A blade whistled. Kiel's sword did not. He dropped it midstroke and clutched at his throat. There his hands closed on the hilt of a knife. Blood flowed thick and fast. His grey eyes looked up, with blank astonishment. Rhillian stood not ten paces away, hand extended in the expert release of a marksman. Kiel saw, and did not comprehend, for what he saw was impossible. He fell with a puzzled look, and sprawled on the grass.
Arendelle charged, blade whipping clear. Perhaps he hesitated, as the fractured vel'ennar reasserted itself in one final gasp, and reminded him that it was a serrin at whom he swung. Or perhaps it made no difference now. Steel clashed on steel, once fast, then again with a slide of counterstrike footing, then a final ripping cut. Arendelle hit limply and slid downslope, blood staining the grass a moonlit, silvery red.
Rhillian held that final killing pose, low on one knee, bloodied blade extended. The serrin holding Daish backed away, eyes wide with horror. A hundred serrin faces stared at her, with all the disbelief and shock of a people who had just seen their worst collective nightmare come to life before their eyes. A hundred pairs of hands itched to reach for blades, and fight back against the one who had killed two of their very own. And yet the one who had killed them, impossibly, unbelievably, was also of the serrinim.
Rhillian stood slowly, and cricked her neck. Her sword arm circled, then came about to find a comfortable ready stance. Her emerald eyes blazed at them all, bright like the moon and cold as death.
“So,” she said to her people. “Who is next?”
Sasha and Yasmyn faced off beside a stream in a grove of trees. In each of their hands was a long stick, scavenged from the surrounding woods. Sasha never sparred with real blades. She trained as she fought, and the way she fought, people died.
Bergen watched nearby, and waited for Arken's men to arrive. Daish had remained in Father Belgride's temple, not in physical shape to attempt climbing a mountain. Sasha did not have much faith that that would stop him trying to find Aisha, however.
Yasmyn had talent, and applied herself with an intensity like the burning sun. Sasha kept it simple, and built on Yasmyn's knowledge of knife fighting, which gave her a foundation in stance, footwork, and simple combinations. Two-handed svaalverd, however, was rather more complex, and deadly. Yasmyn kept walking into combinations that Sasha could finish in her sleep, simply not seeing what lay beyond her immediate stroke. Talent meant nothing without experience, and if she encountered a half-decent swordsman in an even fight, svaalverd or not, Yasmyn was finished.
“Shields,” Sasha said then, and presented her left forearm as though wearing a shield, holding her stick right-handed. “Horrible things. Most guardsmen in Ilduur, defending a fixed position, will use them.”
“Useful things,” Bergen countered, leaning against a tree with eyes on the road past the shore of Lake Andal. “I can crush your head with a shield strike alone.”
“Horrible things because,” Sasha continued, “if you let them, they can be intimidating. They interrupt natural swordwork, they can confuse fundamentals, take space from you. You treat them with contempt because that's how you beat them—with aggression. Once you start retreating, you've already conceded.”
She showed Yasmyn how shields limited a fighter to a one-sided reach from the one shoulder, and how his opposite side became a refuge where a two-handed fighter could stand in range, but where the shieldsman could not reach.
“You have to be close,” she told Yasmyn, demonstrating. “He'll try to crowd you with his shield, to take away your space, so that's not easy. But if you're close enough, and he swings, you step…”
“Underneath and to the side,” said Yasmyn, seeing immediately. Now behind Sasha's shoulder, and with a clear strike to Sasha's exposed side.
“Exactly. The sword arm is the weak side, like the underside of a porcupine. Shieldsmen like to defend with the shield, they lose the art of defending with the blade, and since they can only really attack with the forehand across their body, that rotation takes their shield out of play, and if they miss, they're dead. Also, I don't care if he's as big as your brother Markan, a one-handed grip can never defend as strongly as a two-hander because the wrist folds like this, you see? A two-handed grip creates a cross brace, like a good builder making a cross brace for a temple roof. That's another reason shieldsmen can't defend with a blade against a two-hander.”
Yasmyn's eyes gleamed as she understood, and practised the duck and slide across Sasha's sword arm several more times.
