'Is it? It's the prime of all squabbles, rather - a family of children, all with knives in their belts to snatch at in their heat. Brothers and cousins, and the land too small to satisfy—small wonder if their tempers will not hold. That's how Outremer was made; that's how we raised an army in the homelands forty years ago, from quarrelsome sons who would otherwise have been killing each other over their fathers' fiefs. The Church Fathers would say otherwise, but they stayed safe in their libraries and chapels and never marched with us, they never saw the army in the field. It's the same here. A little sunlight and a priest's blessing don't change a man’s nature. He may say he does this for the glory of the God, but actually he does it for land, for territory, for borders: for somewhere he can stand and say, this is mine, and all that is within it comes to me; strangers hold your ground, beyond my fences'
'The Sharai don't—'
'Marron, do you lack eyes, or is it simply common wit that's missing in you? The Sharai do, exactly. The Sharai don't farm, and they don't build walls and gated roads and guardposts; but you've travelled in the Sands, you've seen how the tribes claim and defend their territories. It's just the same. Neither is Hasan any different. He's a visionary, but all of his vision laid out only amounts to more land for the tribes to fight over. He wants a Sharai kingship, extended over the Sands and the Sanctuary Land both, but he doesn't want to rule.'
'Like the King, then?'
'Mm? Oh - not really, no. Or only a little like the King. The King rules, he just doesn't govern. And see him or not, everyone knows that he's there. Hasan doesn't want to live in Outremer, nor do any of his people. They'd be quite happy to leave it to other Catari, or to us if we were peaceable and paid our tribute duly. Then each tribe could raid the others' tribute-wagons, and they'd be entirely content.'
Marron opened his mouth to murmur that perhaps that would be better than the current dispensation, an unseen King and a cruel, frightened people. Before he could say it, though, another voice cried other news, 'Ghul! Ghul!'
The cry was away, above, but not far. Every eye was drawn to the doorway, to the skidding broken sounds that came ahead of the feet that made them, a man plunging recklessly, helplessly down the stairs and with no one to hold him at the foot.
And so he fell, hard on naked flags, and seemed barely to notice it; his hands like claws had hauled him up the nearest pillar before any man could reach him, so that he stood on his feet again to point, wildly behind him.
'Ghuls! In the yard, in the stables ...'
In the stairwell too, to judge by the sounds he pointed at: hard clopping and hard, huge breathing, as though there were pack-mules coming down the steps.
The hand he pointed with should surely have had a sword in it, and did not. Marron might have offered him Dard and — almost — meant it, except that this man didn't look anything like a fighter. Like a victim rather, visibly terrified and too old to care how visible his terror was. Sparse white hair fell to his shoulders, there were spots on the skin of his face and on his trembling hand where he was still pointlessly pointing he wore the workaday tunic of a palace servant but that it showed no signs of any work, today or any day. One of the Princip's pensioners, past use - except to make porridge, perhaps, and tend these few wounded men for a day?
'Where are the guards?' Marron murmured, standing shoulder to shoulder with Coren and stepping forward even as he registered that none of the wounded men was armed, that they were scrambling to arm themselves with kitchen-knives and cleavers.
'The guards are gone to war, Marron. The servants are gone to the mountains, those few who were left, the Princip sent them last night and he's not a man to leave an empty house protected. These few came in late and exhausted, too much hurt to travel further, or he'd have sent them too. He gave them what healing he could, but he daren't spend all his strength, or all his daughter's either. They're probably still too much hurt to fight.'
They looked it, certainly; it showed in the struggle they had to look strong, to look ready for battle against the truth of what they were and what they held, a pitiful collection of cutlery and cooking irons. Perhaps they truly believed that courage could overmaster weakness, pain, inadequate weapons and all. Marron didn't think so, though. He thought that they only wanted to die in the show of it, because die they surely would if there were ghuls on the stairs, and they surely knew it. Too weary, too hurt or too stubborn to flee further after they had fled this far, they would die here in the Princip's kitchen unless someone else could aid them. And who was there? There was Coren, who had powers as the King's Shadow that Marron couldn't guess at, but seemed rarely willing to use them. As a man he had a sword, the strength to wield it and a long lifetime's experience of battle, but the length of that lifetime must tell against him now; he was old and tired, and was no more fit to stand alone against ghuls than those other men were fit to stand beside him.
