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15

High on its rock, the city scragged the sky like the top of a shattered tree stump. A wall encircled it, high and tight. Buildings stretched up to peer over with narrow eyes. Steep roofs gave back a hard gleaming in the rusty light of Old Sun, except where there were empty gaps.

A single road, wide enough for a cart, zigzagged up the western face of the rock to the single gate. The gate, Ashton said, was fashioned of black iron and very strong. It was set deep between two flanking towers. On the tops of these towers great cauldrons were set, with engines for casting the spreading fire.

At other places around the wall other engines were set. Yur in polished leather manned the wall, and now and again a Wandsman passed along it with a couple of hounds in leash. The wall was sheer and smooth, thirty feet or so atop seventy or eighty of sheer cliff.

Lacking modern weapons, lacking even primitive siege engines, the invaders faced a city that seemed impregnable.

But that night the attack on Yurunna began, though not one man of the Lesser Hearths dight himself for war.

The men drummed and danced and piped and sang or did otherwise as it pleased them. But there was another singing, and that came from the camp of the Fallarin, where the Tarf stood guard in a silent circle, armed with four-handed swords.

The singing was sprightly and wicked and mischievous and cruel, and under it like a whispering base was the sound of wings a-beat.

Up in the city a small wind began to prowl.

It skipped on roof tiles and ran along narrow streets. It poked and whined into holes and corners. It climbed old walls and felt the texture and the weakness of them. It puffed at cressets, torches, lamps. It snuffed wood.

It grew.

It became a hundred winds.

Yurunna was old, a palimpsest, city built upon half-obliterated city as this people and that came down from the north and took it and held it and then left it again for the next wave of wanderers. Some of the buildings were stout, solid stone. Some were built in part of timber brought up from the south, using one or two walls of an older shell so that the wooden structures resembled the nests of mud-dauber wasps plastered to the stone. In the center of the city and in the area around the gate the buildings were used and lived in. In the small outer quarters of the small city the buildings were unused, except along the wall where the sinews of war were stored ready to hand. These buildings were sound, and kept so. Of the others, some had fallen. Some were ready to fall.

All night long the werewinds laughed and gamed in the narrow ways of Yurunna, and the Yur looked up with their copper-colored eyes like the eyes of dolls and saw deadly roof tiles spin like autumn leaves, shied down at them by the fingers of the wind. Chimneys crumbled. Old walls swayed and shook until they toppled. The dark was full of clatterings and crashings. The Yur women wept in their great house, trembling when the shutters banged open and the curtains blew, scurrying to protect their screaming young.

The Wandsmen, two score of them who oversaw the breeding of Yur and Northhound, the training of the young, the ordering of city and field, were at first scornful of the power of the Fallarin. No wind could threaten their strong walls. They became uneasy as the night wore on and their own city seemed to have been turned against them; had in fact become a weapon in the enemy's hands.

The Northhounds on the wall and in the dark streets shivered, though they had felt far colder winds. They howled dismally, and when walls fell on them they died, and there was no enemy they could strike at. The face of the Houndmaster, already set in the grim lines of a heartstricken man, became more grim.

And that was not the worst.

The werewinds played with fire.

Cressets fell. Torches blew down. Lamps were knocked over. Flames sprang up, and the werewinds blew upon them, fanned them, sucked them up into whirling gold-red storms. The black sky brightened above Yurunna.

The Wandsmen fought the fires with fewer Yur than they would have liked. They dared not strip the wall of defenders for fear of winged men, who might scale the unscalable and let down ropes for the wingless.

Toward dawn, when the fires were to some degree controlled, the werewinds struck in several places, oversetting the cauldrons of oil and the supplies of the spreading fire on the wall, then tossing down the huge basket-torches that burned beside the emplacements. The resultant fires destroyed some of the ballistae, ate their way into some of the nearby storerooms, where there was more oil and more of the kheffi for the spreading fire. Wandsmen and Yur had no rest by day.

Stark assumed that the Fallarin rested. He made no attempt to find out. He rode among the tribes, making sure that certain preparations were being carried out.

By evening, the defenders of the city had repaired the damage on the wall, dragging up new ballistae, setting more cauldrons and containers.

When it was full dark, the gay sadistic song began again, with the beating of wings. Again the werewinds prowled and frisked, and destroyed, and killed wherever they could.

Fires were harder to set because this night there were no torches or cressets or lamps in the city. They managed even so. They puffed old embers to life and tumbled more cauldrons and torches, throwing ballistae and crews from the wall and from the towers by the gate. At dawn there was a pall of smoke over Yurunna, and no rest within it.

For three long nights the werewinds made Yurunna their playground. On the morning of the fourth day Alderyk, gaunt and strange-eyed, came like a molting eagle to Stark's tent and said:

"Now you must get off your hunkers, Dark Man. You and your Lesser Hearths and your demon hounds. We have broken the path for you. Tread it."

He went back to his camp, angry cat's-paws striking up sand at every flapping step. Halk looked after him.

"That little man makes an evil enemy."

He had spent his idle days creaking and groaning at martial exercises. He had not yet got back his full strength, but half of Halk's strength was greater than most men's. Now he made steel flicker around his head.

"When we enter the city, I'll bear shield beside you."

"Not you," Stark said, "and not Simon, either. If I should fall, there'll be things for you to do."

Stark sent word to the chiefs. He spent time with Ashton. He spent time with Gerrith. He ate and slept, and the day passed.

