As the three men turned, he stabbed one in the side and pushed the man into the others. For endless minutes or, in reality, a few seconds, it was a deadly dance of slashing steel, dodging, and ducking.
He later couldn’t remember exactly what happened, but suddenly he stood alone, three of the men on the ground, one groaning, the other two silent, the fourth man running through a door to a side room. Yozef followed, only to see the man push another man back who was about to climb through a broken window. The man Yozef chased leaped out the window and vanished.
* * *
As abruptly as it had begun, the firing ceased, but not the shouting and crying. Yozef ran down the hall, glancing into the kitchen and seeing only Gwyned holding Morwena, the same knife still in her hand. Both looked okay.
At the hall doorway to the great room lay a sideboard that had been shoved across the opening. Yozef slid over it and into the room. The only light came from a single lantern turned low. Carnigan was stamping out a small fire from a lantern hit by a firearm. People lay or knelt everywhere. Balwis held his hand to Ceinwyn’s face. Maera held Aeneas and Dwyna, Mirramel’s daughter. Maera’s face was streaked with tears. Breda Keelan sat holding her daughter Anid, with Culich’s arms around them both, one of his legs a bloody mess below the knee. To his left, a woman lay face-down, not moving. Yozef couldn’t see the face, but by her shape and clothing he recognized Mirramel. Next to her knelt Teena, holding one of Mirramel’s hands.
“Is it over?” Balwis called out.
“I don’t know,” answered Yozef, with the first words he’d spoken since directing the front guard to move to the other side of the foyer. In the intervening time, no more than two minutes, he’d killed five men. He realized he didn’t feel sick at the thought. Instead, he felt as if his blood were on fire, as he looked around for someone else to kill. Three black-clad bodies lay in the room. One had his head turned almost backward, Yozef assumed from an encounter with Carnigan. Another had a kitchen cleaver in the back of his head, the same or similar cleaver as Yozef had seen Serys carrying. The third was near a window, still moving, but with his chest soaked in blood.
Seeing no one who needed eminent death, Yozef let his blood slowly cool, until reason resurfaced—and fear. He raced to Maera.
“Are you all right?”
She nodded but didn’t speak, her tears turning into a steady stream.
“Aeneas?”
She nodded again and pulled Aeneas slightly higher in her arm, so Yozef could see the bottom of his nightshirt and the round hole through several folds of cloth. A ball must have missed Aeneas by the tiniest of margins. Now, Yozef did feel sick and had to suppress vomiting at the image of a musket or pistol ball hitting the baby’s soft skin.
Maera nodded a third time, toward her parents. Yozef looked over. Breda held Anid. Beautiful, cheerful Anid, with so much to look forward to, had a hole in her forehead. From the size, Yozef’s shocked brain attributed the wound to one of the pellets from an attacker’s shotgun.
Yozef rose, and for a moment, he and Carnigan just stood looking at each other. Yozef wanted to rage and cry at the same time. Carnigan appeared almost gray, the lines in his already lined face now more like chasms. Yozef glanced at Balwis and only then realized the man was holding closed a serious wound to Ceinwyn’s face. Balwis noticed Yozef’s look.
“She saved me,” said Balwis. “I’d just shot one coming through a window, when another one came up behind me. Ceinwyn hit him with a small chair, and he turned and slashed her with a short sword.”
Yozef didn’t need to ask the fate of the attacker who’d hacked at Ceinwyn. He recognized the knife handle of Balwis’s blade, completely buried in a man’s chest.
Yozef forced himself to take three deep breaths, then spoke aloud to everyone in the room.
“We have to get help, in case they haven’t all gone. And medicants for the wounded.”
He hated to lean on Maera, still shocked by the attack and her sister’s death, but they had no time.
“Maera, give Aeneas and Dwyna to Anarynd. The men need to stay here. We need you to get to Caernford for help. Can you do it?”
She didn’t answer, just swallowed, as if ingesting an impossibly big pill.
“Carnigan, you stay here. Balwis, to me. We’ll see if it’s clear out front and we can get a horse for Maera. Teena, can you take Balwis’s place with Ceinwyn?”
“What about Wyfor? Where is he?” asked Teena.
