by Nathan Hawke
Sixfingers moved nearer, his iron devils around him, his shield held in front of him again. ‘Salt, is it? It hurts my Fateguard like a hornet’s sting but nothing more. And hornets who sting are crushed.’ He closed his fist.
‘Come closer if you dare, Lhosir king. I travelled with Gallow the Foxbeard for a year. I know how you lost your fingers of flesh and bone, and now it seems you have new ones. Did the creature you keep in the crypt beneath Witches’ Reach give them to you? By all means bring them into my circle.’
‘Is it true, Aulian, that you burned fifty of my soldiers in the shaft beneath Witches’ Reach?’
Oribas looked down for a moment. The shame of that still ate at him. ‘I did.’
‘How did it feel, Aulian, to send so many to such a terrible death?’
‘I hear you hung as many blood ravens along the streets of Andhun in your time, King Sixfingers.’
‘Far more than fifty, Aulian. Have you even seen a blood raven?’
‘More. I have stood and watched it done.’
Sixfingers came to the circle of salt. ‘A blood raven is there to be seen by the gods. Those men who died in your fire will wander the Marches for ever. No one will send them to the Maker-Devourer, nor speak out their names.’ His eyes flicked to Achista. ‘Her Marroc did the same, beheading every corpse so no one could say which was which.’ He shook his head. ‘War is war, Aulian. A man who fights well and stands up for his word will be rewarded in what comes after, Marroc or Lhosir or Vathan. Yet you deny men their just reward for honest courage?’
Achista drew back another arrow. Sixfingers stared at her and laughed. ‘You know what shield I carry, Marroc? The Crimson Shield of Modris the Protector, stolen from your King Tane years ago by the mighty Screambreaker, taken from him by the Fateguard, stolen and lost at sea and found again. Loose your arrow, Marroc, and see what happens.’
Achista let fly at his face but the shield seemed to move even before her fingers slipped from the bowstring. The arrow hit the wood of it, close to the rim this time. She readied another.
‘I want them alive.’ Sixfingers was still laughing at them from behind his shield.
And Oribas laughed right back, because as the ironskins reached his circle of salt they stopped as though they’d walked into a wall. ‘My people caught that creature you keep in your crypt hundreds of years ago. They defeated it and brought it here. Your iron-skinned men are nothing more than shadewalkers who don’t yet know they’re dead. My salt does more than sting, King Sixfingers. They cannot pass.’
Sixfingers drew his sword. He pushed through his Fateguard and stepped into the circle. ‘But I can, Aulian.’
Oribas nodded. He opened his hand and held out a flat palm piled with salt. ‘Yes. You can. If that is what you wish. You alone may pass.’
Addic hopped forward on his one good leg, swinging his sword at the king’s head. The Crimson Shield flew up and caught the blow, but at the same moment Achista let fly again. The arrow hit Sixfingers in the ribs and stuck in his furs. He had good enough mail to turn the point but it still made him scream.
‘Come, king forkbeard,’ offered Oribas. ‘Enter my circle.’
For a while, lit up by the moon and the stars, Medrin Ironhand, King Sixfingers of the Lhosir, clutched his side and stared in disbelief. Oribas watched. Crimson Shield or no Crimson Shield, Medrin wasn’t about to fight alone against three, even if one was wounded, another was a woman and the last was armed only with salt and words.
Medrin smiled, mocking his own hubris perhaps, for with even just one other man beside him, everything would have been different. ‘I salute you, Aulian. I see I shall lose more men than I would like when I take Varyxhun. My soldiers will know not to kill you. But then the Vathan ardshan of Andhun had an Aulian and they all knew I wanted him too, and that still didn’t save him.’
He bowed and turned, beckoned his ironskins, and Oribas and Achista and Addic watched them walk to their horses and ride away. When the last echoes of their hooves had long since died, Oribas breathed a huge sigh.
‘You work magic.’ Addic shook his head. ‘I said so from that first day. You’re a wizard.’
Oribas laughed. ‘I’m a scholar. I know things, that is all. And we can all be thankful that the king of the forkbeards isn’t as clever as he thinks.’ He touched the circle of salt with his foot. Medrin could have broken it – kicked the salt aside and made a path for his Fateguard to step through – and he hadn’t thought of it, or else he had but had been afraid, and that was the only difference between the three of them being alive and the three of them being dead.
