The Anvil of Ice

by Michael Scott Rohan

  "How?" whispered Kermorvan in anguish. "That wall should have held many days yet, even against this force. Yet already they stand atop Vayde's Tower! They dare… What sorcery has done this?"

  Elof looked long and hard at that blasted gap, and in his memory embers burst into sudden flame. Suddenly he was back on another hillside, above another town, with the echoes of another thunderbolt yet ringing in his ears.

  "Sorcery indeed!" he breathed, and a black anger awoke in him. "For so my town was taken. If there was any doubt it ends now! He is here! For he has woken the lightning to break your walls."

  "Is that then what we heard?" muttered Kermorvan, shaking his head. "But the outer wall only has fallen. The inner ones are in less good repair. Why should he not strike them at once?"

  "Because the spell exhausts him. He must dance himself to a frenzy in heavy costume and mask, and put forth great power—greater here than he used against Asenby, where he had only to strike down a man, not a wall. He will not do that again this day! But tomorrow…"

  "By tomorrow's dawn," grated Kermorvan, "his dance will be still forever. Look there!"

  Kermorvan's keen eyes narrowed, he was staring across to the roof of the captured tower, almost level with them now. Elof followed his look. Even at this distance the figures were distinct in the clear light; some bore spears and black and white armor, most wore the robes and hats of chieftains, but among them walked one whose robes were plain black and without ornament, though he bore some great crested headdress. To the ramparts he came, mounted them and leaned over with arm outstretched. And as he did so, as trumpets brazened rising discord, the smoky sunlight flashed sullen and strange from the blade he swept in a wide arc, like some terrible scythe of the unseen. One of the crude siege platforms was hauled rumbling forward against the defended end of the wall. The first warriors were poised ready to spring down, when grapples were flung from the ramparts, and a smoking barrel of oil or tar was rolled out and down into its heart. It blazed at once like a gigantic torch, and shadows capered in the flame and fell from its ladders, ants caught in a bonfire. Then the grapples were hauled back, and the whole ramshackle structure lurched, tilted, folded inward and collapsed upon the fleeing Ekwesh beneath. But even as it crashed in ruin, banners dipped and signaled from the tower, and catapults, mangonels and other engines were drawn up to harry the wall anew. Boulders drummed upon the stonework, smashed the turrets, sent crenellations flying in deadly splinters. Darts hailed down on the parapets, and stricken men toppled over onto the heads of their foes. Another platform was pushed forward, files of men gathering around it, but they seemed to falter a moment in their advance as they came within range of the burning tower. Again the sword scythed out into the air, the invaders' battle line blurred, blended and streamed together like the orderly traffic of an anthill stirred by a child's stick. The new assault washed forward through the flaming ruin of the last as if it were not there. Onto the plat-

  form men crowded as it was thrust forward, and even before it crashed and swayed against the wall they were hurling themselves down upon the very spearpoints of the defenders, overwhelming them in a tumbling, insane wave. Flame raced among the dry fields from the fallen tower, and smoke hid the scene.

  Elof turned away, hand to his mouth. A great emptiness seemed to open up inside, a chill void in which thought and feeling alike were swallowed up. Kermorvan looked at him fiercely, questioningly. Elof nodded once, and felt a bitter, salty taste flood his mouth, a sickening, bloody taint. He spat into the bushes at his feet, and it was blood, and there was a sudden sting in the back of his hand; he had bitten deep into his finger without noticing.

  "Then all that remains is to bring you to him," said Kermorvan calmly. His cold eyes met Elof's, and his face was as bleak as his words. "For this I have passed over Ice and sea and many other perils, and I will not now fail. Will you?"

  Numbly Elof shook his head.

  "Very well, then. We will wait here until dark, and then I will bring you to the city and tower through the Ekwesh lines. But you, lady," he added, turning to Ils, "you have come further with us than you meant. You will best stay here for now, where you may yet turn for home should things go ill."

  She glared at him. "Skulk here when things are just getting interesting? Do you think you'd have got this far without me? No, my lad, I come also. Or do you fear they will not welcome me in that fine burg of yours?"

