Inside the foyer, Yozef crossed to the front door and opened it. The front guard turned at the sound. The man had a questioning look, caused by Yozef’s expression and Carnigan pulling weapons harnesses off a high shelf.
“Ser, listen carefully’” said Yozef. “Count to ten, then come inside. Do you understand?”
“Why—”
“No questions! Just do as I say! Once you’re inside, wait and listen for anything happening outside. I’ll be right back.”
Yozef turned and Carnigan tossed him Kales’s harnesses. “Get armed.”
Even without the weapons Kales had on him, the harness was so heavy Yozef almost dropped it. It took him five seconds to set Aeneas on the floor, jam his arms through the harness straps, cinch the belt, and pick Aeneas back up before the baby responded to being dumped on the floor.
Carnigan had somehow donned his own harness without setting Morwena down. Although Carnigan’s harness had fewer weapons than the others, the size of the pistols and the blades more than made up for the fewer number. Carnigan leaned Kales’s musket against a wall, keeping his own and Balwis’s under his arm.
Under other circumstances, the sight of the huge man decked out like a cartoon pirate, holding a two-year-old in the crook of the same arm that held Balwis’s harness, the other arm holding two muskets, would have been amusing. In these circumstances, it was terrifying.
Yozef followed Carnigan thundering down the hall. Carnigan stopped at the door leading to the kitchen and tossed Balwis’s harness at Yozef. “Get Balwis! I’m giving Morwena to Gwyned and getting the people in the kitchen, away from doors and windows, and killing the lights. Then you or Balwis get back to the front door.”
As he caught the harness, Yozef caught a glimpse through the door into the kitchen, where Serys and Anarynd stared at Carnigan rushing into the room. Then Yozef reached the great room. Eight seated faces turned to him. They had heard commotion and were just responding. The questioning or surprised expressions immediately changed to other emotions.
“Everyone,” Yozef enunciated carefully and loudly enough to get their attention without yelling. “Get up, put out the lanterns, and come toward the hall, away from the windows. It’s probably nothing, we’re only being cautious. Kales thinks someone might be out behind the house. He and the back guard have gone to check.”
“How do you know someone’s out there?” demanded Culich.
“Goddamn it, I don’t know! Better to look foolish than take a chance. I noticed the niklons quit sounding off! You tell me. When do the noisy buggers ever shut up? Kales is concerned enough to check it out.”
“The niklons are quiet only if they’re startled or afraid,” said Maera, running to Yozef and taking Aeneas.
Balwis had rushed to Yozef and grabbed his harness.
“I’ll ask the front door guard to also check the grounds,” said Culich, turning to head down the hall.
“Wait, Culich,” said Yozef. “I’ve asked him to come inside and station in the foyer, just in case. It’s less exposed than standing out front.”
“Just in case of what?” exclaimed Breda. Anid and Mared, holding hands, stood behind their mother.
Before Yozef could give another reassurance that there was probably no problem, a series of shots sounded from behind the house, followed by cries.
In a moment of chaos, exclamations threatened to overcome the group, before Culich yelled, “QUIET! Put out the lanterns, then do as Yozef says and move away from the windows. Drag furniture over here.” He pointed to the interior wall of the room.
Culich looked at Yozef. “We’re unarmed!”
Yozef gave Culich one of Kales’s pistols and a knife to a pale-faced Maera, who held Aeneas. Balwis gave one of his two knives to Ceinwyn, standing next to him.
They heard another musket shot and shouts from outside the front of the house.
“I’m going back to help the guard at the foyer.” said Yozef, giving Maera and Aeneas a look.
He ran down the hall again. As he passed the kitchen door, he could see that Carnigan had upended a table that Gwyned now crouched behind, cradling Morwena. Serys held a meat cleaver, the teenage boy Norlin grasped one of Carnigan’s pistols in both hands (he needed two to hold the small cannon and aim), and Anarynd brandished a carving knife.
