Kingdom Blades (A Pattern of Shadow & Light 4)

by McPhail, Melissa

  ‘Men respond to torture with varying resilience. You must learn your captive intimately to know which torments he cannot endure.’

  This truth of the path was why expert interrogators spent hours, even days, working over a captive before questioning him. But Tannour didn’t have that kind of time. What he did have was certainty that the man caught in the Arch of Submission was a Shamshir’im wielder; thus, everything he said was suspect.

  Straightening away from Kifat, Tannour chose another needle, this one designed to stimulate the nerve channels. He felt for the meridian point on the wielder’s bleeding chest, near the shoulder—

  The earth trembled beneath the tower.

  “Too late…” a blood-filled gurgle rasped out of his captive. Kifat choked on his laughter, coughed, sputtered, grinned around bloody teeth, “…too late.”

  Tannour banished his cyclone. Instantly he learned what its reflective walls had prevented him from perceiving—horns of alarm and a rumbling which rapidly grew in strength, casting foreshadows of its truth.

  Tannour braced himself with Air for the impact.

  The cascading wave smashed into the tower, swarmed around the circumference and continued on. The river of the aqueduct was now dumping directly down into the fortress.

  “Goodbye…prince…,” Kifat gurgled.

  Displaced air confirmed the wielder’s boast. The waters were quickly finding channels through the three-tiered fortress. They would continue to build and deepen until the waters spilled over the ramparts and made a fountain for the gods out of the Fortress of Khor Taran.

  Tannour clenched his jaw against a rising frustration. All of his skills would be useless in aiding Trell, for water walked no path. Yet to do nothing…

  ‘Once embarked upon ver’alir, stay the course. There is but one route through.’

  This truth of the path, Tannour had learned agonizingly well.

  The Blind Path was less a craving than a hunger, a knowing that the path must be fed, and that it fed upon sacrifice. These darker wavelengths which coursed ver’alir… Tannour didn’t know if they resonated within him because of something native to his construction, or if some resilience in his nature made him capable of withstanding that resonance when others could not. In any case, ver’alir’s resonance rang an undeniable harmony within his soul, a dark harmony—regretted, even loathed at times—yet as often equally desired; an aching harmony, as the recollection of a haunting melody, beautiful and melancholy, barely remembered from a dream.

  Tannour returned his attention to the man gurgling with laughter in front of him. Kifat would not find his next acts nearly so humorous.

  ***

  Trell flinched away from the shower of glass as much as from the flaming arrow that had caused it. The latter struck the floor in an explosion of sparks an inch from where he was crouched. Already the smoke from the burning roof was clouding the rafters. Trell felt its acrid bite with every inhale.

  Elsewhere in the granary, the men were in action. Every able bodied soldier they freed instantly set to freeing others, but many of the king’s men still sat in docile wreaths.

  Another volley of arrows streaked down through the shattered windows.

  Trell finally succeeded in splitting the silver rope he’d been burning through and looked to the soldier beside him. “Get them up.” He left the man to attend the task and called for Loukas while making for the front doors. Along the way, he ripped two burning bolts out of the floor by their fletching and tossed them into one of the privies.

  Loukas caught up with him halfway to the front. “Trell!”

  Trell dodged back from an arrow, and it thunked into the wood in front of his foot. He yanked it out of the floor, pitched it into the privy and kept going. “How many soldiers are left, Loukas?”

  “A hundred or so.”

  “And how many are armed?”

  “Two score, maybe? I lost count in this confusion.”

  Trell eyed the rafters—or rather the roiling clouds of black smoke that were entirely consuming the rafters. “We can’t wait any longer.” He turned a grim look to his friend. “Get the officers and every man with a weapon to the front. Everyone else should arm themselves with anything they can find. Assign as many men as can be spared to the rear of the column to escort the soldiers still under compulsion. The Nadoriin will assuredly be—”

  An explosion sounded a powerful concussion.

  The ground shook beneath them.