  "They will," said Kermorvan grimly, "since you are with me. But later there may be many old errors to be set right."

  Many times that day they saw the sword sweep out over the city, and watched visions of fear and horror take form in its shadow. Men made mad were driven against their adversaries like chaff in a wind, till blood ran in dark streams down the warm stone. Sometimes the sword would be brandished out toward the harbor, and more of the dark ships would come crowding ever closer in among the hulks, sweeps threshing in the narrow channels as if to waken the drowned who lay below. At last one small ship dared to sail right in under the shadow of the high tower, tilting its bow catapult skyward. A harpoon-sized bolt struck into a tower window with a wide gallery beneath, a rope was hauled up by its cord, and up this swarmed Ekwesh with bows and spears slung at their backs. Half dangling by their hands, half walking up the rock face, they were almost at the gallery, some sixty feet above the harbor, when the next window opened, a pikehead caught in the rope against the rock and severed it. The climbers had never a chance, but fell away with it, to land shattered against deck or water. The oars began to back water frantically, but then some thing of great size and weight was tilted over the gallery rail. It fell spinning straight down upon the hapless ship, clove its foredeck and smashed through the planking. Water fountained upward, the ship lurched and listed, the mast toppled, and bodies spilled into the water on either side. The defenders leaned over the gallery with jeers of triumph. But the stern catapult was still manned, and a hail of heavy shot pounded all around the window. The great gallery cracked, fell away from the wall and crashed down in ruin upon the sinking vessel and the swimmers around it, bringing defenders and attackers alike to a common end. Sickened, Elof rested his head in his hands; only the sounds could he not shut out.

  As dusk gathered, these slowly stilled, and it was smaller fires that sprang up in the gloom, the attackers retreating to their camps. But there was no peace in the quiet that settled over the beleaguered city then. It was a taut, watchful quiet, the desperate stillness of the wounded beast shivering in its retreat. And over the camp was the quiet of the hunter, watching, waiting, with the blood scent already in the wind. The three travelers could sense that watchfulness as they slipped out from among the trees. There was a faint glow of moonlight; they made their way slowly, from bush to bush, from tree-shadow to line of hedgerow or fence and across the fields these guarded. But the fields bore no crop now save ashes, and among them many bones of those who had not had time to reach shelter, men and animals both. The first onslaught had been sudden, the city ill-prepared, that much was obvious, and Kermorvan ground his teeth as they passed. Many of the human skulls were small. "It will be paid for!" he muttered. "And not only by the Ekwesh, if I have my way."

  It was two hours, perhaps, before they came within sight of the besiegers' outer lines, and found just beyond them a wide chain of picket camps, with many men patrolling the darkness between their fires. "They are alert," muttered Kermorvan, as they crouched in the shadow of a tumbled wall, by the blackened skeleton of a tree. "Victory or defeat must hang on a hair now. Tomorrow morning…" He said no more, but they knew. Tomorrow would bring a bolt to shatter another wall, and perhaps with it the flagging will of the city. "And that alertness will make our task the harder. To reach the tower we must enter the city somehow, and that will mean getting past the guards at the beach—see their fires?—and slinking through the streets. A slow and perilous task that will be! It would be quicker simply to cut around the top of the walls, but—"

  Elof coughed hesitantly. "Th
ere is something that might make it easier—at least as far as the walls. I am not sure… a token… I had it from the forest." He reached into his pack, and pulled out the sprig of wood.

  The others eyed it uneasily. "A token, you say?" whispered Ils. "But how will that serve…"

  She was answered as the scent reached them, a warm smell, resinous, heavy, heady. It seemed to flood the mind and sing there like the thin song of insects in a warm still twilight. Elof held up the sprig, and it was as if the dead tree above them awoke, summoned up the ghosts of its leaf-heavy limbs and set them swaying in the strange breeze, casting their old wide shadow in the pale light. Then Elof turned the sprig, and it seemed that the shadow spread outward from his arm, flowing and pooling in the darkness like blood from a secret slaying. And through it ran that heady heaviness, rich with soft rustle of a quiet forest, a safe place to rest one's weary limbs, to forget one's troubles and fears, to let one's leaden head nod a moment and find peace.

