Respectant

by Florian Armaselu

  For two days, Codrin’s men quietly entered Peyris through all the four gates of the city. In the end, he had settled for thirty-five soldiers, twenty of them from Nicolas, men who knew the city. They were led by Emich. Twelve of them were Codrin’s scouts, led by Vlad. Lisandru and Pintea joined them too. The attack on the West Gate would be led by Costa. The men entered the city in groups of two or three, at irregular intervals, joining caravans or other groups. They settled at several inns in the city, like anyone else with business in Peyris. There were no problems, even the cart transporting the bows, well hidden among merchandise, passed without a hitch. They did not try to bring spears, though. On the night of the planned attack, men moved out of their inns, walking toward the West Gate via five different streets. Some of them spent a few minutes in inns on their way. As Costa had suggested, they gathered behind the empty stable, seven hundred feet away from the gate. Costa was waiting for them, with twelve men. The day before, he had had fourteen soldiers, but two were caught trying to sneak into the main barracks and reveal Costa’s treason. One of them, Costa killed himself, and that made him bitter – he had considered the man a friend.

  “We have to wait for the last patrol of the day to go to the gate,” Costa said to a small group of seven, the ones who would lead the assault. “One patrol comes and goes every hour. We need to capture the last one, and replace the soldiers with my men. Usually, there are three guards in a patrol. The rest of my men will move along the wall, from the left. I will lead them. Once the patrol inspects the gate, the men inside will open the door of the guardroom. We need to take the room. Vlad, five of your men should come to the gate along the wall, from the right.”

  “Lisandru will lead them,” Vlad said.

  “Two streets lead to the plaza in front of the gate from opposite directions. We can’t use the street that goes straight to the gate, they can see us from far off; there is a full moon tonight. This will help us as much as it helps them. Emich, you will come through the street on the left. Your men know the gate, and they will launch the first assault, after we enter the guards’ room. Vlad, you will come from the right. You have the best archers. Find a place from where they can shoot at the guards above the gate. They should do this when Emich attacks. Then there are the arrow slits in the gate, and the men with crossbows behind them. It’s hard to shoot at them, but once the guards over the gate are down, you must try your luck. At least you should be able to slow the rate they shoot at. Try and make them keep their heads down. The rest of your men should help Emich.”

  “Pintea will lead the archers; I will support Emich,” Vlad said.

  “We go when the horologe beats one hour and a half before midnight. The last patrol of the day should be at the gate one hour before midnight. At midnight, they change the guard, and there is no patrol. The patrol will come through the main street, and we have to replace the guards far enough from the gate so they do not see us.” He stopped, listening as the horologe sent its metallic ring through the night. “We go now.”

  Codrin lay on the ground, with a hundred men armed with crossbows, a hundred and twenty feet from the gate. It had taken them half an hour of crawling to get inside a small depression in the field, which offered some cover. Most of them were Nicolas’s men; Codrin was relying mostly on bowmen. A bow allows a faster firing rate than a crossbow, but also needs a better trained man and a good position. This time, he needed men to shoot from the ground and at a distance. Five hundred feet from the gate, along the road, Nicolas was waiting with a hundred riders, all dismounted, hidden behind a line of bushes along the road. They would storm the gate once Costa’s men defeated the guards and opened it. Five hundred feet further on, there were four hundred riders led by Vlaicu. They would be the second troop to storm the gate.

  Eyes closed, Codrin entered the city, using his Farsight. Nothing, he thought, and returned. He was still unable to hear anything when he used his power.

  The Swann Inn was one of the best in Peyris. The owner came from Tolosa and had married the daughter of the previous innkeeper. He brought with him not only recipes from the south, but the best wine from Tolosa too, and it was the wine which made him famous in the city. After a good wine, even ordinary food tastes better. It was late in the night, when even the most dedicated drinkers had left the inn. Well trained in emptying wine glasses, some of them walked almost normally. Some of them slid along the walls, keeping a hand on them for balance. And there were others, the real sponges, who walked in a zigzag, from one side of the street to the other. Sometimes, they fell. Sometimes, they managed to avoid it.

