Jeffrey Lord Blade 15 The Towers of Melnon

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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.
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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.
Chapter NINETEEN
�^�
Bryg-Noz met Blade as the Englishman climbed out of his lifter on to the
balcony. The Melnonian's right arm was wrapped in a crude bandage caked with
rust-colored dried blood, but he seemed steady enough on his feet. Certainly
his voice was clear enough as he summed up the situation. Practically the
whole attacking force was up, and the lifters and reels were being temporarily
disabled.
"Why?" asked Blade.
"We don't want any of Nris-Pol's men escaping to other towers. And we don't
want any of the other towers sending men over to help Nris-Pol. We want to
fight this out among ourselves."
Blade nodded. "What about the pikes and the Low People?"
"Over a thousand of them have already been armed. We are holding them back for
the moment."
"Why the devil are you doing that?" snapped Blade. "We've got to move fast.
There isn't any time for fussing about details, or trying to keep the Low
People under control." He clapped his hands together suddenly as a thought
struck him, so loudly that Bryg-Noz jumped in surprise.
"What is it, Blade-Liza?"
"Are the shafts still working?"
"Yes."
"Good. That means Nris-Pol still doesn't realize how big an attack this is.
Otherwise he'd shut off the shafts and let us try fighting our way up the
stairs one level at a time. That could take weeks. But with the
shafts still running& " Blade turned away, a frown on his face as his mind ran
over the possibilities and the risks. Then he turned back to Bryg-Noz. "Can
you give me fifty of your best fighters?"
"Fifty? What for?"
"I want to go up the queen's shaft to the queen's chambers and try to take and
hold them."
Bryg-Noz's jaw dropped, but he managed to close it as Blade raced on.
"Mir-Kasa is something that
Nris-Pol is going to have to defend. Even if he doesn't want to, the warriors
will probably do it without his orders, or even against them. Unless, of
course, he is planning to kill her& " He saw Bryg-Noz shudder at the thought.
"Either way, my attack should draw a few hundred of Nris-Pol's fighters up to
a higher level. There may not be enough left to even hold the stairs, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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