spell?”
“Yes, but a blanket thrown over six thousand covers not many.”
“I see.” Vorn’s eyebrows drew together in a worried frown. “But will it work? Could any spell be sufficient to fend off Incarnadine’s evil? It is said he is no mere mortal.”
“He may be mortal. That is, he may one day die. But he has lived some three hundred years.”
“I have heard that, too, though I scarce believe it.”
“You may believe it. All the Haplodites have been long-lived.”
Arms akimbo, Vorn turned, paced away from the window and stopped. He brooded for a moment, then wheeled slowly around, his gaze on the floor. “Against magic so powerful …” he began.
“We have fought and have nearly prevailed.” She went to him, took his hands and pressed them to her breast. “Have you had cause to doubt me up till now?”
“No.”
“Come.”
She led him across the semicircular room to the staircase. They mounted it, she leading him by the hand. They went up six turns until they came to a hatchway at the top. Vorn threw the hatch aside and they climbed out onto the turret. Stepping over the dead body of a Guardsman overlooked by the clean-up detail, they went to the battlement.
“Look,” she said, her hand sweeping across the scene. “Walls thirty stories high, a keep whose upper floors are sometimes hid in cloud. Walls within walls, towers that touch the sky, black adamantine stone immune to the elements — a fortress of magic and power unimaginable — and you, Vorn, are about to prevail against it. History has never known such a siege. Future generations will scarce credit it. You will be legend.” Her voice rose over the din of shouting soldiers, the whoosh of the catapults, the crack of a thousand crossbows and the ping and clatter of bolts striking stone. Come here.”
She lead him to the south side of the turret.
“We are a thousand feet above the plain.”
Vorn looked out across the dark lands of the Pale. Gray-black mountains hove in the distance, ringing a valley of dirt and dust. Here and there rude farm huts dotted the terrain, and miserable, near-barren fields made haphazard patterns.
So poor a land, Vorn thought. But it was a fleeting thought.
“Was ever a fortress more inaccessible, more invulnerable? You levitated an army a thousand feet straight up.”
“There was no other way,” Vorn said. “Else they would have picked us off one by one as we marched up the trail.”
“You did it by the power of your will.”
The thought crowded into his mind, nudging doubt aside.
“You did it, Vorn. Not me.”
His chest swelled, then fell slowly, a doubting cast returning to his eyes.
“But you …”
“I love you.”
He looked into her face. Framed in the folds of her headdress, it was partly hidden now as the wind fetched the cloth across her nose and mouth. Her eyes contained a hundred emotions he could not fathom.
“Melydia,” was all he could say.
“Do you believe me?”
He looked out again at the dust into which he had poured his army’s blood.
“Do you believe me?”
His gaze was drawn to hers.
“Yes.”
They embraced as a stronger wind blew his cloak around them.
Presently they became aware of a hush that had fallen over the battle. They parted and returned to the north side of the turret.
Melydia pointed. “Behold.”
Airborne objects approached from the northwest. Their flight was swift, and in formation — like migrating birds.
“What this time?” Vorn said. “What manner of hellish thing?”
“We will know soon.”
“Aye, we will. Too soon.”
“Are you afraid?”
He cast a dark look at her. “You think that deserving of an answer?”
“No, my love. Forgive me. I know you fear nothing.”
He encircled her within his meaty left arm.
The objects soon revealed themselves to be bowl-shaped, with appendages that at a distance could have been taken to be wings, but as the objects neared, took the form of pairs of human hands, disembodied human hands.
“Mother Goddess,” Vorn breathed. “What …?”
Each pair of hands bore a gigantic metal caldron that looked much like an ironsmith’s crucible.
Melydia stepped away from Vorn and stood against the battlement, hands on either side of a crenellation, leaning out, her face awry with strange, conflicting emotions. There was hope and expectation and fear and dread. There was hatred. And underneath it all, she knew but strove to suppress with every grain of her being, there was love.
She did not know that there was madness there as well.
“Yes,” she said as thunder rolled to their ears, dark clouds piling over the castle. “Yes!” she screamed over its roar.
A finger of cloud passed across the sun, plunging the countryside into shadow and revealing an eerie blue glow emanating from the castle itself. Webs of lightning shot from tower to tower and bright blue prominences arose from the keep. A storm wind lashed the citadel, but no rain fell. Dust devils whirled about, sucking up the debris of past battles.
The flying caldrons broke formation and descended, revealing themselves to be of immense size. They swooped, then reformed into a line, each caldron poised above a belfry. The hands that bore them were the hands of malign gods — huge, sinewy, and punishing.
A bolt of lightning hit the tower on which Melydia and Vorn stood.
The prince was thrown down. Struggling against the ever-rising wind, he got up and staggered to Melydia, who seemed unaffected. She was still screaming, unintelligible now over the crack of thunder and the howling wind.
“We must go,” he shouted into her ear, then tried to move her toward the hatch.
She was like a pillar of iron. He tried to shake her, but her body recoiled like a spring, her knuckles white against the stone, face uplifted toward the fearful apparition above the castle wall, the line of caldrons that now began to tip. From within the caldrons came a bright red-orange glow.
Vorn looked over the rampart. Men were bolting from the bottoms of the towers, fleeing in panic. He let Melydia go and hopped up on the wall.
“You!” he screamed. “Man your stations!” His voice was lost in the din.
“Back! Get back, I say! Return to your —” He broke off. It was useless. Too much to expect mortal men to face doom at the literal hands of the supernatural. Vorn looked aghast at the slowly tipping caldrons. Too much to expect even the bravest man to face that. For the first time in his life Vorn knew that he, too, was afraid. Yet he stood there.
Liquid fire poured from the crucibles, splashing down on the belfries in flaming cataracts. At once the belfries and the men in them were engulfed. Like animated torches, soldiers streamed from the belfries into the ward, some
