The Last Bastion

by Nathan Hawke

  Valaric threw Gallow a glance then nudged him. ‘Answer! You have to answer!’

  ‘I’ll not be as accommodating, Foxbeard.’ Sixfingers was taunting them now. ‘I’ll be with you as soon as I can. While you wait, perhaps you might discuss with your Marroc friend which one of you I should kill first.’

  Valaric shoved Gallow again. Idiot. ‘Bring your worst, king of dogs,’ he bellowed. ‘My wolves hunger for you!’

  ‘Then enjoy your feast!’ There was a venomous glee to Sixfingers’ voice but Valaric didn’t have time to wonder about that because the tower shuddered and the ramp crashed down, and he was already moving and so were his Crackmarsh men because if there was one thing that got you killed in a battle more surely than a spear or an axe then it was doubt.

  But the men waiting for them when the ramp came down were no forkbeards. They wore closed helms and ragged mail. They carried long Aulian swords and small round shields and their skin, where it showed, was chalky white. Shadewalkers. Sixfingers, somehow, had sent shadewalkers, and for a moment Valaric felt every part of him turn numb. The Marroc beside him thrust a spear through one porcelain throat. The shadewalker staggered but it didn’t bleed and it didn’t fall. Valaric heard a wail of fear and a cry of despair. He felt the air turn cold and sour and his men falter.

  Gallow smashed a shadewalker with his shield. Another lost its hand, cut off at the wrist. It dropped its shield and grabbed a Marroc by the throat and throttled him while the Marroc stabbed it over and over, but Valaric had his own dead man to deal with, slamming its sword into him, battering him back with a strength that wasn’t human. ‘Stand!’ he bellowed. ‘Stand and hold them! Get the Aulian!’ Salt, that was the trick wasn’t it? But none of them had thought the forkbeards would send shadewalkers to do their fighting – who would have thought they could? And, besides, shadewalkers only came out at night, didn’t they? How had Sixfingers done this?

  His men were already breaking and running around him, the shadewalkers stumbling after them and then stopping, staggering in the daylight. Valaric screamed a roar of rage and frustration and hewed at the dead thing in front of him. He slammed two blows into its shield, and then it blocked a third with its long sword but the iron blade snapped. Solace carved a line across the shadewalker’s face. The creature howled, its skin fell in on itself, and before Valaric’s eyes it crumbled into dust and bones and a dizzying stench of death. Valaric reeled and swung at the shadewalker strangling one of his Marroc and half severed its head. It too crumbled before him.

  ‘See! They die!’ But he was too late. His men had left him, even Gallow. Fled, and now there were shadewalkers all around and he could feel the tower shake as the forkbeards climbed through its guts, and then suddenly there was one looking right at him with his shield over his shoulder as he climbed. Forkbeards he understood, and this one couldn’t do a thing about it when Valaric lunged. The point of the red sword split the forkbeard’s mail as though it was cloth and bit straight through to his heart. The forkbeard’s eyes rolled back in surprise. He fell limp and dropped among the others behind him. Valaric bared his teeth and grinned: this, this was what he wanted! He was standing at the top of the ladder and the forkbeards had to get past him. He’d kill them all, every single one of them. Alone if he had to.

  ‘Valaric!’

  And he wasn’t alone. On the road behind him the shade-walkers staggered and lurched. Not a single Marroc had stayed, but two men stood firm nevertheless. The Aulian wizard with his satchels of salt and Gallow, battering the shadewalkers away from him.

  From atop the first gate Reddic saw the Marroc surge into the forkbeard tower and then fall back and scatter and break, screaming as though they’d walked into the gaping maw of the Maker-Devourer himself. They ran like they had the devil at their backs and Reddic could see at once that the creatures who stepped onto the road were no forkbeards. They stood in a daze as though they’d never seen the sun. He gasped. ‘Shadewalkers!’

  ‘Look sharp!’ Angry Jonnic didn’t want to know. On the road beneath them the forkbeards were coming, a hundred or more with the ram they’d left short of the gates. A second tower was coming up the road and the next two weren’t far behind. Reddic squinted at where the forkbeards had driven his Crackmarsh brothers away. The walls of the second tier overlooking the ram were already all but abandoned: where there should have been a hundred men with arrows and stones, now there were none. At the start of the day he’d been scared but there’d been a part of him that had thought they might win. Not any more.

