AN ONSLAUGHT OF TIGERS

Flying the Line:

Boots on the battlements, hands on the rope;

eyes on Zretaia's lights, gleaming below,

a gold constellation of firelit streets,

obscured in their glory by the points of your feet.

Step forward. Fall!

A thrill of plunging fear!

The blur of lights—breath left behind,

Fly! Fly! through the onrushing gale!

By the strength of your arms you fly!

Ah, what have we dared for adventure and gold!

for children and wife, for justice and life!

What have we risked in the thrill of our freedom,

inflamed by our yearning for promised rewards;

freedom and gold, adventure and life—to thee we fly!

—Brushed by clouds of tempest-shredded majesty,

soaring through sheets of layered moonbeams!

swooping through swarms of the alchemist's howling shimmering spells!

The wind and the lightning! Oh what a night!

And ahead, the Tower!

Height upon height of obsidian, wracked with chaos, enchantments swirling bursting clashing unraveling—

—The hiss of an arrowhead cuts past your cheek,

the siege on the battlements skims past your feet;

the jungle is blazing with buckling spells,

as teeming defenders swing scimitar blades,

hacking and sawing the durable line—almost severed!

With all the power of his fall and flight, Cusáhn, a plunging falcon of steel, smashes into the enemy! He scatters them, but when they see that he is only one man, they turn, howling, and swarm down upon him! Cusáhn draws his spark-edged sword in an arcing strike, cleaving through foes with sparkling explosions, but he is surrounded, staggered beneath a tempest of blows, driven back to the cable, to the lifeline of his mates, which he defends against hopeless odds.

Before the enemy can drag him down, a second warrior, a scarlet condor with a crescent blade, crashes from the zipline into the fray! and after him, a third, a roaring crimson streak, vivid as fresh blood, flies from the night in a charging onslaught! The fury of these three demolishes the foe, the cable is saved, and the others swing down from the line.

"Let us make haste!" Cusáhn declares, panting from the fight. "Where is the entrance?"

Glaneir answers, "Above. Follow me."

The comrades run, cautious and swift, through the lights and shadows of the jungle, moving among fantastic sprays of vegetation, beneath emerald fronds thrice the height of men, dagger-leaves whispering in the breeze.

Through the green light of that softly-shining gloom, Viványa lopes parallel to the others, studying the sandy earth by the glow of a flickering enchantment, an emerald ribbon of writhing light. She feels the warm thrill of blood on her neck – a scratch from the battle. She sniffs the air. Smells tigers.

Glaneir's voice drifts through the trees, "This is where we ascend."

A wall of stone, arctic white but for the dark cracks between the blocks, rises from the undergrowth higher than twenty yards into the spell-streaked sky, its pale surface dappled with the amethyst light of the moon. They see no stair, no ladder, no tree high enough to climb.

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"This," Glaneir says, "is a raised walkway that runs between the outer wall and the Tower. Those with the courage to keep their eyes open on the zipline flight have seen already how this place is fortified: the outer wall is a circle, like a wheel; the Tower in the center is its axle. As for the spokes, they are nine – this raised walkway and eight others like it; and each spoke leads from the outer wall to one of the nine gates into the Tower itself. Those are our entrances."

Viványa, not waiting for the end of Glaneir's speech, hurls her grappling line upward, and on her second cast, it catches. She runs halfway up the wall—the hook comes loose! She falls—plummets a yard—catches herself, fingers and toes clawed into the cracks of the masonry. Then she finishes the climb, with the grappling cord held in her mouth. From the top, she beckons the others to scale the rope, and soon all have climbed up onto the walkway, which rises into the nighttime breeze, jungles on either hand. Its width is five paces, without parapet or rail, a bare stone path extending from the outer battlements where soldiers are shouting in combat, to the Tower, where a red-hot portcullis steams wickedly into the night.

Slowly, with a rumbling like a falling cliff, the immense portcullis begins to rise. Rokál can see, in the gaps between the bars, nine white tigers, all shining with spells, and riding them, nine silver knights with shields upon both arms, crowned in visored helms as smooth as the steel heads of battering rams, with no holes for speech or sight, seamless and invincible.

Glaneir warns, "The tiger cavalry!"

Harrin loads a sling-bullet and—whirling the weapon overhead—fires. The bullet strikes tiger-bone with a sharp crack, but the stricken beast only twitches its head as if to rid itself of a jungle fly.

Glaneir warns, "While the rider lives, his steed can never die! The life of both is in the rider, and both see through the tiger's eyes!"

Already the colossal portcullis has risen half a yard above the masonry, and the tigers are snarling with eagerness for the attack. UrokYann gapes, having never seen such beasts, and the hair on the backs of his arms prickles at the deep-throated rumbling of their aggression, a sound to frighten the bravest. But before fear can take hold, he sees his little companions steel themselves and stand fast, and one of the smallest, the lad with blood-red hair, seemingly enraptured by the tigers' ferocity, charges six steps toward the enemy and answers with a roar of shocking force. Then UrokYann understands that his companions, and perhaps even he himself, are dangerous and frightening as the beasts.

