand. The wells and streams provided barely enough water for drinking, none at all for washing. Filth and garbage normally carted off to fertilize nearby fields was piling higher and higher. The Wolves could not break the spirit of Morina's defenders but a plague might.
Of course a plague could also sweep through the ranks of the Wolves. But the Wolves could ride away if they had to, seeking clean air and water, leaving behind their own filth. The Morinans had nowhere to go.
Blade had other worries beside the growing risk of plague. Count Drago was not recovering from his wound. Instead he grew weaker and weaker each day, the flesh melting from his already lean frame. An infection that Rentoro's medicine could not handle was eating him away from within.
The count didn't lack the will to live-in fact, he would have insisted on being carried to the walls each day on a litter if Blade hadn't forbidden it. It was his strength that faded steadily, and the hot, foul air of Morina didn't help. Blade had the count established in the best-ventilated room of the late Duke Efrim's palace, but that was all he could do for the old man.
The count might still live to see the final battle against the Wolves. They were hard at work in their camp, night and day, preparing for the all-out attack on the walls of Morina. Some people in Morina were allowing themselves to hope the Wolves had lost their old spirit and the attack would be feeble. It was true that without the Wizard's leadership, they were under a great handicap. The failure of the night attack through the palace had killed off too many of the best Wolves and given the rest an unpleasant shock. They were suffering from the heat, from lack of food, and from lack of experience in camping out.