“I don’t know,” said Yozef. “I’m sorry, but we have to send for help before looking for him.”
Kales’s wife blinked back tears but nodded.
Balwis turned Ceinwyn over to Teena, and Maera handed the babies to Anarynd. They couldn’t trust any firearm to be loaded, so they took a minute to reload two muskets and four pistols, giving two of the pistols to Maera.
“If your family’s carriage and horses are all right, you’ll use that. If not, we’ll see if we can find a horse still tied up out front. We’ll lead you to the road, in case any attackers haven’t left. We’ll also check on the road guard, though I doubt he survived, since he hasn’t shown up. If it’s okay that far, go to Caernford for men and medicants.”
Yozef grabbed Maera in a fierce hug, then he and Balwis crept down the hall single file against a wall, Maera following. She spit on the first black-clad body they found. Balwis checked out the front door, then went to the rail. Two of the horses still remained tied, and the carriage and its two horses were under a spreading tree. All of the horses appeared skittish from the gunfire.
“I hate sending you alone, Maera,” Yozef said, as he gave her a hand up onto the carriage.
“Oh, Yozef! Anid! Oh, God!”
“I know, but right now we have to think of those who need help.”
They led the horses toward the road, passing two bodies on the way. “We’ll check them on the way back,” said Yozef. “They must be the guard and one of the attackers.”
The bodies were the last sign that anything unusual had happened. When they reached the end of the drive, Yozef yelled, “Go!” and Maera used a buggy whip to speed the horses toward Caernford.
He wasn’t religious, but in such moments, it never hurt to be sure. Please let her be safe from whoever did this and from driving the carriage so hard.
She was experienced with horse and carriage, but not at this speed and with the urge to be as fast as possible.
“Back to the house,” ordered Yozef. He and Balwis started running, then stopped at the two bodies.
“This one’s dead,” said Yozef, as he checked the body dressed all in black.
“The guard is still alive!” exclaimed Balwis. “I can’t see clearly in the dark, but his breath seems strong. Should we take him to the house or leave him here until help comes?”
Yozef thought for a moment. “It could be dangerous to move him, but he could also be bleeding to death. I think we have to risk carrying him inside, where we can see how bad he is.”
They picked him up, each of them with an arm under the man’s back and another arm under a knee. Their adrenaline still flowed, and they hardly felt the weight the fifty yards back to the house. Once inside, they laid him in the hall and began turning up or relighting lanterns.
Teena Kales appeared. “Serys is helping Ceinwyn. What about Wyfor?” she pleaded.
Shit! Yozef thought. I forgot about him!
“What about the injured in the great room?” Yozef asked. “How serious are they?”
“None are in danger of dying right now, and the dead don’t care. What about my husband?” Teena begged.
“Balwis and I will find him, Teena. Please check the guard and see if you can help him.”
More light came from the great room, as lanterns were lit or turned up, illuminating inside the house. Light spilled out the windows, those intact and those broken, onto the grounds. Yozef and Balwis cautiously exited through the enclosed back porch and onto the veranda. Balwis had grabbed a lit lantern and thrown a cloak around it. He
set it on the veranda, and once they descended the steps onto the ground, he pulled off the cloak as they knelt. There was no movement as far as the lantern light could cast. And no gunfire.
“There,” said Balwis, pointing to their left. Thirty yards away lay the rear guard and thirty yards farther was a cluster of bodies. They rose and trotted, backs bent as they scanned while moving. They found Wyfor and three attackers, one of whom was still alive, as was Kales. His left hand was mangled and his chest and head covered in blood, though whether his or the attackers’, they didn’t know.
“Let’s get him to the house,” said Yozef, and they picked up Kales as they had the front guard. He weighed considerably less than the guard, and they ran to the veranda and through the two doors to the foyer. Teena saw them, gave a cry, and left the wounded guard, who now lay moaning.
