From one of the side streets, a motley assortment of fishermen and dockworkers suddenly appeared with much hollering of profanity. The court of the Guard was only blocks away from Fishgate, and it is doubtful in all the history of Hearne whether drunk fishermen have ever turned down an opportunity for a good fight. They came with boathooks, clubs, and long knives. For a heartening moment, the fishermen drove into the flank of the foe with a roar, bashing skulls and slashing throats with the same skill they brought to gutting a catch of fish. But then they broke like a wave and retreated back down their street. It was like watching the tide curling out to sea after pounding against the shore. At least, that was the thought that crossed Declan’s mind when he saw them.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
THE FISH BUTCHER'S ADVICE
Declan had almost been caught in the collapse of the wall beside the Guard tower. The troop of horsemen had been dismounting around him, the horses blowing steam and stamping on the snowy cobblestones. He swung down from his horse. He was more tired than he’d ever been. His whole body ached. His hands trembled on the saddle. He wanted nothing more than to just close his eyes and forget everything for a while. A long while. If he could only forget them all. Jute, Severan, the ghost whispering and muttering to itself, Arodilac, Giverny standing bound on a tower, the dead bodies of his parents. The sea. Liss and the sea.
The pearl pulsed into sudden, frantic life against his chest. It wanted something. It wanted him somewhere. It needed him to be somewhere. The thought surged into his mind. He had to be somewhere. He had to be not here. Not here. Get away. Move. Fast. Declan stumbled away from the horse, his hand on his chest. Someone said something to him, but he didn’t hear. He was only aware of the pearl pulling at him. It pulled at him like he was caught in a riptide and had no choice but to surrender to the relentless current. He drifted across the courtyard to the street gate and the square that lay before the main city gates. The area was crowded with soldiers waiting patiently in groups divided according to duchy. Faces stared at him blankly, each man preoccupied with his own thoughts. He considered climbing the stairs to the top of the wall. He could see several of the dukes standing before the parapet. Was that Jute with them? Jute and the hawk. The pearl beat against him with a rhythm stronger than his own heart. He turned away.
It was at that moment that the wall exploded in a fury of sound and stone and flame. The explosion blew Declan backward off his feet. He skidded across the cobblestones and slammed against another body. There were shards of rock under his hands. He could taste blood in his mouth. His ears rang with the noise of it all. Shouts and screams of pain faded into silence. Dimly, he was aware of a dreadful voice that filled the quiet. Flames leapt in the darkness, behind the veil of falling snow. The voice rolled on. He could not hear it. He was only aware of the pearl. It subsided into serenity against his chest. Satisfied peace.
No, a voice said in his mind. Her voice. The eye of the storm.
And then the storm broke in all of its raging torment. He turned and saw the black tide of the enemy pouring in through the gap in the wall. The firelight gleamed on their armor, wet with melting snow. The firelight gleamed on their forest of spears, on the arrows flickering through the dim light, on the helms shuttering their faces. The ground shook with the stamp of their marching feet. Blades flashed in the darkness and then there was no time for anything, not even to listen for the sound of her voice again. There was no time for anything except to fight. Declan drew his sword and plunged in. The fluidity of the battle line pulled him back and forth, eddying closer to the solitary horseman standing in the gap, and then pushed farther away like driftwood on a bloody tide. He fought in a numb haze, his body weary but moving smoothly through the patterns, adapting and counter-adapting to every minute change around him. He moved through a blur of swords and faceless attackers. The snowflakes whirled around him, spattered red before they could reach the ground. Something made him glance to his right. A different sound, a new taste on the wind, perhaps the pearl hanging around his neck. He angled right, swiveling around each new attacker, administering death almost absentmindedly. It was definitely the pearl. It nudged at him insistently.