For Yurunna that night began like the others—as it seemed to the Wandsmen, a year of others, with the whirling winds dancing death around them and over them, and sandy sleeplessness in their smoke-stung eyes, and their limbs aching. Then they began to perceive that there was movement in the darkness.

They tried to follow it. The winds kicked and trampled, blinding them with dust, wreaking havoc along the wall. Twice and thrice the Wandsmen had replaced the defenses of the gate-towers, clearing away scorched wreckage from the square below to give the Yur fighting room. Now again cauldrons and spreading fire were thrown down to smoke and blaze in the square. Gusts of wind pounded at the iron gate, so that it moved with a deep groaning.

Things, said the hounds of Yurunna, where the Houndmaster and two handlers and two apprentice boys held them at the back of the square, away from the fires. Things come.

Kill, said the Houndmaster.

The hounds sent fear.

Thirty Tarf, fifteen on a side, bearing a ram made from a green tree trunk cut beside Yurunna's springs, came up the zigzag road to the gate. Twenty more came with them, holding the turtle roof above their heads. They did not flinch from the sending of the hounds.

The hounds said, Things do not fear us.

And they became afraid, with a new fear added to the ones they already had, of strange winds and noises and the smell of death.

The Houndmaster said, Those will come who do.

He was a tall Wandsman. The tunic under his dented mail was the somber red that marked him next in rank below the Lords Protector. From the time he had been a gray apprentice up from Ged Darod he had lived and worked with Northhounds. He loved them. He loved their ugliness and their savagery. He loved their minds, to which he had become so closely attuned. He loved sharing their simple joy of slaughter. His heart was broken for each hound he had lost to the were-winds.

For the nine traitor hounds he had lost to an off-world monster called Stark, who was neither man nor beast, more than his heart was broken.

The Lords Protector had come, the august and holy men he had served all his life, tending the hounds and training them and sending them north to guard the Citadel from all intruders. His hounds—his hounds!—had not guarded, had betrayed, had followed after this sky-born blasphemy who flouted their power; and the Citadel was a burnt-out ruin, the Lords Protector driven shamefully to seek refuge at Yurunna.

They had been kind. They had absolved him of fault. Still the hounds were his.

The dishonor was his.

After the Lords Protector, Gelmar came, in such haste that he killed his beast within sight of the gate. The Ochar were broken. Yurunna stood alone against the host of the north, and the leader of that host was Stark, with his nine faithless hounds.

Gelmar and the Lords Protector had fled on, down the road to Ged Darod. Now, as they had feared, Yurunna was tottering to its fall. And the Houndmaster had seen from the battlements a big dark man on a dappled beast riding a circuit of the walls, with nine white hounds running by him.

He spoke to his own hounds, the twenty-four that were all he had left, and less than half of them full-grown. He spoke to them gently, because the young ones trembled.

Wait, he said. There will yet be killing.

The ram begin to swing. The deep drum-sound beat out heavily over Yurunna.

Muster-horns blew, calling the Yur to defend the gate.

The defenses along the wall, already thin, were thinned still more. Many of the storerooms were gutted, and the emplacements destroyed. Because of the blocking of streets where fire and wind had brought down buildings, bodies of men could no longer be moved quickly back and forth. They could only move freely on the wall. Now many of those who manned it were drawn to the gate.

When the wind dropped, it was seen that masses of men had gathered in the plain below and were already on the zigzag road.

Stark was under the wall with his hounds and fifty Tarf, led by Klatlekt. Half the Fallarin, with the rest of the Tarf and one-third of the tribal army, waited in the fields.

Kill, said Stark. Clear the wall.

The hounds ranged on either side, sending fear to the Yur above.

When the chosen section of the wall was cleared, the Fallarin hop-flapped up the sheer cliff, up the unscalable wall, and made fast ropes of twisted hide around the crenels of the firestep.

Tarf swarmed up the ropes, swords and shields hung at their backs. Some spread out to hold the wall. Others hauled up rope ladders or helped the tribesmen climb.

Stark forced the growling hounds to submit while he fitted slings under their bellies. The Tarf hauled them up, careless of their rage and fear. Stark climbed beside them. On either side now came red Kref and green Thorn.

The Fallarin returned to their mounts and rode away.

On the broad top of the wall Stark gathered his party: Klatlekt and twenty Tarf and the hounds. He set out toward the gate.

The hounds forgot the indignity of the slings. There was a dark excitement in their minds, a wildness mixed with fear.

Many minds, N'Chaka. Too many. All hate. All red. Red. Red.

In the square, where the ram was a wincing thunder in their ears, the hounds of Yurunna said:

Things come. There along wall. And men. And hounds.

Hounds?

Yes.

The Houndmaster stroked rough heads. Good, he said. That is good.

He passed word to the Wandsman captains that invaders were on the wall. He snapped orders to his two handlers and the apprentice boys, all Wandsmen, though of lesser and least rank, and thus safe like himself from the Northhounds. All were leaden with weariness, and the boys were all but useless with fright However, the time would not be long. They would do.

He did not call up any of the Yur. The renegade hounds would only kill them before they could shoot arrow or lift spear, and the captains would need every one.

He spoke to his favorite hound, an old wise bitch.

Hounds, Mika.

Mika made an eager growling and led the way.

Up on the wall Gerd said suddenly, N'Chaka. They come to kill.

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Framed