Arrows were leaping at them now, and Yorughan bows were vicious things: no more than four feet long, thick as a man’s arm and needing their giant’s strength even to bend. Celestaine saw three of Thukrah’s soldiers punched off their feet by the arrows, shafts splintering with the impacts. The rest were pelting forwards, leading with small shields or just barging shoulder-first, trusting to their heavy pauldrons to deflect the arrows. Amkulyah, still about Ned’s shoulders like a monkey, returned the favour, pitching a shaft ahead of the charge that struck the middle defender over his shield-rim and through the roof of his mouth.
Most of the general’s people were below now, and Heno dropped after them, straightening his coat and shaking his sleeves out. He looked slightly exasperated with the whole business, and even more so when there was a flash of cold white fire from beyond the arch, and Thukrah started shouting for the Shur-meh to get front and centre.
Celestaine and Heno hustled over, finding Thukrah’s people bunched either side of the arch and a couple of fractured, frozen corpses strewn in the middle to show why.
“They’ve got a Heart Taker?” she demanded, and the general nodded curtly.
“What, you didn’t think the whole gang would be together?” Heno needled, and Thukrah slapped him across the head, staggering him sideways. Celestaine had her blade up, but Heno was waving her to stand down, licking at a trickle of blood from where his scrimshawed tusk had gashed his cheek.
“Battlefield order,” Thukrah growled, and she understood. Sure, the regulars and the ‘Slackers’ didn’t see eye to eye, but there was no time for infighting when the lines were drawn.
“I see three in Taker robes,” Amkulyah reported. Nedlam was standing in line with the arch, but well back. Apparently Aethani eyes were good enough in the murk. “One older, definitely in charge.” He glanced around, unnerved to find so many Yorughan listening to him so intently. “Probably twenty soldiers, but they’re keeping either side like we are, so could be more.”
“Tell me of the chief Slacker,” Thukrah demanded.
“Almost as tall as Nedlam, but thin, eaten-away-like,” Kul reported. Celestaine saw his huge pupils expand and contract as he focused. “Has a big staff with a caged skull. The skull’s on fire, the white fire they do.”
“Skull…?” That obviously threw Thukrah a little.
“Big skull, bigger than yours,” Amkulyah confirmed.
“White hair like mine?” Heno asked, and the Aethani nodded.
“Shulamak,” Thukrah and Heno said at the same time, and the general added, “Balls. Thought he was long dead.”
“Trouble?” Celestaine asked.
“Have to find out.” Thukrah bellowed something that was patently, ‘Oi, you in there!’
Heno leaned in to Celestaine’s ear and murmured a translation. Despite the imminent violence, it was a weirdly intimate moment and she shivered.
Thukrah was demanding their surrender and telling them the Kinslayer—the ‘Reckoner’—was dead, and the Yorughan had their own destiny now. He called out to Shulamak by name, telling him that even Heart Takers could walk under the sky now.
Shulamak laughed, and said that the Yorughan would never walk free until all the others were dead. The Reckoner’s dream still lived, he said. If not now, then they would come from the earth tomorrow, a year’s, a hundred years’ time.
Thukrah sighed and chuckled loudly, asking if they wouldn’t rather have the sky now, even if there were humans under it? He would, certainly. He could look up every day and see the sun, how warm it was on his face. And the Reckoner was dead—why, he had the woman here who’d done it, right here fighting alongside him. She’d carved the old boy up like a seven-hand rabbit—Heno’s literal translation, and Celestaine had no idea what it meant—and where did that leave Shulamak’s dreams now? Come on, old man, the general pressed. Come up under the sky, enjoy the breeze.
There was a growing murmur amongst the Yorughan in the next room that Celestaine took for longing. They had been beneath the earth all their lives, until the war had hurled them across the free nations in a burning tide. But they loved the sun, this much she understood. They hated the dark, cramped spaces and the crushing weight of stone above, because they had found something better.
But then Shulamak was speaking again, voice rich with contempt. The Reckoner was not gone, Heno translated. The Reckoner was right here… And then Heno faltered and stopped speaking and a lash of shock went through Thukrah’s people. Celestaine saw the cold light grow, and then the cadaverous Heart Taker was virtually in the archway, brandishing his staff, rattling the fanged, outsized skull in its brass cage.
