by Ian Whates
“No,” Radulf shook his head, eyes fixed on Aenor’s body. Tears streaked his cheeks.
“Kastell is Aenor’s kin. Remember your oath,” Maquin snarled, knowing kindness would not keep Radulf alive. Then he was moving, picking up Kastell and running. There was a pause and then he heard Radulf’s feet pounding close behind him.
People were running in all directions, a few knots of combat still ringing out. The feast-hall was in flames now, a wall of heat rolling into the yard, the flames sending shadows rippling, dancing like some mad Midsummer’s Eve celebration. All was confusion, screaming, death. Maquin headed for the stables that ringed the courtyard, tripped over a corpse, slipped in blood, righted himself and threw himself into the shadows of the stables. Smoke churned in here, flames crackling in the roof overhead, horses neighing.
“Help me,” Maquin snapped at Kastell as he opened a stable door, the horse inside white-eyed, stamping its hooves. Radulf was behind him and the three of them set to saddling up their mounts.
Taking too long, Maquin thought, the sounds from the courtyard quietening. He hoisted Kastell onto his horse’s back, saw Radulf moving through the stable, opening doors, untying horses, slapping flanks, sending over a score of them charging for the doors.
Radulf leapt onto his own mount’s back. “Now,” the old warrior yelled over the wild neighing and thunder of hooves. They followed the stampeding horses out into the courtyard, saw a giant trampled beneath a tide of hooves, others leaping out of the way. The horses headed for the widest road through the Hold, leading to the eastern gates and Maquin and Radulf followed, leaning low over their horses’ backs.
The gates appeared, open, broken, one hanging from its hinges. The rush of horses swept through them, Maquin close behind. A figure flew from the shadows of a building, a giant grasping at him. It crashed into his mount’s flank, sending them staggering, Kastell crying out. Maquin looked back, saw the giant raising its axe, then a sword hacked into its neck and it was collapsing, Radulf wrenching his blade free.
Other Hunen appeared from the shadows, bellowing warcries.
“Ride on,” Radulf yelled.
Maquin dragged on his reins, trying to turn his mount. Giants closed about Radulf. His horse reared, hooves lashing out, sending a giant crashing, face a bloody ruin. Then an axe swung, cleaved through Radulf’s shoulder and chest, a spray of blood and bone.
Maquin yelled, raw and deep, rage and pain mixed.
The giants about Radulf turned to face him, swept forward, their feet drumming upon the ground. Maquin spurred his horse away, galloped through the gates and out into the night, thundering along the flagstones of the old road.
“Are we safe?” he heard Kastell’s voice, whipped by the wind.
Maquin risked a glance back over his shoulder, saw the broken gates of the Hold highlighted by flames. The silhouette of a Hunen stood outlined there. It raised its war hammer at them.
“It’s all right, lad, we’re away. It’s you and me, now. I’ll keep you safe. I gave you my oath, remember.” Maquin blinked away his tears and rode into the night.
The Singer
Stella Gemmell
Amy lay in the darkness listening to the small voice singing, fraying her nerve-ends, just above the threshold of her hearing. In the depths of the night, full of incoherent dread, she dug her husband in the ribs once, twice, and at last Rob rolled over.
“What?” he mumbled. Then, “Lord, not again!”
“I wish he’d stop,” she whispered, trying to sound merely worried rather than breathless with fear.
They both listened. It was a wild night outside. Gusts of wind rocked the old cottage and rain sluiced down the window above their heads. At times, for a while, they could hope he had stopped. But then the din of the storm would die a little and they would hear the boy’s piping, relentless voice.
“He keeps singing the same words,” Rob said.
Amy sat up. “Of course he does!” she told him angrily, a part of her glad to crack the tension. “He has to go back to the beginning if he gets something wrong. How did you not know that? This has been going on for weeks now!”
But there was nothing but silence from the other side of the bed and after a while she lay down again. Rob always refused to get into an argument.
“Does he ever get to the end?” he asked her after a while.
