It was going to be a long night.
Voth led Tyvian, Eddereon, and the two Delloran pseudo-knights out of the camp and away from the battle. Mort and Hambone had the armoire between them, running at a steady pace despite the weight. Tyvian and Eddereon, swords drawn, menaced away anybody who came close. It worked—very few wanted to challenge a squad of men carrying furniture when there were a lot of other men running around with torches trying to burn down tents. They were outside the camp in a matter of minutes.
“Oy!” Hambone called out. “This here is heavy! Let’s have a rest, eh?”
Voth pointed to Tyvian and Eddereon. “You two—switch off with them! Hurry up! The rendezvous point is less than a mile off.”
Tyvian found himself carrying the back end of the armoire. It was devilishly heavy, made more so by the fact that Artus was inside throwing his weight around in awkward ways. It was like carrying a trunk with a wildcat inside. Good lad, he thought to himself, keep it up.
The ring was like a hot dollop of lead on his finger, dragging his arms down and punishing him with every step. Eddereon must have felt the same way, as he kept releasing the armoire with his ring hand to shake it around. They were at the rear of the party, now—Voth, Mort, and Hambone were scouting ahead, Voth lighting the way with a small feylamp. It was all the two of them could do to keep up.
“Eddereon,” Tyvian panted. “Do you . . . have the materials?”
Eddereon glanced over his shoulder. He also sounded winded. “Yes.”
“Don’t hesitate! When it’s time, just go for it. I’ll back you up.”
“This won’t work, Tyvian,” Eddereon said, adjusting his grip on the armoire. “She isn’t right for this.”
Tyvian’s shoulders and arms burned with fatigue. “None of us were. Just do it!”
Behind a small tool shed built beside a rusty old pump, there was a wagon with a two-horse team already hitched. Voth leapt into the seat. “Throw it in the back—come on!”
Eddereon and Tyvian, with the last of their strength, hoisted the armoire into the bed of the wagon and hopped up next to it. Voth was already ordering the horses forward. Tyvian rested against the side of the wagon and looked back for the first time. The camp burned with dozens of individual fires. “Kroth’s teeth—the whole thing is going up. All this over Artus?”
Eddereon’s face looked bloody in the flickering red glow of the night. “No—all this for a symbol.”
Tyvian pursed his lips. Of course, of course—Artus was not a boy, he was a prince. Though they were concurrent states, they were not equivalent. Sahand wanted a prince captured, and if that meant a whole camp needed to burn, then so be it. It was just too easy to forget the world saw Artus differently than he did.
“He saw us,” Eddereon whispered. “He recognized me.”
“Me too. Which is why we can’t screw this up.”
Eddereon frowned—wanting to argue further perhaps—but there was no time. He nodded. “I’ll be ready.”
The wagon rattled down a rutted old road that circled the city walls. The battle left them behind—they passed one gate, two. At the third gate, Voth swung the wagon toward the city. They were now on the northwest side. The gate in front of them was small and looked unmanned. When they came close, Voth threw back her hood and called up to the gatehouse. “I am Adatha Voth. Open in the name of Banric Sahand!”
They didn’t have to wait long. The gates swung open on counterweights and they rode through—no one challenged them. Once the gates boomed closed behind them, Voth began to relax a bit. She smiled back at her team. “We are all going to be rich beyond our wildest dreams, gentlemen.”
All four sets of eyes turned toward her did not reflect the mirth she had expected. “Gods, don’t tell me the lot of you were taken by the whole Young Prince myth, were you?”
Hambone looked at his hands. “He were a good sort.”
Mort prodded his swollen jaw. “Hell of a left, I’ll give the boy that.”
Voth pulled up her sleeve, revealing a leather bracer in which were sheathed four throwing knives. “Nobody give me any reason to use these.” She pointed at Tyvian. “Especially you.”
Mort whistled low. “Lover’s quarrel, Duchess?”
“Something like that,” Tyvian said. He kept his eyes on the streets, on the windows of the houses they passed. Not a light in any of them, and everything boarded up as though for a storm. The city wasn’t abandoned, though—people were hiding, probably huddled in their root cellars or under beds, waiting for the battle to end.