  ‘Ladders!’

  The stone quivered under Reddic’s feet as the ram hit the gates. He looked for something to throw but Jonnic caught his arm and shook his head. ‘Wait.’ He pulled Reddic away from the edge and pushed him down behind a merlon then shouted at the others to abandon the gate and go up to the next and pull the ladder up behind them. When Reddic made to get up to join them, Jonnic pushed him down again. ‘I said wait!’ He grinned and his eyes were wild and mad. ‘The six of us up here won’t stop them breaking through. Let them think they’ve got an easy ride of it. Let them think we’ve all run away like the rest. Keep nice and quiet and still. Then we can rain rocks and oil on them when they’re not expecting it. Hurt them where it counts.’

  ‘And then?’

  Jonnic patted Reddic on the shoulder. They both knew what and then looked like. Reddic closed his eyes and shook his head. ‘Scared?’ Jonnic chuckled. ‘There’s no shame in that.’

  But Reddic found he wasn’t really, not any more. He’d gone long past scared and it was something else. ‘There’s a girl up in the castle. We spent Shieftane watching the moon together. I wanted to tell her something but I never did.’ He shrugged and whispered a prayer to Modris the Protector. Beside him Jonnic did the same.

  Valaric killed the next forkbeard to show his head at the top of the ladder. Oribas was scattering lines of salt on the road and Gallow was smashing the shadewalkers away, keeping the Aulian free to do his work. One by one he penned them in, and it seemed to Valaric that these shadewalkers were slow and clumsy and not so frightening after all. Yet there were no other Marroc here now. Just him and Oribas and Gallow against Sixfingers and all his army.

  ‘Come on up, Sixfingers!’ he bellowed. ‘We’re both here. The Foxbeard says I get to have at you first!’

  ‘The sun, Valaric,’ Oribas shouted. ‘The sun steals their strength. But I have no fire to burn them, nor iron to kill them.’

  ‘Your sword, Valaric!’ Gallow had one of them wrestled to the ground and was smashing it over and over but it still thrashed and its mail turned his blade. ‘The red sword. End them! I’ll keep Medrin’s curs whimpering in their holes for you!’

  Valaric ran out from the tower and across the ramp. He smashed the red sword into the head of the one wrestling with Gallow and then watched as the Foxbeard ran to take his place. The red sword hacked down another shadewalker. Now that he was outside he could see the forkbeards were bringing their ram up to the first gate and the Marroc on top were already scaling the rope ladder to the roof of the second, fleeing without putting up a fight. Valaric raised his fists at them all, screaming at the top of his lungs, ‘Cowards! You sheep! You’re everything they say of us! If this is the best we are then we deserve everything they do! Mewling hedge-born clay-hearts, all of you!’ Tears were running down his face. The Crackmarsh men he’d had with him, those surly old soldiers he’d quietly thought as good as any forkbeard, they were all gone, cowering along the zigzag road, past the next gate where they had stone and wood and iron to keep the shadewalkers at bay. Probably none of them could even hear him. No one except the Aulian wizard, who shouldn’t even be here, and Gallow, a forkbeard. It made him want to fall on his own sword.

  The second tower was close. Soon it would reach the road and fall open and there’d be no stopping them. He let out a furious howl, grabbed one of the shadewalkers from behind, picked it up and and threw it over the wall onto the throng of forkbeards below. He t
urned back. ‘I have iron enough for these, Aulian!’ He swung the red sword and listened to the air moan as the steel split the wind. A shadewalker fell with its head torn from its shoulders, the next with its face split in two, a third with the point driven through the back of its skull. They tried to defend themselves, but against the red sword, out in the sun and doused by Oribas’s salt, they were as feeble as children.

  Peacebringer. The red sword wanted them. One by one the shadewalkers crumbled to dust.

  25

  THE RAM

  Amovement from inside the tower caught Valaric’s eye, another forkbeard shield creeping up. Gallow was there. He brought his axe down and the forkbeard beneath bellowed an oath. Valaric laughed. The last two shadewalkers were helpless quivering things, paralysed by Oribas’s salt, and they didn’t even try to stop him as he took their heads. He looked up the road to the third gate, praying to Modris that his Crackmarsh men had found their spines again, but no.

