Majesty.’ A sheet of crossbow bolts rattled against the battlements like
hail. It appeared that the rebels had been repairing the results of
Khalad’s tampering. Then, fearfully, splashing in panicky desperation,
swimmers leapt from the edge of the moat and struggled their way to the
barges to slip the mooring lines. The barges were quickly pulled to shore,
and the rebels, their makeshift scaling-ladders already raised, swarmed on
board and began to pole their way rapidly across the moat to the sheer
castle-wall. Sparhawk stuck his head out through the doorway of the turret.
‘Kalten!’ he hissed to his friend who was crouched down on the parapet not
far from the turret. ‘Pass the word! Tell the Atans to get ready!’
‘Right.’
‘But tell them not to move until they hear the signal.’
‘I know what I’m doing, Sparhawk. ~quit treating me like an idiot.’
‘Sorry.’ The urgent whisper sped around the battlements. ‘Your timing’s
perfect, Sparhawk,’ Vanion said tensely in a low voice. ‘I just saw Kring’s
signal from the compound wall. The Atans are outside the gate.’ He paused.
‘You’re having an unbelievable run of good luck, you know. Nobody could
have guessed in advance that the mob would start up the wall and the Atans
would arrive at precisely the same time.’
‘Probably not,’ Sparhawk agreed. ‘I think we might want to do something
nice for Aphrael the next time we see her.’ In the moat below, the barges
bumped against the castle walls, and the rebels began their desperate
scramble up the ladders towards the ominously silent battlements. ‘ Another
urgent whisper slithered back around the parapet. The barges are all up
against the wall now, Sparhawk!’ Kalten whispered hoarsely. ‘All right.’
Sparhawk drew in a deep breath. Tell Ulath to give the signal.’
‘Ulath!’ ~Kalten shouted, no longer even bothering to whisper.’Toot your
horn!’
‘Toot?’ Ulath’s voice was outraged. Then his Ogre-horn rang out its message
of pain and death. From around the parapet, great boulders were lifted,
teetered a moment on the battlements and then plummeted down onto the
swarming decks of the barges below. The barges ruptured, splintered and
began to sink. The viscous mixture of naphtha and pitch spread out across
the surface of the moat. The spreading slick was rainbow-hued and, Sparhawk
absently thought, really rather pretty. The towering Atans rose from their
places of concealment, took up the lanterns conveniently hanging from the
battlements and hurled them down into the moat like a hundred flaring
comets. The rebels who had leaped from the sinking barges and who were
struggling in the oily water below screamed in terror as they saw flaming
death raining down on them from above. The moat exploded. A sheet of blue
fire shot across the naphtha-stained water, and it was immediately followed
by towering billows of sooty orange flame and dense black smoke. There were
volcano-like eruptions from the sinking barges as the deadly, unspilled
naphtha still in their holds took fire. The flames belched upward to sear
the rebels still clinging to the scaling ladders. They fell or jumped from
the burning ladders, streaking flame as they plunged into the inferno
below. The screams were dreadful. Some few of the burning men reached the
far bank of the moat and ran blindly across the tidy lawns of the compound,
shrieking and dripping fire. The rebels who had stood at the brink of the
moat impatiently awaiting their turn to cross the intervening water to
scale the walls recoiled in horror from the sudden conflagration that had
just made the gleaming castle of the Elenes as unreachable as the far side
of the moon. ‘Ulath!’ Sparhawk ‘ roared. ‘Tell Kring to open the gate.’
Once more the Ogre-horn sang. The massive gates of the compound swung
slowly open, and the golden Atan giants, running in perfect unison, swept
into the imperial compound like an avalanche.
CHAPTER 30
‘I don’t know how they did it, Sparhawk,’ Caalador replied with a dark
scowl. ‘Krager himself hasn’t been seen for days. He’s a slippery one,
isn’t he?’ Caalador had come in from the city and located Sparhawk on the
parapet. ‘That he is, my friend. What about the others? I wouldn’t have
thought that Elron could have managed something like that.’
