The footmen set hands to the handles of the doors and braced their feet.
"Six!" the abbot shouted. "Pull!"
The porters heaved the gates wide open, and the butt end of a huge tree-trunk shot through. It posed for a split second, then shot on in with a series of machine-gun snaps, broken ropes festooning it, soldiers tumbling in off-balance in its wake. Fiery swords flamed in their hands.
"Max!" Matt shouted. "Douse those blades!"
The flames slackened and guttered out as two barons, with five knights and twenty footmen, shouldered the attackers aside and charged out through the gate, laying about them with swords. The attackers, taken by surprise, roared and turned to attack the sally-party's rear; but the knights above upended a huge copper cauldron, and scalding water drenched the attackers. They screamed and pulled back into the courtyard.
"Archers! Loose!" the abbot cried, and the courtyard was suddenly filled with arrows. Matt turned away, sickened by the slaughter, looking out at the tunnel for an excuse. The sally-party was doing very well; the tunnel roof was fallen,-and the framework halfway to kindling. While the laborers hacked at oak, the knights and infantry hewed at soldiers. It was all over in ten minutes, and the barons and their liege men pulled back to the sides just as the few surviving attackers poured out through the gate. The barons and their men chopped at them as they came; only a handful were left to stagger back into the enemy line.
"In!" the abbot cried, for a regiment was finally pulling out of the enemy line for a counterattack. The barons bawled orders; knights and footmen alike leaped to catch up their wounded and dead, then rushed back in through the gate. The huge doors boomed shut behind them, and the great oak bar dropped into its brackets as an exclamation point.
"Let them learn from this," the abbot growled; but there was no joy in his eyes, for the talus slope outside the gate was filled with dead and moaning bodies.
"Hold fire!" he bawled, as a small running party charged up the slope from the enemy line. "Let them recover their wounded!"
They took care of their wounded, all right-with quick, sharp, sword strokes.
The abbot shrugged. "Their comrades' swords or ours-what matter?" But his face was long, and he made the Sign of the Cross over the dead, muttering the Latin words of conditional absolution.
The inhumanity of the spectacle was clawing at Matt's brain, trying to paralyze him, and he couldn't quite shake it off.
"Wizard," hummed the Demon by his ear, "I sense expending of- some force beneath us."
"Probably just the brown-robes, coming out to pick up the dead," Matt muttered.
"Nay; I mean beneath the ground, within this mound of earth beneath us."
"Down inside the motte itself?" Matt looked up, a surge of adrenaline banishing the tendrils clinging to his brain. "Check for miners, will you? Sappers, men trying to dig a tunnel under the battlements and up into the courtyard. If you find them, bring the roof down on them."
"And how shall I do that?" From its tone of voice, the Demon knew quite well, but wanted to make sure Matt did, too.
"Weaken the bonds between molecules, of course!"
"There are few men within this world who'd know such things," the Demon chortled. "I go to search the underground."
It winked out. Matt stood scowling. The Demon was testing him, trying to find his limits. Why?
"Malvoisin!"
Matt looked up at the cry. The siege tower was rolling again, without horses. Faintly, he could hear a heavy work-chant. "They're pushing it from behind," he growled. "What can you do about that, Lord Abbot?"
"I can-Ho!"
Fog, sand, and a tidal wave of dust hit the battlements, churning so thickly that Matt could scarcely see the abbot, ten feet away. Men shouted, startled and frightened; then they began to cough all along the rampart, hacking and wheezing.
"Let fly at the malvoisin!" the abbot cried in despair, then broke off in a coughing fit. The archers began their chant, with many breaks for coughs and wheezes, loosing their arrows blindly into the dust.
This was a real emergency, Matt realized. The enemy could roll up their malvoisin under cover of the storm and send their men in, ready and equipped for dust.
"Use your power, Wizard," the abbot managed between coughs from somewhere near. "Banish this fell storm!"
Matt nodded, forcing his voice to be steady.
The western wind howled in. Men shouted; all about him, clanking spoke of knights clutching one another, to brace themselves against the blast ... But the dust thinned with amazing speed and blew away. Matt turned, looking up, and saw a mammoth slab of whirling dust, its front as flat as if it had been planed, standing like a wall between the monastery and its enemies. That wasn't going to help much; it could still hide the malvoisin till it was too close to stop.
A knight howled as the wind hurled him before it, toward the outer edge. His comrades dived and caught his arms just in time. They hauled him back onto the parapet.
"Secure yourselves!" the abbot bellowed, then turned to Matt. "Wizard, this is your doing! Can you stop this wind?"
Matt shook his head. "If I do, the dust will come pouring back in. It's up to the enemy sorcerers to make the dust disappear; then I can stop the wind. What hour is it?"
"Midnight," the abbot shouted. "Five more hours till the dawn; and my men cannot hold against this wind!"
A roar, like a dozen subways homing in, filled the valley. Matt froze, startled. Then he ran to the wall, more blown than running, brought up sharply against the stone, hung on for dear life, and dared a peek out.
The roar was fading. A huge trench had opened in the field, arrowing from the wall straight back into the dust-wall. Dirt was still pouring in all along its length, along with an avalanche of enemy soldiers and knights from the bottom of the dust-wall.
"What means this, Wizard?" Sir Guy called.
"Sappers," Matt shouted back. "Miners. They were trying to dig their way under the wall."
"But how knew you..." The abbot's face froze; he shook his head sharply. "Do not say; I do not wish to know."
The dust began to thin.
"Ready your archers, Lord Abbot!" Matt called. "The enemy's realized he has to dump the dust! I can stop the wind in a minute or two!"
The abbot bawled orders as the dust dissipated; the last few tag ends disappeared. Matt heaved a sigh of relief, and called,
The wind slackened and died-and fog rolled in, worse than London with a three-day calm. Thick, opaque fog settled over the battlements in a few seconds, hiding Sir Guy five feet away. Matt froze, alarm thrilling through him as he saw it hit. A freezing thought nudged his brain. Just before the fog wrapped around him, he took the deepest breath he could and hid his face in the crook of his arm. Around him, he heard men shout, then the clank and thud as bodies hit the stonework. Men choked and hacked as if they were trying to cough up their entrails. This fog wasn't just water vapor; it was a gas attack.
Matt spent all his breath in four lines: