BATTLE FOR THE UPPER GATE
In a fight between flameweavers, everyone gets burned.
Thunder drums kept snarling as the warrior clans beat a hasty retreat from the lower wall. There were cries of pain, shouted battle orders. Amidst the bedlam, Rhianna raced over the paved streets of the market, hanging on to Fallion with her left hand while she struggled to hold her own staff and Jaz’s weapons in her right.
The enormous graaks flew over her head and landed on the upper wall. Wyrmling troops slid down their scaly backs, then raced to take the upper gate, leaving a host of slaughtered defenders in their wake. The wyrmling troops moved too fast to be commoners.
They’ve taken endowments of metabolism, Rhianna realized.
There were cries of despair from the defenders on the upper wall, and all around Rhianna in the market streets below, human warriors began sprinting to meet the threat, jostling her, nearly knocking her down.
Fallion staggered beside Rhianna in a daze, trying to peer back at his lost brother.
With a sudden rattle of chains, a huge iron door slammed down on the upper wall, and there were groans of shock and despair from the defenders nearby.
The defenders had just been locked out of the upper levels of the city. Rhianna whirled and glanced behind. Wyrmling troops were swarming over the lower walls by the tens of thousands.
We’re trapped! she realized. With wyrmling runelords manning the wall above them and a host charging up from behind, the human warriors were caught between a hammer and an anvil.
It was going to be a slaughter.
And she could see no way to beat the wyrmling runelords. There couldn’t be more than four hundred men at the mouth of the warrens. If they charged out, they might be able to take the gate-but in doing so they’d leave the warrens undefended.
The warrior clans weren’t prepared for the wyrmling tactics. They had planned to make an orderly retreat, exacting a heavy toll from the wyrmlings for every step that they took.
But now, once the defenders in the city had been handled, the wyrmlings would be able to stroll through the warrens wiping out the women, the children, the elderly and the babes.
“Fell-ion!” a deep voice cried above the tumult. “Fell-ion!”
Rhianna whirled, saw King Urstone not a hundred feet away. He pointed toward the upper gate, gave a silent nod, then leapt into the air, flying rapidly.
Fallion just stood, his face a blank. He was still in shock.
“Fallion,” Rhianna cried, “we have to win back the gate! Carry me up there!”
Rhianna pointed up. It was a short flight, but a steep climb. The guards from the outposts along the upper wall were all racing to the gate, but these weren’t the city’s grandest fighters. Most of them were mere boys, and they would be fighting runelords.
Fallion seemed to snap out of his daze. He grasped Rhianna around the lower belly and leapt into the air, flapping his wings for all that he was worth.
Rhianna peered down. Beneath them, the wyrmlings had breached the lower wall in twenty places; kezziards were climbing over it. The gate to the lower levels had come down, and the wyrmling hordes were rushing through. There seemed to be no end of them. A few human hosts, realizing the danger, had turned to meet them, but there wouldn’t be enough of them.
Up ahead of her, the monstrous graaks leapt into the air and dove back toward the markets.
They’re going to pick up reinforcements for the gate, Rhianna realized.
One monster winged straight toward them, as if it would attack. Rhianna let out a little cry of despair, and adjusted her sweaty grip on her staff and bow.
Fallion strained, flapping hard, and then went into a dive, veering beneath the oncoming monster. He struggled to pull out of the dive, then suddenly went swooping up like an owl.
Fallion didn’t have a wyrmling’s bulk, and his wings were made to fit the giants. Rhianna figured that together they weighed about as much as a single wyrmling. The wings could carry them, but sweat was streaming from Fallion’s brow by the time they reached the upper wall.
As soon as he landed, he stopped and knelt, gasping for breath. Below them the thunder drums were deafening, and the cries of the warriors was like the roar of the sea.
“Fallion,” Rhianna cried. “We have to clear the gates!”
There were at least a hundred wyrmling troops at the gate to their east, fierce creatures in black capes, with huge strange swords and battle-axes that glinted like molten metal in the torchlight.
King Urstone had landed on the far side of the gate, and now he gathered some young warriors around him, shouting battle orders. But there were not a hundred humans manning the entire upper wall.
Down in the lower markets, the human warriors were charging the gate to the upper portion of the city. The Wizard Sisel led the charge, striding boldly forward, his staff held high. Thousands of warriors marched at his back. A great cloud of fireflies swarmed among the human hosts, lighting the way.
Rhianna did not doubt that the wizard was preparing some spell to bring down the gate.
Fallion glanced up into the sky, as if afraid that one of the Knights Eternal would swoop down on him, but for the moment the skies were clear.
He reached out with his left hand, as if endlessly straining to grasp something in the valley below, something almost beyond his reach. Fires burned in the valley, hundreds of torches in their sconces, dozens of small brushfires.
Suddenly, nearly every torch and burning bush winked out.
Their energy came whirling toward Fallion in a fiery tornado, ropes of burning red flames that twisted in the air and then landed in his hand, forming a white ball that blazed like the sun.
He hurled the energy down among the wyrmling troops that bristled just inside the gates. A fiery ball whooshed into their midst and burst, incinerating a dozen wyrmlings, searing and setting fire to perhaps fifty more.
King Urstone shouted, and his young warriors leapt into battle. Some of them simply hurled themselves over the wall, down to the gate, leaping sixty feet to land atop wyrmling warriors.
It was suicide, but Rhianna saw big wyrmling runelords devastated by the assault, bones crushed by the weight of their attackers.
Fallion reached out again toward the few fires that had flickered back to life. The fires blacked out, and coils of burning energy shot toward his outstretched palm.
Just as suddenly, the coils arced up into the sky, like a fiery tornado that was upside down.
A Knight Eternal grabbed the energy, and came swooping toward them at astonishing speed, holding a glowing ball of molten fire.
“Watch out!” Fallion shouted, stepping in front of Rhianna, using his body as a shield.
Rhianna cowered, afraid that the fireball would take her.
But the Knight Eternal hurled the ball away at the last instant, sent it roiling into the castle’s defenders. Young soldiers let out a wail of pain as they died.
The knight stooped from the sky and dove straight at Fallion, who only now drew his sword.
The knight’s own black blade was in his hand. He winged toward Fallion at a falcon’s blinding speed, his blade held forward.
Rhianna had wondered why Talon had called these creatures “knights.” Now she saw: it was racing toward them like a lancer, but instead of a war-horse, it rode upon the wind.
“Damn you!” Fallion roared, “this is for my brother!” He leapt toward the knight, twisting his blade as they met.
There was a spark and a clang as metal struck metal, then the unmistakable snick of a breaking sword.
The knight blurred past Fallion in a thunder of wings-just as Rhianna leapt up and smashed the creature with her staff.