Tyvian looked at Hambone. “I’ve got to know—why’d you choose Sahand over him?” He kicked the side of the armoire, which still thumped occasionally from the efforts of its prisoners.
“Whatcha mean?” Hambone asked.
“The Young Prince here saved your life—you said so yourself. He treated you with respect, he counted you among his friends. Why betray a man like that for a man like Banric Sahand?”
Hambone laughed. “That don’t even make sense.”
“What doesn’t?”
“You can’t understand ’cause you’re not from Dellor,” Mort said. “If you’re from Dellor, you understand.”
Eddereon was trying to catch his eye—Tyvian knew Eddereon wanted to spring their trap, and now, but he couldn’t. Not until he got his answer. “Try to make me understand, Mort.”
In the distance, a church bell began to ring. It was echoed by another, and then another. Eddereon sniffed the air—it smelled faintly of smoke. “The White Army has breached the walls. If we’re headed to the castle, we’d better hurry.”
Voth chuckled. “We’re in no danger, trust me.”
Tyvian turned his attention back to the Dellorans. “Well?”
Mort prodded at his bruised jaw. “In Dellor, we’ve got nothing—nothing. There’s barely any food, no big cities, no roads worth using—nothing like this down here.” The big man shrugged. “Tell you a story: when my da was a boy, he watched my uncle and his parents starve to death one winter, only he didn’t know it was happening. They just kept passing the food down, ya know? Kept the youngest alive. Fur trappers found him come spring. He thought his family had just been sleeping. For a week.”
Hambone nodded. “That happened to my cousin. Happens often enough, if you catch a bad break. My sister was taken by folk like that—they lost their claim in the mine and went to banditry.”
Tyvian’s mouth had gone dry. “What happened to her?”
Hambone shook his head. “Never found out. Figure they ate her or something. Some folk do that.”
“Did that,” Mort corrected him. “Not since Sahand. He put a stop to it.”
“My father joined Sahand’s army when it went south,” Hambone added. “He didn’t come back, but Sahand paid my mother his weight in silver for not bringing him home.”
“You southlanders think about Sahand, and you think of an invader,” Mort said, “but we see him as a provider. Everything I got—everything my family’s got, everything anybody I ever knew got—they got from the hand of the Prince of Dellor.” Mort pointed at the armoire. “The boy prince can keep his respect. Me? I’ll take food for my family and my weight in silver to my wife. No one else can give me that.”
“By pillaging other countries?” Tyvian asked.
“Look around,” Mort countered. “You shits got enough.”
Tyvian did look around—at the quaint little houses and the cheery tavern signs, the flowers in the window boxes and the glitter of the occasional iron street lamp, the pretty statues and the plazas full of big trees. Mort was right. They did have enough. More than, in fact.
Tyvian reflected that the last time he had been here was when he first met Artus. The boy had been a filthy street urchin then, a foot shorter and skinny as a colt. Tyvian had picked him off the street for his profile, considering it inherently aristocratic. Now the boy was a prince, and Tyvian was about to dump him right back in the place he’d found him. The irony left a bad ta
ste in his mouth.
Almor Castle—the seat of the counts of Ayventry—seemed to spring out of nowhere, popping into view as they rounded a corner as though they’d turned the page in a storybook. The castle was comparatively new, having been rebuilt after the end of the last war. It had a contemporary style—soaring windows and dagger-sharp spires, flying buttresses and a gold-leafed central dome. Tyvian didn’t need to be a mage to know that, while the place looked fragile, it had enough wards and defensive abjurations placed upon it that it could likely withstand any conventional siege.
Unlike the rest of the city, Almor was positively bustling with activity. Delloran mercenaries were marshaling in the plaza before the gates and marching off to repulse invaders, and the battlements were full of Sahand’s command staff, eyeing the battle on the other side of the town through Kalsaari spyglasses and dispatching couriers here and there. Somewhere in there was an anygate that led directly to Sahand himself—Tyvian would bet his life on it—and that was where they were about to go.
He and Eddereon were running out of time.
They couldn’t spring their trap in the field, and not in the gates, and they certainly couldn’t spring it in a plaza full of Delloran soldiers. They had to do it now. Tyvian nodded to Eddereon.