And then there was Marron. Numbed, exhausted in his turn - but young and fleet and swift to recover when there was food in his belly, with a fine sword apt for his hand and that hand well-trained for fighting. What did it matter if an oath was broken casually, for little reasons like the lives of strangers, so long as it was kept where every little thing mattered hugely? The gods or luck or bloody fate must care for Jemel and Sieur Anton, because he could not; perhaps the djinni would care for the girls, as it had taken them where he could not; Coren could surely care for himself, either with his sword or with a swift departure. That left these men, who held their lives too cheap to run. These Marron could perhaps care for, because he didn't even know their names.
Perhaps.
The more noise there was in the stairwell, the more quiet and still they were in the kitchen. If terror was a weapon, then sound was its keenest edge. A clear, brisk rattle like hooves in a stableyard was half smothered by the wet rasping weight of oxen's breath, the muted rub of hide on stone; Marron had met ghuls before, but still found his mind leaping from shape to dreadful shape as it struggled to make sense of what it heard.
Then, at last, there was darkness moving in the shadows. Huge, ponderous figures bent below the stairs' low ceiling, squeezing through the doorway, straightening slowly in so far as ever they could stand straight.
Three, just three of them came into the kitchens. Split and shredded rags that had once made robes were clinging to rough hair and skin, to show where they had dressed and shaped themselves as women in their approach to the palace; from a distance they must have seemed like belated refugees.
The palace was a maze to Marron still; he wondered how they'd known where to come. Perhaps they could smell out living men. Or if they were slaved to the 'ifrit - as surely they must be, this attack was too bold for random ghuls — then perhaps they were guided by the stones in their tongues, driven by their masters' will. Go there, turn here and here, go down: you will find men gathered, kill them there.. .
Perhaps. Kill them or die might have been implicit, the extent of 'ifrit sight; like the djinn, they couldn't see past death's possibility. Kill them or dir. it would do for both parties, perhaps, men and ghuls alike. Marron could see another path, though, and meant to try it.
He stepped forward, and monstrous heads turned to eye him. Whether this was the ghuls' true shape, he wasn't certain; did they, could they truly have one, who could shift their shape by will alone, or at least by will and pain? But he had seen one thus before, when it abandoned the disguise of a woman: still roughly human, though no human was ever so crudely modelled, with its gross body bowed and its brutal arms swinging below its knees, its head stretched and distorted, more horse than man if horses ever did have lions' teeth...
Roughly human, inhumanly rough: they carried no weapons, and needed none beyond the strength of those long, long arms and the claws that tipped them, the bite of their heavy jaws, their weight and reach and simple savagery. Marron felt more than small against them. He felt delicate as parchment, fine-drawn as an inkline, Dard like a slender nib to write their story. And he felt also that he cou
ld have written it as he chose if he had only been another man, the man he should have been, loyal to his raising and his skills. Ghuls were deadly but clumsy with it, awkward in their own bodies and slow of thought, however swift of arm. Left to themselves they would always prefer disguise and ambush to direct assault, the strike from behind and in darkness to face-to-face battle in the light. Here, Marron could have called a dance of steel and blood that would have proclaimed the triumph of man above beasts and demons, the cold and killing touch where civilisation meets barbarity. There were only three and he could kill them all, if he could only choose to do it.
Lacking that choice, lacking any, he raised the sword that he had sworn not to use again and he walked clear-sighted into a fight, crying back over his shoulder as he went.
'Lead the men away from here, Coren. You can do that, while I delay the ghuls.' The King's Shadow could walk through walls and take men and women with him, through solid rock and distance. Marron couldn't even walk between the worlds any more, and missed it badly.