“He says he has the Kinslayer there!” Heno spat. “His skull, his spirit. He says he’ll bring it back.” And then Shulamak was chanting a single phrase over and over, and his followers were chiming in. Celestaine knew it from the battlefield—it had rung in her ears during more than one retreat from the victorious Yorughan. “Schor harkt na!” Masters of all.
“That’s not his skull,” she shouted. “His head wasn’t even that big!”
But events were already out of control. Thukrah was bellowing orders, but one of his own people suddenly turned and tried to stab him in the face. The blade cut a black line across his cheek, crossing the old axe scar, and then Shulamak and his people rushed through the arch, the blazing skull their banner, and everyone was fighting everyone else.
In those first moments Celestaine had no idea how many traitors Thukrah was facing, or whether it was her and her friends against the whole pack of them. She just went straight towards Shulamak, to fight Yorughan who were, at least, definitely his people rather than the general’s, until the old Heart Taker fell prudently back into his chamber again.
She made speed her ally, and her pale human face, too—every enemy Yorughan wanted to kill her, for Thukrah had told them exactly what sacrilege she’d committed. Probably too late now for her usual self-effacing, It wasn’t just me, and besides, for once she wanted to own the damn deed. Yes, I killed your cursed Reckoner. Reckon with that! They wanted to kill her so much they got in each other’s way. She saw one axeman whip his weapon back to swing at her and bury it in the face of his closest ally, and another warrior slammed into the body and sprawled practically at Celestaine’s feet. She dropped low to stab the luckless fighter in the back of the neck, crouching behind the angle of her blade so that the axeman’s eventual stroke just parted head from haft and left him holding a truncated piece of stick. Fighting from your knees was another tactic her swordmaster would have yelled at her for, but he hadn’t owned a sword like hers. In the baffled moment where the axeman stared at his little stump she swung her sword in a flat arc half a foot from the ground and the closest four Yorughan lost their feet at the ankles. She leapt up with a cry as they dropped all around her and came face to face with one of the junior Heart Takers, his hands on fire with white light as he prepared to rip her lungs from her body.
She had time to say, “Arses,” before Amkulyah’s arrow pierced the mage through one ear and out the other, the Heart Taker’s eyes crossing in a moment of perfect, inadvertent comedy before he fell. Nedlam bowled up a moment later, Kul still using her helmed head like a rampart to shoot over.
“We need to get in, to the chief mage!” Celestaine shouted.
“Leave it to—” Nedlam started and then Kul lunged past her face with his bow, a blur of lithe movement. Celestaine didn’t see the enemy arrow at all, just head the sharp clack! as it deflected from his bowstave and rattled off towards the ceiling, rather than spitting Nedlam’s face. For a second she and the Yorughan just stared at each other, putting together what had happened.
“Whatever you’re doing, do it!” Amkulyah shouted, and Celestaine snapped out of it, looking around for Thukrah.
She found him with his back to the wall, beside the archway. There were four dead soldiers at his feet, all clad as his men, and she had no idea how many had been trying to kill him. In one hand he had his Arven
nir sword, in the other his hooked goad, both arms gory to the elbows. His face was running with blackish blood, but he had a grin for her when she ran up.
“Right, then,” he said, as though she was slightly late for an appointment. “I say we go in there and cut Shulamak a new eyesocket.”
A blaze of white fire cut through the door, sending Thukrah’s men stumbling back, but he seemed not even slightly deterred. At least the incursion from Shulamak had been contained, and all the surviving enemy were next door again.
“Slacker,” said Thukrah to Heno.
“Fire with fire?”
“Yaro yaro e, right,” the general agreed. Then he raised his voice and addressed the rest of his people, presumably saying something like, ‘The rest of you no-goods be ready to go.’
“Hold,” Celestaine told him. “They’re all about the doorway, right? And they’ve got two mages left, Shulamak and Shulamak Junior, or whoever.”
Thukrah chuckled. “Your point?”