  “Look at that one,” one guard laughed, pointing at a man struggling to find his way, twenty paces in front of them. “How long until he goes on all fours?”

  “I wish I was in the Swann right now, instead of wandering on the streets. Do you want to bet on him?”

  “Why not? Two silvers apiece. Tomorrow, we have a day off, and one of us will have enough coin to get drunk at the Swann. I will say twenty steps. The one who gets closest wins.”

  “Thirty steps.”

  “Fifteen,” the third one said.

  “One, two...” they started to count, moving closer to the drunkard. “Twenty...”

  “You are out, Lesot,” the other two laughed, and the man cursed.

  “Twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six.”

  “Blast you, man,” the one who’d bet on twenty growled. “You won, and I am now poorer by two silvers.”

  “Help me,” the drunkard begged, as the guards came up behind him.

  “Yes, I will help you,” Lesot said, and punched him in the ribs. Ready to join him, the other two did not see a shadow moving with surprising speed from the wall. In the blink of an eye, he was behind the guards, and his two curved swords sliced through the air. The guards fell soundlessly. It was a masterly move; before his last step, the shadow man had crossed his arms and swords in front of him. When both hands sprang to their proper positions, his swords of unequal length cut two wide arcs through the necks in their path. Lesot did not get to admire their finesse; he was dead too, and the drunkard bent quickly to clean his dagger on the dead man’s clothes. Three more men in Peyris colors came from near the fence and carried the bodies away, lining them up along the fence, face down.

  “Thank you,” Costa said, as Pintea sheathed his curved swords. “We take it from here; you can return to the archers.” He waited two more minutes, listening, and walked away, toward the gate.

  A hundred fifty paces behind Costa and his men, a courier, bringing a message for the captain of the West Gate, saw the attack on the guards, under the strong light of the full moon. Only fifteen years old, he was walking almost stuck to the fences, trying to avoid the drunkards leaving the inn; they were all going toward the city, away from the gate. That was lucky for him; the two soldiers Costa had left behind, close to the inn, did not see him. He took in the scene, and then he ran away, toward the barracks, using the drunk men as his cover.

  As they entered the plaza, Costa turned toward the three men behind him. “Good luck, Marcou. I’m going to join our men at the wall. We will attack the moment they open the door of the gate room for you.”

  The patrol continued to walk slowly through the open space, toward the West Gate, while Costa moved stealthily along the walls of the houses bordering the plaza, almost running. Just a hundred paces away from the city wall and his men, Costa stopped suddenly and listened to the night: he could hear boots hitting the ground in a rhythmic cadence. We have been discovered; they have sent a second team to the gate. He threw caution to the wind and ran toward his men, waiting at the foot of the wall.

  Marcou heard the noise of running soldiers too, and he half turned: the soldiers were just entering in the plaza. “Don’t turn round,” he ordered his men. We are trapped. “Walk normally. Our best chance is if they ignore us. We look like a patrol, and it’s only thirty paces to the gate.”

  Codrin was using his Farsight, letting his mind fly arou
nd the gate and inside it. Somehow he found it easier to train when he had a real objective, and he was more than motivated; taking the gate of Peyris was more dangerous than taking the gate of the Eagle’s Nest. Ah, he thought, finally. Costa is entering in the plaza. They have replaced the men in the patrol. He watched everything, learning how to change perspective faster. Each change pained him, as if a knife was stabbing into his brain, but at least the pain did not last. Then he saw a twenty-five strong group of guards entering the plaza, just as the horologe beat the hour before midnight.

  “First line, shoot over the wall,” he shouted, and watched the flock of arrows hitting the ground in front of the running guards. Too short. He waited a few moments, watching the guards advancing through the plaza. “Second and third line, shoot over the wall.” Tomorrow, I will have an interesting time explaining why I ordered this.

  The arrows followed the same trajectory. This time, they hit the troops full on, and only eleven guards were left standing. Disoriented, they stopped running for a few moments. Five more arrows came from the side street and four more guards fell. The remaining men ran toward the gate.