‘Now what?’
‘Shadewalkers. Iron devils.’ Addic shook his head. ‘Where does it end?’
‘Varyxhun.’ Achista offered him her shoulder. ‘Valaric.’
It was a while before the other Marroc returned, slinking through the darkness to reveal themselves. Their talk was muted. Another handful of men killed and no forkbeards slain. It had turned that way of late, ever since Sixfingers had come. There were only nine of them left. Some said that the forkbeards could never win as long as even one of the Hundred Heroes was alive but none of the Marroc there that night much liked the notion.
They took it in turns to carry Addic. Achista led them to a ridge overlooking the road and then over it and down and into a sharp valley on the other side and then along another ridge until Oribas hadn’t the first idea where they were any more; and then suddenly, as the dawn broke, he found himself overlooking a sharp ravine and realised they were above the Devil’s Caves; and they kept very still and very quiet as they watched the Lhosir king and his ironskins file down the road, finished with massacring the Marroc hiding in the caves, and turn back towards Witches’ Reach. In the quiet of the early morning Oribas made Addic lie on his belly and stitched his gashed calf closed, bandaged it as best he could and told Addic that if he ever wanted to run again then he’d best rest in a nice comfortable bed with plenty of food and water. They both laughed at that until Achista snapped them out of their joking.
‘Look.’
Down around the mouth of the caves a single figure was moving.
*
The shadewalkers stayed for hours. For a whole day, or that’s how it felt to Reddic, but at last they left and didn’t come back and everything fell silent and dark. And of course it fell to him to be the one who crossed the line of salt and crept away in the pitch black, feeling his way on his one good hand and his knees until he reached a wall and then along it until he saw the light from outside. Dead men littered the cave. He couldn’t see their faces but he felt them, felt his hand press on someone’s cold dead fingers or his leg slide in something sticky and wet that he didn’t want to think about yet couldn’t not. The passage out was the worst. More than half the Marroc of the Devil’s Caves – fifty men or thereabouts – had died caught between the shadewalkers and the iron devils. A little sunlight reached in but being able to see the bodies he had to step on to get outside didn’t make it any better.
There was no sign of the shadewalkers outside, or of the iron devils except the footprints they’d left in the snow. He realised that he had no idea, in the end, whether the shade-walkers had gone back the way they’d come or followed Sixfingers. He took a good long look around and then went back to the cave and started pulling out the bodies. Took a while with one arm, but clambering over dead still wet with blood was no thing for children. When he was done, he went back along the passage and called out, guiding Arda and Nadric and Jelira and the children with his voice. He let them pass and sat there alone in the dark a little while, contemplating all that he’d seen, and then went looking for Torvic’s mules, still with Nadric’s arrowheads bagged over their backs. When he led them back out to join the others, he heard a shout, harsh and hostile, and he was still blinking the sun out of his eyes when he realised an archer was crouched over the top of the cave mouth. Just the one, but her arrow was pointed at his heart. ‘And you! Name yourself!’
H
e sank to his knees, too tired to be afraid. ‘Reddic of the Crackmarsh men.’
‘Who’s with you?’
Arda threw down the axe she’d been holding. ‘Arda of Middislet, and for the love of Modris put your bow down, girl. I know your voice, Achista of Witches’ Reach. We had a few days together if you remember it, and if you’re so keen on having someone to shoot then you should have come here a little earlier in the night. Plenty of choice then.’
The archer lowered her bow and scrambled down and Reddic started to laugh. He stared as tears streamed down his face. This was Achista the Huntress? He’d expected someone . . . well, bigger. But she smiled at Arda as she came close, though her face was full of worry and sadness.
‘Smithswife! What brings you to the Devil’s Caves?’
‘Middislet isn’t safe, that’s what. Seems like there’s nowhere safe, from what I see. Beginning to wish I’d taken my chances where I was.’
Achista spat. ‘Sixfingers is in the valley. He’ll be marching on Varyxhun in days.’
‘We have two thousand arrowheads for Valaric,’ said Reddic, gathering himself together. He slapped the mules they’d brought all the way from the Crackmarsh. It hadn’t been easy finding them, nor leading them out of the cave.
