Rurik's Arc

Chapter 16 of 22

The last enemy foot soldier vanished down the far side of the ravine. Rurik walked his line and counted. Where twenty archers had stood at dusk, eleven remained. The wounded he could carry. The dead he could not. His wyrm lay coiled below the barrel wall, one wing of its body dragging, the fresh gash black along its iron scales. The dawn assault was broken. But Rurik knew what broke assaults did next. They rallied, counted their own gaps, and came back at the thin place. His thin place was here, on this ground, with eleven bows. Thorin climbed onto a cask beside him and looked south. "They'll re-form. Down past the tree line." "How long?" "An hour. Maybe less." Thorin wiped his father's axe on a dead man's cloak. "You can't hold the rim with eleven bows." Rurik did not answer. He looked at the ravine walls, at the makeshift barrier of casks and grain sacks and iron doors his men had built through the night. The trap had killed the horses. It could kill again, if the enemy did not learn. Bjorn came up the slope, blood dried on his beard, dragging an armful of enemy shields. He dropped them in the dirt. "Their bows. Off the dead." He kicked a bundle of enemy quivers toward Rurik. "Take what they carried." Rurik understood. "Arm the men who can't draw. Line them on the rim. Make it look full." "Won't fool a man who counts," Bjorn said. "They won't count. They'll see a full rim and a live wyrm." Rurik turned to Gunnar, who was already prying an iron door loose from the wall. "The barrier. Can you move it up?" "Break my back doing it," Gunnar said. He hefted the door onto his shoulder. "But yes. Narrow the mouth. They come in single, they die single." Kjell walked the ravine floor below, setting his iron traps in the churned mud where the horses had fallen. He looked up once. "Anything that steps here loses a foot. That buys a breath." Rurik put his hand on the wyrm's cold scales. The gold eye rolled toward him. He could not send it up the wall again. It could barely climb. But it could still coil behind the narrowed gap and strike what came through. "One more," he told it. "Just hold the mouth." They worked the hour Thorin gave them. Gunnar hauled the doors up and pinned the ravine to a gap two men wide. Kjell seeded the mud with iron. Bjorn stood dead men's bows in the hands of the wounded. When the enemy re-formed and marched, they saw a full rim, a live wyrm, and a gap that swallowed men one at a time. They tested it once. Three men stepped into the traps and fell. The wyrm took the first through. The others pulled back and did not come again. The pass held. Rurik had eleven bows and a wounded wyrm, and it was enough for today. But the enemy had not fled. They had only stopped counting.