“Heno holds the arch; fire with fire, like you say. Ned and a bunch of your people, have them follow me.”
“Through the door?” Thukrah waggled his eyebrows to suggest he didn’t rate her chances.
“Not exactly. Just follow.” Crossing back past the arch, she realised she hadn’t felt alive like this since she cut the hand from the Kinslayer, and what did that say about her precisely?
Chapter Eleven
“WHILE THERE IS much to be said for the Perspicacious Lens of Glyssa,” Doctor Catt remarked, “one is forced to conclude that Glyssa, whoever in fact she was, only ever wanted to look at things that were plentifully well lit, because I am having the scabs’ own job making out what is going on.”
Doctor Fisher just grunted and peered down into the courtyard where General Thukrah’s stand-in was maintaining loyalty by dint of all-comers weapons training.
The two of them were perched up on the wall of Bleakmairn, concealed from view by the powers of Incantor’s Gauze. Catt had been squinting into a blue glass disc for some time, seeing confused images of fighting Yorughan with the occasional glimpse of Celestaine’s face showing as a pale blur.
“I don’t even understand why they’re all fighting one another,” he complained mildly.
“Yoggs,” Fisher said dismissively. He pulled down the peak of his Cheriveni army cap, an accessory he had in no way earned the right to wear, and made a great show of trying to nap.
“Well, even so.” Catt shivered. He had not, of course, rushed to the recruiting sergeant to have his name put down for the army. He was a gentleman of a certain age and disposition, after all: not for him the push of pike. Not that he hadn’t done his little bit to further the war effort, after all, with the gathering of intelligence and one reluctant poisoning, but he had always tried to stay well away from the Yorughan. Their robust physicality intimidated him.
“If you get a chance,” he added, “could you just put a fresh shine on Torquil the Majestic’s Opal Dweomer-Shield? It sounds as though they have quite a few Heart Takers down there, and I really don’t fancy them detecting our shrouding and coming to take a look.”
Fisher sighed theatrically, but did the honours with the little bejewelled buckler, scattering the traces of their magic so that only the most diligent of mage-hounds could pinpoint them.
“We’d be in an abysmal predicament should this chance to be a wasted venture,” Catt went on, peering into the lens and then wincing as Celestaine seemed to escape death by a hair’s breadth. “Oh, do come on, young lady, bring matters to a prompt conclusion. I know that our interests are about to diverge sharply, but I would rather not have sent you to an early demise.”
Fisher snorted, and Catt eyed him testily. “Is something snort-worthy?”
“You like her.”
“Well don’t you? Slayer of Kinslayers, et cetera?”
“And you’ll still rob her.”
“Ah, if there were any other way.”
“Plenty of other ways,” Fisher pointed out.
“Very well, if there were any other way that didn’t take more effort than this one.”
“There we go.” Fisher shook his head with a rueful grin. “This is why I like you, Catt.”
“Well, that’s that sorted, then,” Doctor Catt observed. “Some day I may discover why I like you, or even if. Oh, now, wait—what’s she doing?” He squinted, tilting the lens as though he could shed more light within it. “Oh, now that’s rather clever…”
HENO STRODE FORWARDS, staff raised before him.
“Shulamak!” he challenged. “Seo chak!” and then another phrase Celestaine remembered from the battlefield. “Ho yaro ser!” Test your fire! The cry of the Heart Taker to his comrades commanding forth their power.
“Heno na a?” came Shulamak’s voice, and then a torrent of what was clearly abuse.
Heno laughed, that rich warm sound that so often presaged devastation. “He says I betray our order, to be standing on this side of the wall!” he shouted, for Celestaine. “How much more, if he knew I’d brought down his Kinslayer?”
The howl of outrage suggested Shulamak understood Middle Kingdom speech well enough, as Heno had doubtless guessed, and then spears of white fire were leaping through the archway, making Thukrah’s soldiers cringe back. Heno dropped into a fighting stance, his hands sheathed in jagged light, catching each shaft as it came and hurling it back, like so many javelins. Celestaine heard at least one scream from the far side of the arch as Heno banked a shot past Shulamak and into his troops.
