by Tim Stead
“You have seen that whoever directs the armies of Seth Yarra will not baulk at this, and why would he show his hand so early? He is confident. So far the game is his. His pieces have moved on the board and we have moved in response, just as he anticipated, but I like to think that we have done better than he expected.”
“Then what are we to do, Deus?”
“What we can. There are battles to win, cities to run, and each of us has our own duties. If we hold the green road we will have the winter to prepare, and then we may have a chance. To that end I must go.”
“I will prepare to raise the levy. We will train more men, but there must be something else I can do.” He would not let it happen. Images of the city burning filled his inner eye. His friends dead, the city gone, the end of Avilian – he would not permit it. Just an hour ago he had been standing in a city that was eternal, enduring beyond his imagination, and now it was a ghost, teetering on the rim of the abyss.
“Treat your prisoners well, especially the half-priest, Keb. Learn as much as you can about his faith, about the ways of Seth Yarra. Pretend an interest if you do not have one. There may be some clue there.”
“I will do it.” I will be wiser than I can be, older than I am, stronger than a boy of eighteen summers, and I will not let it happen.
Narak was gone. Suddenly, as fast as an eye blinking the man was vanished and Quinnial was looking at a wolf. The wolf looked back at him with calm eyes. It was not at all alarmed to be suddenly thrust into the middle of Bas Erinor. Compulsion, Quinnial thought. The wolf was under instruction, and reassured by Narak’s presence in its mind.
Like me, he thought.
He walked back to the garden gate, suddenly feeling the cold again, and the wolf followed a few steps behind.
48 On The Wall
Skal pushed the body of the dead Durander away from him, and used the motion to duck and roll out of the way of the swinging blade. He heard it cut the air over his back, and came up with his sword drawn, his dagger ready. He missed an easy chance. His attacker had overreached himself in trying to deliver a killing blow, and his sword had carried him round too far to defend his right side. Skal was too far away to take advantage of the error.
He made use of the moment’s space.
“Stand to!” he shouted. “We are attacked!”
He didn’t wait for the man to swing again, but launched a counter of his own, pushing the man back against the wall with a series of aggressive cuts to the head, one of which rang the man’s helmet like a bell.
Telan. The man was Telan. He glanced down the wall, and in the starlight he could see dozens of them. He knew their swords, their helmets, their plate armour chests.
The man tried to come under his high attack, and Skal turned his blade and buried his dagger under the Telan’s armpit, twisting it free. The man wasn’t dead, but soon would be with a wound like that. He stepped left and attacked another enemy who was engaging one of his own Avilians, killing him with a single blow.
“To the stairs,” he said to his man. “We must gain and hold the stairs.”
There were a lot of Telans coming over the wall now. Skal could see that the defenders were hard pressed in several areas, and there were no archers standing by below the wall to clear the steps. They would have been little use anyway. The starlight might be enough to fight by, but it was a poor light for arrows.
He turned back to fend off another attacker, all the time edging towards the makeshift staircase. If the Telans took it they would hold the wall. They could bring over archers, and at dawn thousands of Seth Yarra. Skal realised their mistake.
Seth Yarra did not fight at night. It was something that everyone knew. It was in all the books, all the texts, all the accounts of the last Great War. None of them had expected the Telans to defy the strictures of their allies. Militarily it might be a clever move, but politically it would be a disaster for them. It showed the Seth Yarra, slaves to conformity, how unlike them the Telans were.
Skal was picking up more men as he moved. There were seven of them now, shuffling along the wall. Skal was holding their rear with two other men. It was the safest place. He had often reflected that it was difficult to kill a man if he was constantly moving away from you. The real danger came from the wall itself as more Telans leaped across the gap.
They must have approached in silence, muffled the ends of the ladders somehow, tied cloths around the uprights so that they made no noise against Arbak’s boxes when they touched. It was an unusually disciplined attack for Telan soldiers. It was clever, and not long until dawn.
A quick glance told him that men were hurrying up the pass from the camp. It was less than half a mile, but it seemed a long way tonight.
A burning sensation on his cheek snapped his attention back to the fight. He felt a trickle of blood on his neck and knew he’d been scratched. He struck back, making two of the enemy pressing forwards take a step the other way. He cut a hand, saw a blade drop, but didn’t have the time to finish the man as other pressed him again.
They were not particularly skilled, these Telans, but they hewed enthusiastically, and it took all his effort not to get cut again. He ducked a high blow and stabbed a man in the thigh, stepping back again to avoid a wicked chop from a man to his left. He parried two more blows, and risked another glance along the wall.