  “Charge!” Emich moved forward and attacked the remaining guards in the plaza. From above the gate, arrows flew down at them and a man from Emich’s troop fell. Then another.

  “Shoot at will at the guards on the wall,” Codrin ordered, and a hundred arrows peppered the wall above the gate.

  “To the gate!” Costa started to run even before finishing his order. How did Codrin know when to shoot?

  “We are under attack!” Marcou shouted, knocking at the door of the guardroom. “Open the door!” The door opened suddenly, and he barely had time to step back before it crashed against him. He grabbed the door and pulled it wide open, dragging the guard who had just opened it – his hand was still on the handle.

  “What are you doing?” the guard asked just before he died, stabbed by the man behind Marcou.

  “Make way!” Lisandru shouted and jumped inside the room, his two curved swords unsheathed, moving them like the wings of a windmill. He killed three men before they knew what was happening. A moment later, Marcou and Costa came in behind him. The room was thirty feet across and there were twelve guards still alive. One of them charged his crossbow, aiming at Lisandru. Parrying a sword thrust, he slipped aside, trying to put someone else between him and the bolt. An arrow came from the door, piercing the neck of the man with the crossbow. From the corner of his eye, Lisandru saw Pintea, who was already nocking again, and another arrow flew. In less than a minute, all the men in the guardroom were dead.

  “Emich!” Costa shouted. “Open the gate, I will go after the men at the arrow slits.”

  It took them four long minutes to open the portcullis and the locked gate. Emich and another soldier took two torches from the sconces on the wall, and they painted two circles of fire through the darkness.

  “Make ready!” Vlad shouted. “Riders are coming from the barracks.”

  Pintea moved forward with his five archers. “Shoot at will,” he ordered, while Vlad organized the men behind him in an inverse V shape. “We move forward when the riders are thirty paces from us. Stand. Steady. Now!”

  Followed by two of his men, Costa climbed the stairs, three steps at a time. A man appeared in the doorway of the upper room, a crossbow in his hands. Two feet away from the guard, Costa half turned, to offer a smaller target, and a bolt hit him in the left shoulder. He stumbled, then pressed forward, cutting the hand on the crossbow, then finding the man’s neck. He stepped aside, hiding behind the wall, and his men did the same. “Two archers are still alive. We need to take them.”

  “Ride!” Nicolas ordered, seeing the torch signal through the open gate. The Spatar and his men were already mounted. The battle cries from the gate carried far through the night.

  “Vlad, make way for our riders!” Emich shouted, and slowly, Vlad and his soldiers retired toward the walls, pressed hard by the mounted guards.

  Nicolas stormed through the gate and found himself in a good position; the city guards were lined up to fight Vlad’s men. They cut through the guards from behind, and entered the plaza, where fifty more riders were still ready to fight.

  “I am Nicolas, the Spatar of Peyris,” he shouted. “Put down your weapons and return to the barracks.”

  Accustomed to obeying him, more than half of the guards stopped fighting. The ones who continued to fight were surrounded quickly and surrendered when Vlaicu entered the city, and his four hundred men filled the plaza.

  “Lisandru, come with me,” Pintea said. “Costa went up there and has not returned.” They passed through the guardroom and climbed the stairs leading to the first floor. “What happened?” he asked, seeing Costa and his men hidden behind the walls on both sides of the door. He frowned, seeing the bolt in Costa’s arm.

  “There are two more with crossbows inside.”

  “Do you know their positions?”

  “The same position as ours, but on the other side of this wall.” Costa tapped the stone with the hilt of his sword.

  “The gate is taken, and our men are inside the city.”

  “Did you hear?” Costa asked. “I am captain Costa, and I serve Duchess Cleyre. We have taken the city. You are the guards of Peyris, not of Albert.”

  “You killed one of us.”

  “He put a bolt in me. Think about it.”

  “How do we know that you’ve taken the city?”

  “Look through the window. Nicolas, the Spatar of Peyris, commands the army of the Duchess.”

