Chapter 190: The Emir’s Seat
The charge began and the defenders fired into it before the lead horses reached the entrance.
The first shaft came from the center of the doorway at a near-flat trajectory and went through the neck of the lead rider, the point entering the left side and coming out the right in a spray that reached his horse’s mane before his hands came up.
He went off his horse with both palms pressed to his throat and hit the stone floor across the hall’s entry.
The second shaft found the center of the next rider’s chest, through the coat and the ribs behind it. The man folded forward onto his horse’s neck and the horse carried him into the hall anyway, into the dark, and ran another three strides before its front legs gave in and it went down sideways, the rider thrown clear into the left lane.
Two more shafts came in that volley. One found a horse through the eye, the animal dropping immediately and blocking the left side. Another went into the haunch of a different horse, which stumbled forward and turned on its own, circling as the wound worked at it.
Three ways into the hall. The center had a dead man across and a fallen horse. The left had a dead horse. The right side was clear.
The riders behind the fallen pushed through anyway. Hooves came down on the dead man in the center lane as the press moved past him. The fallen horse was ridden around.
Temur went in through the right side with Goru behind him. The hallway column was two meters to his left, a timber as wide as his arm span, fire-darkened at its base. Behind it the archer who’d fired last was already nocking his next shaft.
Temur cut from horseback as he passed, the blade going down from the collarbone diagonally across the chest, finding the gap below the iron plates. The man dropped backward into the ground.
The hall was thirty meters from entrance to platform. The elite guard’s front rank was fifteen meters in, a solid defense across the entire way inside.
Inside the left side a rider’s horse refused the spear set ahead of it, braking hard enough that the man’s weight drove forward over the saddle. He drove his heels in anyway and the horse hit the spear at the chest, the point going in below the right shoulder joint.
The horse screamed, the specific continuous high note, and kept driving forward onto the shaft until the wood broke under the weight. The spearman lost his grip and went sideways.
The horse’s right front leg started failing on the next stride, the wound pulling at each step, and on the third stride it went down and the rider hit the stone floor on his shoulder, rolled, and came up with his saber.
He fought from the floor.
Two defenders came at him and he went into the first man’s swing instead of away from it, inside the range, and drove his saber through the right side at the short rib. The second man’s blade came across his right shoulder while the first was still going down, opening the muscle from the joint toward the neck.
He kept his grip.
The second man’s next cut went at his throat and he ducked under it and drove upward through the man’s chin, the blade stopping when it found bone. The man hit the column base and slid down it.
His right arm wouldn’t lift past the shoulder. He kept the saber and kept moving.
The melee was happening across all three ways inside simultaneously.
A rider two columns ahead was fighting on horseback against two defenders at once, his horse turning to cover both sides, the man cutting left and right but the column shortening every leftward swing. One of the defenders moved inside the horse’s turning radius and drove a short sword up under the rider’s left arm, finding the gap in the coat.
The rider made a sharp cry and bent sideways.
The second defender cut across his thigh in the same instant. The rider stayed in the saddle and kept cutting with his right arm, but his left had stopped responding.
An elite guard archer behind the third column pair released into the mass at fifteen meters and the shaft went through the back of a rider who had just taken that position, the man driving three more strides before his body caught up to the damage, then going face-forward into the hearth, his coat catching on the stone.
A horse without a rider was circling in the center lane, turning where there was nowhere to go, until a shaft from the second rank found it through the neck and it went down across the hearth stones. The men around it stepped over it and kept pressing north.
Bodies in all three sides and men fighting around them and over them, twenty meters from entrance to platform.
Temur was past the hearth when he saw Buras in the left side, his right hand forward on the reins and his left arm against his chest, fighting a defender with the shortened swing his wound forced on him. His coat was dark with blood at the flank, but he was still in the saddle and still moving north.
The platform steps were the last organized formation.
Spearmen stood on the upper step with the stone height giving them the advantage, driving their points down at mounted height, the elevation forcing the riders below into a worse position than the ground.
Temur drove at the center.
A spearman shifted right and pushed his point at his horse’s chest. Temur pulled left, the point scoring across the horse’s shoulder, and on the return cut he found the spearman’s elbow, the blade opening the joint. The man’s arm dropped and he fell back off the step.
A defender from the eastern side of the steps drove a short sword horizontally across Temur’s ribs as he completed the cut. The iron plate in his coat stopped the point but not the force behind it. Something bent inside the plate and one of his ribs snapped hard, the pain running up through his chest on the right side.
He stayed in the saddle. He could still breathe.
Juqa was above the fallen spearman and drove a blade through his back into the stone.
Temur pushed his horse up the two steps onto the platform.
The ruler was there. He wasn’t fighting and he wasn’t running.
Five guards in better coats than anything else in the hall had moved to flank him. One hand on his arm, two behind him, two facing forward. They were walking him backward toward the rear doorway.
Their eyes were on the exit, they didn’t look back at the fight.
The ruler’s face was turned toward Temur’s position.
Then the guards moved him through the rear doorway and the light from outside vanished as the last body passed through it.
Goru came alongside from Temur’s left, blood dark on the left side of his coat. He looked at the doorway.
"That’s the emir," he said.
Temur kept his eyes on the darkened exit. The sounds of fighting behind and below them.
"Get the arban. We pursue." he said.
He drove his horse toward the doorway regardless if they were overextending their position.
