The Ravenous Siege (Epic of Haven Trilogy Book 2)

by R. G. Triplett

  "Wake up, you old fool!" Timorets said, his fear now overwhelming his senses. "Come on now ... you're giving the scholar here quite a fright." He reached out to shake the shoulder of the entranced Arborist, but when his hand touched Engelmann, a current of some deep magic grabbed hold of the brewer and threw him against the stone wall with a breath-stealing thud.

  "Brewer!" Celrod exclaimed as the large man knelt down to help his friend.

  Timorets' face was ashen and his dark eyes were wide with terror. The distant boom repeated its ominous rumbling. "They ... they ... they are coming," the brewer said in a shaking, frightened stutter.

  "Who is coming?" Celrod begged.

  "They ... they ... they are coming for us ... they are coming for us!" Timorets continued.

  "Dammit you old drunk, who is coming?" Celrod demanded as his large face began to moisten with a cold sweat.

  BOOM! The distant sound grew louder and the rumbling reverberation shook the walls of the prison hold with even greater force.

  "Engelmann!" Michael screamed at the absent Arborist. "Engelmann, wake up! Wake up, please!" The distant memory of Cal there atop the west wall, his mind and body held in the unrelenting grip of whatever magic assailed him, flooded the thoughts of the imprisoned groomsman.

  Timorets grabbed the lapels of the round-bodied teacher. A tear escaped his wide, terrified eyes and rolled down his bearded cheek. "They are coming!" he whispered in a panicked scream.

  "Michael, can't you wake him? Can't you do something?" Celrod shouted to the groomsman.

  "They are coming. They are coming," Timorets continued on. His whispers rose in ominous intensity, and their terrified cadence quickened the hearts of his cellmates with the pulsing tension of utter fright.

  "Engelmann! What is happening?"

  BOOM! This time, the force of the sound shook the entire ground beneath the prison hold, and prisoners nearby began to scream out in panic from their own iron cells.

  BOOM! It came again, quicker and closer and deeper.

  "They are coming! They are coming for us!" Timorets continued.

  "Brewer! Get ahold of yourself!" Celrod demanded as he shook his bearded friend. "What did you see? Who is coming for us?"

  "Over there!" came a voice from across the courtyard. "What in the damnable dark?"

  A pounding wind gusted through the courtyard in short, violent bursts.

  Celrod looked to Michael, his eyes wide like a frightened dog. "What is it? What do they see?"

  Michael ran to the iron wall. Gripping the bars with his calloused hands, he lifted himself up to see above the stone battlements in hopes of spotting whatever it was that the other prisoners had seen.

  "They ... they ..." Timorets tried to speak, but his panicked voice could not seem to maintain control of his words.

  "What is it, Michael?" Celrod shouted as he held the frightened brewer tight, willing sanity to return to Timorets.

  "They are here," Timorets said, his voice suddenly flat and unwavering.

  Celrod's eyes went wide as a cold shudder washed over him and the skin on the back of his large neck rippled with goose-pimpled flesh. "Michael?" His voice wavered in the wake of his fear. "Michael, for the love of the THREE who is SEVEN, what do you see lad?"

  WHOOSH! WHOOSH! The same torrents of angered wind sounded again, closer. Michael lowered himself from the iron bars he had been clinging to, there at the top of his cell. His face was sickly white with disbelief. The young groomsman turned to look at his mossy-bearded mentor, whose sagely wisdom and unshakable courage had once persuaded him to hope when all others despaired. Now, though, the champion of hope stood stone-like and bewitched, nothing more than a statue.

  "Engelmann, please!" his voice whispered his plea.

  Celrod searched the groomsman's face as he knelt beside the brewer. Their silent conversation was held for mere moments before the sounds of a violent crash and bloody screams woke them from their reverie. The ground shook in rhythmic succession as stones and turrets began to collide and crash onto the sacred ground of the holy city.

  "Down!" The brewer shouted from his corner as he watched a fiery projectile hurtling towards the courtyard before them. "Everyone find cover!"

  The collision sent fodder and fire splintering in a thousand destructive directions.