The tigers, inflamed by Viványa's cry, bellow in a cacophony of rage, rearing, riders struggling for control. Viványa answers the moment the tigers pause for breath, shaking her own bones with an even more terrific roar, throat-tearing, guttural, a blood-heating sound like a physical blow, and Rokál, with a start of recognition, knows it to be the noise of no pirate lad—as he'd mistaken his comrade to be—but of a berserker, full-fledged and steeped in blood. And now UrokYann, caught up in Viványa's spirit, joins in the roaring on her side, his voice huge and deep, both of them oblivious to their perplexed companions as they stoke the flames of their ferocity, they and the tigers exciting one another violently, roar upon roar, in a mounting frenzy of intoxicating wrath.

Beneath that savage din, Cusáhn murmurs to Rokál and the others, "We cannot stand the charge of nine."

Rokál answers, "The way is narrow; they will come three by three."

"Still," Cusáhn warns, "we must break up their onslaught, or be trampled down."

Tzark lifts two of the three javelins from Viványa's back, so deftly that she notices nothing. He says, "He'll not have time to throw more than one; who else has the skill? I say aim for the forelegs; they may not die while their rider lives, but I'll wager they can trip."

Cusáhn takes one javelin, Rokál the other, as the grinding portcullis inches higher than two yards, soon to be higher than the riders' helms. Tzark and Glaneir back several paces behind UrokYann and Harrin, while Rokál and Cusáhn advance side-by-side, and Viványa, flushed and bright-eyed from the roaring, moves forward between them. Rokál tells her, "I and this over-vaunted guardsman will throw as well as we can, but we are no javelineers."

Cusáhn agrees, "It is for you alone to break up their onslaught, however slightly. Should even one tiger stumble, it will slow the impulse of their charge, and perhaps that will be enough."

Viványa narrows fierce eyes at the steaming portcullis. Her throwing hand taps her weapons, contemplative, lingering on the javelin, but as her eyes gauge the battlefield and a plan takes shape within her mind, her fingers settle on the heavier, less accurate harpoon. Then she begins moving, loping ahead along the right-hand edge while working rapidly with the harpoon cord, measuring it by pulling length after length straight, until she judges that the slack is equal to three-fourths the height of the wall—and at that carefully measured spot on the cord, with her left hand, she grips with crushing force.

Cusáhn roars, "They come!"

The tigers charge, their nine-throated bellow vibrating like an earthquake in Viványa's bones, exhilarating her, taking her breath as she launches herself in a countercharge against the torrent of snapping teeth and thunderous muscle. At close range she wrenches her arm into an overhand throw; the harpoon hurtles, barbs hissing, rope uncoiling, and slams through the neck of the rightmost tiger, but the beast does not even flinch. It pounces at Viványa; she flings herself to the left-hand edge. More tigers leap at her, claws shearing toward her unarmored head, but she hurls herself headfirst off the wall!

"Vivict!"

"Vivict!"

Seeing their comrade fall, Cusáhn and Rokál round on the enemy and throw javelins with all their strength, the points sticking harmlessly into the surging beasts. Now grim-faced from the knowledge that they must clash with an unbroken charge, the two warriors ready their halberd and spark-edged sword, bracing themselves for the overwhelming impact of nine tigers at a headlong sprint.

The harpoon cord, still trailing from a tiger's neck, snaps taut! Viványa, having plunged down the wall three-fourths of the way to the earth, jerks to a stop, halted by her crushing grip on the cord. Her weight would be nothing to the tiger with the harpoon lodged in its neck, but when that weight wrenches within its throat, without warning, tearing at deep-seated barbs, it is enough to drag the beast thrashing and bellowing into the path of its comrades' reckless charge.

The tigers crash and tumble in a shattering overthrow! Knights smash onto the stone and spin beneath their rolling mounts, which shriek and flail as their riders are crushed! More tigers skid along the edges left and right, clawing stone to keep from falling as shields crash down through the jungle, thrown aside by riders clinging to their tigers' necks!

Only one mount and knight prove nimble enough to thread the pandemonium and lunge at Cusáhn, but Rokál, roaring in triumph at the overthrow, swings his mystic blade in a cleaving arc through the tiger's throat, severing enchantments and slaying the invincible beast! The rider stumbles free, now blind in his visorless helm, then suddenly flies in another direction, having met a two-handed blow from the terrific mace of UrokYann. Ulto begins crowing as Rokál and Cusáhn charge through the avalanche of writhing beasts, slashing and hacking through tumbling foes. The sword of Cusáhn shrieks and sparkles as it shears through the knights, while UrokYann seizes an enemy's armored leg and flings him like a rag over the edge.

The final pair of riders manage to remount and make ready for battle, but find themselves unexpectedly outnumbered, pestered by Harrin's slingstones, faced with a halberdier who slays invincible tigers and a swordsman who cuts through seamless mail. Nevertheless, they make a spirited charge, and after a worthy and difficult fight, Cusáhn and Rokál cut them down!