LITMIR.BIZ

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crash of the last gate was accompanied by the shout of Keshian Dog Soldiers outside. They apparently felt as if the day was already theirs, perhaps were even thinking the remaining garrison was holed up inside behind makeshift barricades, waiting for the final slaughter.

      Suddenly there was pounding on the door before them and Martin turned. ‘Get ready.’

      His twenty men were arrayed in two lines, with their backs to the corridor leading to the kitchen and the sub-basement below. The first ten bore shields and the second bows and arrows, despite few of them being skilled archers.

      A rhythmic pounding began on the doors. It would be only a matter of minutes before the one on the attackers’ left, behind which the defenders waited, would begin to buckle.

      Martin’s mad plan was about to begin and he prayed for a brief moment to Ruthia, Goddess of Luck, to take pity on him and his men.

      The timbers on the heavy wooden doors shook and splintered around the hinges and the large wooden bar cracked. Mortar fragments rained down from the stonework above the supports, filling the air before the door with a fine haze of dust.

      ‘Easy,’ said Martin. ‘Wait.’

      Another thud and the bar cracked more, torquing itself apart. ‘Wait,’ he repeated.

      With a loud thud and the protest of iron fittings being ripped out of masonry, the hinges were pulled loose. For a pregnant moment the door hung slightly ajar, the splintering bar holding it against the door on one side.

      ‘Now!

      Crydee bowmen fired into the narrow opening and the Keshian attackers screamed in pain and anger. The bowmen ran to the second position, while the ten men with shields crashed against those Keshians trying to enter the keep.

      Martin was behind them, his sword held high as he struck downward over his men’s shields, his only objective, to slow the Keshians down for one more minute.

      It was mad chaos at the door, with men grunting, cursing, shouting and bleeding. The brawlers selected by Ruther were skilled at close fighting, and from behind their shields they were content to wait for any sign of exposed Keshian flesh and slice at it with daggers and dirks, not trying to kill, only to make the enemy bleed, and to slow them down.

      The Keshian Dog Soldiers all wore iron cuirasses, leaving their arms and shoulders exposed, while the Crydee defenders wore mail coifs over mail shirts with sleeves down to their wrists. No fatal blows resulted from the first two minutes of fighting, but a lot of Keshians would be sporting scars on their arms, shoulders and faces if they survived the day.

      There was a moment when the fight seemed to take a breath, as the Keshians collectively pulled back to adjust the crowding at the doorway.

      ‘Back!’ shouted Martin, and the ten men and he turned, then sped down the hallway toward the kitchen. Martin waited for a moment, allowing the others to pass him. Then the door finally fell to the stones, and the Keshians came boiling through the entrance.

      ‘Down!’ Martin yelled, and the men before him all knelt while a flight of ten arrows sped overhead, striking the first two Dog Soldiers. The others ducked back inside the shelter of the barbican or crouched low, but it gave Martin and his men another moment. ‘Now!’

      Hanging above Martin in a net were three bales of straw soaked in oil. A pair of fire arrows was shot into them, setting the bundles ablaze. The rope holding the bales was cut and the pile came down. When it struck the floor, it exploded into a massive ball of fire, forming a curtain of flames across the hall that would halt the Keshians for another two or three minutes.

      Martin crawled furiously forward, having been missed by the falling bales by less than a yard. He felt the heat wash over him as he gained his feet and started to run into the kitchen. The straw would burn out quickly, and soon the Keshians would be kicking the smouldering remnants out of their way.

      Martin hurled himself down the stairs to the first basement. The entire room had been filled with more oil-soaked straw with every loose piece of timber, furniture from the rooms above, and kindling they could find stacked on top. A soldier waited for him, torch in hand.

      As he reached the man, he said, ‘Now!’ and the soldier threw the torch as far across the basement as he could, and then both of them dived through the portal while two others pulled the heavy wooden door shut behind them.

      As they secured the door with a large brace jammed into place they heard the whooshing sound of the flames igniting. ‘We don’t have much time,’ said Martin.

      They ran down the steps to the smaller sub-basement where men were already entering the escape tunnel. He motioned for the man before him to enter and waited until he vanished from sight. Shouting after him he cried, ‘Clear the tunnel as fast as you can.’

      He could hear the crackle of flames above and knew that it would be close to a half hour before the Keshians could brave the fire in the basement below the kitchen. Martin wasn’t going to give them a half hour.

      He waited until he was certain that his men were more than half-way through the tunnel, then went to a large chain in the corner of the room. It led up through a series of pulleys in the wall to the roof of the tower known as the ‘Magicians’ Tower’ because it was where Pug and his mentor, the magician Kulgan, had resided decades before. He hauled down hard on it and as he had suspected was met with resistance as the old mechanism hadn’t been used in almost a century. His grandfather had tested it once, but since then the old valvework at the top of the tower had remained untested. Martin hoped it still worked and that the trap his ancestor had devised would still be effective.

      At the very top of the Magicians’ Tower a mechanism released a canister of twenty gallons of what was called ‘Quegan Fire’: a mix of naphthaline, sulphur, limestone and fine coal dust. This would create a massive fireball when dropped into the flames in the keep entrance, two floors above Martin’s head. It had been constructed as a last resort, a means of denying the castle to an invader.

      As soon as Martin felt the click of the mechanism engage, he yanked hard, then sprinted for the entrance. He was forced to make his way bent forward, for the tunnel was too low for him to run upright. He reached the first marker, and grabbed the two ropes attached to the supports for the overhead shoring. He hauled on them and felt earth fall on him and heard timbers creaking. A short moment later he felt a compression of the air as the tunnel collapsed behind him. Then there was a dull thud and he knew the Quegan Fire canister had exploded.

      It would burn hotter than a blacksmith’s forge. Any man in the keep not able to reach a door would be incinerated or die as the air was sucked from their lungs by the voracious fireball. If, as Martin suspected, the Keshians had pressed hard expecting desperate resistance in the keep, the Keshian commander would just have lost at least two hundred Dog Soldiers in the conflagration.

      Martin reached a second set of ropes and pulled them, even though he knew the first fall had worked. More earth fell as he hurried along.

      It seemed to take forever to get out of the tunnel and then suddenly he was outside. Instantly a pair of arms wrapped around him and Bethany was hugging the breath out of him.

      He hugged her back then held her at arm’s length. ‘I thought I told you to leave with the wounded, again?’

      ‘You did, again.’ She was dressed in the same hunting clothes she had worn when last she had come to Crydee, when her arrow had taken down the wyvern which he and Brendan had faced.

      ‘Why are you still here?’

      ‘Waiting for you,’ she said, as if that was all the explanation needed.

      He glanced around and saw that Sergeant Ruther was there as well with an additional ten men along with the twenty who had preceded Martin through the tunnel. ‘Report,’ said Martin.

      ‘Everyone safely out, sir.’ Ruther smiled. ‘Everyone,’ he repeated.

      Martin looked back, but his view of the keep was blocked by the large rise from which the tunnel

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