“Just don't let him hit you with the fucking shield,” Sasha continued, demonstrating with the invisible shield, aiming for Yasmyn's head. “He'll go high, like this, but with his weight into it….”
“If I go under it,” Yasmyn decided, doing that, “he's defenceless.”
“Yes. Cut him through the middle as you go.” Yasmyn's stick slapped Sasha's stomach, and she spun out and away. “Remember, heavy weaponry is good for mass combat, not for single combat. Weapons are only as useful as the tactics they allow you to employ. A naked warrior with a spoon can defeat a knight in full armour if he has the tactics to exploit a weakness.”
“Men coming,” called Bergen. Sasha walked to his side and looked out through the trees. Along the road, a group of men approached on foot. They wore the clothes of regular Ilduuri, and seemed armed.
Sasha noticed Bergen looking down at her. “What?” she asked.
“I heard infantry friends describing that for real, from the receiving end.” He jerked his head back toward where she'd been conducting the lessons with Yasmyn. “No wonder we lost so many.”
“I heard infantry friends describing Steel shieldwork to me,” Sasha replied. “They'd never seen such teamwork. No wonder we lost so many.”
Bergen nodded slowly. Sasha clapped him on the arm and walked to the edge of the tree line to welcome Arken and his men.
She led them in amongst the trees for cover. She counted twenty-three; with her, Bergen and Yasmyn they would be twenty-six. Against two hundred? she wondered. If they got it right, they could do it with ten. If they got it wrong, a thousand would be insufficient.
“Two boats,” Arken described their transport. “No Stamentaast on the water.” They were a half-day's walk down the valley, near the opposite end of the long, thin Lake Andal. One of Father Belgride's priests had rowed their own transport back to the temple pier himself, after transporting them here overnight.
The men were all Ilduuri Steel, strong men, most young, a few as old as forty. Their swords were long in the Ilduuri style, and nearly half carried shields on their backs—smaller than Enoran and Rhodaani Steel shields, as Sasha had heard. Considering the heights the Ilduuris had to trek up and down, that was not surprising.
They looked at her now, some with suspicion, others with curiosity, a few more with the wide-eyed intensity of men confronted with a legend come to life. Some Ilduuri, it seemed, did pay attention to events beyond their borders. Particularly the Steel.
“Are you as good as the stories tell?” one asked her.
“That depends on what stories you've been listening to,” said Sasha. “I was the uma to Kessligh Cronenverdt, who is assuredly as good as the stories you've heard. Lately I've become a better swordsman than him, though it did take a crossbow bolt through his leg to do it. He says I would have surpassed him anyway, but I suppose we'll never know.”
Eyes turned to Bergen for confirmation. “She's easily the best swordsman I've ever seen,” said Bergen. “No contest. When we were on opposite sides at Shero Valley, word spread through the lines that she'd commanded Isfayen cavalry to break our flanking lines and destroy a contingent of our artillery. That has rarely happened in all the history of the Enoran Steel. So, yes, she can command, too.”
“Who is senior here?” Sasha asked them.
Men nodded at Arken. “He's formation sergeant,” said one. Sasha was slightly surprised that the older men were not more highly ranked. Perhaps they were ex-Steel rather than active service. Or perhaps
they were simply not command material. Promotion in the Rhodaani and Enoran Steel had been based on merit, not age.
“You have no higher ranks who could be trusted?” she pressed.
“A few we might trust,” Arken admitted. “But at this moment, we agreed that might is not qualification enough.”
“The Remischtuul have been playing games with officer promotions for years,” another man said. “There aren't many officers we trust.”
She could win these men. There had been a time when she might have felt unnerved at the prospect. But she had led enough men in battle to know that that time was past. They were good soldiers, as all Steel were good soldiers, but they lacked her experience. They had not seen the battles that lay beyond Ilduur's borders, and they did not know how that fight would go.
She did. She had been taught by the greatest. She knew mountains from her homeland, and lately cities and plains as well. She fought like serrin, but was herself very human. And now, these men who wished desperately to save their land from evils looked around for someone who knew all these things, and could lead, and found only her.