  “I thought I heard Nicolas,” one guard whispered. “I prefer to serve Nicolas and Cleyre than Sandro and Albert. We are coming out,” he said loudly. “Our crossbows are down.” He placed his weapon on the floor, and pushed it in front of the open door. The second guard did the same.

  Knight Dolen was the Master Guard of Peyris that night, and he was napping in his office, when the courier came to give him the news that the West Gate was under attack. He had a hundred riders on duty that night, but it took them half an hour to gather. They rode out just as a second courier came to announce that the gate had fallen.

  “Who is attacking us?” Dolen asked, turning in the saddle to address the courier.

  “Sir Nicolas. He has taken the gate in the name of Cleyre, the Duchess of Peyris.”

  “How many men does he have?”

  “More than a hundred, and many of them are archers.”

  Nicolas and I never really got on, and that bitch shamed me in front of the court. “Sound the general alarm.”

  “Maybe we should talk with Nicolas and the Duchess,” his deputy said.

  “Traitor,” Dolen growled and killed the man with a brief flourish of his sword. “We serve the Duke, not Nicolas and his bitch. Sound the alarm. Tardon, take five guards, and go see what’s happening,” he said to his most trusted man.

  Tardon returned before the three hundred men from the barracks could be assembled. “Sir,” he reported, “Nicolas has more than six hundred men, a hundred of them armed with crossbows. They have already taken over the western part of the city. And, Sir,” he said in a low voice, “I saw that man from Poenari.”

  “What man?”

  “Codrin. If you want my advice, we should leave. Nicolas is not our friend, and there is no way we can defeat them.”

  “Gather my men at the North Gate. Cancel the alarm,” he shouted. “Go back to your beds.”

  Half an hour later, Dolen left the city, with a hundred men. During the night, they hid in a forest north of the city, and with the first light of day, they rode toward Amiuns.

  ***

  Octavian and Reymont arrived at the camp between Peyris and Amiuns at noon, and they were happy to do so, both because they had escaped Albert’s bigmouth and small brain, and because Peyris was now close. A real city, not just a simple fortress. They went directly to Sandro’s tent. The newly promoted first Spatar of Peyris was not busy; there were no pressing issues.
r />   “Anything new?” Sandro asked his guests, and sent his pages out of the tent.

  “In Amiuns, the water is not good, the beds are too small, as are the rooms, and the servants are too old, especially the women. Shall I go on? Albert has a long list of complaints,” Octavian said and seated himself.

  “We should change places. How long will we stay here?”

  “There are some rumors about soldiers gathering around Peyris,” Octavian said, evasively. “We should know more in a few days.”

  “We have had a few desertions. Perhaps fifty men.”

  “Any news from Peyris?”

  “Nothing urgent,” Sandro said. “Nicolas is still camped outside the walls. What is he planning?”

  “Perhaps he is trying to bribe his way into the city, but those we left in command are hostile to him. Like Dolen. He hates both Nicolas and Cleyre.”

  “Why do you mention Cleyre?”

  “I think Nicolas wants to make her Duchess. He obviously doesn’t know that she is already married and far from Peyris.”

  “Neither did I,” Sandro said, frowning.

  “Only a few people know. You are now one of them.”

  “You may not enter,” the two soldiers guarding the tent said.

  “Mind your words, soldier,” Dolen growled and pushed away the one blocking his path.

  “Let him in,” Sandro said, seeing the Knight’s red face. “Dolen, why are you here?”

  “Peyris has fallen.”

  “To Loxburg?” Reymont asked, and Octavian threw a murderous glance at him.

  “Old Loxburg is in his bed. It was Nicolas who took it.”

  “How could Nicolas take Peyris with only eight hundred men? You had the walls and five hundred guards,” Octavian said.

  “Costa attacked the West Gate during the night, and Nicolas entered the city, but it was not he who led the attack. It was Codrin, and together, they had more than fifteen hundred soldiers. I barely escaped with a hundred men, and we spent the night in the forest, before coming here.”