Dragons of Winter Night - Margaret Weis [176]
The dragonarmies marched upon the Tower at dawn.
The young knights—the hundred or so that were left—stood silently on the battlements watching as the vast army crawled across the land with the inexorability of devouring insects.
At first Sturm had wondered about the knight’s dying words. “They ran before us!” Why had the dragonarmy run? Then it became clear to him—the dragonmen had used the knights’ own vainglory against them in an ancient, yet simple, maneuver. Fall back before your enemy … not too fast, just let the front lines show enough fear and terror to be believable. Let them seem to break in panic. Then let your enemy charge after you, overextending his lines. And let your armies close in, surround him, and cut him to shreds.
It didn’t need the sight of the bodies—barely visible in the distant trampled, bloody snow—to tell Sturm he had judged correctly. They lay where they had tried desperately to regroup for a final stand. Not that it mattered how they died. He wondered who would look on his body when it was all over.
Flint peered out from a crack in the wall. “At least I’ll die on dry land,” the dwarf muttered.
Sturm smiled slightly, stroking his moustaches. His eyes went to the east. As he thought about dying, he looked upon the land where he’d been born—a home he had barely known, a father he barely remembered, a country that had driven his family into exile. He was about to give his life to defend that country. Why? Why didn’t he just leave and go back to Palanthas?
All of his life he had followed the Code and the Measure. The Code: Est Sularus oth Mithas—My Honor Is My Life. The Code was all he had left. The Measure was gone. It had failed. Rigid, inflexible, the Measure had encased the Knights in steel heavier than their armor. The Knights, isolated, fighting to survive, had clung to the Measure in despair—not realizing that it was an anchor, weighing them down.
Why was I different? Sturm wondered. But he knew the answer, even as he listened to the dwarf grumble. It was because of the dwarf, the kender, the mage, the half-elf.… They had taught him to see the world through other eyes: slanted eyes, smaller eyes, even hourglass eyes. Knights like Derek saw the world in stark black and white. Sturm had seen the world in all its radiant colors, in all its bleak grayness.
“It’s time,” he said to Flint. The two descended from the high lookout point just as the first of the enemy’s poison-tipped arrows arched over the walls.
With shrieks and yells, the blaring of horns, and clashing of shield and sword, the dragonarmies struck the Tower of the High Clerist as the sun’s brittle light filled the sky.
By nightfall, the flag still flew. The Tower stood.
But half its defenders were dead.
The living had no time during the day to shut the staring eyes or compose the contorted, agonized limbs. The living had all they could do to stay alive. Peace came at last with the night, as the dragonarmies withdrew to rest and wait for the morrow.
Sturm paced the battlements, his body aching with weariness. Yet every time he tried to rest, taut muscles twitched and danced, his brain seemed on fire. And so he was driven to pace again—back and forth, back and forth with slow, measured tread. He could not know that his steady pace drove the day’s horrors from the thoughts of the young knights who listened. Knights in the courtyard, laying out the bodies of friends and comrades, thinking that tomorrow someone might be doing this for them, heard Sturm’s steady pacing and felt their fears for tomorrow eased.
The ringing sound of the knight’s footfalls brought comfort to everyone,