Despite their courage the Legionnaires and the militia were falling back. The second wave of Brutes had arrived, and they swept through the waterfront and the roads closest to the water, overwhelming the roadblocks and pushing the defenders inexorably back toward the city wall. The Legion had to abandon its headquarters, and soon the entire street fell to the marauders. Refugees fled toward the inner city.
Falaius had fought enough battles to know when to retreat. The streets of Mirage were swiftly filling with Brutes, and there was nowhere the outnumbered Legion and its allies could regroup. They would have to fall back on the city gates. He knew all too well that the wall itself was not a final defense. There were gaps in the ancient stonework and places on the north side of the city where entire sections of it had vanished over the centuries, but the gates were strong and the wall would give his fighters a chance to recover their breath.
“Fall back!” he bellowed. “Fall back to the gates!”
The word passed from group to group. Slowly but steadily the defenders disengaged from the fighting, grabbed what wounded they could, and retreated to the towering walls of the Legion Gate. Unconcerned, the Brutes let them go.
Falaius, Linsha, and several Legionnaires were the last to enter the gates. They staggered inside and watched as the gates were swung shut and barred. Linsha listened to the solid thud as the gates closed and the bar fell into place, and she closed her eyes sadly. It seemed to her the final knell for the Knights of Solamnia had been sounded. Even if they wanted to, they could no longer fight their way into the city to help the Legion. They would have to stay within their Citadel or find a way to escape north and join the forces of the militia.
Weary to the bone, Linsha wiped her sword blade clean and pushed it back into the scabbard. A young girl with a pitcher of water offered her a ladle. She drank two full ladles and dumped a third over her head before she regretfully passed it on to someone else. Her head hurt abominably and the soreness returned to her back, yet she felt too tired to do anything about it. She just wanted to lie down and sleep. She cast a look at the sky, hoping it would be dark soon, and was dismayed to see the day had barely passed midafternoon.
“Lord Falaius!” called a sentry from the wall. “Come see this. The Knights are about to join in the battle whether they like it or not.”
Linsha was ahead of Falaius and shot up the stone steps to the battlements like a catapult. She pushed into a crenel and stared out at the fortress on the hill above Mirage. It looked so invulnerable on top of its hill, its defenses strong and its pennants flying defiantly above the towers.
She could see another large group of Brutes had climbed the road to the Citadel and were standing out of arrow range while they looked over the castle.
“Do these Brutes know siege tactics?” Linsha asked the Legion commander as he came to stand beside her.
“Unfortunately, yes.”
Other people crowded up onto the walkway that looked out over Mirage, the harbor, and the distant hill. They watched as the Brutes began to spread out across the practice fields and around the crown of the hill to surround the Citadel. They saw the raiders break into the outbuildings and set fire to the stable-although Linsha knew from Sir Remmik’s constant training that the horses had already been released or removed to the safety of the bailey. They spotted the dark showers of arrows that fell from the walls and the larger missiles that were flung from the high towers, forcing the Brutes to keep their distance.
“They have enough supplies and weapons to hole up in there for months,” Linsha heard someone remark.
“That’s all well enough for them, but it doesn’t help us much,” another voice grumbled.
“It won’t help them much either if Thunder-”
A shadow dark and prophetic swept over their heads, and the wind of the dragon’s passing choked the words in Linsha’s throat.
Wordlessly the observers on the wall watched the huge blue sweep over the harbor and make a lazy circle above the Solamnic Citadel.
Linsha’s throat went dry. The Citadel had been her home for over a year. While the Missing City wasn’t the best assignment she’d ever had, she had grown to appreciate the castle’s amenities and its strengths, and she had come to know many of the Knights and servants who worked within its walls. She even liked a few of them. Neither they nor the fortress deserved what was about to happen next.
Falaius rubbed a hand over his sweating face. “Does Remmik have defenses against dragons?”
Linsha did not take her eyes off the fortress or the dragon. She simply gave a dry laugh that held no humor. “He had one of our sorcerer Knights concoct some spells to protect the walls and the gate. Those might hold since they are a few years old. But magic has been failing all over Ansalon. The Knights have nothing new, and no weapons that will fight a wyrm that big.”
“What was Remmik thinking to build a fortress like that?”
“When he designed it, he never imagined that Iyesta would be dead or that magic would be so unpredictable,” Linsha said.
She didn’t know why she was trying to defend the Solamnic commander. She had often asked the same questions herself. But what Sir Remmik had done was the same thing he had done in other parts of Ansalon-organize a circle, build defenses, and train young Knights into a fighting unit. The only difference here was he had had more authority, more time, and more resources to create his vision of a perfect Solamnic Circle. The problem was he had not taken into account some extraordinary circumstances, and now one of those circumstances was circling overhead and eyeing the fortress with utter malice. Linsha wondered what Sir Remmik was thinking at that moment.
In the blink of an eye, lightning crackled from the dragon’s jaws and exploded on the cap of one of the Solamnic gate towers. The boom rolled across the Missing City. A second bolt of lightning from the dragon struck the tower again, and pieces flew off the tall structure. Smoke wafted from the interior. A third strike curled around a stone column, pulverizing mortar and weakening the structure even more. Without waiting to see the results of his breath attack on the first tower, Thunder concentrated three more bolts of lightning on the second gate tower, then he moved around the walls, systematically attacking each tower until the defenders were dead and the stonework was scorched black. Thick clouds of smoke rose from the interior where fires consumed the buildings, the fodder, and the stores.
The massive dragon slowly came to ground in front of the gates and tucked his wings close to his body. The Brutes watched impassively. For one brief moment, Linsha wondered if the dragon was going to allow the survivors of the fortress to surrender, but that fragile hope shriveled a heartbeat later as Thunder swung his blunt, heavy tail into the base of the gate. The two towers guarding the gateway shattered like cheap pottery. They collapsed with a rumble and sent a cloud of dust and mortar billowing over the Citadel.
The big blue roared with pleasure. Using his front legs, he clawed a hole through the wall where the gate had stood and shoved his massive forequarters into the fortress. More towers on the outer wall fell to ruin; more lightning seared the carefully built stonework of the outer wall. Soon he brought down the entire front section of the outer wall and began to concentrate his cruel will on the inner gateway. There seemed to be no sign that the surviving Knights were fighting back.
“Is there any way for them to get out of there?” Falaius said softly.
Linsha had to swallow hard to get enough moisture into her mouth to answer. “I don’t know. I heard some time ago that Sir Morrec had talked to Sir Remmik about building an escape tunnel, but if it was ever done, no one told me.” She gave a bitter laugh. “It would be like Remmik to have workmen construct a small tunnel from the other end so no one knew about it, then in a crisis he could reveal his planning and forethought and look like a hero once again.”