The lanterns cast enough light for them to see Kales’s wounds. He had half a dozen shotgun pellet holes in his left arm and the left side of his chest. Yet from habit, he’d worn a heavy leather coat that had blunted the pellets, which had barely pierced his skin. However, his hand had taken most of blast, and he was missing two fingers. Although none of the wounds were life-threatening, he was unconscious. One of the pellets had struck his forehead with a glancing hit, enough to knock him out, but thankfully hadn’t penetrated his skull. Teena cried, as she worked on putting a tourniquet on the hand, and Yozef and Balwis left Kales to her and hurried down the hall to the great room.
* * *
Captain Bekir Uzcil had no desire to be a martyr. He accepted risks as part of being in the Narthani army and serving on such missions as this one, assigned by Brigadier Zulfa. When the possibility of success in a mission was lost, he saw his duty as surviving to serve and fight again on a later day. The strike’s chances of success had always been problematic. Everything had gone well up to the point when a guard and a second man had left the house and walked straight into Uzcil’s men. The attempt to quietly eliminate the two men failed and unexpectedly cost four of his men. By then, they’d lost the element of surprise, and their only option had been an immediate assault on the house from all sides.
Their only chance of killing the hetman, and possibly this Kolsko man Havant wanted to include, was to overwhelm the people inside before they could react. The unexpectedly stiff defense and his men’s disadvantage at having to force the attack had led to short, vicious hand-to-hand fighting, each step of which whittled away at his men’s numbers. Uzcil had led three men down the hall toward where they believed most of the defenders had gathered, when an attack from behind surprised them. The single attacker had shot and killed one of his men before they knew he was there, then stabbed another before they could respond. In the semi-darkness and chaos, the ensuing seconds were a blur, but Uzcil saw his third man fall and fought his own frantic defense against the man who had attacked. Then part of his brain noticed the fighting slacken off in the large room at the end of the hall, all of which convinced him it was time to save what he could, including himself.
He disengaged from the islander and fled through a window in a room off the hall. Outside, he called to two of his men, one standing next to the window and reloading his musket, the other running from the western side of the house, where he had been stationed to prevent anyone escaping out a window.
“It’s over,” Uzcil said, panting. “We’re leaving.”
“The others?” a shocked man cried out.
“Gone. Dead or wounded. There’s nothing we can do for them. We did our best, and it went to shit. Time to get out.”
Uzcil ran around the bedroom wing of the house to retrace back to where Havant and Drifwich waited. A fourth man joined them, having withdrawn from the eastern side of the house when the fighting died and it became evident the attempt had failed.
* * *
Havant knew things hadn’t gone well. Instead of hearing twenty attackers simultaneously firing, several sporadic shots could only mean they had been detected early. The following lull and then sounds of fighting that lasted five minutes before dying off momentarily gave him optimism. This was quickly dashed when he heard voices from the front of the house, then sounds of a carriage racing toward Caernford—obviously going for help.
He wasn’t surprised when Uzcil appeared out of the darkness with only three of his nineteen men. “I take it the strike didn’t go well?” Havant said, his voice conveying only information, no emotion or judgment.
“It went to shit,” Uzcil spat. “You said the hetman would have only three guards and Kolsko one guard. We must have faced more than that, and some were trained and dangerous. One of them killed three of my men and alerted the others. I know of another man who killed at least three more by himself and almost gutted me before I got out.” Uzcil’s tone just short of accused Havant of incompetence in providing information and planning for the attack.
Not that Havant cared. He only dealt with what was, not what he wished. He had already gone over his own options, while waiting to see if any of the strike team returned. They had, so the number of options settled to three. He could return to Caernford to continue his role and hope Drifwich and the remaining men reached Salford and escaped without being captured. Their being killed while fleeing was also acceptable, as long as Havant wasn’t compromised. He didn’t like that option, because it depended on people and events over which he had no control.
The second option that allowed him to continue in Caernford was to eliminate all connections to himself, meaning to kill Drifwich and the four surviving team members. The killing didn’t bother him, but with one against five, the odds were too great. Havant had a brief moment of regret that all of the men hadn’t died in the attempt. He eliminated that option.
That left only one choice. He would flee with the five back to Salford and the waiting sloop.