  “Daw—what was that?” The Dannish officer Gideon straightened out of a near grouping of soldiers, torch in hand.

  Trell turned swiftly to Loukas.

  Loukas looked wan. “Do you—”

  Trell shook his head.

  “I should—” he hooked a thumb over his shoulder towards the doors.

  Trell gave him a voluminous look of agreement.

  Loukas sprinted for the doors.

  Trell’s every sense was screaming in alarm. “Gideon, get your men to form up ranks, armed officers to the front.”

  “Soldiers of Dannym, form up!” Gideon rushed through the crowd of milling, disoriented men, shouting instructions.

  Trell ran after Loukas.

  A horn sounded from elsewhere in the fortress, a deep and scornful cry, as if the mountain itself was bellowing in rage. Reaching the front of the granary, Trell pushed through the parted doors—

  And came up short behind Loukas.

  Water was flooding the streets. Easily two dozen Nadoriin were awash in it, their lines scattered, all of them grappling for each other and struggling against the current.

  Trell grabbed Loukas by his coat and hauled him back inside before the Nadoriin recovered themselves or an archer got off a lucky shot.

  Loukas slammed the doors and turned breathlessly to Trell. “The aqueduct—”

  “Those men we saw the other day.” Trell arched brows in understanding. “They must’ve been setting charges.”

  “The fortress alarms—”

  “Their signal.”

  “All that water,” consternation flooded the Avataren’s green-eyed gaze, “and this place like a sealed urn…”

  Shouting came from elsewhere and everywhere.

  Trell took Loukas’s arm. “Come on, we’ve got to move.”

  ***

  Raegus n’Harnalt was readying his men to respond to the alarm from Khor Taran when an explosion echoed from ridge to ridge. Moments later, the ground rocked beneath him.

  What the fethe….?

  He set heels to his horse and stormed along the ridge, following the sound back towards its origins near the fortress. The others of his men were arrayed among the trees. He shouted orders to hold their positions as he thundered past.

  Dawn’s early grey light was diffusing itself around thunderheads in the east, the harbingers of a coming storm. The wind fought against him as he sped along a wide dirt path. He followed the track to an overlook where, just the day before, he and Trell had planned out the stages of their attack and egress. He threw himself off his horse and jumped-slid-clambered to the furthest point of the overlook—

  He swore in his native dialect, and then again in the desert tongue for good measure.

  A powerful waterfall was churning down the mountain out of what used to be the aqueduct. The deluge had spawned a mudslide that was piling up against the fortress gates, clearly already deeper than a man was tall.

  Raegus swore again. He and Trell had planned an avalanche to block those doors and wipe out the road, but after their men and the Dannish soldiers had escaped the fortress. What in Fiera’s name was he going to do now?

  A sudden loud crack brought his gaze swiftly back to the north tower. Even as he watched, the water gushing around the tower became milky, and then the base seemed to simply…wash away. The length of the tall tower tipped…tipped…toppled—

  Slammed down across the middle fortress wall. The water found a new course and flooded down into the lower tiers.

  Raegus cursed an
d ran for his horse.

  ***

  Air told Tannour of the tower’s crumbling base before it actually began tipping. He yanked his needles free of Kifat’s chest and sprinted up the rapidly inclining floor towards the hole the wielder had blasted in the wall. He ripped off his head-shroud and dove into open air just before the tower crashed down across the middle wall.

  Tannour hit the water along with a shower of pelting rock. Waves surged around him, tumbled, dragged and sucked him under. Ver’alir could offer no help against this.

  The churning current dragged Tannour into a channel towards a stairwell, now a funneling flood. He bobbed up and found air for a brief moment before the water sucked him into the frothing vortex the river had made of the tunnel beneath the wall.

  ***

  With the Dannish Captain val Mallonwey’s help, Trell made fast work of organizing the ranks, even among the chaos of the quickly flooding granary. At least the water had quenched the fires on the floor.

