Arken shook Sasha awake. Sasha rolled and crawled immediately to their viewing outcrop. There on the road winding up to the keep gates was a pair of wagons. Drivers carried torches guttered and flamed by the wind. Even now, the drawbridge was lowering with a rattle of rusty chains.
“Let's go,” Sasha whispered, and ran. Even through the clouds, enough moonlight lit the rocky trail to show them the way. Sasha, Yasmyn, Arken, and Danel scampered down the rocks. There rose no cry from the keep walls-in this weather the guards were inside, and would be lucky to spot dark shadows flitting across dark rock.
Sasha reached the keep wall and hugged to it, crouched and moving fast. Ahead, the drawbridge hit the ground across a ditch barely more than waist deep. The wagons began to clatter across it. Sasha leaped into the ditch, ducked low, and scampered directly under the wagons' wheels, and up on the drawbridge's far side. Atop the wagons, torch-wielding drivers with eyes narrowed against stinging rain looked only to the archway ahead, and shelter.
Both wagons crossed, and the drawbridge began to rise. Sasha jumped onto it and slid within the archway, aware that Arken was directly behind, Yasmyn and Danel on the opposite side. Above them, a portcullis was beginning to fall, a further grinding and clanking of chains.
The four infiltrators ducked beneath before it came down with a clang. Amazingly, there were no guards on the ground behind the entrance. The wagons clattered on ahead toward the second gate. All the guards, it seemed, were on the walls above, and not looking for shadows creeping along the ground.
There was a ladder up the wall to the drawbridge and portcullis mechanisms above. Sasha looked up, saw no activity high on the wall, and began climbing. She moved fast, Yasmyn just as fast behind her, as the two men in chain vests and with shields on their backs struggled. The winch mechanisms were under cover atop the wall, and guarded by two bored men in chain mail and helms.
Sasha cleared the ladder and slithered low on hands and toes, pressed to the shadow of a wall. In an instant, Yasmyn was beside her, darak gleaming in her hand. Sasha nodded at one man. Yasmyn nodded back.
They moved together, Sasha drawing her blade, sneaking three steps about the drawbridge winch, and striking off her target's head. Yasmyn's guard went down more messily, with a cut throat and flailing limbs. Sasha hated it, this brutal murder of unwatchful men. But the need for speed and silence left no other choice.
Yasmyn was already winding the drawbridge down, a huge handle for a small woman. Up on the trail, the other men would be moving now. Arken and Danel arrived-Sasha indicated for Danel to raise the portcullis, and stared at where this wall adjoined a fortified guardpost between them and the main keep tower. If men came rushing from there, as they might at any moment, this position would be overrun.
“Hold here,” she told Arken. “Keep them off until our people are in through the gate. Then fall back. I'll get the other gate.”
She turned and ran along the wall top, past archer crenellations to her left, and rounded the corner. Here was a long stretch of battlement to the second defensive wall ahead, and the guardhouse within which the portcullis winch was housed. These walls all made a box around the wagons below. Now paused before the second wall, the wagons were being inspected by guards who emerged from doorways. And here above them, two crossbowmen came from the guardhouse to stand, one on either side, and watch in case of trouble. If either happened to look up right now, Sasha knew she was dead.
She sprinted. Her boots were soft, and with no armour she was faster than the men could have been. Someone yelled, but the crossbowman on the wall before her took a moment to realise his peril. Then he looked up in astonishment.
Sasha slid feet-first beneath the crossbow as he tried to bring it to bear, and took his leg with the sword. Then she was up, nearly overbalancing off the high wall's edge. On the opposing wall, the other crossbowman fired, the bolt whizzing past her nose. A big man with a shield leaped from the guardhouse entrance ahead to block her way. Sasha dropped her left shoulder into the shield at full sprint, knocking him into his wall, then thrust her blade beneath the raised shield to stab a leg. He yelled and swung as she ducked back, thus taking his shield out of play, and Sasha slashed his exposed shoulder.
He stumbled, and Sasha simply hurdled him before one of his comrades could stick a crossbow through the guardhouse crenellations and shoot her. The guardhouse was open, with archer crenellations and a roof mounted on poles like an afterthought. A crossbowman backed away swiftly, shocked to find her so close, and a guard with a shield interposed himself and swung hard. Sasha slid and ducked left to his exposed side, and killed him.
A second did the right thing and charged her, shield first. With no available target, Sasha tried to dart around but there was no room-the shield hit her and crashed her sideways against a crenellation. She fell, and the shieldsman tried to come down on her with a stab, but Sasha swung at his leg, which he barely defended with a downward crash of his shield, and stumbled back. Sasha rolled up and away, in time to find another onrushing guard trying to impale her with a spear. She spun inside it and took his head, then another guardsman took a crossbow bolt through his back from one of his own archers on a further wall. Men were yelling in confusion and anger across the wall defences.
Two without shields tried to rush her with only one-handed swords-Sasha killed one instantly, the second scrambling back in terror as the shieldsman who'd charged her now tried to corral her toward him and the cross-bowman who was hiding behind the portcullis mechanism. Sasha smashed his shield once and again, trying to provoke an attack. A third time, and this time he swung back, and Sasha met it with full force. Her two-handed grip send his one-hander spinning through the air, whereupon she simply grabbed his shield in frustration and tried to wrestle it aside, while he tried to stop her.
She abandoned that fight as the other swordsman came back at her with a new and foolhardy courage, and died for it. And now Arken was crashing into the guardhouse. She left the unarmed shieldsman to him while seeking the crossbowman behind the portcullis winch, finding him sobbing in fear, too frightened to even threaten her with his weapon.
Arken beat the shieldsman to the ground with raw power and rammed a blade through his throat, then came striding to the crossbowman and killed him, too. Sasha stood in helpless horror, breathing hard, bruised from her fall and bleeding from the head where the shield had rammed her into the wall. The crying crossbowman gushed blood and kicked as he died. Sasha wanted to throw up.
“Get the winch!” Arken roared at her, taking up a shield position at the guardhouse entrance. A crossbow bolt struck his shield as he crouched behind it with practised balance, and awaited the next rush.
Sasha sheathed her blade and winched hard on the portcullis mechanism. From the boundary wall, two more shieldsmen came rushing into the guardhouse. Sasha stopped winching and drew her blade as Arken came under attack from his side also, blocking that way in with shield and thrusting sword.
Danel chose that moment to come rushing through the other boundary wall entrance and crash into the shieldsmen with superior shieldwork and crushing blows, a bolt through his arm that did not seem to slow him any. Then Yasmyn, ducking past to wind at the winch…and behind them, Sasha saw with a glance back, guards pursuing across the walls.
Only now there came the sound of fighting below. Danel finished his two opponents and blocked the guardhouse entrance to others, and Sasha risked a look over the wall beyond this portcullis.
Down there she saw horses running crazily, pouring beneath the wall, out toward the main gate. And a tight phalanx of Steel, some shields above their heads to ward archers from the high walls, others with shields before to guard archers at ground level, and all pressing through the crazed mass of horseflesh, and turning toward where the third gate would have to be open, to accommodate all these horses. Sasha saw men over that way, scrambling atop that wall to lower that portcullis, but the mechanism did not allow that to happen quickly. They would not make it in time. She ducked back as a bolt fizzed by her head.