At the end of the hall knelt the guard, watching the front door intently. They heard voices, then feet on the wooden veranda steps.
“Quick, to the other side!” Yozef told the guard, grabbing Kales’s musket. He knelt where the guard had been. If anyone unfriendly came through either the front door or the door into the rear enclosed porch, the two of them wouldn’t be concentrated in the same place, and the intruder would face fire from two directions.
* * *
Uzcil had watched the people sitting on the back veranda rise and start into the house. Too bad, he thought. We could have eliminated them first. With three of the men gone right away, the rest of the attack would have been almost anticlimactic.
He wasn’t worried until one of the three men didn’t go inside but spoke to the guard. Then the two of them walked down the stairs and toward the spot where Uzcil and the other eleven men waited.
“No problem,” whispered the man next to him. “We’ll take care of them.” The man and three others slunk away, spreading out in the direction of the two approaching men.
Uzcil watched, not quite holding his breath, uneasy with the wrinkle in what had started as a stealthy approach to the house. He watched the two men get closer, then . . . what? Where was the first man, the one walking ahead of the other by twenty or thirty feet? The lights from the house helped backlight the two men. The rear man, the guard with a musket, was still visible, but the other, smaller man . . . where had he gone?
In an instant, all plans at stealth disintegrated.
* * *
Wyfor Kales trusted his instincts. Not to say they hadn’t proved wrong a time or two, but listening never hurt. Better mistaken than dead. The silence of a throng of annoying pests was not as significant to him as an intuition he recognized—a summation of too many years in too many situations where the slightest signal was too important to miss.
From the veranda and before Yozef had said anything about the missing niklon chorus, had he seen a flicker of movement in the starlight? Had there been a faint clink of metal that could have been a window latch or an echo from the kitchen? He didn’t know the answers, didn’t think about knowing them, and didn’t care. All he knew was that every nerve ending was reaching out into the night.
Kales was a hundred feet from the house when he morphed from a walking man to a wraith. He dropped to the ground as boneless and casually as oil slipping down a glass surface, then moved silently on fingertips and boot toes.
To the men watching, it was as if Kales had disappeared. One man was only twelve feet away when his target vanished. His surprise lasted only ten seconds before the corner of his eye caught an almost imperceptible movement, and a coldness stroked his throat. An urge to say something was stifled by the warm flush that bubbled from his lips and the hot flood running down his chest. He rose to his feet, only to fall face forward.
Eight feet away, another man was shocked to see his companion stand. What!? flashed through his mind. The next moment a blade plunged upward, under his ribcage, through his diaphragm, and into his heart. The blow prevented his lungs from expelling air, so he couldn’t shout. It killed him that instant, though it took another twenty seconds for the rest of his jerking body to capitulate.
A third man had turned from seeing the first man rise and fall, and he became the first to see Kales after his disappearance. He fired his shotgun at a blur moving toward him, gratified to see the blur being smashed to the ground. Yet he didn’t live to identify what he had hit. The flash from a pistol was his last sight before the ball hit his left eye.
Kales felt a terrible blow to his left side. His arm didn’t work, but blackness waited to overtake him just long enough for him to pull his s
ingle pistol at the man illuminated by his own shotgun flash.
The guard following Kales saw the two flashes, the larger of the shotgun and the smaller of the pistol. The first bright flash appeared too suddenly and not in the field of view he directly faced. The second flash came when he had focused his attention where the first flash originated. It revealed men, many men, two only thirty or forty feet away. He only needed to turn his leveled musket a few degrees to fire at the closest man. His ball struck the crouched man six inches below his right nipple, breaking a rib and coursing through his liver and intestines.
The guard didn’t see anything else, after three of the four musket balls fired at him ended his life.
* * *
Uzcil might have cursed to himself at the loss of his team’s surprise advantage or because Arkol, the man to lead the initial assault at the rear of the house, was down, dead or wounded, but he had no hesitation about the appropriate action.
“That’s it!” he yelled to the seven men who still functioned. “We’ll check our wounded on the way out, spread out, and hit the house at doors and windows.”
He’d hoped that he and the eleven other men at the rear of the house could burst through the back doors and be inside before the people knew they were coming. That hope was gone. The only option left was to hit this house as fast as possible and at as many points as they could, to prevent a concentrated defense. What worried him more than the loss of surprise was that four of the men now racing toward the house had empty muskets. Among their eight, they now had only two loaded muskets and two shoguns. After that, they’d have to attack with pistols and steel.
* * *
The five men at the front heard the firing at the rear of the house and took it as the signal to go in. Nirrem, the leader, gave the order. “At the front door! Munkun, you’re first. Try the door. If it’s locked, use your shotgun. Tonkel, if the shotgun doesn’t get the door open, use your axe and get us inside. Let’s go!”
* * *
Yozef’s heart pounded as if about to burst from his chest. He hyperventilated, his breath coming in gasps. He heard sounds . . . low voices, then louder, then feet on wooden steps and the floor of the front veranda. Light from the single lantern on the veranda and from a hall lantern still flickering after the attempt to turn it off gave enough light for him to see the door latch quiver, as if someone were checking the mechanism.
Despite Yozef focusing all of his senses on the door, the shotgun blast that took out the lock and left a six-inch hole left him frozen for several seconds. A fortuitous delay. The door kicked open, and a man with a short musket leaped through, only to be hit by a musket ball the guard fired from the opposite side of the foyer.
Two more flashes and cracks came from outside, the flames and smoke pouring through the door jamb. The guard was flung backward, as both balls hit him, one on a shoulder, the other on a hip. As he reached to pull his pistol from his belt, a third shot struck him in the chest.
A man stepped through the door, slipping sideways against the wall, watching the fallen guard. Dressed all in black, he wore a cloth over most of his head, leaving only eyes, nose, and mouth showing. The man didn’t see Yozef crouched only seven feet away, so close that the flame from Yozef’s musket hit the man’s chest. Yozef didn’t watch as the man briefly stood straight against the wall, then slid slowly down, leaving a trail of blood on the wall from the exit wound.
Yozef didn’t notice because he was busy. As soon as he fired the musket, he dropped it and pulled out one of Kales’s pistols, in time to shoot a third man who tried to enter the door. The man pitched back onto the veranda.
A fourth man fired into the foyer, missing Yozef but causing him to fire back with the last of Kales’s pistols. He didn’t see whether he’d hit anything and cursed at himself for firing without a clear target. He was now down to two knives on Kales’s harness.
Yozef listened for more men. He thought he heard two voices, then steps running away, down the veranda toward the great room wing of the house. He was about to run after them, when an axe crashed through the lock on the enclosed porch’s outer door. He had locked it on the way in but realized, with a jolt, that he hadn’t locked the next door, from the porch to the foyer. He stood six feet away from the door.
His split-second of indecision ended, as sounds of many feet and much cursing came toward the unlocked door. Later, he had no clear explanation for his next act: he pulled pistols from the two fallen attackers and jumped into the hall that led to the bedroom wing of the house.
Once again he seemed to have inane thoughts at the most stressful times. The one that popped into his head now was vindication. Maera and everyone else had expressed puzzlement and doubt when he’d insisted that the two halls leading from the foyer to the two wings of the house should not be straight but angled differently in their first twelve feet. When the house had been under construction, he’d stood in the framework and felt uneasy that from one end of the main hall in the bedroom wing, he had a clear line of sight to the great room. Although he couldn’t articulate why it bothered him, he’d insisted on the angle change. This made it impossible to see down the hall more than fifteen feet in either direction from the foyer.
He ducked around the angled corner, as he glimpsed men rush into the foyer.
* * *
Uzcil was the second man into the foyer. He didn’t need to be first, in case someone was waiting. He’d served his time being first through doors or point on patrols.
The only thing waiting were three bodies. He cursed aloud, there being enough din elsewhere not to bother suppressing his disgust. In the dim light, he could see that two of the bodies were his men, the third was one of the guards. Another of his men lay sprawled motionless on the front veranda. He looked around.
Who the hell designed this house and these weird hallways? Havant didn’t say anything about this.
Shouts, screams, and gunfire drew his attention in the direction of the great room, the kitchen, and the dining room, where they assumed most people would have gathered.
“This way,” he pointed, and they moved.
* * *
Carnigan and Norlin had the only firearms in the kitchen. The three women crouched behind the heavy wooden table Carnigan had overturned. All three held knives or cleavers. Sounds came from all directions: down the hall, in the great room. Then the kitchen door to the outside crashed inward, as its lock gave way from a kick.
Carnigan had left one lantern on low enough to see someone coming in. A man dressed all in black dove into the room, hit the floor, and rolled behind a counter. Carnigan held his fire, but Norlin shot at the figure, missing by two feet and losing his grip on the huge pistol. Another man stepped in, exposed partway through the door, and fired a shotgun into the room, spraying both Carnigan and Norlin.
Carnigan was hit several times but hardly flinched, as a one-inch ball from his pistol took off the top half of the man’s head. Carnigan glanced to the side. Norlin lay back on a countertop, blood seeping from three hits to his chest and one to his throat. Anarynd jumped up and pulled the boy down to the floor. He gasped, choking on his own blood, and a frothy red puddle pooled on his chest.
Anarynd held her hands paused above the boy, not knowing what to do first. She looked at Carnigan. He shook his head.
Carnigan heard windows breaking in the dining room next door and shouts and shots from the great room, but he couldn’t move yet. The other black-clad man still lurked in the room. Carnigan couldn’t leave the women and Morwena.
In desperate need to both protect those in the kitchen and go help the others, Carnigan ducked down to the women. “Throw every pot and pan you can get your hands on toward the other side of the room. Now!”
Gwyned set Morwena on the floor and joined Anarynd and Serys in grabbing anything metal and throwing it from behind the overturned table. When the first one hit, Carnigan ran out and dove over the counter that the other attacker had disappeared behind. As Carnigan cleared the cou
ntertop, the man spun from six feet away and fired his pistol. The ball hit Carnigan’s upper left arm, momentarily shocking him. As the man threw away his pistol and drew a hatchet, Carnigan moved faster than a man his size should be able to. He grabbed the man’s knife arm with the hand of his unwounded arm. With a wrench, he dislocated the man’s elbow, then a big fist broke his jaw and drove a splinter of bone into the man’s brain.
His arm was on fire, but he had no time to deal with it. He could hear firing and shouts in the hall and the great room. He pulled another knife and ran to the dining room, not noticing that Serys and Anarynd followed him.
* * *
The sounds coming from the east wing of the house panicked Yozef more than thoughts of his own safety. Maera and Aeneas hid in the great room where the group of black-clad men headed. Yozef peeked around an angled corner. He couldn’t see the four men. He raced across the foyer and peered around the next corner.
The four men had their backs to him. They faced down the hall. One of them fired a pistol, then dropped it, and all four, with blades and hatchets in hand, rose to rush the great room. Yozef ran after them. From twenty feet away, he pulled the trigger on one pistol. There was only a spark. A misfire. Without pausing, he dropped the pistol and grabbed a knife with the same hand. He pulled the trigger on the second pistol. It fired, and one of the attackers went down. He dropped the second pistol and drew another knife, as he reached the three men.
He felt more scared than he had during the raid on St. Sidryn’s. There, he had taken cover behind a barricade alongside other defenders, including Carnigan and Denes. Here, it was only him. In the second before he reached the men, it flashed through his mind not to think, but let to his reactions take over, as Kales had drilled into him during those bruising sparring sessions.
Heavier Than a Mountain (Destiny's Crucible Book 3) Page 44