Twenty-three men of the Ilduuri Steel. Was it enough?
If they succeeded here, she reckoned, against vastly superior numbers, and brought down the corrupt and cowardly fools who led Ilduur to such ruin, then twenty-three would be more than enough. It did not take a lot of men to create a legend. The fewer of them there were, the greater would be their glory, a glory that could sweep the Ilduuri Steel all the way to Jahnd.
It was a steep hike from the valley floor, up a zigzagging trail through pine forest and across sheer slopes. A rocky cleft enfolded them as they continued to climb, legs aching on steep steps cut into rock, until they emerged onto a new world of height above the Andal Valley. Here ahead rose more mountains, mostly hidden from the valley floor, yet now dominating the sky. The Andal Valley had looked so large from down inside it—now on top of its flanking walls, Sasha could see how small a space it carved for humans amidst these great, soaring peaks.
“Pretty,” Yasmyn remarked in good cheer, looking about as the trail levelled off to wind its way along a ridge of smaller trees. “Very much like Isfayen. Not as rugged, though.” Yasmyn's legs were in no difficulty on the climb, and her mood seemed positively buoyant the higher they went. Perhaps she would prove useful after all.
The mountain ahead was Dirdaan, the old name of some pagan god no longer worshipped. At a clear spot on the trail, Arken paused and pointed halfway up the mountainside. There, perched upon a rocky shoulder, she could see a building, at too great a distance to make out any detail. How in the world anyone had managed to build it up there, she did not know. It looked impossible.
“The Altene,” said Arken. Sasha repressed a laugh, and shook her head. “What's amusing?”
“We're going to try and attack that with twenty-six men,” Sasha said cheerfully. “What's not amusing?” Men who overheard laughed, and kept walking.
“Odd place to command from,” Yasmyn suggested as they resumed.
“Not a command,” Sasha corrected. “Two days' journey from Andal in good weather won't allow it. It's a retreat, a place in which to hide and be safe, yet close enough to the centre of power for influence. A good place to store a hoard of Meraini talons and its keepers.”
“You speak Lenay?” Arken asked in Saalsi, not understanding a word. Yasmyn, of course, spoke good Lenay and average Torovan, in addition to her native Telochi. That gave her two tongues in common with Sasha, half-a-tongue to meet with Bergen's broken Torovan, and none at all with the Ilduuri men, for whom Torovan was nearly as foreign as Lenay. Yasmyn had picked up a few phrases of Saalsi since she'd come to have serrin as friends, but Sasha had been struggling for fluency with that tongue for much of her life, and was still not entirely there.
“Yes,” said Sasha. “How many of your men speak Saalsi?”
“Ten speak it well enough,” said Arken. “The others all speak some—it's quite common amongst the Steel.”
“Then we'll use it for our attack. I have no Ilduuri, and we've nothing else in common.”
“And what about her?” asked Arken, looking at Yasmyn as the Isfayen girl walked ahead.
“She'll stay with me.”
“Are you talking about me?” Yasmyn called back in Lenay as they walked.
“Aye,” Sasha affirmed. “He wonders what you'll speak in the battle.”
“Tell him the Isfayen need only the language of blood,” said Yasmyn.
“And he's looking at your arse,” Sasha added. Yasmyn threw a look over her shoulder and smirked at Arken.
Arken frowned. “What did you tell her?”
“That you were looking at her arse.”
“It's hard to avoid at this angle.”
“She's the sister of the Great Lord of Isfayen,” Sasha added. “Men have died terrible deaths for less.”
Sasha did not think she could keep up the banter all the way to the Altene. But if this group of foreign men were to trust her enough to follow her orders, some bonding was in order. Men she'd known a long time could overlook the fact of her gender, but for men recently met, it was impossible to ignore. Better to use her gender, and the unique position it gave her, to make amusement with them.
There were a lot of trails through the mountains, and this one crossed several of them. Any in the Altene fearing assault could not guard them all, but Arken was concerned they might post a wandering guard or two, or recruit locals to the task. He sent two men to walk ahead, unarmed and passing for locals, in case the trail was watched.
