The hall was deserted now, but outside he could see figures running past in a noon-bright glare far brighter than anything the torches could conceivably be giving off. He ran to the door and, momentarily cautious, pushed his head out for a preliminary look.
Irdna was built around a central square, with the town hall and other public buildings in the middle of the square. The shops and houses stood in two concentric rectangles around it, their windowless outer walls forming extra barriers to anyone penetrating into the town even if they breached the outer wall.
Blade saw that the rooftops and walls had sprouted clusters of armed men. Two additional groups had stationed themselves in the main square, each facing down one of the wide streets that led to the two main gates. Both streets had also been blocked with overturned carts, and Blade saw working parties busily piling timbers and sacks of grain to strengthen the barricades. All the people-a good proportion of the fighters were women-seemed armed to the teeth, with firearms, cold steel, and bows. The parties facing the streets each had a small artillery piece on a four-wheeled carriage, and Blade saw fuses smoldering and shot stacked ready for use.
Hundreds of old people and children were pouring into the square, huddling against the walls of the inner layer of buildings and avoiding both the streets and the open center of the town square. Blade wondered why they had not stayed in their homes, then remembered the way the village houses had been pushed in on themselves. Anyone caught in his house would be likely to die under the collapsing rubble, while in the open he might at least run. And no doubt the people had vain, vague hopes that the walls and the fighting parties would keep the Ice Dragons from ever reaching the center of town.
Abruptly the droning roar ceased, and what seemed in contrast a dead silence fell down on the town. But it was only in contrast. As Blade's ears recovered from the strain, he could make out a continuous crunching and snorting from outside the walls. Then the blue-white glare also died, but not before Blade saw a pair of vast and hideous fanged heads rise on immensely long necks over the main gate of Irdna. Half a dozen muskets let fly into the sudden darkness, then the crunching and snorting in turn died. There was a moment of genuine silence during which Blade found himself holding his breath-and then a series of thunderous crashes from all around the walls. It seemed that a giant was bowling twenty-ton boulders against the town's walls.
More guns went off, then the crashes came again, this time in ragged synchronization. In the moment of silence that followed, Blade heard leaders yelling to their men to hold their fire until they had a clear target. As the Ice Dragons rammed themselves against the town walls a third time, now all moving together, Blade strode over to the guards facing the main gate. Their leader turned around and stared at Blade.
«Nilando!»
«How did you get out?» exclaimed the Irdnan. «I thought-«Whatever he thought vanished in the thunder of another thrust by the Ice Dragons, sounding as though the very glaciers that were their homes were pushing against the walls of Irdna. Nilando turned back to watch the gate until the groan of its tortured timbers had died away, then repeated his question. Blade was just about to answer when in his turn he was cut off by the battering-ram crash of the attacking monsters, and then by a wild cry that somehow rose over all the crashes and screams that should have drowned it out.
«They're over the east wall!»
The east wall was invisible behind the roofs of houses and shops, but the roar and crash of falling stones and the crackle of splintering timbers told its own frightful story, as did the continuous flashes as the eastern guards fired as fast as they could load their muskets. Then Blade saw glints as they dropped their muskets and pistols, and more glints as some snatched out swords and axes. Others leaped wildly down from second- or third-story roofs, preferring broken limbs or heads to death at the hands of what was plowing into the town behind them. Another fanged head rose up, something white and shrieking writhing in its teeth. Directly ahead, three more monstrous shapes rose once again over the main gate and lunged forward in a deadly wedge. The main gate screamed in a final agony of dying metal and timber and gave inward.
Instantly the cannon the guard party was manning went off with a tremendous flare of flame and smoke and a roar that would at other times have been deafening, but now sounded to Blade no louder than the popping of a paper bag. Then the musketeers were forming up into a single line, raising their weapons to their shoulders, and firing a savage rolling volley that made dust and stone chips spurt all around the gate as balls smashed into the wall. Some of the grapeshot from the cannon and some of the musket balls must have hit the Ice Dragons, but they paid no more attention to them than Blade would have to a mosquito bite. Behind the first three Blade saw more heads rising, and he nocked an arrow to his bow and pulled back, waiting until one of the beasts held its head motionless long enough to permit a shot at the eyes. Those antique muskets the Irdnans were using might have some advantages over a longbow, but accuracy would not be one of them. Other archers were also forming up and letting fly, both from the square and from the rooftops.
Whether the volleys stung the Ice Dragons or, more likely, gave their Masters a moment's pause, the massed monsters coming through the gate slowed for a moment and milled about. Blade looked off to the right, toward the broken east wall, and saw more heads looming there too, as more Ice Dragons poured through the breach and ramped and raged about amid the buildings on that side of town, snatching the last few defenders screaming from the roofs. But they showed no signs of pushing on into the town square from that direction.
Blade looked back to the gate attack just in time to see the whole mass surge forward, a wall of flesh on a forest of tree-trunk legs, and the musketeers and archers let go another massed volley. Then the Dragon formation split apart, as two at each end of the line hurled themselves at the houses on either side of the street, like rugby players ramming a hole in the opposing defenses for the ball carrier. Blade heard timbers crack, stones cascade into the street, ponies and livestock scream as they died in the collapsing buildings, and the fighters of Irdna do the same as they fell to their deaths on the stone streets or felt fanged jaws close around them. In the darkness, Blade dimly saw the capture webs flick out, snatching still others up from the streets or down from the roofs and windows.
The Dragons closed ranks, moved forward, opened again, and again buildings fell and men and animals gave their death cries. Now the Dragons were less than fifty yards away and their odor marched before them like a mephitic wall. Some of the men of Irdna, tough as they were, stared with panic-stricken faces at the death lumbering slowly and inexorably toward them, but most, including Nilando, simply gripped their weapons tighter, licked their lips or sipped from their canteens, and waited to die on their native earth. Then the Dragons reared up, and as one of them turned slightly sideways Blade caught his first clear glimpse of a Dragon Master.
In every limb and feature Blade could see, the Master was human. But he was dressed from the neck down in a shimmering silver suit, slightly bagged at the joints and showing signs of extra padding on the torso, and his head was concealed in a spherical silver helmet with a dead-black visor. In each hand he carried the short stave or wand that Rena had mentioned, and as he flicked them forward and backward along the Dragon's neck Blade could see the monster responding. The Master looked in fact like nothing as much as a cross between a moonwalking astronaut and a medieval knight, and it was easy to guess that the helmet and suit provided virtually complete protection from any missile. But if one were to close in, and strike full force at a Dragon Master with, let us say, an axe-supposing the Dragon permitted one to close-what then? Blade found he had a great desire to gather in one of the Dragon Masters and with him perhaps a few clues to the menace that threatened this dimension.