“I’ll be going with you,” Havant told Drifwich and Uzcil. “With this few of us, we have plenty of horses. We’ll run back to where they’re waiting and take two each. As planned, we’ll burn the first two semaphore stations along the road before the line turns away from the Salford road. If we push it, we should reach the signal point before dawn. If it’s still dark, I can send a signal to override the captain’s reluctance to send a boat ashore, even if the extraction is in daylight.”
* * *
Eighteen minutes after Maera had left, whipping the carriage horses, a dozen mounted men galloped down the drive toward the Kolsko house. Half rode bareback, not taking the time to saddle up after Maera had stopped at a pub on the outskirts of Caernford. She’d raced inside, screaming that the hetman had been attacked and needed help at the Kolsko house.
During the next thirty minutes, more armed men arrived, some riding and some running, including a steady stream of medicants, more armed men, Luwis and Kennrick, and a hundred other Keelanders wanting to help in any way they could. It was Kennrick who finally ordered anyone else turned back. The grounds around the Kolsko house had filled with so many people and horses, it became too chaotic.
Following the first medicants was a fully equipment and staffed MASH unit that had prepared to accompany a training maneuver the next day. The medicants quickly decided to treat all of the wounded in place, instead of first transporting them to the main hospital at St. Tomo’s.
Yozef found that he had no duties, except to stay with Maera. Anarynd and Gwyned took Aeneas, Morwena, and Dwyna, Mirramel’s daughter, to the bedroom wing of the house and away from the turmoil and carnage.
Culich’s lower leg was hopeless, having taken most of a shotgun charge. The medicants amputated two inches below the knee.
Ceinwyn had received a slash that almost sliced a cheek off her face. Balwis had held the flap of flesh in place until relieved by Teena Balwis. He cursed, as he recounted to Yozef how he’d had to pull out a tooth hanging sideways from Ceinwyn’s wound, so it wouldn’t interfere with his holding the wound closed. In other circumstances, Yozef would have been impressed with Balwis’s command of cursing, if he had
n’t been involved in his own demonstration in both Caedelli and English.
Kales regained consciousness before the medicants arrived. Though in great pain, he worried first about his wife, then about what had happened. Balwis gave him a summary.
Carnigan refused to lie down for the medicants, until ordered to do so by Gwyned before she left with Anarynd and the youngest children. The pistol ball wound wasn’t serious. His harness was more of a thick leather vest than simply straps. It had absorbed most of the force of seven shotgun pellets that penetrated Carnigan by no more than an inch.
Gwyned and Anarynd suffered minor injuries—bruises and a single shotgun pellet to a forearm for Anarynd, bruises and a cut on her shoulder from an unknown source for Gwyned.
Unscathed were Yozef, Maera, Balwis, Serys, Breda, and Mared.
The final death toll was six: three of the guards, Norlin, Mirramel, and Anid.
CHAPTER 33: SWAVEBROKE
Shullick, Capital Swavebroke Province
Margol Swavebroke was the fourth of his family to be Hetman Swavebroke. His great-grandfather had taken on the Swavebroke last name after the existing hetman died with no designated heir and no relative closer than third cousin. The struggle, and almost civil war, as to which family would fill the hetman role resulted in Margol’s ancestor winning. However, the contentiousness of the succession still tainted elements within the Swavebroke clan, and Margol’s grip on the leadership depended on a core of five boyermen. The most important of these was Boyerman Hargo, whose district comprised the capital, Shullick, and the immediately surrounding area.
The Swavebroke clan had suffered a single coastal raid by the Buldorians but none yet from the Narthani. When reports came of raids and attacks on other clans, Hargo and two other boyermen with coastal districts had resisted Margol’s proposal to increase defenses and plan for evacuation, in case of raids or invasions from the sea. As their overt position, they stated that the economic cost would be too great for events that might never occur. Margol Swavebroke knew they also had not agreed with his decision to come to Moreland’s aid, being among the islanders who thought the Narthani threat too distant and that it involved other clans, not Swavebroke. The perceived victory at Moreland City had blunted the boyermen’s criticism of going to Moreland’s aid, but Margol didn’t feel his position was strong enough to fight the boyermen’s resistance to spending coin on improved defenses and evacuation planning, in case of further Narthani attacks.
Heavier Than a Mountain (Destiny's Crucible Book 3) Page 45
