Guardians of the West

began to sway.
    "How much longer do you think it's going to stand?" Barak asked as he came out of the darkness with Lelldorin at his side to join them.
    "Not very." Durnik replied. "The ground's starting to give way under it." The groaning creak above them grew louder, punctuated by the continual sharp crashes along the inside as Mandorallen's catapults stepped up the pace of their deadly rain.
    Then, with a sound like an avalanche, a section of the wall collapsed with a peculiarly sinuous motion as the upper portion toppled outward and the lower sank into the sodden earth. There was a great, splashing rumble as the heavy cascaded into the slush and mud of the hillside.
    "A man should never try to put up stonework resting only on dirt," Durnik observed critically.
    "Under the circumstances, I'm glad they did," Barak told him.
    "Well, yes," Durnik admitted, "but there are right ways to do things." The big Cherek chuckled. "Durnik, you're an absolute treasure, do you know that?"
    Another section of the wall toppled outward to splash onto the slope. Shouts of alarm and the clanging of bells began to echo through the streets of the fortified town.
    "You want me to move the men out?" Barak asked Garion, his voice tense with excitement.
    "Let's wait until the whole wall comes down," Garion replied. "I don't want them charging up the hill with all those building stones falling on top of them."
    "There it goes." Lelldorin laughed gleefully, pointing toward the last, toppling section of the wall.
    "Start the men," Garion said tersely, reaching over his shoulder for the great sword strapped to his back.
    Barak drew in a deep breath. "Charge!" he roared in a vast voice.
    With a concerted shout, the Rivans and their Nadrak allies plunged up through the slush and mud and began clambering over the fallen ruins of the north wall and on into the city, "Let's go!" Barak shouted. "We'll miss all the fighting if we don't hurry!"

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
    The fight was short and in many cases very ugly. Each element of Garion's army had been thoroughly briefed by Javelin and his niece, and they had all been given specific assignments. Unerringly, they moved through the snowy, firelit streets to occupy designated houses. Other elements, angling in from the edges of the breach in the north wall, circled the defensive perimeter Javelin had drawn on Liselle's map to pull down the houses and fill the streets with obstructing rubble.
    The first counterattack came just before dawn. Howling Bear-cultists clad in shaggy furs swarmed out of the narrow streets beyond the perimeter to swarm up over the rubble of the collapsed houses, only to run directly into a withering rain of arrows from the rooftops and upper windows. After dreadful losses, they fell back.
    As dawn broke pale and gray along the snowy eastern horizon, the last few pockets of resistance inside the perimeter crumbled, and the north quarter of Rheon was secure.
    Garion stood somberly at a broken upper window of a house overlooking the cleared area that marked the outer limits of that part of the town that was under his control. The bodies of the cultists who had mounted the counterattack lay sprawled in twisted, grotesque heaps, already lightly dusted with snow.
    "Not a bad little fight," Barak declared, coming into the room with his blood-stained sword still in his hand. He dropped his dented shield in a corner and came over to the window.
    "I didn't care much for it," Garion replied, pointing at the windrows of the dead lying below. "Killing people is a very poor way of changing their minds."
    "They started this war, Garion. You didn't."
    "No," Garion corrected. "Ulfgar started it. He's the one I actually want."
    "Then we'll have to go get him for you," Barak said, carefully wiping his sword with a bit of tattered cloth.
    During the course of the day, there were several more furious counterattacks from inside the city, but the results were much the same as had been the case with the first. Garion's positions were too secure and too well covered by archers to fall to these sporadic sorties.
    "They don't actually fight well in groups, do they?" Durnik said from the vantage point of the upper story of that half-ruined house.
    "They don't have that kind of discipline," Silk replied. The little man was sprawled on a broken couch in one corner of the room, carefully peeling an apple with a small, sharp knife. "Individually, they're as brave as lions, but the concept of unified action