The Towers Of Melnon

Chapter EIGHTEEN

It was just after dawn, the same time of day that Blade had arrived in Melnon. And the weather was almost the same also-a glowing blue sky overhead, promising a clear day-but the towers themselves were still veiled in mist. The towers-and the Waste Lands of the Tower of the Serpent, where five hundred picked fighting men crouched, waiting.

They had not been picked as carefully as Blade would have liked. But he could hardly argue that the refugees from the Tower of the Serpent should not be allowed to help liberate their home. And three hundred or more of the best fighting men of the Tower of the Leopard should balance any weaknesses among the exiles. There were also the two hundred «underground» fighters already inside the Tower of the Serpent. Blade and Bryg-Noz were hurling against Nris-Pol the strongest fighting force seen in Melnon in better than two hundred years. And it would get stronger still, the moment the pikes that each man was carrying got into the hands of the Low People. The attackers were carrying enough of those pikes to arm nearly every able-bodied Low Person in the Tower of the Serpent.

So they had strength and courage and determination. But skill, and the subtle battle sense that tells you when to strike and when to wait for a better time-did they have these also? Blade looked up at the sun. He would find out in a few minutes.

Blade looked at the Waste Land around him. No one looking casually down from the balcony at it would have dreamed that five hundred men lay hidden there, ready to strike. In fact, even someone looking for the men would have had trouble finding them. All their weapons and faces were smeared with brown-gray paste, and everyone wore faded green. The exiles from the Tower of the Serpent, of course, wore green by right. But it had been a struggle to get the Leopard warriors to wear something other than their own proud-and highly visible-yellow orange. Some of their commanders had even tried to invoke the War Wisdom in protest, until the Council of Leaders squelched them.

Blade could hardly think of a more pointless objection than the War Wisdom. After today's battle the War Wisdom and the Peace Wisdom alike would be shattered into small pieces, regardless of who won the battle. The old mold which had held Melnon in frozen suspension for centuries was about to come apart. Neither queens nor councils nor commanders would be able to put it back together again.

The mist was beginning to burn off under the heat of the fast-rising sun. Blade risked a look upward, to see if any signs of the war party's moving out showed on the balcony high above. He hoped they would hurry. He wanted the hundred warriors well on their way toward the Plain of War before people inside the tower launched their attack. The war party would certainly fight, otherwise. And to start off the day with a pitched battle against a hundred of Nris-Pol's opponents was not his choice.

The figures of men were beginning to appear along the railing of the balcony now. Not very many of them, though, at least not yet. The sacred routine set by the War Wisdom would prevail even today-at least for a few more minutes.

Blade was wearing the usual two swords in their scabbards and a stout club hanging on his belt. He also carried a great wand, wrapped in cloth and slung on his back. That was strictly for the worst sort of life-or-death emergency. Bryg-Noz and Blade alike felt that it would be far better to get through the entire day's fighting without revealing the great wands any more than necessary. Their existence would be enough of a shock to the people of the tower if it was announced peacefully, after the fighting was over. Unleashing them in the middle of the battle could also unleash utter chaos.

More figures were appearing on the balcony. Still no sign of any change from the usual routine, or of any awareness of danger. One man was visibly standing a little apart from his fellows. Then Blade saw the gleam of a lifter dropping down, to swing just in front of the man. The First on the Ground launched himself downward. In a few minutes he was indeed on the ground. Blade heard the familiar words of the formal declaration faintly across the hundred yards to the base of the tower.

Then men started swinging themselves out into space on lifters and plunging downward. Blade felt his own breath quicken, and felt a tension almost radiating from the forty-odd men scattered across the Waste Land around him. They were primarily a diversionary force, to fight only if there was no other way to keep the war party busy. Their main goal was the balcony, and a rendezvous with the main attack.

It would not be long now. More than half the war party was already on the ground, and Blade could count a dozen warriors descending on lifters at any one moment. Sixty, seventy, eighty-the number of men on the ground swelled continuously.

And then there was a sudden soundless flurry of motion among the figures remaining on the balcony, and the glint of dancing swords catching the sun. One of the figures was forced against the railing, and then over it. The dark shape plunged down through two hundred feet of air, his limbs flailing desperately. A small puff of dust rose where he struck the earth. A moment later another came sailing down after it, and a moment later two more. One of the last seemed to be wearing the work clothes of one of the Low People, but even Blade's eagle-sharp eyes could not be certain.

But he could be certain that something had gone badly wrong with the attack inside the tower. It was supposed to strike upward from the lowest Levels to the balcony, clear it, then lower the lifters for the men on the ground outside. That way the whole attack would not have to fight its way up the narrow stairs, where the defending warriors would have all the advantages. But the attack was not supposed to start until after the war party was well on its way to the Plain of War. Someone had blundered, and the alarm was up. Blade cursed under his breath.

A moment later someone else blundered. This time it was one of Blade's own men. Forgetting to wait for Blade's signal, he rose from his hiding place and hurled his smoke bomb. This time Blade swore out loud, in a bellowing roar that rolled away across the Waste Land. Plumes of green smoke suddenly spurted up on either side of him in response to the first bomb, as the scouts relayed the message. Blade's straining ears could pick out war cries on the other side of the tower as the main attacking party rose from its cover and moved into action.

