The wagon stopped with the tongue only a stride short of the wall.
RenSime drivers and passengers scrambled off the slowing wagons, and freed the horses. Tanhara channels and Companions pulled the stretchers out of the lead wagons, and helped the walking wounded. The moment everyone was clear, each wagon was tipped over barricading the still open gate and the smaller door beside it.
The older children and everyone else wrestled the panicked animals, people, stretchers, and crates of screeching birds toward the open gateway.
Beyond the barricade, on the far edge of the harvested fields, the Freebanders had regrouped and were now pounding toward the Fort behind a large contingent on foot.
Solamar was certain these Raiders were just a contingent split off from the larger horde that had destroyed whatever town was burning behind the distant hill.
Have I found Fort Rimon only to lose it?
Through the gate opening, Solamar zlinned the Tanhara Gens with his own Companion, Losa, a white-hot glow among them. The Rimon Gens didn’t all go down to the shelters so they’d be there to help our Gens.
Behind Solamar, at the barricade, both Rimon and Tanhara marksmen took positions on the overturned wagons and laid down a barrage of arrows that stopped even the Raiders who were in the grip of Killust. Solamar didn’t have time to be shocked at the Rimon use of the bow.
Meanwhile, the Fort’s mounted renSimes attacked and harried the Raiders, buying time as the next fifteen wagons pulled into a circle around the first ten. That left three wagons outside the makeshift barricade.
Tanhara refugees struggled to salvage their possessions at risk of their lives.
Rimon defenders swarmed out of the Fort shouting orders to cut the draft horses loose and scatter them down the path into the confusion of attacking Raiders.
Against the flow of defenders coming out to help, Tanhara animals, people, older children, all burdened with whatever they could carry, all shouting advice, yelling orders, and trying to keep track of their loved ones, clambered over the toppled wagons, boiled across the narrow space and poured through the Fort gates struggling toward safety.
The smaller gate door was barely wide and tall enough to get one horse through at a time. The last of the four-ups that could squeeze through the Fort gates cleared, and the huge gates began slowly closing.
Over five dozen prime draft animals were driven down the hill into the swarm of Raiders.
As the gates closed, some stretchers had to be abandoned, the wounded carried over someone’s shoulders. The channels struggled to control the ambient, dampen the panic, and scrambled to get into position where he could help. Solamar dismounted and pulled Trilli into the stream of frantic people entering the Fort.
More than two hundred adults, kicking at the chickens and geese, dragging the goats, calling their dogs, towing and carrying children, crammed through two narrow openings to join the mob of Gens and other children they had sent ahead. Many tarried outside the shelters in mounting anxiety for their loved ones while Rimon’s Gens urged them to go below where it would be safe.
The channels managed to keep the local ambient muted, unattractive to the attackers. Solamar finally in position, joined his efforts to theirs. He boosted one of his patients onto Trilli’s sweaty back, a renSime with a broken leg. “Just a few steps,” he assured the man, “and you’ll be in a solid bed, no more jostling, no more wagons.”
He split his attention between his fainting patient and the battle forming at the barricade. The Fort’s riders arrived at the barricade and leaped from their horses to the overturned wagons. The Freebanders arrived right behind them, pounding at the defense line, and dying.
Death filled the air, the small deathshocks of selyn-depleted renSimes forming a wave of background noise under the potent ambient.
Then the Freebander’s fire-arrows began to rain onto the wagons. Sheets of fire leaped for the heavens. Screaming panic shattered the ambient lanced with burn-pain and pulsing horror. The world turned black, red and white.
Solamar plunged himself hypoconscious, struggling to cut off his awareness of the ambient, once again wishing he were Gen. Gens didn’t have to feel everyone’s pain as if it were their own.
Again, Gen pain split the ambient, this time a Companion’s burn pain sizzling like lightning.
An instant before his awareness shut down, Solamar zlinned several Raiders off in the distance lanced by the incredible shock of that Companion’s pain, fall from their horses and lay twitching.
Raiders didn’t use fire as a weapon because it could do more harm to them than to their targets. What is going on here?
Drenched in sweat, shaking, he coughed in the smoke and dust, suddenly hyperaware of the smell of singed flesh, the screams of the horses, the stench of fear. He let himself drift duoconscious again, still leaning all his weight into holding his horse’s nose down, keeping the animal from bolting into the mass of humanity ahead of him. He rejoined the other channels trying to control the ambient. The burned Companion was being carried into the Fort. Raiders would soon learn not to use fire as a weapon against Forts.
Above them, from the top of the stockade wall, arrows arced into the massing Freebanders, peppering the ambient with the pain of each hit. Despite his effort to avoid it, Solamar zlinned each plume of selyn rushing out of a junct renSime already near Attrition.
Some of the Fort’s renSime defenders packed in around him as an escort. “Quickly! Channels to the underground shelter!”
The people and animals ahead of Solamar jammed together, trying to make room for those still coming through the big gate. Solamar turned to watch it close behind him.
Freebanders leaped through a sheet of fire from one of the wagons, over the heads of the defending archers, landed in the midst of the churning mass of refugees and headed for the gate. Just inside Gens were still crammed into the mob pushing through. More Freebanders were coming over the burning wagons.
Solamar’s escort turned toward this new menace, and a moment later the wave of Freebanders came at them in a flying wedge, slashing their way through with long, heavy bladed knives.
True to form, the lead Freebanders in the attack were all close to Attrition, the point at which their bodies would run out of selyn. They were dead if they didn’t get a Gen to Kill within the next few minutes, draining the Gen’s life force to replenish their own.
Bleeding renSimes fell all around while Tanhara defenders grappled with the Raiders.
Then the flying wedge of Raiders was past Solamar, into the seething mass of humanity inside the Fort. The miasma of deathshock spread like a poisonous fog within the walls of safety.
Screaming, howling and slashing, another wave of Raiders leaped through the flames of their own making, some of them with their clothing on fire.
Solamar zlinned a knife flying through the air. He lunged toward the target, one of his own escort, planning to push him aside.
The knife thunked solidly into flesh. The tip sliced into heart muscle. The man died standing up. Solamar landed on top of the renSime corpse and sprawled in a tangle amidst trampling feet.
Trilli bolted into the mass ahead. Someone caught the reins, and that was the last Solamar knew about the horse and his patient.
Hands and tentacles pulled him to his feet, his green shirt and tan riding leathers drenched in the guard’s hot blood.
He was only a few steps inside the gate when it thudded shut. Five renSimes levered the huge crossbar into place. Tanhara refugees were still pushing through the smaller door fleeing the mass of Raiders behind them.
The ambient was a strident, paralyzing, sense-deadening pressure against his whole body. And then suddenly—it wasn’t.
A towering nageric