‘Then Valaric will thank you. We’ll have need of them soon enough.’ The Huntress waved up the slopes and a few minutes later there were a half a dozen more Marroc around them and a dark-skinned man that she called Oribas, and Reddic knew that this was the great and terrible Aulian Wizard, though Arda glared at him as though he was a snake.
‘So you got him back, then.’
Achista turned to Arda. ‘Barely. They were about to hang him. He was on the scaffold when we took Varyxhun castle. Addic rescued him off the gallows.’ She swung back to her men. ‘Sixfingers turned back for Witches’ Rea—’
‘Oi.’ Arda glared. ‘Where’s my husband?’
Achista ignored her. ‘Hasavic, you know the paths best. Can we get mules to Varyx—’
Arda stepped around, planted herself in front of Achista and poked her in the chest. ‘I asked you a question, woman.’
Everyone stopped. Hands went to swords and axes but then fell away. What were they going to do – draw steel on an unarmed Marroc woman in front of her children? Achista frowned. ‘Gallow left Varyxhun, Smithswife. He killed a man. Angry Jonnic wanted to hang him. And others. People who didn’t know him. We sent him away. Probably for the best, what with him being a forkbeard. So he didn’t come back to you?’
All the anger fell out of Arda. Her shoulders slumped. ‘No,’ she said. ‘He didn’t.’
21
THE AULIAN BRIDGE
The Aulian Way ran from Tarkhun almost due east to Issetbridge, through the fringes and spurs of the Shadowwood and then the Crackmarsh, roughly following the Isset with a typical Aulian straightness of purpose. Issetbridge itself lay at the foot of a mountain a few miles short of the bridge from which it took its name, the great Aulian Bridge that crossed the Isset and led to Varyxhun. From the town the road wound up the slope like a coiled rope spilled down the mountainside.
The town and the Aulian Way were both thick with Lhosir who had marched from Tarkhun. Gallow and Mirrahj followed the edge of the Crackmarsh, slipping between the bands of soldiers that swept the water meadows. They travelled at night and in the day they hid close to the cascade of the Isset falls, the impassable cataracts that divided the river in two. They skirted Issetbridge the next night, picking their way along trails and paths that wound up into the mountains, and rejoined the Aulian Way on the other side. Now and then they rode past bands of Lhosir heading towards the bridge in their dozens and hundreds, but no one challenged them. Gallow carried a shield of the Crimson Legion, stolen from the Lhosir in the Crackmarsh, and his beard was long enough now to split into two stubby little forks. He was one of them, one of Medrin’s Men with a Vathan prisoner, and all the old soldiers who’d once fought for the Screambreaker and might have known his face were dead or far away. Medrin didn’t want them.
They reached the bridge not long after dawn. Gallow and Mirrahj stared at it open-mouthed. A single arch of grey stone reached across the river from the base of the gorge cliffs on one side to the base of the cliffs on the other. Its peak rose a hundred feet above the water rushing beneath it, and was level with the sides of the gorge and the two halves of the Aulian Way. Whole trunks of Varyxhun pine, split down the middle and laid side by side, reached from each edge of the gorge to the centre, the midpoint held up by that one stone arch. In the Screambreaker’s day that was all there had been, but now someone had built a crude wooden watchtower over the middle of the bridge.
Gallow pointed. ‘Guards.’
‘I saw the bridge in Andhun the day the Marroc burned it down,’ murmured Mirrahj. ‘But that was nothing like this. Who built it?’
‘Aulians.’ No one could match the Aulian masons. It left him wondering whether Oribas had the knowledge to build such a thing if he had the craftsmen to work the wood and stone. Gallow reined in his horse. The bridge was visible from the road for miles and so the road was visible from the bridge. Judging by the smoke of their morning fires there were soldiers at each end and some in the watchtower. He was about to ask her if she’d be his prisoner for one more time as they crossed the bridge, hoping that no Lhosir would question his shield and his face, but he saw the look in her eyes and knew the answer before he spoke. A part of him was glad. They’d enter the valley together as they meant to leave it, one way or the other, with shields held high and spears levelled at the hearts of their enemies. He laughed. ‘You would have made a good Lhosir, Mirrahj Bashar.’