They were close to the steps now. It was only a few yards, but the wall was being lost. Where he had come from he could see nothing but Telans, pressing forwards behind their comrades, jumping onto the fighting platform from the ladders. There were fifteen men with him now. He knew that some had fallen at his side, but he could not count them. He did not know their names.
He saw archers on the wall, Telan archers. There were not many, but more were coming over the wall every second, and he could see them loosing a steady rain of arrows at the men coming up the pass. There was nothing he could do about that.
The man beside him now was a Berashi, a man he recognised. It was the young captain who’d first greeted him when he had arrived at the wall, Captain Simfel. They fought well together, but after a while he envied the man his shield.
The Berashi infantry carried heavy shields, round and robust, a steel mesh dressed in cloth with a prominent, sharp boss. Simfel used it in much the same way that Skal used his dagger. It was not as light, to be sure, but it was secured by two thick straps to his forearm, and its size made it easy for him to block a blow, even taking the weight of it on his shoulder. Skal’s dagger depended on the strength of his wrist, and even now his wrist was tiring. The boss, too, was a weapon. He had seen Simfel kill more than one man with its razor point.
He was counting time in bodies, the number of men he had faced and beaten, and he was well into double figures. They had reached the steps, and now held them against a fighting platform that was packed with the enemy. There had been over a hundred men up here, and now they were no more than twenty, packed into a tight circle. There were answering volleys from below now, and he could see clutches of men fall with each flight of arrows, but the Telans still had the upper hand.
He heard Arbak’s voice, loud and calm, impressing order on chaos, and he felt confident that things would go their way. The general knew what he was about.
A man thrust at him, and he beat the blade aside, only for another to cut at him from the other side. He was slow and it jarred against his breast plate. He lunged back, forcing the second man back, but the first slashed at him again, and he felt steel bite at his leg. The pain was shocking, and he staggered back a step. Simfel saved him, stepping between him and the man he was facing, smashing his shield into the man’s arm, sending his sword clattering away.
Skal regained his balance and gritted his teeth against the fire in his leg. He could feel the blood, warm and wet, moving down his leg with surprising speed. It was a bad cut, he guessed, but not immediately fatal.
He attacked again, trying to keep his injured leg as still as he could, using it as a rigid piv
ot, but it hampered him. He remembered a trick that he’d seen Quinnial use on Ampet – exaggerate the handicap, draw the enemy in. He allowed himself to stumble, and for a moment he thought he had made a fatal mistake. His leg was weaker than he had thought, and the pain stabbed at him again, making his head sing. The man came in, just as he’d planned, throwing aside caution for an easy kill, but Skal was strong enough and forced his leg to obey. He turned his enemy’s point and drove his blade into the man’s side.
He stumbled again as he withdrew his blade, knocked sideways by the man on his left, and for a moment he thought that he would fall off the fighting platform. His leg struggled to grip the stone, slippery with blood, but his boot caught on an edge, and he righted himself, turned again to face the enemy. His sword felt heavy and awkward, as though he’d picked up the wrong blade, but he couldn’t remember dropping his own. The night seemed to be getting darker instead of lighter. He knew that dawn was coming, but everything seemed wrong.
An armoured Telan fell past him with an arrow in his back, and that puzzled him too. Who would be shooting them from behind?
He was down on one knee, shaking his head, trying to clear it, but the shadows at the edge of his vision wouldn’t go away. He looked up, and all he could see were the backs of Avilian soldiers. Help had arrived then.
An arm went around his shoulder and he tried to shrug it away, making another effort to stand. “I don’t need any help,” he said.
“You’ve done your part, colonel,” a voice said in his ear. “Leave it to the rest of us. You need to get that wound bound.”
“I need to fight,” he said, but either the arm around him was too strong, or he was too weak, because a moment later he was being manhandled down the steep stairs. He heard Arbak’s voice again, calling the volleys as the archers swept the walls, and somewhere above him the stars were going out.
49 Hellaree
The ruins were older than the kingdoms of men. What remained, and even what remained upright was still impressive. The place was called Hellaree, and it was said that the last great mage emperor had made his stronghold here, a mass of dark stone climbing up the eastern slopes of the Dragon’s Back, but the tales were nearly as ancient as the stones themselves, and just as reshaped by time, worn by a hundred generations of tongues. The stones of a dozen great towers had fallen, making the slopes below a scree of cut stone, now weathered back to nature’s shapes by frost and wind and rain.