‘Neither would I. He was doing everything but wearing a sign reading
‘conspirator’ on his forehead – all that swirling of his cape and
exaggerated tip-toeing through back alleys.’ Caalador shook his head.
‘Anyway, he was staying) in the house of a local Edomish nobleman. We know
he was inside, because we watched him go in through the front door. We were
watching every single door and window, so we know he didn’t come back out,
but he wasn’t inside when we went to pick him up.’ There was a crash from a
nearby palace as the Atans broke in the doors to get at the rebels hiding
inside. ‘Did your people check the house for hidden rooms or passages?’
Sparhawk asked. Calador shook his head. ‘They stood the Edomish noble
barefoot in a brazier of hot coals instead. It’s faster that way. There was
no place to hide in that house. I’m sorry, Sparhawk. We picked up all the
second-raters without a hitch, but the leaders – ‘ He spread his hands
helplessly. ‘Somebody was probably using magic. They’ve done it before.’
‘Can you really do that sort of thing with magic?’
‘I can’t, but I’m sure Sephrenia knows the proper spells.’ Caalador looked
out over the battlements. ‘Well, at least we broke up this attack on the
government. That’s the main thing.’
‘i’m not so sure,’ Sparhawk disagreed. ‘It was fairly important, Sparhawk.
If they’d succeeded, all of Tamuli would have flown apart. As soon as the
Atans finish mopping up, we’ll be able to start questioning survivors – and
those underlings we did manage to catch. They might be able to direct us to
the important plotters.’
‘I sort of doubt it. Krager’s very good at this sort of thing. I think
we’ll find that the underlings don’t actually have a lot of information.
It’s a shame. I really wanted to have a little talk with Krager.’
‘You always get that tone of voice when you talk about him.’ Caalador
observed. ‘is there something personal between you two?’
‘Oh, yes, and it goes back a long, long ways. I’ve missed any number of
opportunities to kill him – usually because it wasn’t convenient.’ I was
usually too busy concentrating on the man who employed him, and that may
have been a mistake. Krager always makes sure that he’s got just enough
information to make him too valuable to kill. The next time I come across
him, I think I’ll just ignore that.’ The Atans were efficiency personified
as they rounded up the rebels. They offered the armed insurgents one
opportunity to surrender each time they surrounded a group, and they didn’t
ask twice. By two hours past midnight, the imperial compound was quiet
again. A few Atan patrols searched the grounds and buildings for any rebels
who might have gone into hiding, but there was little in the way of
significant activity. Sparhawk was bone-tired. Though he had not physically
partiCipated in the suppression of the rebellion, the tension had exhausted
him more than a two-hour battle might have. He stood on the parapet looking
wearily down into the compound, watching without much interest as the
grounds-keepers, who had been pressed into service for the unpleasant task,
cringingly pulled the floating dead out of the moat. ‘Why don’t you go to
bed, Sparhawk?’ It was Khalad. His bare, heavy shoulders gleamed in the
torchlight. His voice and appearance and brusque manner were so much like
his father’s that Sparhawk once again felt that brief, renewed pang of
sorrow. ‘I just want to be sure that there won’t be any bodies left
floating in the moat when my wife wakes up tomorrow morning. People who’ve
been burned to death aren’t very pretty.’
‘I’ll take care of that. Let’s go to the bath-house. I’ll help you out of
your armour, and you can soak in a tub of hot water for a while.’
‘I didn’t really exert myself very much this evening, Khalad. I didn’t
even work up a sweat.’
‘You don’t have to. That smell’s so ingrained into your armour that five
minutes after you put it on, you smell as if you haven’t bathed for a
month.’
‘It’s one of the drawbacks of the profession. Are you sure you want to be
a knight?’
‘It wasn’t my idea in the first place.’
‘Maybe when this is all over, the world will settle down enough so that
there won’t be any need for armoured knights any more.’
‘Of course, and maybe someday fish will fly too.’
‘You’re a cynic, Khalad.’
‘What is he doing up there?’ Khalad demanded irritably, looking up toward
the towers soaring over the castle. ‘Who’s doing what where?’
‘There’s somebody up in the very top of that south tower. This is the