Guardians of the West

replied.
    There was no moon, of course. The clouds that had hovered over the area for the past week and more obscured the sky. The night air was chill as Garion and Durnik moved carefully across the shallow valley toward the besieged city.
    "Cold night," Durnik murmured as they walked through the rank gorse.
    "Mmm," Garion agreed. "How deep do you think the water might be lying?"
    "Not too deep," Durnik replied. "I asked Liselle how deep the wells are in Rheon. She said that they were all fairly shallow. I think we'll hit water at about twenty-five feet."
    "What gave you this idea, anyway?"
    Durnik chuckled softly in the darkness. "When I was much younger, I worked for a farmer who gave himself great airs. He thought it might impress his neighbors if he had a well right inside his house. We worked at it all one winter and finally tapped into an artesian flow. Three days later, his house collapsed. He was very upset about it."
    "I can imagine."
    Durnik looked up at the looming walls. "I don't know that we need to get any closer," he said. "It might be hard to concentrate if they see us and start shooting arrows at us. Let's work around to the north side."
    "Right."
    They moved even more carefully now, trying to avoid making any sound in the rustling gorse.
    "This should do it," Durnik whispered. "Let's see what's down there." Garion let his thoughts sink quietly down through the hard-packed earth under the north wall of the city. The first few feet were difficult, since he kept encountering moles and earthworms. An angry chittering told him that he had briefly disturbed a badger. Then he hit a layer of rock and probed his thought along its flat surface, looking for fissures.
    "Just to your left," Durnik murmured. "Isn't that a crack?"
    Garion found it and wormed his way downward. The fissure seemed to grow damper and damper the deeper he went.
    "It's wet-down there," he whispered, "but the crack's so narrow that the water's barely seeping up."
    "Let's widen the crack -but not too much. Just enough to let a trickle come up."
    Garion bent his will and felt Durnik's will join with his. Together they shouldered the crack in the rock a bit wider. The water lying beneath the rock layer gushed upward. Together they pulled back and felt the water begin to erode the hard-packed dirt under the wall, seeping and spreading in the darkness beneath the surface.
    "Let's move on," Durnik whispered. "We ought to open up six or eight places under the wall in order to soak the ground thoroughly. Then tomorrow night we can push the cracks wide open."
    "Won't that wash out this whole hillside?" Garion asked, also whispering.
    "Probably ."
    "That's going to make it a little hard for our troops when they rush this place."
    "There's not much question about the fact that they're going to get their feet wet," Durnik said, "but that's better than trying to scale a wall with somebody pouring boiling oil on your head, wouldn't you say?"
    "Much, much better," Garion agreed.
    They moved on through the chill night. Then something brushed Garion's cheek. At first he ignored it, but it came again -soft and cold and damp. His heart sank. "Durnik," he whispered, "it's starting to snow."
    "I thought that's what it was. I think this is going to turn very unpleasant on us."
    The snow continued to fall through the remainder of the night and on into the next morning. Though there were occasional flurries that swirled around the bleak fortress, the snowfall for the most part was intermittent. It was a wet, sodden kind of snow that turned to slush almost as soon as it touched the ground.
    Shortly before noon, Garion and Lelldorin donned heavy wool cloaks and stout boots and went out of the snow-clogged encampment toward the north wall of Rheon. When they were perhaps two hundred paces from the base of the hill upon which the city rested, they sauntered along with a great show of casualness, trying to look like nothing more dangerous than a pair of soldiers on patrol. As Garion looked at the fortress city, he saw the red and black bear-flag once more, and once again that banner raised an irrational rage in him. "Are you sure that you'll be able to recognize your arrows in the dark?" he asked his friend. "There are a lot of arrows sticking in the ground out there, you know."
    Lelldorin drew his bow and shot an arrow in a long arc toward the city. The feathered shaft rose high in the air and then dropped to sink into the snow-covered turf about fifty paces from