She shook her head. Then, because he could not see her, she said, “No. He gets tired and makes mistakes, or he falls asleep.”
“What would happen if he did?”
The pitiless sun burned down on the dead and the dying. The parched desert soaked up the blood, all the blood shed that day, and thirsted for more. Bodies blanketed the gritty sand in bright shades of red and green and blue, and more red. By the end of the day the colours would have turned to brown and grey and black.
Cuchlain the Battle King threw himself from his horse and ordered a boy to give the beast some water. Most of the horses were dead now, but a king could not walk into battle and this last mount would have to live at least as long as he did.
“How many?” he asked his brother, Agrain, his inevitable question. He was not asking how many had died that day, just how many lived to fight again tomorrow.
“Five hundred and forty seven,” his brother replied promptly. Cuchlain glared at him, daring him to lie, but Agrain’s face was invisible, hooded against the fierce sun. There was no breeze, there had not been the breath of a breeze for more than a hundred days. They ducked together into the tent which was, if anything, hotter than outside. Cuchlain tore off his helm and snatched up the jug of water and drained it, letting some splash over his face and down his neck.
Then the other question he asked each day. “Is the boy still singing?”
Agrain nodded and Cuchlain felt the clutch of dread in his belly and a random, treacherous thought: How could I ever think I could conquer this place?
“What happens when he stops?” he asked.
Days dragged past, each one a torment. Inside the fortress conditions were as bad as those outside. Food had long since run out, the dogs and cats had vanished and even brown rats were scarcely seen. Most of the wells were dry and all the water, for a thousand-odd people, came from the last and deepest of the wells, which was guarded and its water carefully rationed. Daily it turned darker and muddier and all knew that when it ran out they would soon die. But inside there was at least shade within the ancient walls, and coolness deep in its dungeons where today’s prisoners were there of their own choosing; they were the women and children and old folk, existing each day in the dark waiting for death by thirst or under the invaders’ swords.
Among them was Aska, who had been daughter, wife, mother, grandmother and great-grandmother and in her hundred-some years had seen all her family die of disease or in childbirth or war. She was the oldest person within the walls. She was quite alone in the world, but as her body shrank to skin and ropey sinew and bone so the hot gleam in her eyes became brighter. She claimed to remember the last time the fortress was under siege, a century before, when the boy singer had first appeared. He had sung then until the siege ended.
“When the boy stops singing the fortress will fall,” she said to her captive audience, her voice bone-dry and sharp with prescience.
“When the boy stops singing the siege will end,” the shaman accompanying the invading forces had told the Battle King.
Cuchlain had nodded briskly, as if that was what he anticipated. It seemed to satisfy him, and not one among his knights dare point out the ambiguity of the prediction.
“Then kill him,” he had ordered.
But it seemed the singer could not be killed, for though his voice was heard throughout the fort and among the invading forces beyond, he was seldom seen, and only then as a slender, insubstantial figure glimpsed on turret or crenellation. Men murmured that they had seen him walk through the warriors’ camp at night, stepping among the sleepers, his feet barely touching the ground. They said he wa
s heard amid the crash and clash of battle, and in the cries of dying men, and in the songs of the stars.
He is a ghost; a ghost cannot be killed, the knights whispered among themselves. Our arrows will fly right through him. He is a dream, some said, and we will only awaken from it when we are dying.
He has a throat, a thing of flesh and sinew, to sing with, rational Agrain argued. He can be killed.
But the best of bowmen – and these were not the best, for their eyes were parched gritty and their arms weak from hunger and thirst – could not have hit the distant, indistinct shape, even when they could spot him. In his fury the Battle King ordered them all killed and only his brother’s cool-headedness saw the order reversed at the last moment. The shaman had already been put to death many days before.
“Let’s wake him up,” said Rob a few days, and long nights, later. “Perhaps he’ll go to sleep again and forget his dream.”