  "What is happening?" Celrod demanded as he shouted above the chaotic noise.

  "Dragons!" Michael finally said to the round teacher. "Two of them as far as I can see."

  Celrod's face went slack in utter disbelief. "Dragons? But there have not been dragons in Aiénor for centuries!"

  "I know … and yet … their flames light up the city," Michael said with shocked acceptance. "Engelmann was right."

  ROARRR! The soul-chilling screams of the twin dragons sounded on the wind as the mighty serpents soared in mirrored unison, assaulting the walled city of Haven with a barrage of missile-like boulders.

  "We have to get out of here!" Timorets blurted to his fellow prisoners. The fever that had possessed his senses just moments before had now cleared from his eyes. "It is no longer safe here in the city."

  "Where are the guardsmen?" Celrod fumed. "Where are those damned green coats when you need them?"

  ROARRR! The violent screams of the monsters threatened to drown their conversation in wave after furious wave of annihilation. Off in the distance, Michael and his fellow prisoners could see a wash of sickly, green fire pour over the many roofs of Westriver, filling the black sky with a smoke-riddled, deathly glow that was punctuated by the panicked screams of Haven's citizens.

  "We will roast alive in here!" Celrod said with a hard swallow. "They left us to roast alive!"

  "Come on then," Michael said. "There has to be a way out of here!"

  Another wave of crashing stones and falling strongholds filled their ears with the sounds of city collapsing all around them.

  "Margarid!" Michael whispered to himself, worry now fueling his resolve to escape. "Grab that rock, grab whatever you can!" he ordered. "We have to break the lock! We have to get out of this iron hell!"

  The three men went to work, hurriedly and clumsily using whatever they could get their hands on to smash and pound the locking mechanism, all the while praying that their efforts might spring the hold of their doomed fate.

  ROARRR! The twin dragons screamed their maniacal roars once again. The whooshing of their leathery wings seemed closer now, and the fury of their violent wake blew Michael's long, dark hair in an ominous gust of foretelling. He stopped pounding, his hands bloody and aching from the crude, sharp edges of his shattered stone. As he looked to the sky, what he saw robbed the resolute groomsman of any hope of escape he had endeavored to collect.

  The two pairs of hungry, green, glowing eyes seemed fixed in a ravenous stare upon the trapped inhabitants of the prison hold. The faint, sickly hues of byzantium scales caught the roaring fires of the besieged city below and reflected their deadly intent.

  Completely unlooked for, the voice of Engelmann the hopeful broke through the madness of the moment. "Get down!" he shouted with a thunderous authority. "Away from the gate, now!"

  The three inmates, though completely startled by the forgotten voice, did not for a moment hesitate to follow his instruction. They leaped with terrified deftness, sheltering themselves behind the thickest part of the stone walls. Within mere moments of their obedience, the iron gate that had once doomed them to a fiery death exploded in a jumble of mangled bars and splintered stone.

  They shielded their faces, recoiling from the blast, cringing away from the heat of the green flames. A small measure of relief washed over them as they watched the twin beasts circle away from the prison yard and back towards the center of the city to inflict more doom upon whatever living residents they could find.

  The four of them looked each other over, quickly checking for broken bones and bloody flesh. A collective sigh of relief was given before Engelmann spoke again. "Come on now, my boys. It would seem to me that
the THREE who is SEVEN has not written off our lives just yet, at least not with the disregard of our friend, the master warden. So let us return the same courtesy to the forgotten citizens of this wretched place, shall we?"

  "Engelmann!" Michael blurted out with a bit more concern to his words than he expected. "What happened to you? Are you-"

  "We haven't the time to find answers to all of our unasked questions, my boy," the old Arborist proclaimed, unwilling to let him finish his thought. "At least not when there are dragons afoot. Come now, we have work to do!"

  The three men nodded in agreement, choking back their questions beneath the thick clouds of deadly smoke that billowed from the burning roofs around them. They carefully climbed their way out from the heap of fallen stone and mangled iron, but what they saw before them made their hearts sink.