I could watch him all day, she thought wistfully, but she had her own plan to put into motion.
She chose her spot, eight feet to the arch’s left. A glance showed Nedlam’s reassuring bulk at her shoulder, bloodied cleavers ready for action. Amkulyah fit an arrow to his string. A score and more of Thukrah’s soldiers were crowded in behind, keeping plenty of space between them and Heno.
She spared one more glance for her Heart Taker. He had given a foot of ground and his face was locked into an expression of concentration, rather than his usual scornful grin. Shulamak was testing him, and she didn’t want to wait to find out who was the stronger.
She dropped the point of her sword so that it touched the boundary between floor and wall, and pushed.
The dense stone fought her, but this wasn’t her first time as improvisational architect. She knew when to lean into it, when to let the steel find its own way. She thrust the blade in six inches, guessing at the thickness of the wall, then hauled up, keening the edge through stone and severing the very bones of the earth. At head height she turned the straight stroke into a cleaving arc that would hopefully run high enough to give even Nedlam head room, and then drew the blade back down with no more than the occasional spark. When she was young, she’d heard a story about a child with a magic quill, that could draw a door in a wall that could be walked through. All she lacked was the ability to close the portal afterwards.
She finished the cut with a straight flick along the base and then stepped back, because there were some tasks Nedlam was just plain better at. The huge Yorughan took two steps back, shrugged Amkulyah onto her right shoulder, and then whooped out a warcry and rammed the demarcated wall with her left, shunting out a door-shaped wedge of stone and not stopping, running right into the other room with Thukrah’s soldiers at her back.
Celestaine waited until the rush was gone before following, because being in a press of bodies with a sword of infinite sharpness was always a bad idea. She made sure she was right on their heels, though, and her heart was pounding with a sheer childish excitement. She couldn’t help it. She’d seen the unstoppable Yorughan charge so often—always from the wrong end. She’d seen their ferocity in battle, matched only by their courage and their discipline. Like every enemy of the Kinslayer, she’d hated them: their tusked faces, their strength, their sheer unwillingness to give. But she’d thrilled to them too, in a perverse way. She couldn’t help admiring them even when she was steeped in their dark bl
ood, when she was fighting for her life or to give the civilians time to escape. They were an elemental force, and in her dreams she’d explored what it would be like to be one of them, to be a part of that thundering momentum. She threw back her head and did her best shot at the long ragged sound that had struck fear into her so often. It didn’t sound much like it should, but it felt good.
Thukrah’s people had got stuck in, driving towards where Shulamak was still launching his power at Heno. For as long as Heno could hold him, the old Heart Taker should be out of the fight. More Yorughan were scrambling out from another chamber, some unarmoured or half-dressed, many looking scrawnier than usual. Presumably the hold-outs hadn’t had the chance to lay in much of a larder.
Still, they were trying to flank her side, and so she met them head on, using the staccato flaring of the magical fight to light her way. The first few hadn’t even seen her—she caught a pair of archers still frantically stringing their bows and cut them without slowing, enough to put them out of the fight. Her next swing lopped the head from a spear that someone thrust her way, the shortened shaft ramming her shoulder painfully and bringing her up short. She cursed and took three quick steps back, because if a Yorughan got into grappling with her, it wouldn’t go well. Her enemy was just staring at the stick in his hands, though, and then he had a foot-long dagger out but was backing away, plainly not up for this sort of nonsense right now. He had a bolder friend, though, a broad Yorughan woman who came howling for Celestaine with one of their heavy hacking swords. She tried to clip the blade above the quillons, but her enemy was quicker than she’d thought, so she got the hand behind the wrist instead. Looking past her suddenly ashen opponent, Celestaine saw she had the undivided attention of at least a dozen of the Yorughan second wave, but none of them wanted to be next. It was an education, really. She remembered them as the indomitable masters of battle, unstoppable in attack, dangerous even in retreat, often fighting down to the very last when their master demanded it. That master was gone, though—and the skull was perhaps not the substitute Shulamak hoped. They were hungry and beaten, cut off from the sky. This wasn’t the field they wanted to die on.
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