  As the men were lining up, Trell felt that peculiar energy that comes in times of great need—heated apprehension rising beneath cold determination, forming a thunderous storm of urgency. There was hardly time for inspiring speeches, yet he had to say something to guide them through the chaos surely to follow.

  With the smoke pressing down from above and the water rising from below, Trell climbed up on an urn and raised his hands for quiet.

  “Soldiers of Dannym!” He felt every set of eyes shift and fix upon himself. The air was hot where he stood, acrid and difficult to breathe. He worked hard to put strength into his voice. “I thank you for your courage and your trust. I tell you truly—I don’t know what we’ll face out there. I know many of you are still disoriented, confused, angry—and you’ve every right to be. I know my men and I are strangers to you, but I give you my word, we will stay the course at your side! Fortune looks favorably upon men of honor, and Luck graces the brave. If we work together, we will overcome!”

  “Just point us towards the bastards, Your Highness!” someone called. Others fervently joined in this sentiment, and a thunderstorm of demands for retribution quickly overcame the room.

  “They shall know Dannish steel!—”

  “We’ll bathe in their blood!—”

  “Death to the Nadoriin!—”

  Trell raised his hands to quiet them. “You seek blood for the wrongs waged against you, and rightly so, but today I bid you focus on one life—yours—and that of the man next to you—”

  Another horn sounded, louder than the first.

  He spun an urgent look from the doors back to the men. “Soldiers of Dannym, this fortress is dying, and we’re far from free of its final throes. Let us not perish with it! His Majesty needs you with him in Nahavand. This was your mission, and my mission it remains.”

  Trell jumped down with a splash and sloshed for the doors. Loukas quickly found his side. “Bold words. Very inspiring. Just how in Fiera’s name are you expecting to get us out of here?”

  Trell cast him a sidelong eye. “I was expecting you to get us out of here.”

  “No-no-no—” Loukas shook his head emphatically, “I get us in, you get us out. That was the deal.”

  “I’m starting to feel shorted on this deal of ours.”

  “Trell…” all the levity had drained from Loukas’s voice.

  Trell paused behind the line of armed men who would be first through the doors and met his friend’s gaze. “If anything happens to me, I’m counting on you to get them out.” Trell looked to the men lined up behind him and shoved his sword high. “For His Majesty—courage and honor!”

  “Courage and honor!” hundreds of voices echoed.

  Then the doors were flying open and the mass of men was shoving forward into churning brown water. The current pushed them towards a wide boulevard in the shadow of the wall separating Khor Taran’s middle and lowest tiers. Archers were there, firing down into the melee.

  Trell heard the battle before he reached it, saw the arrows flying down into the emerging crowd of soldiers, listened to their cries of pain. One black-shafted arrow splashed down in front of him. Another hit to his right, striking a near man in the arm. Trell grabbed him before he fell and supported him while he recovered his footing. He returned a look of gratitude limned in pain.

  Then the front lines had blurred enough to reach Trell, and he raised his sword to meet a Nadoriin with a missing eye. The latter fell quickly, and Trell moved to the next. The water was surging around his knees.

  As Trell fought, submerged things caught on his boots, tripped him, made him stumble. When he needed to dodge swiftly, the water dragged at him. When he needed to hold his position, the current shoved him forward. They were battling the water as much as each other, and men fell as often to the churning froth or its buried dangers as to another’s blade.

  Dannym’s officers fought free of the ropes that had bound them, even though the braided links still shackled their wrists and necks, but many of the king’s foot-soldiers remained partially chained together. They fought as best they could with such a handicap. Sometimes their linked wrists proved a boon, but other times, when one of their number fell to a blade, or the water caught a man in a violent embrace, the entire group went down.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Trell saw Loukas fighting a Nadori soldier wearing a chequered keffiyeh. The latter stood a head taller and much broader than the Avataren, yet Loukas seemed to be holding his own.