“He’s not asleep,” Amy repeated tiredly. “I’ve been in there a dozen times and he’s wide awake and I tell him to snuggle down and sleep. I tell him he’s keeping us awake. I tell him he’ll make himself ill. He says he has to get the words right, then he can go to sleep, but he never does. He’s very upset.”
“I’ll talk to him,” Rob said, swinging his legs out of bed.
“You won’t stop him. He’ll just sing more quietly.”
“Good enough,” he said.
On the last morning the sun did not show its face. Dawn was an eerie lightening of the sky, green and yellow streaks staining the horizon. Clouds hung low over the land, clouds heavy with fate. The Battle King’s remaining soldiers had not the strength to climb the siege ladders, far less fight. The defenders, all of them injured, most of them dying, propped themselves up on the walls, weapons to hand, and looked up into the lowering sky.
The boy sang on.
“We must do something! We’re getting no sleep. He’s getting no sleep. We can’t go on like this!”
“He sleeps during the day,” Amy said, but she knew her husband was right. The boy was pale and gaunt, his eyes dark with pain. Wherever he went to at night, it was draining the life from him.
“We could sing it for him,” Rob suggested. “We know the words well enough, for Christ’s sake.”
“We don’t know all of them. We don’t know how the song ends.”
They looked at each other.
“Do you know the words?” they asked him. “Do you know the end? Tell us the words and we’ll sing it for you tonight. Then you can get some sleep.”
The boy was tearful, weighed down with his burden. He shook his head. “It has to be me. I have to be there.”
Cuchlain the Battle King crawled up the wall at dead of night, his knife in his teeth. His once-burly frame carved to a spectre, his eyes hot and hungry, he climbed like a black spider up the high wall of the southernmost turret. No sane man would attempt it, but he was no longer sane. His knights were all dead. The only man left alive was his brother, who clung to life alone in the tent surrounded by blood-encrusted weapons.
The stones of the wall were each the size of a fist and they were crumbling and treacherous, but Cuchlain managed to cling on, to keep climbing on this, his last attack, for attack was all he knew.
He grasped the top of the wall and heaved himself up. For a long while he lay there, gasping, hurting, reckless of the enemy. And there were no defenders now; the few who remained no longer expected a night attack and many of them feared the boy singer more than they feared the forces of the Battle King. Most were lying deep in the cool dungeons with their kinfolk.
The singing was loud and clear up here and Cuchlain lifted his head and looked about him. Mist swirled along the tops of the walls and around the turrets, and through it he could see another turret, a taller one, the tallest of all and the figure standing at its top, in plain view, his head lifted to the darkness, his voice clear as water.
Cuchlain struggled to his feet, paused for breath then stalked along the wall, eyes feverishly fixed on the boy. He stepped into the darkness of the turret and saw stairs spiralling upward. He climbed them, his heart lifting with hope. At the top he walked out into the mist and saw the small boy standing on the low turret wall. He was hardly a dozen paces away and perched high above the lethal drop on to the stones below. Cuchlain took his knife in his hand and moved toward him.
The boy turned and saw him and his voice paused for a heartbeat. The king grinned.
Then the boy opened his mouth. “The valiant warrior scaled the wall, his trusted blade his only friend,” he sang, his clear young voice sharp as silver.
Cuchlain, lifting his knife to strike, hesitated.
“Unarmoured, he braved the demon’s eye and fell to his doom upon the sward.”
The Battle King lunged forward but the figure of the boy drifted like mist and the knife thrust through nothing but darkness. Cuchlain lost his balance and stumbled, falling forward over the low wall and plunging down to smash on the stones below.
When Agrain struggled from his tent in the dawn, weak and half-maddened by blood-loss and by thirst, he found his brother lying broken on a gentle slope of green grass which led down to a lazy, sunlit river. Of the fortress and all its people there was no sign.
The boy never again sang at night, indeed he showed no interest in singing for the rest of his life. He soon forgot about those strange experiences and his father did too, but Amy kept them close to her heart and sometimes, after midnight when she thought she heard a distant voice raised in song, she would shudder.