The main trail up to the Altene was on this near face, Sasha learned from talking to a man who knew the area best. But that face was sheer, and the trail's various bends climbed in clear view of the Altene's windows and towers. Even if they ascended at night, the full moon would surely give away their approach. But at the rear of Dirdaan, he insisted, there was a way up.
“You've climbed it yourself?” Sasha asked him.
The Ilduuri, a wiry man named Eirden with a thick blond moustache, shook his head. “Not me. I've a cousin who climbs. He knows all the climbing trails to these mountains.”
“And he's climbed it?”
“Well, no. But he knows there is a way up.”
“Says who?” Sasha persisted, with growing concern.
“Common knowledge.”
Sasha distrusted common knowledge as much as she did common wisdom. But she kept her dismay to herself.
They passed between Dirdaan and the flank of its neighbour, a narrow pass beneath the sheer drop from the ridge upon which the Altene sat, very high above. It was late afternoon, and Dirdaan's opposite, northern side was in shadow. The peaks beyond, toward the Enoran border, lit up the horizon with sunlit, jagged outlines.
Soon they turned off the trail and through trees in the mountain's shadow. The Dirdaan flank above them was a vertical cliff. Sasha didn't much fancy the prospect of scaling it by daylight, let alone in the approaching darkness.
One of the two scouts ahead came quietly back, and indicated that they should all move off this narrow trail and into the trees to one side. After some moments of silent, cautious approach, they found the second scout by where the trees ended, directly at the base of Dirdaan's cliff.
There was a narrow trail here, Sasha saw, climbing the cliff. Not a natural trail, though it had been carved into natural formations. It wound upward along the sheer rock face, vanishing as it went higher. And at the beginning of the trail, where it reached the ground amidst loose rock and encroaching trees, was a stone guardhouse.
“Did common knowledge have a guardhouse here, too?” Sasha whispered to Eirden. Eirden scratched his moustache, and reluctantly shook his head. Sasha crawled to the first scout. “How many guards, do you think?”
“It looks large enough for five,” said the scout. “I've only seen one, though. He came out the back and relieved himself over the edge.”
The trail was well above them here, as they look
ed at the rear of the guardhouse. The building made a wall in an arc about the trail mouth, from cliff face to cliff face, with a gate beneath a small, two-person tower. Obviously it wasn't going to stop a determined attack from ten or more men, but that wasn't its purpose.
“I've seen these backdoor guardhouses in Petrodor,” she murmured. “They're only here to slow us down, and usually they have an alarm. Can anyone see a rope or cord running up the cliff face to the Altene? Or perhaps they'll have a loud bell in that tower that can be heard from above.”
No one could see anything. But all agreed that if they were to take this guardhouse, they would have to do it quietly.
“We climb the cliff here,” said Arken, “and get up to the trail, then come down on them from behind.”
“They can see this whole face from the tower,” Sasha cautioned. “If we climb here, we'll have to do it by night. How many of us can do that?”
Arken looked around, then up at the cliff. It seemed very sheer. Sasha had tried climbing such faces herself, with some success—she did not weigh much compared to the men, and was strong for her size, and relatively unencumbered. But this face was four times the greatest height she'd ever attempted, and a fall from above the halfway point would most likely be fatal. The closer to the guardhouse they climbed, the shorter the distance up to the trail, but the more likely the guards would see them, even in the shadow of moonlight.
“We need only one person to reach the trail with a rope and secure it, and then the others can follow,” said Arken. “We need not attack the guardhouse at all.”
“No,” said Sasha, after a moment's thought. “The day is clear, the night will be clear too, and even in the mountain shadow, the full moon will be bright. For twenty-six of us to scale the cliff this close to the guardhouse without being seen is too much of a risk, and if we climb further from the guardhouse, the ascent increases. Two or three people would be less likely to be seen and could take the guardhouse unaware, as they won't be looking back up the trail. And also, if they do have some secret cord to ring an alarm up at the Altene, by taking the guardhouse we can at least know if we were spotted, and thus if the Altene will be expecting us.”
Haven: A Trial of Blood and Steel Book Four Page 34
