The door got a warped timber across it into the brackets and Alden dragged a fallen joist up against it as a prop, working one handed with his strapped forearm held against his chest, swearing in a low continuous stream.
The breach took Osric and Argilac and Rutger, and everything the ruin had. The broken stools that had been heaped in the corner since before any of them was born. Two lengths of joist off the collapsed part of the upper floor. A roof beam that took all three of them and a great deal of language. They built it waist high and then chest high, and it was not a wall, and everyone who looked at it knew it was not a wall.
Erryk came in off his horse and got about four steps and went down on one knee.
"Leave it in," Osric said, before he could reach for it. "Leave the shaft in. You draw that here and you'll empty out on the floor."
"I know it." Erryk's breath was coming short and shallow. "I've done it to other men."
"Then sit down and hold the stair mouth and stop being useful."
"That's the first sensible order you've given all night."
Osric took stock of what he had.
Voss, laid against the wall with an arrow through the meat of his shoulder from behind, white as tallow, and his right hand not working. His crossbow was ruined and he had known it in the hollow.
Alden, forearm laid open near to the bone and strapped, able to swing his axe and not able to swing it twice at the same man.
Ansel, sat with his back to a rock and his leg out straight, the sabre cut across the outside of the thigh packed with somebody's shirt and still going through it. He could not stand. He said he could and he could not, and Osric watched him try once and said nothing about it afterward.
Erryk, with an arrow in his back and no colour in his face, propped at the foot of the stair with his falchion across his knees.
Rutger, sound, and limping from a horse's hoof.
Doran, sound.
Argilac, sound, with a right hand he could not entirely close.
Himself, with a hole in the shoulder that had been packed nine hours ago and had begun to leak again on the ride, and a left arm he could lift to the height of his own belt and no further.
And a woman with a dead man's knife who had put herself into the corner by the north wall without being told and had stayed there.
Eight of them. Four fit to fight properly.
Out on the slope, somebody laughed.
The first assault came at the sun's edge, and it came at the breach.
They had seen it from outside and known it for what it was, and about thirty of them came up the hill at a run in the grey, silent again, spread wide so that a bolt or an arrow could not take two.
"Here they come," said Doran, from the breach.
"Let them get to the timber. Nobody wastes anything."
They got to the timber.
The first man over put a boot on the fallen roof beam and rose above the barricade with his sabre coming down, and Osric took it on his shield and felt the shock go into the arm that could not lift, and drove his messer up underneath into the belly and out sideways. The man came down across the timber. Osric shoved the body back into the two behind him with the shield and fouled them both.
The second came over on the left and Rutger put a spear through his thigh and let him hang there on it, screaming, in the gap where the next man wanted to be, and did not pull it out for four seconds.
After that they came three at a time and there was no describing it.
It was fought across a chest-high heap of broken furniture in a ruin at dawn, and there was no room for anybody to do anything well. Men grabbed one another. Osric took a sabre on the guard and got his shoulder into a man's chest and put him back over the timber onto the ones behind him. Argilac had his blade bound up against another's, chest to chest across the beam, and stopped trying to win it with the messer and hit the man in the mouth with his gauntlet instead. Once. Twice. Felt the teeth go on the second and put the point through the throat as he reeled off.
Alden was at the door and the door was going.
An axe head came through the rotten planking a hand's breadth from his face, and he hacked down at the fingers that came groping through the split, and two fingers and a thumb ended up on the flagstones by the jamb and lay there for the rest of the morning.
Voss fought left handed and badly and did not stop. He killed a man who came over the timber at Ansel's blind side by getting the knife in and hanging onto him with the dead arm and both of them going down, and Doran had to haul the corpse off him afterward.
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Then the horses went.
Four of them were picketed against the back wall and they had been mad since the hollow, and when the noise came over the barricade one of them tore its peg out of the earth and came up into the middle of the floor with its ears flat and its eyes white.
For about ten seconds it was the most dangerous creature in the tower. It caved in the side of a Khesari's skull with a hind hoof and put Doran into the wall with its shoulder, and then it went out through the breach over the barricade and over the men on it and was gone down the hill, and two more went after it through the gap it had made.
"THE BREACH," Osric roared. "PLUG THE BREACH."
They plugged it with their bodies because there was nothing else left to plug it with. The horses had taken half the timber out with them.
Ansel dragged himself along the wall on his backside and got into the gap at the bottom of it where a man could crawl through and lay across it, and stabbed upward at anybody who tried, and Osric would remember that afterward: a man who could not stand, using himself as masonry.
