Wizard Of Rentoro

«No. We can hold them for the time being. Stay where you are. You'll have your share of fighting before the night's over, don't worry.»

The messenger dashed off. Blade sheathed his sword and bent to pick up an intricately engraved battle ax, fallen from the hand of a Wolf leader. He raised it high and the light of the burning tar flamed across the polished blue steel.

«Men of Morina!» he shouted, and then another rallying cry from Home Dimension's warfare sprang to his mind. «Men of Morina! They shall not pass!» Blade whirled the ax over his head, then sent it whining toward the shaft of a Wolf's lance. The lance split in two, the point rang on the cobblestones, and Blade sprang into the gap it left to close with the Wolf.

The Wolf leaders were fully armored and Blade was not. With both sides on foot that was an advantage for Blade. The Wolf leaders had to move eighty pounds of steel with every step they took. Blade carried less than a third that much. He stormed through the ranks of the Wolf leaders as though he was the Wolf and they the sheep. His ax whirled, whined, and smashed down with sparks, the clang of splitting armor, and the indescribable sounds of shattering bones and tearing flesh.

The Wolf leaders tried to surround Blade, but the gap was so narrow and they were so tightly packed together he could block them completely. One Wolf leader did get around Blade, tried to stab him in the back, and was promptly attacked by five Morinans. His mace smashed two of them into the ground, then the others drove him into the barricade. He fell over a jutting chair leg, fell back into an upturned table, and the other three men swarmed over him. He knocked another down with his mace, but the last two got up again and he did not.

Blade held the Wolf leaders at bay single-handedly for a good five minutes. Finally the pile of armored bodies widened the gap in the flames until he could no longer hold it by himself. The Wolves poured through, to be met head-on by the mounted guards and by Morinans who had too much to avenge to be worried about such a minor thing as their own lives. The Wolf leaders were good fighters, each worth two or three Morinans, and their armor protected them from much. They were not good enough or well-protected enough to stand against people who only wanted to kill and didn't care about being killed in the process.

So the fight exploded all along the barricade, with Blade in the middle of it, still swinging his ax. At last the press of bodies around him grew so thick he no longer had room to swing. He drew his dagger and began stabbing Wolves through the eyeslits of their helmets, under their armpits, anywhere their armor offered him a vulnerable point. He stabbed again and again, until his dagger was coated an inch deep in congealed blood and began to lose its point. He lost track of how the battle was going, how many of his own men and how many Wolves were dead, even how many men he'd killed himself.

Suddenly the whistle of arrows and bolts was added to the uproar, followed by screams as they struck into the ranks of the men-at-arms behind the Wolf leaders. Other arrows struck the Wolves' heudas. The maddened animals jerked themselves free of the men-at-arms holding them and bolted in all directions. A man-at-arms tried to stop one and the desperate animal drove one of its sharp horns into his thigh. The man was lifted high, screaming and thrashing, then dropped to the ground where a dozen more heudas trampled him.

Blade looked up and saw the windows and roofs of the houses on either side of the street crammed with archers. Zemun Bossir must have decided that it was worth stripping the walls, if the Wolves' attack from the palace could be smashed quickly. Well, they could argue the point in the morning, if they both lived through the night. The Wolves weren't going to get through along this street, but that didn't mean the fight was over. There were four other streets, all of them had to be held, and there could still be an assault on the walls. The Wolves might even learn how to fight a battle on their own!

Blade was still on his feet when dawn broke over Morina, after one of the longest and bloodiest nights of his life. The Wolves kept coming out of the palace and hurling themselves at the barricades. Blade rode from one danger point to another, rallying the defenders against each successive attack.

«They shall not pass!» The cry that rallied the French defenders of Verdun in 1916 now rallied the Morinans against the Wolves. The improvised barricades of furniture and cobblestones were held as firmly as if they'd been walls of solid iron.

After a while, the Wolves gave up trying to crack the barricades and tried to outflank them. Then there was more savage fighting, house-to-house and even room-to-room. Blade himself grappled with a Wolf leader and threw him down a flight of stairs. His armor did not save him from a three-story fall. Other Wolves died with their faces smashed in by chunks of firewood, were scalded by boiling water, were pushed into fireplaces filled with hot coals.

When the Wolves could choose their ground, they were as good as ever. Then four or five Morinans would die for every Wolf. But the Wolves were not often that lucky, and even certain death did not stop the Morinans. They quickly sensed they had the advantage, and became more fearless and more bloodthirsty as the night went on.

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 i

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.