Free Web NovelChapter 189: The Last Wall
Temur POV
The main avenue leading north had dozens of garrison men in it, all face-down with shafts in their backs from the pursuit.
They’d held the cross-street long enough for the next group to fall back to the next position, and then they’d turned to run and the assault riders had already closed the distance. The last one had gone down ten meters before the citadel gate.
Temur rode past them at a trot and watched the complex open ahead of him.
The citadel palisade was shorter than the city wall, the timber lighter, and the gate was single-leaf with iron strap hinges and no pitch on the wood.
Sixty or so fighters in coats with iron sewn into them stood in formation between the assault riders and the gate. Two men were at the gate frame behind them, hands on the bar, working it into its bracket.
Buras was on his right. Left arm against his chest, right hand on the reins, eyes forward. Temur did not look at him again.
Where Möge rode, there was open ground between his horse and Goru’s.
Goru said from behind him, "Guess they got tired of running away."
Temur kept his eyes on the soldiers ahead. "Time to end this," he said, and drove forward.
The first volley from the garrison rearguard came as the assault riders entered the citadel plaza from three streets at once. The defenders had picked their positions before anyone arrived.
A shaft from the east went into the horse one position to Temur’s left through the upper neck just below the jaw. The animal’s front end dropped without any warning, chest to stone, and the rider went over the neck and landed on both hands. He pushed himself up immediately but his bow was three meters from him on the plaza stones.
A second shaft came from the center and found the inside of a rider’s forearm on Temur’s line, driving through the muscle between the bones. The man dropped his bow, held the reins, kept moving with a face that had gone pale and tight.
Temur was already into his release. Thirty meters, the rearguard archers standing behind the spear line. His shaft went into the shoulder of the nearest archer and spun him a step backward.
The spearmen charged before any command reached them, coming forward at a run with their points down to mounted height.
The rider to Temur’s right tried to break left around the nearest spear, but the spearman adjusted and the horse took the iron in its shoulder before the movement finished. The horse screamed and went sideways. The rider held his seat and drove through the turn.
The man coming directly at Temur had his spear at Temur’s horse’s chest.
Temur pulled left hard, the point skidding along the horse’s shoulder and missing the chest. His saber came across and down on the return. The cut found the man’s upper shoulder and opened it, and the man’s arm dropped. He went to one knee with his hand going to the wound.
Juqa rode over him from behind and killed him with a downward slash.
The spear formation broke when the west flank riders entered the plaza.
The remaining garrison fighters moved backward toward the gate, walking, facing south, closing space between themselves shoulder to shoulder. The bar came down inside the gate with a flat, heavy sound that crossed the plaza in a lull between the fighting’s noise.
The sound meant the gate would not open for anyone now.
Eight men stood in front of it.
Buras put a shaft one-handed through the throat of the archer who was still working his bow, and the man sat down against the gate face. The seven remaining men looked at the assault riders closing from three sides and did not lower their weapons.
"Not like we had to plans to capture them anyway," Goru said.
Temur watched the formation hold. "Focus," he said.
What followed in the next two minutes cost the assault force one more rider, dead from a knife through the side of the neck at arm’s reach.
The man who put the knife there was already taking his second wound when the blade went home, and he fell pulling it back. The remaining men at the gate were done for.
The fighting had burned out by the time the axemen reached the gate.
Temur was at the near side of the plaza, watching the citadel’s palisade top while the six men with axes went to work on the lower hinge and the gate’s vertical timber.
The lower hinge was iron strap on iron pin, the pin driven down into the horizontal sill timber.
The hinge would hold longer than the wood, so the axemen split the work. Two men went to the hinge with a chisel and a heavy hammer and four worked the gate’s from the face on each side of the hinge mount.
It was loud work on the open stones of the plaza.
The noise of iron on iron at the hinge spread differently from the axes on wood, a high flat note against the lower cracking sound of split wood. The gate broke in long pale lines where the axe heads worked, the fresh wood bright against the weathered outer surface.
The lower hinge pin moved upward in its seat on the fourteenth hammer strike, a fraction of silver visible above the strap.
The sixteenth moved it to the limit of what the strap held, and the seventeenth drove it through.
The gate leaf shifted on its remaining upper hinge and leaned outward. The axemen put their shoulders to it and pushed, and the upper hinge’s timber seat gave under six men pushing against it together. The gate went inward and down into the citadel earth. freewёbnoνel.com
The assault riders moved through.
The complex courtyard was packed earth, forty meters of open ground between the fallen gate and the main building at the far end.
Guard barracks flanked east and west, both with closed doors. The main building’s entrance stood open, wide enough for three horses, and in there a formation of defenders waited, fifty at least, in coats with iron plate and bows already drawn.
The assault riders were in file through the gate. Temur was three horses back from the lead.
Two shafts came from the defenders before the lead riders were fully into the complex.
One went through the right thigh of the lead rider, the man driving forward anyway with his leg pressed hard to the saddle, and one went through the shoulder of the rider behind him, the man folding forward but holding his reins.
The third shaft from that volley found the horse of the rider immediately ahead of Temur through the front of the chest. The animal stumbled twice and went chest-first into the earth. The rider was thrown clear, landed on his side.
Temur went through the gate and drove forward across the courtyard.
At thirty meters the defenders had hand weapons out and charged.
One man in a plated coat moved at Temur’s horse’s legs, low, driving at the tendons. Temur turned the horse hard left and the man’s blade caught the hind leg instead of the front, the horse kicking back on the return.
The cut across the man’s neck on Temur’s return stroke opened the throat and brought blood but did not go deep enough. The man’s hands went to his neck and he dropped to his knees.
Goru came past on the left and handled it in one motion without breaking his pace.
Buras was on Temur’s left.
A defender’s blade found the iron in Buras’s coat and rang off it, the sound flat and bright, and the defender shifted the strike and cut across Buras’s left side where the coat opened at the flank.
Buras made a grunt from behind his teeth, short and hard. He stayed in the saddle with his right hand on the reins and his left hand pressed flat against his side. The defender was taken out by a shaft on the back from another rider.
"That’s going to hurt later," Buras said.
Temur reached the main building’s entrance with twenty defenders still in the passage.
The hall they set position was dark. At the far end of that darkness, past the load-bearing columns across the room’s length, a figure stood on the raised platform.
It was not moving toward the defenders and not moving toward any exit. It stood there in the dark, watching the gate.
The men in the hall had not broken their position.
Temur held his horse and prepared for the charge.