They held for a while.
Osric could not afterward say how long, and it did not feel like anything at all while it was happening. He knew that at some point his shield had lost its lower third. He knew that at some point he had gone down on one knee in the wet and got up again with somebody's hand on his collar and had never learned whose. He knew that Alden had stopped swearing, which was worse than the swearing.
Twice they came over in numbers and twice the seven of them got them back out. Once a Khesari got right through into the room, all the way through, and
turned round looking for the stair, and Doran killed him from behind before he found it.
The dead began to be a problem. They fell across the timber and made a ramp of themselves, and every man who died on that barricade made the next one easier to come over, and by the second push the Khesari were climbing on their own people to get in.
"They're not tiring," Argilac said, in a gap, with his chest going like a forge bellows.
"No."
"Father, they're not tiring."
"They've eighty," said Osric. "They can send us fresh ones all morning and we've nobody behind us at all. Get your breath and stop talking."
Somewhere out on the slope a voice was calling something in a language none of them had, and the tone of it was unhurried, and each time it called the pressure at the breach shifted a few feet along.
He's reading us. He's watching where we're thin and moving them.
Ansel fought from the ground.
He could not stand and so he did not try. He wedged himself with his back against the rock at the end of the barricade and cut at legs, at ankles and knees and the insides of thighs, which is filthy work and effective, and he did it for the better part of four minutes and put two of them down and crippled a third.
Then one of them saw him.
He came over the timber with his sabre already low and he did not go for Ansel's head or his body. He went for the arm, took most of it off below the elbow with one stroke, and then put the point into Ansel's chest under the collarbone and leaned on it.
Ansel made a sound. Not a scream. Something shorter and more surprised.
Rutger was four feet away with a spear in another man and could not get it free.
Osric was eight feet away with two men in front of him.
Argilac got there. He came off the barricade and took the Khesari across the back of the neck and killed him outright, and then he was on his knees beside
Ansel in the wet with both hands on the wound, trying to hold in something that was not going to stay in.
"Ansel. Ansel."
"Get his belt," Osric shouted, from the timber. "Above the elbow. GET HIS BELT."
Argilac got the belt. He got it round the stump and hauled it tight and put his knee on it, and it slowed the arm and did nothing whatever about the chest.
Ansel's free hand came up and got hold of the front of Argilac's mail, and pulled, and Argilac put his ear down to the man's mouth, and Ansel said something into it.
Then his hand opened.
Argilac stayed there on his knees for perhaps three seconds with the man's blood going out over his thighs, and then somebody came over the timber above him and he came up off the floor into him with a scream that did not sound like his own voice.
The barricade went a minute later.
It went the way barricades go, all at once, when enough weight has come onto it and enough of it has been dragged out of place by the dying. The roof beam rolled. The timber slid. And then the breach was simply open and there were Khesari inside the ground floor of the tower.
"STAIR," Osric roared. "FALL BACK TO THE STAIR."
It took perhaps twenty seconds to cross that room and it cost more than the rest of the morning.
Doran went first with Voss, because Voss could not fight at all now. Alden and Osric held the middle, giving ground a step at a time, and a sabre laid Alden's cheek open to the teeth and he spat blood and kept his feet and kept moving backward.
Erryk got up off the floor at the stair mouth with the arrow still in his back and stood in the throat of it, and that is the only reason any of them reached it. He killed two men in that gap and took a sabre across the front of the thigh doing it, deep, and went down onto one knee and went on fighting from the knee until Osric got a hand under his arm and hauled him up onto the first tread.
And Rutger did what needed doing.
He went the wrong way.
He walked out into the middle of the room where the press was thickest and set his shoulder into the frame of the ruined door, where the hill had shifted the timbers and narrowed the gap at the base, and jammed himself into it.
One man with a shield and no intention of leaving can hold a gap like that against three for a little while, and a little while was what was wanted.
"RUTGER. STAIR."
He heard it. Osric saw him hear it.
He set his feet wider and did not come.
They took him the way they take anybody, which is not with a fine stroke but with weight. Four of them came at the door together and the shield went back into his chest and his boots slid on the wet stone and the gap opened, and once the gap was open there were blades in it. He killed one more of them going down. He was still holding the doorway when he stopped being able to hold anything, and his body in it slowed them a moment longer, and that moment was the one Alden used to reach the stair.
They backed up the spiral one bloody tread at a time.