Declan smelled them before he saw them. Fishermen and dockworkers. They brought the scent of the sea with them. Salt and fish and the sweet decay of seaweed. They surged past him like a wave, yelling and cursing. He was caught up in their attack and found himself fighting at the tip of a wedge driven into the enemy’s flank. A giant of a man with a cleaver in each hand and still wearing his fish scale–smeared apron roared alongside him. The cleavers blurred through the air, chopping through helms and hauberks just as quickly and as efficiently as, no doubt, they chopped through haddock. The black ranks broke before them, retreating, and then counterattacked in sudden and vicious steel. The fishermen were thrown back in a flurry of blood. They regrouped in a narrow side street leading away from the city wall. Declan found himself still beside the man with the cleavers. The fish butcher turned and grinned down at him. His breath stank of ale.
“Ain’t nothing like a good fight, eh?” shouted the man. His voice boomed and carried over the sounds of the battle. He laughed, the sound as loud as the tolling of the harbor bell, and turned to holler at the others crowded around them in the street. “Another go at the bastards, right, mates?” He was answered with a cheer. The fish butcher looked down again at Declan. Something flickered behind his eyes. The sea, gray and cold. For a moment, Declan thought he could hear the rumble of the surf. The pearl pulsed against his chest.
“Straight at the horseman now,” said the fish butcher quietly. “Beware the horse. Go for the rider. Take him down to earth, you hear me? Down to the earth. The fire’ll burn you, but water’s yours. Don’t be forgetting that. Every man here’ll spend their lives to get you there. To the last drop of blood.” He turned and shouted. “Ready, mates! Let’s have another go!”
A roar went up at his words. Declan shivered. The scent of the sea grew stronger around them, and again, he heard the pounding of the surf in his ears, louder and angrier. It was surging toward the shore. The mob drew in a breath as if one single creature, breathing in the smell of the salt waves, of seaweed and brine, of fish and the cold and silent things of the deep. Then they roared again with one voice, a great booming sound that was more like the waves crashing against the stony cliffs than something from human throats. They charged back down the street. A contingent of Thulish soldiers gave way for them in weary surprise and Declan found himself fighting alongside the fish butcher again. Black helms fell before them, cloven and bright with blood. Boathooks jabbed past his shoulders, busily gaffing the foe as if they were fish to be caught and gutted. A toothless old costermonger fought on his other side, swinging a stone mallet with both hands. For a moment, the enemy line broke before them, but then it hardened into renewed fury. They were a strange foe, those black-armored soldiers, for they fought in complete silence. They did not speak and they did not cry out in death. They had no officers yelling commands or cursing them on to greater fervor. The few faces that Declan saw, invariably of dead men who had lost their helms, were staring and slack, blank faces as expressionless as stone under the falling snow.
The wave of the fishermen and the dockworkers, the costermongers and fishbutchers—all those who made their lives on the edge of the sea—crashed again and again on the enemy line. And like the land that is worn away by the sea, their foe gave way in grudging blood, inch by inch and dead man by dead man. They were closer to the black horseman now. But new ranks of the black-armored foe marched with ringing step through the ruined walls. They pressed forward, trampling their own dead. They closed in around the horseman and pushed the attacking wedge of fishermen back, back, and further back until they were fighting under the eaves of the nearby houses.
Where’s Jute? thought Declan in desperation. His sword was heavy in his grip. Far off to the left, he glimpsed Owain Gawinn fighting at the front of a flank of Guardsmen. Past them, the me
n of Harlech fought alongside their southern neighbors of Thule. The tall figures of Lannaslech and his son Rane were visible in the shifting shadows. The leaping flames burning along the wall and in the sprawled wreckage of the city gates cast a flickering light on the scene. Other than the fires, the day was as dark as a night without stars.
Where’s Jute?
It was a question on the mind of many at that moment. It was a question that was about to be answered.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
THE STRUGGLE IN THE HEIGHTS
Jute had been about twenty feet up in the air above the wall when it blew apart. The blast sent him cartwheeling up through the air. Shards of stone whistled past him in vicious, singing tones. He grabbed hold of the wind, wove it around him, and steadied himself. Fury flooded through him. He angled down. The horseman below him was all that existed.
“Stop!”
The hawk flew past him.