Eddereon reached over the side of the moving wagon, grabbed the rim of the wheel, and broke it with a quick, ring-enhanced wrench of his hand. The wagon lurched to a halt, causing Mort and Hambone to tumble over into the front of the wagon bed and almost sending Voth flying onto the backs of the horses.
“Kroth’s teeth!” she snarled and hopped down to the street to inspect the damage. “Krothing cut-rate wheels!”
Tyvian pointed up the street toward the brightly lit plaza full of Dellorans. “It’s a short walk. We can carry it the rest of the way, right?”
Voth looked at him, one eyebrow raised. “Is that you . . . volunteering for physical labor?”
Despite himself, Tyvian grinned. “I’ve got to hand it to you—you’re sharp.”
Then Eddereon threw the armoire on top of her with one quick heave. The petite Voth was pinned to the ground as completely as if a horse had sat on her.
Hambone looked poleaxed. “Wh . . . what are you doing?”
Tyvian drew a dagger and placed it at Hambone’s throat. “I don’t want to kill you, so don’t make me.”
Mort was quicker on the draw—he charged Tyvian, spearing him against the side of the wagon and knocking Tyvian’s head against the top of the wheel. Lights flashed in his eyes along with the pain.
Eddereon was on the big man in an instant, grabbing him by his sword belt and heaving him across the street like a bale of hay. By that time, Hambone had his sword drawn. Voth was gasping from under the armoire. “Help! Help! Treachery!”
Eddereon charged after Mort, his sword out. Tyvian faced Hambone, drawing his sword more from ingrained muscle memory than intent. The world still seemed to wobble a bit from his knock on the head.
Hambone slashed at Tyvian’s face, which Tyvian parried without needing to think about it. “Ham, put up your sword—you don’t need to do this.”
“You put up your sword!” the Delloran countered. “You’ve gone mad!”
There was a clash of steel behind Tyvian, and Hambone’s attention was momentarily diverted toward Mort and Eddereon’s fight. Tyvian took the opportunity to knock the sword from Hambone’s hand with the flat of his blade. Then he put the tip at Hambone’s throat. “Yield!”
Hambone blinked at him. “What’s ‘yield’?”
Then Mort, flying backward from some blow of Eddereon’s, slammed into Tyvian’s side. Again, Tyvian found himself smashed against the wheel of the damned wagon.
Hambone turned and fled toward the castle, waving his arms. “Danger! Help! Traitors!”
“Kroth.” Tyvian dropped a second dagger into his hand and cocked it back to throw—Hambone’s broad back made an easy target, and he was silhouetted perfectly by the light of the castle.
But he didn’t throw.
Mort was dead weight—whether unconscious or fatally injured, Tyvian couldn’t tell. Blood poured from his mouth. “Tyvian!” Eddereon shouted. “The armoire!”
“Right!” Tyvian hacked the lock off the doors and threw them open. “Artus!”
Artus didn’t answer—he was unconscious. So was Michelle. He checked their pulses—still alive. “We should have knocked in some damned air-holes.”
“Reldamar!” Voth shrieked, one arm batting against the side of the armoire. “I knew it! I should have known! You’re dead, understand? Dead! I’ll find you, wherever you run!”
“Adatha, darling, whatever makes you think I’m leaving you behind?” Then, ignoring the ring’s protests, he kicked her in the face hard enough to knock her out.
“Stop!” It was a small column of Delloran mercenaries, headed their way. Hambone was in the lead.
Eddereon picked up Artus, and Tyvian moved the armoire aside to throw Voth over one shoulder. That left Michelle. With one arm, Tyvian reached down and scooped her up—with the ring pulsing its power through his muscles, she seemed to weigh next to nothing.
Which was good, because now they had to run for it. They heard barking.
Of course the Dellorans had dogs with them. Big, mean-looking ones.
Laden with their human cargo, Eddereon and Tyvian sprinted down an alley into the street beyond. The dogs were hot on their tail, though, covering the distance between them at blistering speed. One set of jaws clamped down on Michelle’s dress, which fluttered behind Tyvian like a cape. He yanked it free with a tearing sound and kicked out at the closest dog, but it leapt back. And its four friends were right behind it.
