Domes of Fire

The gleaming, brightly-lit castle, however, remained silent. No soldiers lined the battlements. No globs of liquid fire sprang into the night sky from within those nacreous walls.

The defenders crouched silently behind the battlements and waited.

‘Good,’ Vanion muttered after a quick glance out of one of the embrasures in the turret. ‘Someone saw the potential of those barges. They’ve clapped together some scaling ladders.’

‘We have to rupture those barges now, Vanion!’ Ehlana exclaimed urgently.

‘You didn’t tell her?’ Vanion asked Sparhawk.

‘No. The concept might have been difficult for her to accept.’

‘You’d better take her back inside the castle then, my friend. What’s going to happen next is likely to upset her a great deal.’

‘Will you two stop talking about me as if I weren’t even here?’ Ehlana burst out in exasperation. ‘What are you going to do?’

‘You’d better tell her,’ Vanion said bleakly.

‘We can start that fire at any time, Ehlana,’ Sparhawk said as gently as he could. ‘In a situation like this, fire’s a weapon. It’s not tactically practical to waste it by setting it off before your enemies are around to receive its benefits.’

She stared at him, the blood draining from her face. ‘This wasn’t what I’d planned, Sparhawk!’ she said vehemently. ‘The fire’s supposed to keep them away from the moat. I didn’t want you to burn them alive with it.’

‘I’m sorry, Ehlana. It’s a military decision. A weapon’s useless unless you demonstrate your willingness to employ it. I know it’s hard to accept, but if we take your plan to its ultimate application, it may save lives in the long run. We’re outnumbered here in Tamuli, and if we don’t establish a certain reputation for ruthlessness, we’ll be over-run the next time there’s a confrontation.’

‘You’re a monster!’

‘No, dear. I’m a soldier.’

She suddenly started to cry.

‘Would you take her inside now, little mother?’ Sparhawk asked Sephrenia. ‘I think we’d all rather she didn’t see this.’

Sephrenia nodded and took the weeping queen to the stairway leading down from the turret.

‘You might want to go too, your Majesty,’ Vanion suggested to Sarabian. ‘Sparhawk and I are more or less accustomed to this sort of unpleasantness. You don’t have to watch, though.’

‘No, I’ll stay, Lord Vanion,’ Sarabian said firmly.

‘That’s up to you, your Majesty.’

A sheet of crossbow bolts rattled against the battlements like hail. It appeared that the rebels had been repairing the results of Khalad’s tampering. Then, fearfully, splashing in panicky desperation, swimmers leapt from the edge of the moat and struggled their way to the barges to slip the mooring lines. The barges were quickly pulled to shore, and the rebels, their makeshift scaling-ladders already raised, swarmed on board and began to pole their way rapidly across the moat to the sheer castle-wall.

Sparhawk stuck his head out through the doorway of the turret. ‘Kalten!’ he hissed to his friend who was crouched down on the parapet not far from the turret. ‘Pass the word! Tell the Atans to get ready!’

‘Right.’

‘But tell them not to move until they hear the signal.’

‘I know what I’m doing, Sparhawk. Quit treating me like an idiot.’

‘Sorry.’

The urgent whisper sped around the battlements.

‘Your timing’s perfect, Sparhawk,’ Vanion said tensely in a low voice. ‘I just saw Kring’s signal from the compound wall. The Atans are outside the gate.’ He paused. ‘You’re having an unbelievable run of good luck, you know. Nobody could have guessed in advance that the mob would start up the wall and the Atans would arrive at precisely the same time.’

‘Probably not,’ Sparhawk agreed. ‘I think we might want to do something nice for Aphrael the next time we see her.’

In the moat below, the barges bumped against the castle walls, and the rebels began their desperate scramble up the ladders towards the ominously silent battlements.

Another urgent whisper slithered back around the parapet.

‘The barges are all up against the wall now, Sparhawk!’ Kalten whispered hoarsely.

‘All right.’ Sparhawk drew in a deep breath. ‘Tell Ulath to give the signal.’

‘Ulath!’ Kalten shouted, no longer even bothering to whisper. ‘Toot your horn!’

‘Toot?’ Ulath’s voice was outraged. Then his Ogre-horn rang out its message of pain and death.

From around the parapet, great boulders were lifted, teetered a moment on the battlements and then plummeted down onto the swarming decks of the barges below. The barges ruptured, splintered and began to sink. The viscous mixture of naphtha and pitch spread out across the surface of the moat. The spreading slick was rainbow-hued and, Sparhawk absently thought, really rather pretty.

The towering Atans rose from their places of concealment, took up the lanterns conveniently hanging from the battlements and hurled them down into the moat like a hundred flaring comets.

The rebels who had leaped from the sinking barges and who were struggling in the oily water below screamed in terror as they saw flaming death raining down on them from above.

The moat exploded. A sheet of blue fire shot across the naphtha-stained water, and it was immediately followed by towering billows of sooty orange flame and dense black smoke. There were volcano-like eruptions from the sinking barges as the deadly, unspilled naphtha still in their holds took fire. The flames belched upward to sear the rebels still clinging to the scaling ladders. They fell or jumped from the burning ladders, streaking flame as they plunged into the inferno below.

The screams were dreadful. Some few of the burning men reached the far bank of the moat and ran blindly across the tidy lawns of the compound, shrieking and dripping fire.

The rebels who had stood at the brink of the moat impatiently awaiting their turn to cross the intervening water to scale the walls recoiled in horror from the sudden conflagration that had just made the gleaming castle of the Elenes as unreachable as the far side of the moon.

‘Ulath!’ Sparhawk roared. ‘Tell Kring to open the gate!’

Once more the Ogre-horn sang.

The massive gates of the compound swung slowly open, and the golden Atan giants, running in perfect unison, swept into the imperial compound like an avalanche.