Kahless - Michael Jan Friedman [85]
Kahless was just the point of a dagger, the razor edge.
Morath was the one who cut and thrust with it.
Porus rode up to them, his face dirty with the dust of the road. Squinting, he scanned Molor’s defenses.
“Too bad we all could not have lived to see this,” he rumbled. Then he turned to his leader. “When do we attack?”
Kahless frowned. If it were the tyrant sitting outside these gates and someone else were within, the assault would already have begun.
“Now,” he replied.
Gesturing, he ordered his men to bring up the siege engine. With a collective grunt, they put their backs into it.
As the engine rumbled forward on massive wooden wheels, the outlaw glanced at the faces of the tyrant’s archers. Even from this distance, he could see the apprehension there, the realization that they were not as safe within their walls as they had imagined.
He laughed a hollow laugh. Vathraq’s walls hadn’t kept Molor from murdering Kellein. Why shouldn’t he return the favor?
ut the engine alone would not carry them to victory.
At another signal, his most agile warriors climbed the monstrous timbers of the thing, their bows slung over their backs.
When they reached the platform, they took up their positions and knelt. Of course, Molor’s archers would have an advantage over them, firing down from a greater height. But Kahless’s archers were not c harged with tearing down the gates. They were only there to provide cover fire, so those below could do their job.
Faster and faster the engine rolled, heading for the great, iron-bound doors to the tyrant’s citadel. Kahless himself rode beside it, raising his battelh to the heavens and bellowing a challenge to the enemy.
The sense of it did not matter, only the sound itself.
Hearing it, each of his warriors took up the cry, until it drowned out the rumble of the engine s wheels with its thunder and echoed back at them from Molor’s walls.
The outlaw ignored the arrows that rained down on them, taking the mounted and those on foot alike. His place was in the lead, no matter the danger. Anything less would have been a breach of his promise to Morath.
He would sooner have died than breach that promise.
And just in case he came to feel differently at some point, Morath was right beside him to remind him of it.
As they approached the gates, Kahless clenched his teeth with determination. Rocks, not just arrows, were pelting the ground all around him. Warriors died in agony and were flung from their screaming starahkmey.
But this was just a taste of the carnage to come. Just the merest hint of the blood that would be spilled this day.
As if to underscore the thought, the outlaw wheeled on his starahk and uttered a new command. Heeding it, the archers on the siege engine braced themselves-and those on the ground gave it one last push. Despite its terrible weight, the thing surged forward.
It couldn’t go far on its own, Kahless knew. But it didn’t have to. Molor’s iron-bound gates were only a couple of yards away.
With a earsplitting groan, the engine’s front wheels slammed into the gates. A second later, the immense battering ram swung forward. Unlike the engine itself, nothing had stopped its progress yet.
Then that changed. The ram struck the gates, sending up a whipcrack of thunder. The outlaw’s bones shuddered with the impact.
“Again!” he cried.
As his archers provided cover, his ground forces drew the ram back and then drove it forward again. The gates creaked miserably, like a mighty animal in awful pain.
But they didn’t yield. At least, not yet.
A second time, the ram was drawn back and thrust forward. And a third. But it was only with the fourth blow that the mighty gates began to cave inward. The rebels bellowed, drawing courage from it.
The fifth stroke sounded like rocks breaking; it caved the gates in even more. And the sixth burst them open at last, giving the invaders access to what was inside.
Like yolok worms reaching for an especially luscious piece of fruit, Kahless and his warriors swarmed around