  Suddenly the way cleared for a burly Nadoriin, who shoved through the melee towards Trell with the brown water surging around his thighs. His bearded face was drawn in deep lines, and he carried shades of fury in his gaze. He wore the braided agal of an officer around his keffiyeh.

  Trell raised his blade to meet him.

  Their swords clashed, locked. The Nadoriin growled in his own tongue, “Akkadian dogs!”

  He shoved Trell off and swung anew. Their blades struck-reverberated, struck-reverberated—powerful blows fuelled by a powerful anger.

  The officer might’ve overpowered Trell more easily—for he was taller and broader—but the cortata sang in Trell’s thoughts, putting strength into his limbs and unexpected force beneath every blow.

  Something caught at Trell’s feet—both of their feet.

  Suddenly the current had him and the Nadoriin, their boots tangled in netting or aught else—Trell couldn’t say, except it was threatening his balance. They both stumbled, staggered, tried to maintain their footing and continue their battle until neither became possible. The Nadoriin fell with a splash, yanking Trell into the stream after him.

  Men fought to either side as the current swept them on together. Two arrows nearly found their mark—one scraped Trell’s ear as it splashed into the water. Half a foot to the left and it would’ve struck the Nadoriin. He loudly cursed the archer for a fool.

  Trell saw where the current was taking them nearly at the same time the Nadoriin did. The powerful flow of water, forging its own path as ever was water’s wont, had churned away at stone and plaster until a gaping hole had opened in the fortress wall where it abutted the mountain itself. Now a waterfall emptied down into cavernous darkness.

  “What’s down there?” Trell scrabbled furiously for some kind of handhold.

  The Nadoriin, who was swim-splashing beside him with the same fervent intention, swung him a stare, perhaps surprised that he spoke his language. “Caverns! Death!”

  “Work with me!” Trell tried to claim some footing, but whatever was around their feet was creating a powerful draw. Taking a chance that the Nadoriin preferred his own life over Trell’s death, the prince shoved his sword into the scabbard on his back and dove for a doorway with both hands.

  He missed. The current swept them on.

  The Nadoriin had better aim, or a stronger jump, and succeeded in hooking his arms around a fencepost. Trell grabbed onto his thigh.

  A sudden commotion among the archers on the walls drew both of their gazes upwards. Men started sho
uting. Then the mass of archers fled, just as the top of a falling tower came into view. It struck the wall in a violent explosion of splintering stone.

  Water came surging across the ramparts in the tower’s wake, making waterfalls of the crenels, while angry waves stormed down the stairway tunnel nearest Trell—

  And swept Trell and the Nadoriin towards the waterfall.

  ***

  Loukas watched the falling tower with a sort of horrified fascination. That is, until the resultant flood swept him off his feet. He grabbed for balance at the man nearest him, who happened to be Gideon, while all around them, men toppled like sticks in the surf. The Dannish soldiers maneuvered well in the suddenly chest-high water, but the desert-bred Nadoriin clung to anyone who appeared able to swim.

  Both Loukas and Gideon realized this advantage in the same moment. Gideon struck off through the flood, shouting new orders to his men, while Loukas turned to rally the Converted—

  And saw a dark form tumbling down the rushing cascade that had once been a stairwell. A grave foreboding beset him.

  Loukas lurched after the body, half-swimming, half-running against the current. He only just caught the man before the stream dragged him off. Blood stained the water around his body.

  Feeling like an entire volley of arrows had just struck his chest, Loukas turned the man over…

  Gideon sloshed back to his side. “Ah…the wielder.” He sounded not the least regretful to see him dead. And very dead he was. Tannour had clearly been at him for hours.

  Loukas grimly released the body to the current and let out his breath, relieved that the wielder hadn’t been Tannour. But then, where was Tannour?

  And for that matter, where was Trell?

  Loukas cast a fast look across the battle, though it seemed less a battle now than a rout, with the well-trained Dannish soldiers—and apparently capable swimmers—taking rapid command of the scene.