  The second forkbeard tower reached the road and stopped, and even Valaric knew better than to stand alone against the dozen angry forkbeards who’d come howling out of it. He grabbed Oribas, turned and ran, shouting at Gallow as he did and didn’t look back until he reached the elbow where the road turned from the siege towers and second gate behind him and doubled back on itself up towards the third. Past the elbow there were Marroc on the walls over his head again, more men with stones and arrows and fire. Forkbeards were coming out of both of the siege towers now, scores of them, and Gallow still stood alone to face them. Valaric could have murdered him for that. A forkbeard facing dozens of his own kin when a hundred Marroc had been too afraid? And for a heartbeat Valaric thought about running back to Gallow’s side, facing them together, the two of them against the whole of Medrin’s army just like it had been in Andhun. Utter madness, but when he held the red sword he felt immortal.

  The forkbeards were advancing slowly behind a wall of shields, taking their time, content to walk the Foxbeard slowly back. As Valaric watched, an arrow from up on the fourth tier took one of them in the legs. Gallow threw back his head and roared out his challenge once more: ‘Here I am, Medrin! Waiting for you!’ The first gate was being smashed in without a single Marroc holding his ground to defend it. The second gate had the forkbeards from their towers behind it already. They’d just walk up to it and open it.

  Valaric walked through the third gate with the red sword over his shoulder. He growled and looked at the faces around him, the men who’d broken and run at the first drawn sword. But as he prepared to bellow out his furious contempt, Oribas touched his arm. The Aulian took his hand and raised it high, the red sword still firm in Valaric’s gasp. ‘Men of the Varyxhun valley! For years you’ve feared those creatures. Shadewalkers that many of you thought could not be killed. Today one man alone with this sword has destroyed them.’ He dropped Valaric’s arm and lifted one of his satchels of salt. ‘I have fought them too. You saw me. I didn’t kill any and I had no sword, but I didn’t run because I did not need a blade.’ He sprinkled a line of salt across the road. ‘Salt! Nothing more, yet it is like a wall of stone to them. They cannot pass. Throw it on their skin and it burns them like fire. Salt!’ He threw the satchel down and pulled Valaric up the road, muttering under his breath, ‘You’ll have to give salt to every man now. I have no idea how many shadewalkers are in this valley but it’s many more than you put to rest today. Tell them it works on the ironskins too. Men must know how to fight whatever enemy stands before them. You cannot blame them if they run when they do not.’

  Valaric looked back through the open gate at Gallow, still alone, still facing the forkbeards. He didn’t understand why the forkbeards didn’t simply charge and overwhelm Gallow with their numbers. He stopped at the edge of the road and looked down. The ram was still at the first gate but the forkbeards must have smashed through already because he could see them clearing rubble on the other side and trading insults with the Marroc atop the second. Now and then an arrow flew down. One good charge and he still might sweep the forkbeards off the road and smash their towers. One good charge, but that was what the gates were for. So that he didn’t have to. So that he didn’t have to lose so many men, not yet.

  Stuck in his throat though. He yelled down the road at Gallow, ‘Foxbeard! Save it for the sixth gate, not the second.’ He sighed and shook his head because walking away wasn’t what forkbeards did when they could stand and fight instead, however stupid it might be. Yet after a moment Gallow backed away and the forkbeards didn’t follow. Valaric took a deep breath and let it out between his teeth. The second gate wouldn’t hold long, not with forkbeards on both sides. ‘Two gates lost in a single day.’

  Oribas touched his arm. ‘They still have to open it. Then they have to clear the road and bring up their ram and you can drop rocks and arrows on them all the way. Your men have seen that shadewalkers can die now and the forkbeards cannot easily bring those towers any further; and if they do then I have an idea or two about how we might stop them.’ His eyes were gleaming. ‘Imagine many stones hitting the men behind that ramp as it opens. Hitting them very fast and hard.’

  Valaric felt suddenly light-headed. ‘What I want, Aulian, is to imagine the dragon coming out of that cave behind the sixth gate and eating them all. That would do nicely.’

  Gallow was walking through the third gate while the Marroc there all looked away, pretending he didn’t exist, closing the gate behind him. The Aulian was nodding to himself, lost in his own plans. ‘I’ll go back up to the castle now. You’ve got enough carpenters there and rope and wood. I could have one made by sunset. And the dragon of your stories will drown them, not eat them.’