  The courtyard was ablaze, washed in the wake of the sickly green fire. The high guard towers stood decapitated, their finished keeps now nothing more than rubble on the ground of the square. The smell of burning straw and painted timber was poisoned with the horrid stench of burning hair and melting flesh, and the stark awareness of the carnage slammed into the swirling thoughts of the three men as they beheld the horror before them.

  A dozen of the prison chambers on the north side of the courtyard had been engulfed in flames. The small, freed company of men scanned the wreckage and peered through the smoke-laden carnage in search of survivors, but the only residents they could see upon first glance were blackened and charred, clinging lifelessly to their iron bars.

  "Are they all dead?" Timorets whispered tentatively as he leaned into the rubble.

  "Help us!" choked a voice from out of the thickness of the smoke. "Help us, please!"

  "Over here!" another called. "Help!"

  "Come on! Quickly now!" Engelmann ordered. The old Arborist moved with determined agility, leaping over fallen rubble and hurdling broken battlements as he wound his way towards the desperate voices calling for help.

  "Do you see them?" Michael shouted to his old friend. "I can't see anything in all this blasted smoke!"

  "Help us! Please hurry!" a voice begged again.

  There, at the eastern end of the prison hold, two lone figures waved and shouted their cries for help from within a mangled, burning corner chamber. "Over there!" Michael shouted. "I see them! Hurry!"

  "Help! Please hurry!" the two men screamed desperately as the growing flames began to lick their hungry way closer and closer towards the cell.

  "Quickly now, my boys," Engelmann urged. "They haven't much time left."

  Michael reached the fiery prison cell first and went straight to work with a broken piece of stone that he had picked up in the courtyard. As he grabbed the iron lock that held the two prisoners captive, an agonizing pain shot through his left hand. Michael screamed out in excruciating shock, but it was too late. The blistering metal lock had seared an angry impression on the groomsman's hand. Instantly, blisters began to form on the tender side of his palm. With great agony and pain-induced rage, he smashed the piece of rubble against the molten metal until it gave up its resistance and released its lock.

  Michael held his left hand in his right, willing his mind to focus on something other than the damage to his skin. The corners of his eyes were wet with tears, both from the intensity of the smoke and from the burning pain. Timorets was next to reach the cell, and he kicked the door open with the sole of his boot so as to not repeat the same flesh-melting mistake as his new friend.

  "Come on now ... is it just the two of you?" the brewer asked the two men.

  "No," the taller of the two tried to cough out, but the thick smoke and the intense heat were robbing the very breath from his lungs. "No ... our brother," he coughed violently again, his words getting lost amidst the din of the chaos. "He ... is still-"

  "Hurry now!" Timorets interrupted. "Let's move before this whole place goes up in flames and takes us all!"

  "Hurry lads!" Celrod shouted against the roar of the fire and the crushing sounds of chaos, while Timorets did his best to help the two prisoners from their fiery cell.

  BAROOM.

  BAROOM.

  BAROOM.

  The guttural, sickly horns sounded off in the distance. Their otherworldly tones pierced the ears of the newly liberated prisoners of Haven and instantly stole whatever hope they had managed to revive in their weary and terrified hearts.

  "What kind of devil makes a signal like that?" Celrod asked the mossy-bearded Arborist.

  "The same kind of devil that marches in the shadows of dragon's wings," Engelmann responded. "We have to hurry. We must leave this place … now."

  Timorets led the two weary but grateful prisoners out from the rubble of their prison cell and into the smoke-filled courtyard, where his friends waited to receive them.

  "Are you alright?" Michael asked between clenched teeth as he held his badly burnt hand.

  The taller of the two men coughed and wheezed against the smoke. "One ... one more."

  "One more what?" Michael asked.

  "Of ... of us!" the man labored.

  "Brewer!" Michael shouted. "There is another still in there!"

  Timorets hesitated a mere moment, calculating the likelihood of another successful trip into the fire. Then he steeled his face, nodded to Michael, and pulled his sweat-soaked shirt up over his nose and mouth so as to try and filter the suffocating smoke. He wound back through the debris of ruined stone, but before he could make it to the fiery rubble of the prison cell, he heard a whooshing sound overhead. A large support beam alight with the sickly green flames crashed heavily and finally into the remains of the iron door, dooming the third brother to a bitter death.