“This way!” Eddereon called. He’d bashed in the door to a thaumaturge’s shop. Tyvian darted up the stairs and through, dogs literally nipping at his heels. Eddereon slammed the door on them the moment they were in.
The clambered around in the dark for a second before they found the stairs and headed up. Voth’s head knocked vials off of shelves, and Michelle’s torn dress pulled over chairs and small tables. Some combination of distillations mixed and started a fire behind them. At the moment, Tyvian considered this an advantage—it would cover their escape.
The dogs’ human handlers arrived. They were through the door immediately, armed with axes and maces and other weapons of indiscriminate violence. It didn’t take them more than a moment to hear Eddereon and Tyvian knocking around on the stairs and they were after them, fire or no fire.
Eddereon led the way up to the attic and then to a narrow window. He passed Artus out onto the roof and put out his hands. “Voth!”
Tyvian handed her over and Eddereon transferred her outside, too. Then he went. “Come on!”
But the Dellorans were there. The first one went to chop Tyvian in half like a slender tree. He leapt back, but in the process, dropped Michelle. She hit the floor with a thump and stirred. “Wha . . . Artus?”
Two more Dellorans in the room. Tyvian hadn’t space beneath the eaves to draw his sword, and the one with the axe was between him and Michelle. The soldier took another swing and Tyvian ducked back again, this time taking him halfway out the window. “Michelle!”
Eddereon grabbed him by the back of the shirt and hoisted him onto the roof. “Let’s go!”
“No!” Tyvian scrambled to go back inside, but found himself eye to eye with a Delloran with a dagger in his teeth. He grabbed the hilt of the dagger and pulled, slashing through the man’s cheeks, but there were more where that came from—there was no getting in. And the building was on fire.
Eddereon had Artus and Voth each under and arm. “We’ve got to go! They’ll get her out—she’s too valuable alive!”
Then he ran along the spine of the roof and leapt to the next house over.
Eddereon was right—they needed to go. Voth could wake up any second, and the plan was not yet secure. Michelle being held prisoner was better than all of them dying in a house fire. Tyvian,
his ring squeezing his hand numb, followed Eddereon across the rooftops.
It was time to look for a forge.
The iron ring did not create itself, after all.
Chapter 20
The Sack of Ayventry
The battle raged through the night and into the next day. At some point the battle lines became blurred—no longer were blocks of pikemen and halberdiers maneuvering down streets and holding plazas and marketplaces, but now bands of four or five soldiers from either side were ambushing one another in alleys or shooting arrows down from rooftops. Desperate combat in close quarters, knife against cudgel in the dark. By dawn, the gutters were choked with more blood than the city’s sewer demons could eat.
It also became clear to Myreon that she had lost control of her forces. With no camp to return to, the White Army fought with a vicious desperation. While in the field, the disciplined ranks of the Delloran forces were vastly superior, in the cramped lanes of Ayventry, the battle was far more even. In a way it was a repeat of the Battle of Eretheria, but this time the two sides were equally equipped. Sahand’s men died in nearly equal proportion to Myreon’s own. Bodies clogged the streets so that carts could not get by. Houses burned, and the screams of those trapped inside echoed in Myreon’s head.
All of it—the whole battle—had transformed into something different than all the battles before. The orderly pretense of warfare had been stripped away, as had the gleaming moral righteousness of the war’s cause. Myreon was witnessing something vicious and barbaric. It was a bonfire that she could not extinguish or even temper—she could only watch as it burned.
She had hoped the Dellorans would surrender. They didn’t, however, even as her forces encircled them and drove them back toward Almor Castle. She had hoped the people of Ayventry would rise up with the White Army to throw off their occupiers, but this also didn’t happen. They screamed and fought and cursed them. Houses were found booby-trapped. Men were murdered in the dark. To the people, Myreon was the invader—the wretched necromancer, come to claim their bones. She was the murderess who had thrown their young Count in a dungeon and now came to destroy their only protector—Banric Sahand.
The Far Far Better Thing Page 21