  Valaric unexpectedly sat down, because it was suddenly that or fall over. He felt dizzy and had no idea what the Aulian was talking about. He looked at his feet in front of him. One of his boots was light and one of them was dark. Which was odd because they’d both been light at the start of the day.

  It was blood. ‘Oh . . .’

  Oribas was staring at him. The Aulian knelt down and pushed at the mail surcoat that Valaric wore down to his knees. He poked at something and a sharp pain shot right up Valaric’s spine. ‘One of the shadewalkers.’

  ‘I don’t even feel it.’ Did he want to look? That was a lot of blood, but he’d run all the way up the road so it couldn’t be too bad, could it? But Oribas wasn’t even looking at him. The Aulian was waving his hands at the nearest Marroc and yelling for a mule, and at Gallow, and calling for his satchel, and all with an urgent panic in his eyes. Valaric sat humming to himself. Some old tune his mother had used to sing when he was a boy, one he’d forgotten for years.

  Reddic listened to the forkbeards yell at each other and then tuned his ears for the scrape of wood on stone that would be a ladder but it never came. After another hour, when there still hadn’t been any forkbeards climbing over the battlements, he needed a piss. Jonnic snarled at him. There were forkbeards all over the road below clearing stones so they could move their ram. They hardly weren’t going to notice if some Marroc stood up on the gates and relieved himself over them.

  Reddic turned his head. There were more forkbeards further up the road. The second gatehouse was surrounded. But more to the point, the forkbeards on the second tier could see him if they cared to look down. He couldn’t even sit up. Didn’t dare move at all. After another hour he just let it out. It was an odd feeling, lying down and pissing in his pants. Couldn’t say he could remember ever doing that before. And there they stayed, the two of them alone, lying still as statues because that’s what Jonnic said, while the forkbeards pushed their ram and then their army on up the road.

  Oribas had barely got two Marroc to bring a mule when Valaric tipped over sideways, white as a sheet. Gallow caught him and eased him to the ground but the bleeding was worse than the Aulian had thought and so there wouldn’t be any taking him up to the castle to patch him together. He’d do it here. They needed him. Without Valaric, the Crackmarsh men would simply
break.

  Oribas waved back the Marroc with the mule and beckoned Gallow closer instead. ‘Hold him.’ He eased Valaric onto his back. Blood still ran freely out of his leg, though it should have clotted by now. ‘Pull back his mail.’ He rummaged in his satchel wondering why the wound wasn’t closing. If the shadewalker had hit an artery Valaric would have died back on the road so it wasn’t that, but it just kept bleeding. There were desert animals that used the same trick on their prey. Bit them and then left them to bleed until they were too weak to run. He’d never understood how they did that. Spirits. Bad spirits, his masters had said, which was another way of saying that they didn’t know either.

  ‘I never thought I’d come back,’ said Gallow out of nowhere. ‘It was right that I did. I’ve made myself whole again.’

  Gallow had Valaric’s mail pulled back. ‘Now get his trousers down.’ Needle and thread and Firaxian powders to make the bleeding stop. Marroc clustered to see what he was doing. They stared at him and so Oribas stared back. ‘Do you want to be the ones fighting the shadewalkers? No? Then give me space to work! Fetch some wine. Good strong dark wine. The best you can find.’ It might help Valaric or it might not but it would certainly help an Aulian scholar who’d never been so close to a battle in all his life until Gallow had brought him over the mountains. He set to work with Gallow crouched beside him with his weight on Valaric’s shoulders.

  ‘I made an oath on Shiefa’s night. It was three years to the day since I left Middislet with the Screambreaker. I made an oath in blood, Oribas, a promise to fight no wars once this one is done. And after that I dreamed of how it would be if Medrin Sixfingers simply ceased, if he changed his mind and went home, if there was more to our horizon than bloody war and starving siege and a slow and unwelcome death. Can you do that, Oribas, wizard of Aulia? Can you make Medrin simply disappear?’

  ‘No.’ Oribas snapped. His stitching was ragged and there was blood all over his hands and yes, he was staunching it at last, but far more slowly than he should have. He shouted at the Marroc, ‘Water! Bring water!’