“Deal with that son of perdition later. For now, you have a more important task.”
“What’s more important than killing him?” said Jute.
“The darkness covering the city. Sorcery draws the storm clouds here. It weaves them together to banish the sunlight. And in this growing darkness the evil feeds and grows strong. He’ll prove your master if you bring him to battle. The darkness is his element. It isn’t yours. It must be dispelled or you shall be defeated. If you are defeated, then all of Tormay will fall.”
Jute stared at the hawk for a moment and then flung himself up into the sky, up toward the gathering storm. The wind howled around him in delight. The hawk followed them on swift wings. The earth was forgotten. The battle raging below them was forgotten. The storm clouds grew closer and snowflakes lashed down at them. Light quaked within the clouds, as hot as molten metal, brimming with a deadly, flickering radiance. And then the lightning flashed down. It lanced down with purpose in its strike. The air cracked. Jute’s eyes went blind. He spun out of the way. He was unable to see anything except the red glow of the lightning flashing before his eyes. He could smell the hot metal odor of it. The air was on fire. Another bolt struck down, and then another. They were all aimed at him. It was as if some giant archer stood above the clouds, loosing arrow after arrow.
Into the clouds, said the hawk in his mind. Get up into the clouds and tear them apart. The longer we delay, the stronger the horseman becomes.
Jute did not answer the hawk. All his concentration was spent on dodging the lightning bolts. They were like immense trees of searing light that grew in an instant between sky and earth, an ever-shifting forest of violence. The clouds burgeoned closer with each second as he mounted higher. But then, with a shiver of horror, he realized that the clouds were rushing down just as fast as he was flying up. They surged down in great swaths of black vapor, weaving and growing and churning. It looked to Jute as if the sky was made of stone—black stone, mottled here and there in dark gray—and that the entire mass was about to crush him to the earth. The gigantic slabs of stone slammed against each other. Lightning crashed down at him. Thunder shook the sky. He dodged and reeled, staggering up through the heights. The air around him alternately blazed with the lightning’s leaping heat and then froze in the driving swirls of snow. The clouds were dreadfully close now. Molten light bloomed above him in the darkness. It was a hideous flower of heat, promising death and destruction. A fraction of a second later, the lightning flashed down at him. It was birthed so near him that he was struck deaf and blind by the proximity. He had no time to react, but the wind had already blown him to one side. Below him, though, on the edge of his mind, he felt an abrupt exclamation of pain from the hawk.
Jute had no time to bother with him, however, for he was now in the clouds. Darkness surrounded him. He could not see with his eyes, not even his own hands in front of his face. Snowflakes battered against him like a hail of rocks. He could feel blood streaming on his skin, bleeding and then freezing into ice. The currents of air buffeted him this way and that. Heat trembled into sudden and blazing life nearby and he flung himself away, cringing and waiting for the roaring thunder. Something was in the darkness with him. He could feel it somewhere close by. It was insubstantial, almost nothing at all, a vapor of thought drifting on the edge of his consciousness. Perhaps it wasn’t even real. Perhaps it was only a construct of his imagination. Yet, even if it was less than real, Jute feared it more than all the lightning and thunder and the searing cold dark. The hawk was silent, and he was all alone in the storm.
Jute.
He knew the voice. It was a quiet voice, quieter than a whisper.
Little wing. Thou hast left the earth. Thou dost soar above the heights. Thou dost reach the sky, and rightly so, for all this is thine. It is thine alone and none may gainsay thee. But wither wilt thou go? Wilt thou ascend to the stars? Wilt thou ascend to the house of dreams and knock upon that silent door? No one will answer thee. No one. But I would offer thee another way. A path far from the realms of man. Set thy foot to it and thou wilt find the treasures hidden in darkness. Thou wilt find knowledge. Thou wilt find power and glory. Thou wilt set thyself on the heights of the world, and all shall bow down to thee.
The voice trailed off, quiet and patient. It waited for him in the storm. It had waited for so long. It understood patience better than the stones and the mountains, better even than the ocean that will return and return again to the shore, content to remove a single grain of sand in the certainty of its placid expectation.
