Iron Eyes muttered something about mercy for the mad. But he did not get carried away. “Shift them without hurting them. If they won’t be shifted, make them a feast for wolves and crows.”
The latter were in the air, excited.
Iron Eyes had used the dwarf language. The old men heard. They seemed amazed. Then decided they were overmatched after all. They went back inside, pursued by the derision of crows.
The entrance loomed dark as a fathomless cave.
Iron Eyes again asked, “You were going to keep me from marching straight in, weren’t you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. On the other hand, it might be instructive to see how Aelen Kofer mail stands up to a falcon’s bite.”
The old man was guessing, based on Piper’s speculations. Layers of hearsay and imagination could be hiding something but it seemed most reasonable to suspect the presence of firepowder weapons. Which he had explained to Iron Eyes when the expedition was forming. “You see any unusual bones around here?”
“I see a lot that are busted up strange. You mean the striped creature? Like the ones that tried to invade the Realm of the Gods?”
“Yes.”
“They don’t look so different with the meat off.”
“Extra fingers and toes.”
“There’s that. But the small bones are scattered, probably for miles. But sometimes theirs are black. Don’t ask why. We found out getting rid of the ones we dealt with before. How should we do this? Can you just pop inside?”
“No. I don’t know what I’d be jumping into. There might be spells to make me unhappy. But I could get up on the wall… Girl!”
Heris turned, perched amongst panicky crows, looked down, turned again to rejoin Februaren and Jarneyn. “Not one falcon, Double Great. Two. One the kind Piper calls a hound. The big kind he got rid of because they worked so bad at Clearenza. The old men are beside them with torches. I didn’t see anybody else. If it wasn’t for them I’d say the place was deserted.”
Februaren told Iron Eyes, “Move your people out of the way, now.” He indicated an arc, narrow end at the gate, that he thought should be dwarf-free. “And tell them there’s going to be a lot of noise. These machines talk loud.”
Heris asked, “What’s the plan?”
“We get those people to think the whole mob is charging in. They fire. Then the whole mob charges in.”
Februaren and Iron Eyes made the arrangements. Crows and wolves observed, remaining at a safe distance. The crows kibitzed. An occasional wolf crawled forward, got hold of a fallen pack mate, dragged it away until one of the Aelen Kofer decided to object. Iron Eyes told Februaren, “That’s clever. The perfect trick.”
It tricked no one.
Iron Eyes, not counting chickens, already had another plan running. Some of his people brought rails from the fence. Wolves paced them but took no risks.
Heris wanted a look at the countryside roundabout. She went up top, came back down. “The wolves are waiting for something.” The beasts were gathering out where they could not be seen, with numerous comings and goings. At least two dozen more had come from somewhere.
“Probably expecting the Bastard.”
Aelen Kofer work parties used fencing to bridge the moat off to the right of the gate. They started building a ladder. Heris told them, “Wait.” She took a coil of rope from a dwarf, turned sideways, then dropped one end from the top of the wall. A half-dozen dwarves swarmed up. They climbed like monkeys despite the clutter they carried.
Those six readied their crossbows, stepped forward, sighted on the two old men. Then dove back so violently that one knocked Heris right off the wall. She did miss the makeshift bridge. Which meant an intimate encounter with icy, nasty, shallow water. She came up cursing, turned sideways, got back up top in time to watch a fog of burned firepowder clear from the little courtyard. Dripping, starting to shudder in the breeze, she demanded, “Anybody hurt?”
The dwarves could not hear her. The bellow of the hound had stolen their hearing briefly. Heris had trouble hearing herself, but because of water in her ears. She had been falling when the hound roared. The wall had sheltered her from the noise.
A dwarf pulled her back as the lighter falcon barked. The glimpse she had gotten was of two old men reloading the hound, now aimed for a blast through the gateway.
All six dwarves popped up and loosed quarrels. Shrieking crows whipped around them. There were no cries from below.
Heris turned sideways. She materialized four feet behind the hound. One old man had his left hand pinned to its wooden mounting frame by an Aelen Kofer bolt. Heris smacked the other one with her fist. “Ow! Goddamn! Why didn’t I bring something with me?” She grabbed both torches, turned sideways, chucked them into the moat from the top of the wall. “That’s your cue, Double Great!” She swatted a diving crow. And watched just long enough to make sure the Ninth Unknown understood.
She turned yet again.
One groggy old man was trying to cut the bolt nailing the other to the hound’s frame. Which, at a glance, told Heris why Piper had rid himself of the big bore weapons. The machine could not be moved easily. And recoil had cracked its supporting frame after one firing.
A mob of dwarves trundled into the courtyard. Overhead, angry crows registered their disapproval by defecating on the fly.
Cloven Februaren and Korban Iron Eyes were not among the arrivals. “What now?” She decided to go see. Nearing exhaustion, she walked out this time. And reached the drawbridge in time to see Iron Eyes and the Ninth Unknown become involved in another engagement with more wolves than ever before. Wolves who seemed desperate but unenthusiastic. This time they encountered Aelen Kofer and human sorcery before they got close enough to be ripped up by Aelen Kofer steel. This time the survivors left with their tails all the way under and their bodies riding low.
Februaren and the dwarves grabbed lupine corpses and headed inside the castle. Crows followed. Several died as dwarves lost their senses of humor.
Heris needed not ask why all the excitement. She had her answer once she got a look at the dead wolves.
Some of the fallen from the first attack had begun to shift shape. The largest wolves, the ones with the heaviest, darkest fur. The leaders of the vast pack.
“I don’t know,” Februaren said, answering a question she had not yet asked. “Changed by the Night. By the one who lives here, maybe, using whoever was unlucky enough to be passing by. Making himself a fierce pack of protectors who dared not run away. Because everywhere else would mean an agonizing death at the first hint of a change. Damn those things!”
A skilled sniper of a crow had gotten him in the forehead with a nasty load.
The old man dug into one of the pouches hanging from his belt while muttering in Archaic Brothen. He found something, flung it into the air, shouted. To Heris it looked like a fistful of peppercorns.
Each peppercorn shot off toward a crow. The air filled with little pops as those hit feathers at high velocity. A hundred birds gave up flying, fell, lay twitching. The rest fled, making more noise than ever.
“Not a very nice man, the Bastard.”
“Blood will tell, child. What about in there?”
“The falcons have been captured. And the two old men. I don’t understand what’s happening. The dwarves were standing around waiting for orders when I left.”
The dwarves had gone into the fortress while Heris was outside. They had found nothing remarkable. The dizzy old men were the only inhabitants. Though there was a suite on the second level that showed signs of regular use.
Its user appeared to have been absent for some time.
The inside of the castle consisted mostly of storerooms generously stocked with supplies suitable for use by