She turned her horse in a circle, shook her head at him and set off at a canter along the road, calling over her shoulder, ‘And you might even have passed as a Vathan, Gallow Smallbeard, though your riding is poor. Mind, since you’re a forkbeard, it’s a constant surprise that you don’t fall off.’
Gallow galloped after her. The Vathen made better riders it was true, but the Lhosir knew perfectly well how to deal with soldiers on horseback. A hedgehog of spears and shields and some archers, and once the riders were all rolling around on the ground wondering what had happened to their horses and why they were stuck full of arrows, then you fell on them with axes. Men who wouldn’t face you toe to toe deserved no better.
The Lhosir at the bridge saw Mirrahj and Gallow but did nothing until Mirrahj spurred her horse to a gallop and lowered her spear. Two of Medrin’s men hastily raised their shields and ran out into the road, saw they were alone and hastily ran out of the way again. As he reached the bridge, Gallow kicked his horse faster and rode alongside Mirrahj, putting his shield between her and the Lhosir behind them. Mirrahj’s eyes were already on the archers in the watchtower, her own shield raised to ward off their arrows. Medrin’s Lhosir threw their spears. One flew over them; the other hit Gallow’s shield, stuck for a moment and then fell out a few paces later. His eyes shifted and he brought his shield around in front of him. ‘The horses!’ he shouted. ‘They’ll shoot for the horses.’
‘And that’s why we Vathen hate you forkbeards so much!’ Mirrahj leaned suddenly forward until she was almost lying flat on her horse’s back, her shoulders across its neck and her head almost resting between its ears. She raised her shield over them both. One of the archers on the watchtower released a shaft but his arrow flew long. The second was aimed at Gallow, who sat up straighter and drew his axe from his belt.
‘Do you know who I am?’ he roared. ‘Gallow Foxbeard, come to take your king’s head because his hand wasn’t enough!’ He threw the axe. The archer hesitated and then let fly too, but the moment cost him his life. Gallow lowered his head and the arrow glanced off his helm while his axe took the archer square in the chest. The Lhosir fell back onto the platform, tumbled over the edge and fell to the hungry river below.
Mirrahj slowed to let Gallow pass. Now she was lying right back in her saddle with her head over her horse’s arse
and her shield covering both her and her horse from the one archer that was left. Gallow galloped past her. ‘Crazy Vathan!’
The Lhosir soldiers at the far end of the bridge had seen it all. They blocked the road now, seven of them in a wall of shields, spears bristling. Gallow slowed. He looked for a way past but there wasn’t one, not wide enough for two horses, not without one of them taking a spear in the flank, and so he stopped a dozen feet short of their spear points and dismounted. Mirrahj drew to a stop behind him. His shoulders itched from knowing there was an archer still in the tower, but only a nioingr would shoot a man in the back.
One of the Lhosir facing him stepped forward, bold with a strong clear voice. ‘Name yourself, enemy.’ He was young, too young to have fought with the Screambreaker unless it had been against the Vathen. Gallow grinned at him and twirled his spear.
‘Gallow Foxbeard. And you?’
‘Bedris One-Eye. I’ve heard your name, nioingr. We know who you are.’
Gallow twirled his spear again. ‘Call me that two more times, Bedris One-Eye, and you’ll be obliged to stand against me to prove your mettle.’ He peered. ‘Seems to me you have two good eyes, boy, so how did you earn that name?’
‘I’ll stand against any nioingr, Foxbeard. I call you nioingr. And again, nioingr. That good enough for you?’ Bedris stepped out from his men and faced Gallow.
Gallow laughed at him. ‘Your name, Bedris One-Eye. You didn’t earn it for yourself, so you’ve taken it from someone. I knew a Jyrdas One-Eye once. Fierce he was. I wouldn’t have wanted to cross my sword with his when he was in his prime, that’s for sure.’ He lifted his spear slowly as he spoke, sinking down behind his shield so there wasn’t anything to be seen of him except his feet and his face.
Bedris hissed, ‘Jyrdas One-Eye sired me.’ He’d settled into a fighting crouch now too. The other soldiers eased back, their eyes following the fight.