Sandrunners
Anthony Ryan
Blue for the mind. Green for the body. Red for the fire. Black for the push… And white. She paused in the recitation to issue a giggle, so shrill and barely controlled she could scarcely credit it came from her own mouth. White for the madness.
The sand gave way beneath her feet, tipping her face first into the dune she had been climbing, rust stinging her lips and invading her mouth. She choked and gagged, finding she had no spit to clear the metallic tang and scraping at her mouth with feverish fingers. “The Red Sands,” Wittler had said when they first caught sight of the crimson dunes three days gone. He had shouldered his long-rifle and crouched to scoop up a handful of the red dust. “Except it ain’t sand, Miss Ethy. See?” He held out his hand and she peered at the tiny flakes in his palm. “Rusted,” Wittler said, holding his hand up to let the wind take the flakes away. “All that’s left of whatever stood here before the Crater.”
The crater… She stifled a sob, closing her eyes against the memory. Only a day ago, when Wittler had still been kind. Big and scary, but also kind…
The bullet gave a soft whine as it careered past her ear and buried itself in the dune barely an inch from her head. She gave a hoarse shout and jerked to her feet, reeling to the right, then the left, scrambling up the dune in a cloud of dust, hoping to confuse his aim. Six seconds to reload a long-rifle. Never saw him miss before.
The second shot came as he crested the dune, plucking the sleeve of her duster, leaving her arm numb but unbloodied as she tumbled down the far side in a tangle. She reached the bottom with a pained yelp, lying spent but forcing herself to wait for the dust to settle before drawing breath.
Must’ve been at full range, she decided when her babbling thoughts calmed enough to draw a conclusion. Puts him a mile behind me, less if he’s out of Green. Green or not, the two missed shots told another story, even at full range Wittler wouldn’t have missed twice. He’s truly as mad as a Blue-soaked dog.
Blue… She sat up, trembling hands exploring the felt-cushioned box on her belt, sighing in explosive relief on finding her vials unbroken. She held them up to the light one by one. All the Red had gone back at the Crater, when the night grew so cold they thought they’d freeze before morning. The Green was still two thirds full, but still best kept for direst need. The Black was reduced to just a smear at the base of the vial, and the Blue… Enough for only one more taste.
She resisted the impulse to gulp it down there and then. She won’t be expecting me yet, she knew, recalling a deeply instilled mantra. When the sun’s half-set. Not before. Not after.
She returned the vials to the box and reached for her pack, feeling what was inside roll a little. Checking it for cracks was redundant. They never break. But still she undid the straps and peered down at the pale, round shape, fingers tracing over the marble-like surface and finding it cold. They were always chilled to the touch, waiting for the waking fire.
She closed the pack and got to her feet, eyes scanning the surrounding dunes for the most likely course. Getting clear of this desert was her first priority, back to the badlands where at least there was cover. Out here she risked Wittler’s eye every time she climbed a dune and what were the odds he’d miss three times?
She unslung the canteen from her shoulder, still half full thanks to the company’s strict water discipline, and washed the iron from her mouth before taking a drink. Only as much as you need, Wittler had said every time they filled the canteens. Never as much as you want. Indulgence kills out here. He had smiled his kind smile, big hand resting on her shoulder for a second, eyes warm, so different from the wild, terrorised stare she saw back at the Crater. And his voice, hissing, thick with accusation: “Miss Ethy… You know what I saw…”
She started for a low series of dunes to the north, hoping he’d stick to the higher ground, and moved on at a half-run, fighting memories.
They had set out from Carvenport near two months before, five seasoned members of the Honourable Contractor Company of Sandrunners and their newest recruit. Ethelynne Drystone, recently granted employee status in the Ironship Trading Syndicate, officially contracted Blood-blessed to the Sandrunners. She was the youngest Academy graduate to ever accept such a position, and not without opposition.
“I had hoped sanity might prevail,” Madame Bondersil had said with a faint sigh of exasperation as Ethelynne stood before her desk. “Clearly twelve years of my tutelage was insufficient to imbue you with basic common sense.”
