The Hidden Temple by Catherine Cooke

Author:Catherine Cooke [Cooke, Catherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy, General, Fiction
Publisher: Tor Books
Published: 1988-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

The main northern gate of Cavernon City had been heavily reinforced by Senomar's builders when they had strengthened the walls. Now there were three gates within the thick wall, between two massive towers. The first was a four-foot-thick slab of a portcullis, delicately balanced to be raised and lowered easily. In peacetime it would never be closed. Now it presented a featureless, iron-bound face to the enemy.

Behind it was the original gate with its two twenty-foot-high doors and its huge inner bolts. The innermost gate consisted of a central iron grating large enough to admit two wagons side by side, and two smaller side gates for horsemen. The towers and walls around the northern gate were the strongest in the city. It was a foolish place for an army to direct a first assault.

When Kyellan and three thousand men arrived, Caer archers on the battlements were shooting thick flights of arrows down at the besiegers. Some found their marks, but most bounced off the shields the enemy soldiers held over their heads as they ran. There had been siege-defense engines mounted on the northern wall once, but those had been dismantled and removed to the harbor at the beginning of the naval threat. The Kerisian soldiers were assaulting the wall with little more than spears and ladders. They had not had time enough in the Dhalen camp to construct engines or rams, much less time to build means to transport such weapons across the river.

Captain Marat ran down the wall stairway to greet Kyellan, surprised and pleased at the mass of reserve troops the Commander led. The slim Parahnese officer sent a man to the gates to tell them to raise the inner ones so the army could gather behind the last portcullis. Then he turned to Kyellan. "The Kerisians haven't done any damage yet," he said. "There was nothing in the river for them to harm. All the fishing boats and barges were taken into the inner harbor late last night. They had to swim their horses across, but their infantry crossed on rafts."

"Why didn't you attack them while they were crossing?" Kyellan said irritably. "Yes, I know. Waiting for orders. Well, we're going out now. Pull your cavalrymen off the walls and hold them in reserve. My men will need heavy support from your archers when the front gate is lifted."

"Yes, sir!" Marat relayed the orders cheerfully. Kyellan guessed that he and Captain Oman had been under orders from Tobas not to act hastily, to wait for word from the palace. Otherwise, they would have taken out a sortie long before. They were not men to sit idly.

Had the Kerisians left their best commanders behind at Shalkir? This was a ludicrous assault. The enemy numbers were large enough to fill the fields and ditches between the wall and the river, but they could not hope to take the northern gate without rams, or hold the ground upon which they had advanced. Kyellan only needed to call up the off-duty men of Fourth and Fifth Division to outnumber the Kerisians.

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