  Through the gloom moved the travelers, and it seemed to them that light leaf mold rustled beneath their feet, that the sounds of harsh voices and the clink of weapons and armory and even the sound of the sea faded into the small night noises of any woodland; that the smells of cooking, of blood, of death vanished among the many strong scents of trees. Not the sharp evergreens of Tapiau's forests, these, but the blossoming fruit trees that must till recently have flourished here. So perhaps they also were revenged upon their slayers, for the travelers slipped like ghosts themselves among the lines of picket and sentry, moved between the trenches and the fosses and the tents of dark hide. Kermorvan had noted each position of the enemy, each obstacle on their path; at any given moment, though he could not see far ahead, he knew what must lie there. When he was in any doubt Ils, to whom the dark was no greater than that of the duergar's delvings, could set them aright. But always as he turned and twisted the little bough Elof felt a light pattering on his hand, as a few more needles fell away.

  So they passed through the lines of the enemy, and came at length to the wide breach in the wall, like the outline of a great blazing spearhead that had struck down into the stone, splintering, shattering, melting to nothing. The black-armored sentinels squatting there nodded and bowed their heads, dreamed perhaps of the dank chill forests of their harsh homeland, while their watchfire flickered and sank under the wood-shadow. Death hovered over them in those few seconds of passing gloom and they never knew it, nor paid any heed to the slight choking sound, half anguish, half fury, instantly stifled as Kermorvan caught rein of his temper. There were only a few faint scufflings among the rubble then, that might be rats climbing after carrion, and they too faded and were gone.

  In the darkness the wall seemed to go on upward forever. Elof moved almost in a daze, hardly able to believe the clifflike heights he scaled were the work of men. The massive stone blocks he clambered over, as great almost as those of the Mastersmith's tower, must rather have been hewn and raised by the creatures, human and animal, who stood as carved pillars on the houses below. Very fair those houses had been in the days of their pride, but pitiless gleams of passing moonlight revealed them like hollow teeth, crownless now, jagged, blackened, empty windows agape or yet smoldering, pitiful as the skulls in the fields. Bodies lay unburied on the rubble at their bases, or found a grave of sorts beneath it, only a limb thrust grotesquely out, or simply a smear of blood across the paving, dust-gilded already and trampled in by many feet. It was a mixture of wonder and horror too rich for the smith, too much the nightmare of his youth writ grotesquely large; he wrapped the darkness he carried tight around himself, to see no more than he must. Kermorvan clambered on, thin-lipped, without looking back. Only Us seemed little impressed with the city of the carnage, except to shake her head wonderingly at the foolish strife among men.

  When they reached the top of the wall, clambering over the rubble of the blasted parapet, she stopped and shivered. "I feel very high up here. And out in the open. Is that shadow-thing of yours fading?"

  Elof looked around, and nodded. "It has lost many needles, amid too much stone."

  "Then save it!" said Kermorvan. "Do you bestow it safely, for we may need its last powers yet. Up here behind the battlements we should be able to pass without it, if only we tread silently."

  They moved then like sentinel spirits above the shattered streets, agleam with Ekwesh watchfires. The battlements were broken in many places by catapult shot, and the flagstones of the parapet cracked; here and there the wallhead had fallen away, leaving gaps they had to jump across. Many of the defenders who had fallen on the ramparts yet lay there, in places so thick it was hard to step among them, white faces and wide eyes yet staring up at the travelers as they passed. To Elof they seemed to be asking why he had come so late, and from Kermorvan's expression he felt much the same. It seemed like a century, though it cannot have been more than an hour, before they reached the southern flank of the outer wall, and found their path blocked.

  Here, as in other places where outer wall drew close to inner, a short bridge had been built between them, defended at either end by a high gatehouse, turreted and galleried, straddling the parapet in front of them. Tall gates of iron, blank and featureless, barred the way along the wall. Elof looked hard at them, wondering about their weak spots, but knew he could not break them silently enough to avoid an alarm.

  "Tread softly here!" whispered Kermorvan. "For we do not know who holds this part of the outer wall, and dare not simply knock. I have no wish to be quilled through by my own folk, if they are too hasty to challenge before shooting. We must see them first. So I rely on your eyes, Ils!"