He wasted no more breath swearing. The damage was done. Now all he could do was to try to salvage as much as possible-perhaps even a victory. Blade himself rose from cover, snatched a smoke bomb from the sack at his waist, and hurled it as far as he could toward the war party. Thick, oily green smoke gushed up, spreading fast across his field of vision, mixing with the mist to form an impenetrable curtain.

Seeing Blade in action, his other forty warriors joined in. The war party vanished behind a solid wall of rolling, greasy green smoke. The wall spread to either side, and forward and backward as well. Within moments of the first bomb, gentle swirling greenness was all around Blade. With luck, both his own men and the war party would be completely invisible from the balcony. The men up there would have no idea of what was happening on the ground.

He dipped into the bag again, pulled out a white armband, and tied it about his left arm. With everybody on both sides wearing green, some sort of identification was needed to distinguish attackers from defenders. Blade hoped that all his men would remember this precaution. If they didn't, on their own heads be it. He wasn't going to stop to ask questions.

Then he pulled out a whistle, put it to his lips, and blew hard. The mist and the smoke and his own taut nerves did weird things to the whistle blast. It seemed to go on and on, echoing from the walls of all seven towers like some terrible death-shriek. But from behind Blade and on either side of him came the sound of running feet. Dim figures pounded past in the smoke, heading for the tower and the war party. The warriors of Melnon were accustomed to fighting duels, not pitched battles. So the warriors of the Serpent would have no training to help them stand off a massed attack. Nor did the warriors of the Leopard have much training to help them deliver one. Blade hoped surprise and speed and the smokescreen would let them get away with it, however. He drew his own two swords and broke into a run.

Blade wore light sandals, like the rest of his men, and he skimmed lightly over the broken ground. But others ran even faster. Before Blade had covered half the distance to the base of the tower, war-cries and death-cries and the clang of weapons sounded from ahead.

Blade charged through a thick patch of smoke and came out in the middle of the fight. A small wiry figure darted at him, with his long sword reaching out. There was no flash of white on the man's arm. Blade parried by reflex and struck by calculation. His short sword drove into the man so hard that it penetrated through the armor and into the flesh. Blood spurted down the glossy green, and the man howled in agony and reeled back.

He reeled into the path of one of Blade's men, forcing him to halt for a moment. A long sword swished out of the smoke and took the exile's head clean off. But that in turn slowed the man with the long sword long enough for Blade to close under his guard and kick him in the groin. The man doubled up, and as he did so, Blade's long sword came down. A second head flew into the air, to bounce and roll to a stop not far from the first.

That was the first and last exchange of blows that Blade remembered at all clearly. From the moment the second head struck the ground, the battle dissolved and flowed around him in an endless confusion of rushing bodies, flashing swords, and screaming men. He remembered losing his short sword to a down-cut from an oversized warrior, closing with the man, and chopping him across the throat with a knife-hand karate blow. He remembered tripping over a body that suddenly rolled under his feet, and rolling in his turn to escape the down-slash of along sword. Then he sprang to his feet behind the attacker, closed, locked both hands around the man's head, and jerked back hard to snap his neck like a carrot.

He even remembered shouting, «Hold! Warriors of the Tower of the Serpent, hold! We come only to destroy Nris-Pol, a danger to us all! We are not your enemies!» But nobody in the war party believed him. He didn't really expect them to.

Eventually both the smoke and the fighting began to break up. Some of the survivors of the war party ran blindly off into the Waste Land, pursued by some of Blade's survivors. Others, less panic-stricken, ran to their lifters and began to rise into the air.

But Blade had planned for this also. Several of his men ran forward, swinging weighted lines. They whirled the lines about their heads, then sent them whipping upward. The weights looped around the lifter cords, tangling them. Before the men on the lifters could react, the men on the ground had fastened their cords to stout pegs. A few hefty blows with a mallet drove each peg into the ground. And then it was just a tug of war between the reel above and the peg below.

Usually it was the reel that lost. They were not designed to cope with the extra strain. One by one they burnt out, and let their lifters fall. Some of the men on the lifters survived the falls long enough for Blade's men to have to fight them. But Blade saw one warrior come straight down from forty feet up. He writhed about like a half-severed worm, his back obviously broken. Blade went over to him and put him out of his misery with the short sword.

As Blade stepped back from the stiffening body, a pike sailed down from above, slicing into the earth with a thump six feet away. He glared upward for a moment, then he noticed that a slip of white paper was fastened to the butt of the pike. He picked it up and read:

Balcony secured. Main attack force getting into position. Join us as soon as possible. Bryg-Noz.

The signature was unmistakable. Blade turned to his men and shouted, «We've got the balcony. They'll be sending down lifters for us in a moment. Everybody follow me.»

The war party was no threat any more. Half its members were dead or maimed, the other half either fleeing or fled, and demoralized by the sudden nightmare attack out of the greenness. By the time they recovered their nerve, if they ever did, the main battle in the tower would have been decided one way or the other.

Blade waited as the lifters came down one by one, and his unwounded men scrambled into them and rose up toward the balcony. The smoke was almost gone now, and he could see that the railing far above was lined with a motley array of figures. A good many of them were carrying pikes.

When the last of his men had gone, Blade climbed into a lifter of his own. The cord tightened, and the lifter lurched and swayed sickeningly up into the air. Blade held on and swallowed. The battle had not affected him at all-he had seen much worse many times. But the pendulum motion of a rapidly-rising lifter was something he was never going to get used to, no matter how long he stayed in Melnon.