He could still step from one Marron to another, though, from the confused and stubborn boy to the swordsman raised and trained. Even without the Daughter's strength and speed, he had his own share of both and the wit to use them.
'Marron, remember, kill with a single stroke; a second will only heal the harm of the first.'
'I have not forgotten.' Nor had he, any more than he had forgotten his oaths, his many oaths; any more than he had forgotten Jemel, or Sieur Anton, or himself.
He knew a hundred ways to wound a man, to drain blood and strength and yet leave him living. Few were sure in a single stroke; he couldn't afford needlework, a prick here and a prick there, when each prick undid the one before. And he didn't know the ghulish body, how it differed from a mans, what blow might be fatal and what not. But this much he did know, that ghuls were rougher-made than men, more brutal, spirit wrapped in something closer to original clay than mortal flesh. They did bleed like men, but likely not to death, he thought. He could hew and hope, at least, where he could not hew to kill. And if one looks to be dying well, I can hew it again until it heals. And then again, to hurt it...
It was an absurdity, a madness: to fight and mend, to mend and fight again. But it was his own madness, a nonsense of war when war was a madness in itself. He ducked neatly under the flailing club-like claw of the nearest ghul, hesitated just a moment, and then struck hard and clean.
Dard bit, seemed indeed to leap forward in his hand in its eagerness to bite after a long fast. Bit deep, for blood and meat together: drove in beneath the swinging arm, high and rising into the massive creature's chest, so far that in a man the point must have erupted from neck or spine behind. In a man, it must have been a mortal blow. Marron gave the blade a twist to let the blood run freely, and still thought the ghul would survive. It might be fleshly made but it was spirit still, it could shape its body to its will; anything short of a death-blow he thought it could repair, in time.
A gush of hot blood drenched his hand, as though he'd tapped a barrel. It soaked the sleeve of his robe, stinking mightily. The ghul staggered before him, both hooked claws lifting in a way that seemed to disregard its own hurt, if it could only strike at him.
But its blood was flowing, and the one arm failed and fell back, too heavy for torn muscles and fading strength; the other had no speed to it, and Marron didn't even need to duck. He simply sidestepped watchfully and called back over his shoulder, 'Get you gone! Why do you linger?'
'Lack of confidence,' Coren said quietly at his back, 'and rightly so, it seems. You could have killed that thing, and did not.'
'Hurt, dead, what difference to you if you're not here? Muster those men together, and leave this to me.'
'Some difference to you, perhaps, if I'm not here. But, Marron, look...'
The ghul he had maimed was slumped against the wall now, sliding down it, leaving a dark wet streak where its sodden mats of hair rubbed against the white plasterwork. Solitary by nature and unnaturally driven by 'ifrit, stones in their tongues to impel obedience, the others should be trampling it, he thought, struggling to be swiftest to the slaughter.
Instead the second beast was crouched above its brother and impeding the one behind, blocking its way past the long kitchen tables. Marron should have used the moment, and did not; did nothing but gape in bewilderment, then snatched for a slow understanding as the one ghul raked a claw across the others throat, opening a wound that could bleed only in a dribble, as there had been so much blood lost already.
Or no, not that. It bled and then it did not bleed, so swiftly closing that only a dribble escaped. And the wound that Dard had made, wide and wet, that closed also; and the creature that had been so hurt rose up strong and fresh, gazing at him with the eyes of a maddened horse set in the skull of what might have been the dream of a maddened horseman. All the world was mad, Marron thought, if it allowed a monster to remake itself in a moment, by virtue of a second wound that should have killed it dead.
"They are not stupid, Marron,' Coren said at his back, above the whispers and soft cries of the wounded men. 'They may move more slowly than you do, they may even think more slowly — but they do think, and they are as wily as any man. And they know what they are, as well as we do.'
'Well, then ...' Could he hurt them all, so badly that they could not hurt each other? It seemed unlikely. But he was still quicker, he could worry them, distract them, draw them to himself and so do well, do something good this day and have nothing to worry him at the end of it. 'Best take those men away swiftly, Coren.'