  She peered into the deep shadow beneath the turret. "I see nobody on the gallery at this side, nor on the bridge, nor at the windows. If there are sentries, they must be watching the outward side. But how can you hope to get past?"

  "Climb across to the bridge, of course," said Kermorvan, and padded forward, unwinding a rope from his pack, while the others gaped in disbelief. "And from thence to the far rampart. The outward side of the tower is featureless to discourage grapnels, but on the inward side there is guttering. I will go first, and hold you, if the rope will reach." With long swift fingers he knotted it round his waist and sprang swiftly up onto the top of the battlements, crouching so as not to be seen against the sky. When he reached the guttering he straightened up swiftly and inched his way out spiderwise, long limbs outstretched, face flat to the stone. The others heard his taut whisper. "The rope… too short! Follow as best you can—Ils, then you, Elof!" Ils swallowed audibly, but managed to clamber up with Elof s help. He heaved himself after her, steadfastly refusing to look down, but when he reached the corner of the gatehouse he found her frozen in the way, her face leaden in the moonlight. "Be bold!" he whispered. "Your mountainsides are higher, delvings deeper!" But not so open, he guessed, nor without a single handhold, and he felt his own palms go moist at the thought.

  "Kerys!" hissed Kermorvan. "Come on, you fools!" Elof swallowed, detached an arm from the rope and caught Us round the waist to steady her. With that encouragement she began to shuffle forward again, a little unsteadily, but gaining ground as she went. Elof saw that her eyes were tight shut. He inched along after her, sword slapping awkwardly at his legs, wondering if he really could hold her; short of stature she was, but solid. But at last there was Kermorvan, balanced on a waterspout, reaching down to help her over the rim of the battlements onto the parapet behind. In helping her up Elof staggered and for one nightmare moment looked down into the shadowed pit of rooftops beneath. Then Kermorvan's hand reached out to him also, and he was tumbling over the ramparts onto the grimy stone.

  They lay there a moment in the deep shadow of the gatehouse, in a gasping heap, catching their breath, savoring a sudden release from tension. Then Kermorvan chivvied them afoot in fierce whispers, and turned to climb the far side of the bridge. But just as Elof scrambled up, the swordsman spoke in his ear. "Hsst! What's that?"

  They stared. In the shadows at
the far end of the bridge something glinted, shifted, shimmered, became clearer. A tall figure took shape, clad in bright mail covered by a dark surcoat. He was busy removing his helm, like a weary sentry coming off watch. He looked up, started violently and swept out a great sword. Kermorvan made no move to draw, but stood calmly watching. The armed man hesitated.

  "Who goes?" he demanded. His speech was like Ker-morvan's but gruffer and less precise. "Speak, or I'll—"

  "Has the moon gone to your head, then, that you do not know me, Bryhon?" demanded Kermorvan in return.

  The newcomer stopped dead, stiffening with evident amazement. The moonlight shone clearly on his face now, and Elof all but choked. He was very tall, taller even than Kermorvan and more broadly built, certainly older. His hair was jet black, long and waving glossily around his neck, though only a few strands straggled across the top of his pink scalp; his beard was equally thick and glossy, with the same stiff wave in it, the eyes heavy-lidded and still, the nose long, straight but slightly bulbous. It was a well-made face in its way, but to Elof, for a moment, it seemed very terrible. There was no fine resemblance, but the overall likeness of cast and coloring was so strong that, just for a minute, he had mistaken the man called Bryhon for the Mastersmith.

  Bryhon took one jerky step forward. "You!" he barked, and his sword flashed up. Within the inner gate there was a soft clatter of arms, a scuffle of heavy boots and four mailed men came spilling out onto the bridge, looking from him to the newcomers with cold, alarmed eyes. Three had short bows drawn ready in their hands, the fourth an arbalest, and their surcoats bore the same claw device as Bryhon's. The dark man cocked a shaggy head at the travelers. "Do you look at this, then, lads, and believe it if you will! My lord Kermorvan, come swarming up walls in the watches of the night!"