The storm raged around Jute. Thunder rolled beside him, beneath him, above him, in the distance. He was no longer even sure where he was in relation to the sky. Was he flying up? Or was he hurtling straight toward the ground? Dizziness surged through him. Surely he was about to crash down into the valley below the city. The earth would shatter beneath the force of his impact. He would die. No. How do the anbeorun die?
This I can tell thee, said the voice. I can tell thee many secrets. What dost thou wish to know? I was there when the first star was set in the dark firmament. I was there when it blazed forth into wonder and life. I was there when time began in the house of dreams. Dost thou seek such knowledge, or wouldst thou hear of other things? I can tell thee how the wind was killed. Or wouldst thou know what happened to thy brother fire? It began in the quiet, in the silence of his mind, on the edge of his dreams.
“No!” said Jute aloud in great horror. “Don’t tell me anything. I will not learn from you. Besides, I think I know what happened to the fire. I know who you are.”
There are so many things waiting for thee. The heights of the world are thine, Jute, if thou wilt take a step closer. One step closer to me. One step, and I will give you everything that is in your heart.
The voice paused for a moment and then spoke again, so quiet this time that Jute almost could not hear it. The fire need not burn forever. I will even make thee the savior of the city and its people. They will bow before thee. Thou shalt be their bulwark in wisdom and justice.
But then Jute was no longer listening to the voice, for he had burst through the top of the clouds into sunlight. Blue sky spread out around him in an endless blaze of glory. It stretched away toward a horizon that defied even Jute’s keen eyes. It was that sort of deep blue found on perfect afternoon days, when all is right with the world. In the east, however, above the undulating surface of the clouds, the sky was darkening down into shades of purple. Stars gleamed there in the gathering darkness. But where Jute floated in the air, turning and turning as if he could not see enough of the sight around him, the sun shone down in serene and dazzling brilliance. He laughed out loud with delight. The warmth of the sunlight surged through his body. The wind blew by him and its voice was glad.
We could stay here forever, you and me.
I wish that would be so, but we live for others, do we not?
The wind did not answer him. Jute took a deep breath and then plunged down into the storm clouds. He flew faster than thought, nearly as fast as the reaching rays of sunlight. He blurre
d into the wind and the wind was him. The clouds unraveled around him as if he had punched through a rotten weave of cloth. They sprang away in shreds and tatters of gray. They shriveled under the blast of the wind, unpicked from their knots by the relentless fingers of its breath. And the sunlight flooded on through. The storm clouds fled away in a rolling bank of darkness, hurrying away into the west.
Sunlight shone on the city of Hearne far below. From so high in the sky, Jute could see everything from the Rennet Valley east of the city to the ocean shining beyond the docks and the breakwater. What he saw made his heart falter. Sunlight flashed on a sea of black armor. The army of Mizra stretched across the valley. They darkened the earth with their numbers. They marched toward the city like an endless horde of beetles, their shiny carapaces inching closer and closer to the ruined walls. Jute could smell smoke in the air, even as high as he was. Gray plumes drifted up from the edge of the city. The sky over the city was scarred with the smoke. Fire reached up underneath it in hungry and grasping red. He could see the battle line reeling back and forth across the rubble of the ruined city wall.
Well done. The hawk soared alongside him. The bird’s voice sounded tired. It is no easy thing to say no to the master of Daghoron.
He knows a great deal of what I wish to know. I think, now, I understand people like Severan more. The wizards and the scholars. Knowing the answer to a question is no little matter. I understand why they would be willing to devote their entire lives to such things.
Aye. Certain questions are worth dying for. The meaning of a single word could potentially change the world. But there are some questions that should never be answered.
He still sleeps, doesn’t he? He isn’t awake?
He sleeps and dreams. The hawk nodded.
Good. Jute shuddered. I would not want him awake. Now, we have a battle to attend to, don’t we?
The Wicked Day Page 38