'I'll take you first, Marron. You matter more.'
To whom - his friends, Surayon, the Kingdom? 'Not any more. The Princip took what mattered from me,' and stowed it somewhere in the palace. He had no feeling for it, no sense of where it might lie.
'You could matter as a swordsman, if you chose.'
But he had made that choice already, and didn't mean to change it. Surely he had proved that by now, if it hadn't been proved long ago?
Being a swordsman in the only way he could, he didn't glance round even to glare at the King's Shadow. Didn't speak to him either, only stood with Dard raised and ready, watching the gap between the heavy tables, the only way the ghuls could come at him, one by one. He thought he could hurt them, one by one; they could heal each other, but only one by one. That must buy time enough for Coren to open his hidden gateway and escape with what little garrison was gathered here.
But, they are not stupid, Marron — and he had forgotten it again, not held it close to the forefront of his mind, not given the ghuls the same respect he'd give a human foe.
Two of them laid their brute clawed hands suddenly atop those refectory tables and vaulted over on long stiff arms. Scrubbed timbers creaked under an extreme and sudden load, the force of it; one snapped, late and uselessly. The ghuls had swung themselves half across the kitchen in one simple movement. Their hooves skittered on the flags of the floor; for a brief moment they looked likely to fall, and did not.
Stood now within a long arm's reach of the wounded men with their pitiful kitchen-weapons; and ghuls have long, long arms.
Pointless for Coren to bellow, 'One stroke only - one stroke!'
Where one stroke of knife or cleaver could never kill, could barely cut tough hide; where the foe seemed barely to register the blow, even with a heavy blade buried deep in the flesh, wedged in the bone of its flailing arm; where dying seemed almost a duty, why worry whether you hurt or healed before you died, why not simply chop and chop?
They did that, those men, those doomed men. They chopped and hacked with a will, with that heedless energy born of utter despair; and - one by one as Marron had hoped to meet the ghuls, to prevent all this - they began to die.
He saw the first death, even while he was trying to watch everything that happened, everywhere. He saw the last of the ghuls - its rank hair glistening, still sodden with its own blood, that it seemed now not to miss at all - watching him, his sword, th
e movements of his head and hand; he saw Coren doing nothing, only standing back and watching as he was himself, that big blade wasted in an old man's hand who apparently had no strength to wield it; he still saw how the first man died under the ghuls' hand.
In a ghul's hands, rather. One great arm swung, a claw struck and clung hold; now the other could reach out and take a more leisurely grip.
One twisted, nut-knuckled hand circled the man's upper arm, the other his neck; there seemed no effort in it, as the ghul pulled its two hands apart.
The man had dropped his little knife, long since it seemed; now he arched his back and gave himself over entirely to screaming.
Screamed and did not stop, but was stopped rather: just as Marron was wishing the claws to grip tighter and choke back that cry, it was cut off. Not choked, not smothered; it did not dwindle, or break off into a sobbing, desperate gasp for air, it was simply gone, snapped like a string, and the room was emptier for lack of it and the man who made it.
It seemed quiet then, but not for long. The ghuls were among the men, and it seemed that there was only him to prevent a slaughter. They were too hurt, too poorly armed, unled; they needed Ransomer discipline - perhaps the first time he had missed that, or any aspect of it - and they did not have it. Coren could have, surely should have plunged forward to take command. A man who had authority over princes, and who had led in war before, how not? But Coren made no move, and Marron had a ghul of his own yet to face. To face again, to strike again: to kill or not to kill, as his hand or mind allowed.
He meant to maim it, as he had before; its companions were too busy now to heal it. But he was prevented, forestalled. The ghul's eyes that had been sheened with a cunning intelligence were suddenly dull, as though it had been cast into shadow. It had been shambling towards him with deadly intent; now it checked, swung its arms randomly as though it groped for what it could not see, blundered directly into a pillar broader than itself and clung to it.
Hand of the King's Evil - Outremer 04 Page 49
