‘What made you change your mind, Perraine?’ Sparhawk asked sadly.

‘Martel’s lost his hold on me. Ydra’s dead.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I’m not. Somehow she realized what was happening. She went to the chapel in her father’s house and prayed all night. Then, just as the sun was coming up, she drove a dagger into her heart. She’d sent one of her footmen here with a letter explaining everything that had happened. He arrived just before Martel’s army encircled the city. She’s free now, and her soul is safe.’

‘Why did you take poison then?’

‘I’m going to follow her, Sparhawk. Martel’s stolen my honour, but he can never steal my love.’ Perraine stiffened on his narrow cot, and he twisted in agony for a moment. ‘Yes,’ he gasped, ‘an excellent poison. I’d recommend it by name, but I don’t altogether trust our little mother here. Given half a chance, I think she could resurrect a stone.’ He smiled at their teacher. ‘Can you find it in your heart to forgive me, Sparhawk?’

‘There’s nothing to forgive, Perraine,’ Sparhawk said in a thick voice, taking his friend’s hand.

Perraine sighed. ‘I’m sure they’ll strike my name from the Pandion rolls, and I’ll be remembered with contempt.’

‘Not if I can help it, they won’t,’ Sparhawk told him. ‘I‘ll protect your honour, my friend.’ He gripped Perraine’s hand tightly in an unspoken pledge.

Sephrenia reached across the bed and took the dying man’s other hand.

‘It’s almost over,’ Perraine said in a faint whisper. ‘I wish –’ And then he fell silent.

Sephrenia’s wail of grief was almost like that of a hurt child. She pulled Perraine’s limp body to her.

‘There’s no time for that!’ Sparhawk told her sharply. ‘Will you be all right here for a while? I have to go and get Kurik.’

She stared at him in astonishment.

‘We have to dress Perraine in his armour,’ Sparhawk explained. ‘Then Kurik and I can take him to one of those streets just inside the wall. We’ll shoot a crossbow bolt into his chest and lay him in the street. They’ll find him later, and everyone will believe that one of Martel’s mercenaries shot him off the wall.’

‘But Sparhawk, why?’

‘Perraine was my friend, and I promised to protect his honour.’

‘But he tried to kill you, dear one.’

‘No, little mother, Martel tried to kill me. He forced Perraine to help him. The guilt’s all Martel’s, and one of these days before very long, I’m going to make him answer for it.’ He paused. ‘You might start thinking about that hypothesis of ours,’ he added. ‘This seems to poke quite a large hole in it.’ Then he remembered the Rendor with the poisoned knife. ‘Either that or there’s more than just one assassin out there to worry about,’ he added.

The first probing attacks came after about five days of looting. They were tentative, designed primarily to identify strong points – and weak ones. The defenders had certain advantages here. Martel had received his training from Vanion, and Vanion could, therefore, predict almost exactly what the white-haired former Pandion would do, and, moreover, he could marshal his forces so as to dissemble and deceive. The probing attacks grew stronger. They came sometimes at dawn, sometimes late in the day and sometimes in the middle of the night when darkness shrouded the smoky city. The Church Knights were always on the alert. They never removed their armour, and they slept in snatches whenever and wherever they could.

It was when the outer city lay almost entirely in ruins that Martel moved his siege engines into place to begin the steady pounding of the inner city. Large rocks rained from the sky, crushing soldiers and citizens alike. Large baskets were mounted on some of Martel’s catapults, and bushels of crossbow bolts were launched high into the air to drop indiscriminately into the ancient city. Then came the fire. Balls of burning pitch and naphtha came sailing over the walls to ignite the roofs and to fill the streets with great splashes of searing fire. There were as yet no half-ton boulders, however.

The defenders endured. There was nothing else they could do.

Lord Abriel began to construct engines of his own to respond, but aside from the rubble of destroyed houses, there was very little at hand to throw back at Martel in reply.

They endured, and each stone, each fireball, each shower of arrows dropping from the sky in a deadly rain only increased their hatred of the besiegers.

The first serious assault came not long after midnight eight days after the looting had begun. A disorganized horde of Rendorish fanatics came shrieking out of the dark, smoky streets to the southwest bent on attacking a somewhat shaky bartizan on the corner of the old wall in that quarter. The defenders rushed to that point. Sheets of arrows and crossbow bolts swept through the black-robed ranks of the Rendors, felling them in windrows like new-mown wheat. The shrieks took on that note of agony that has risen from every battlefield since the beginning of time. On and on, however, came the Rendors, men so wildly gripped by religious frenzy that they paid no heed to their dreadful casualties, some of them even ignoring mortal wounds as they dragged themselves towards the walls.

‘The pitch!’ Sparhawk shouted to the soldiers who were feverishly shooting arrows and bolts down into the seething mass of the attackers below. Cauldrons of boiling pitch were dragged to the edge of the walls even as the scaling ladders came angling up from below to clatter against the weather-worn battlements. The Rendors, shrieking war cries and religious slogans, came scrambling up the rude ladders only to fall howling and writhing from those ladders as great waves of scalding pitch engulfed them, burning, searing.

‘Torches!’ Sparhawk commanded.

Half a hundred flaming torches sailed out over the walls to ignite the pools of liquid pitch and naphtha below. A great sheet of flame shot up to bathe the walls and to burn those Rendors still clinging to their ladders as ants sizzle, shrivel and fall from a log cast into a fire. Burning men ran from the crowd below, shrieking, stumbling blindly and trailing streams of dripping flame like comets as they ran.

Still the Rendors came, and still the scaling ladders ponderously rose from their ranks, pushed from the rear by hundreds of hands to swing up and up, then to hesitate, standing vertically, and then to slowly fall against the wall. Fanatics, wild-eyed and some actually foaming at the mouth, were desperately climbing even before the ladders fell into place. From the top of the walls, the defenders pushed the ladders away with long poles, and the ladders reversed their rise, teetered back out to stand momentarily motionless and then toppled backwards, carrying the men near their tops to their deaths below. Hundreds of Rendors crowded near the base of the walls to avoid the arrows from above, and they dashed out to scramble up the ladders towards the tops of the walls.