  "No, dammit all!" Timorets shouted in angered rage as he shielded his face from the growing flames. The heat was too intense and the smoke became too thick to even breathe. Another one of the massive support beams plummeted in a heavy blaze only a few paces from where he stood, and Timorets had no choice but to let the fallen prisoner go.

  Engelmann was the first to see the brewer emerge out of the smoke, and the defeated shake of his bearded head was all the evidence the Arborist needed to prod the men into action. "Come now, my boys, the prison hold is lost, and I fear this city of ours will not stand much longer. I do not intend for you to go the same way."

  BAROOM. The soul-chilling reverberations echoed again. The war horns of the invaders momentarily drowned out the frightened screams of the besieged citizens.

  "What do they want?" Celrod asked anxiously.

  "Quickly now!" Engelmann demanded. "There is no time to ponder the intentions of such bringers of death when there is still life to preserve." The Arborist looked the weary prisoners over. "We have to leave now!"

  "But the portcullis is locked, and the walls are ablaze with whatever hellish fire comes from the bowels of dragons," Celrod reasoned aloud. "And how do you suppose we will survive out there with no blades and no armor, when the streets are overrun?" He turned his gaze to peer beyond the smoky rubble.

  "The Menashe," Engelmann whispered with deliberate intent, his eyes lighting with a hopeful glow as the word crossed his lips.

  "Kaestor's doom?" Celrod recoiled. The large schoolmaster gulped nervously as he spoke. "That is where men go to disappear."

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  "SHHH! QUIET NOW," JOHNREY WHISPERED as he and a handful of riders and citizens watched from the hidden safety of the tavern's root cellar while legions of the black-cloaked Raven Army march in hardened unison. The menacing eyes of the invaders were devoid of life, and yet they seemed aglow with an evil, green enchantment. It had not taken long for the North Wall to fall and the strength of Haven's defenses to break under the fury of the mighty twin dragons and the overwhelming ranks of their marching forces.

  It was Johnrey and a mere two score of his fellow cavalrymen that were able to return to the city and find a temporary reprieve within its walls. As for the remainder of the great company of Armas, they were l
ost there on the Melania field, killed or at the very least wounded and left for dead. Once the walls had been breached under the bombardment of massive stones and green fire, whatever resistance remained had quickly become overwhelmed and scattered.

  The remnant of citizens and soldiers hid, huddled in the darkness as they watched the unfolding terror through the foggy windows of the cellar. The click of a latch above them caused the gathered citizens to freeze as the sound jolted their attention to the entrance of the cellar. Hands went to sheathed blades, and the collected breath was held in anxious silence as a pair of boots became visible on the steps. The room stayed quiet as the suffocating fear permeated the air, and the guardsmen and citizens alike stared at the soles of the feet of whoever this was who descended into their hiding place.

  "Corporal?" came a whispered voice from atop the stairs.

  A step down, and then another. "Is Corporal Johnrey down here?"

  The men and women looked up to see a guardsman climbing down to them. A collective sigh of relief could be heard as the group realized that their position was still secure.

  "Corporal?" the guardsman whispered as his feet touched the dirt floor. "Where is Johnrey?" His words came hushed and rather out-of-breath.

  The white-bearded Johnrey tore his gaze away from the invading army to see one of the younger archers, his green tunic burnt and bloody and his right eye swollen shut. "What is it, son? What word do you bring?"

  "Marcum has counted nearly two hundred of our bows and swords remaining, all of us scattered and hiding in cellars and in lofts throughout the borough," the archer explained.

  "Two hundred?" Johnrey lamented. "From over two thousand strong ... to this." He shook his head and ran his hands through his snowy beard.

  "Is there any word as to the captain?" Keily blurted out in unbridled worry.

  All eyes were on the runner, hoping against the fiery odds that somehow Armas had been counted among the living that had survived the last charge, but the young guardsmen just looked to the dirt covered floor and shook his head sadly.