Two towers still stood, or at least made a bold vertical show of it. Their tops were rounded and broken, as befitted the towers of a dead and forgotten empire. One rose sixty feet, the other somewhat less, and they stood among the broken bodies of their erstwhile peers like memorial stones. Each tower was easily sixty feet across, and they were joined by the remnants of a curtain wall, jagged with decay.
Around the larger tower, stretched out behind the curtain wall, was a paved area. It was still level enough to walk upon without watching your feet, and it was here that Sithmaree waited.
She was impatient. Fashmanion was late. The sun was already past its apex and the crow had said he would meet her at midday. There was something that he wanted to discuss, he had said, something about Narak, and about Seth Yarra. She and the crow god had found themselves natural allies. Neither of them trusted the Wolf entirely. He always seemed to have his own agenda, ran in his own, secret space. He was altogether too fond of mortal men, she thought.
The sun and the stones were hot. Even this late in the year it was uncomfortable, despite the snows that patched the hillside above Hellaree, despite the high white peaks. There was no wind, and the dark stone caught the sun and radiated its warmth back at her. She did not want to remove her cloak, and she was becoming bored, so she stepped inside the tower.
There was little to see, but it was cooler here. The sun struck a crescent of stone on the south side and that band and the bright blue sky lit everything well enough. There were two places where stairs had ascended, broken stumps of stone protruding from the walls, rising in a curve around the inside of the great tower. The walls must have been fifteen feet thick in places. There were large, deep holes in the stone where she supposed beams had been placed to support the floor that the stairs had once served, and at the same level there was a great gap in the wall pointing north, where perhaps a corridor had pierced the tower, leading to another place long destroyed by frost and wind.
There was something melancholy about the tower, a sort of brooding regret, and she wondered who had built it. The stories, unreliable as they were, said nothing about the builder.
She tested the first stump of a step on one of the destroyed spirals, and found it strong. She moved to the next. Some were two feet of worn stone, and others no more than half a foot. Still others had gone altogether, but with the occasional slight risk she made her way by step and jump up to the great gap in the wall and perched there, looking across the ruins. She could see the other tower clearly, half eclipsed by the shadow of the one in which she stood. There was less of it than she had at first assumed. The back portion was crumbled away so that the walls curved back and down into a sea of dark rubble.
Something in that sea of stone caught her eye. There was something down there that was darker than the stone, and deeper black than the stone in shadow. She studied it, but it was shapeless, soft edged, and she could make out no detail. Oh for the eyes of a hawk, or even a crow.
She looked around. There was no more to be gained by staying in the gap, and a breeze seemed to be picking up, getting the better of the sun. She jumped down the inside of the tower, the twenty foot drop was easy, and walked out through the gaping entrance. She looked around, but there was still no sign of Fashmanion, and she could see right across fifty miles of open plain. It worried her more that she could see no crows at all.
She walked around the side of the tower, her curiosity still stirred by the black thing she had seen there. As she stepped into the shadow she saw a feather on the ground and stooped to pick it up. It was black, long, with the gentle curve of a flight feather, a primary from the wing tip. It was a crow feather, but old and dry. There was something odd about it. Looking closely she saw that the quill was pierced with tiny holes on opposing sides, as though something had been passed through it. A thread. It was a feather from Fashmanion’s signature black cloak.
He had been here. He had been here before. Well, that made sense, she supposed. He would hardly arrange to meet her in a place he did not know. She dropped it and carried on, deeper into the shadow of the great tower until she came to the place where she had seen the dark object.
It was still here. She crouched beside it and touched it with her hand. It was a cloak, and more than that it was the crow cloak, the black feathered cloak. Fashmanion would never leave this thing behind. She lifted the edge and jumped back, dragging it behind her, a hand flying to her mouth.
There was a body beneath the cloak. There was a lot of blood, too, and the blood was fresh and red. Someone had not been kind to Fashmanion. He was unrecognisable. She could see one whole arrow and two broken ones sticking out of his chest. An arm and a foot had been severed. The neck was cut almost all the way through and his face had taken two cuts across it.
He had been killed recently. In the last hour at a guess. Sithmaree turned, and was just in time to see a bowman loose an arrow at her. She flinched back from its path, but her reaction was too slow, and the head ripped a track across her skin and buried itself in her shoulder. The force of the blow spun her around, knocked down to her knees.
Blood silver.
The archer was already drawing a second arrow, but for a moment Sithmaree was transfixed. Her eyes stuck on him. He was like no man she had ever seen.
He wore a cloak of dark green, and apart from that was dressed in the purest black. The cloth was plain. There were no patterns, no silver tracings, no fluted cuffs. The cloth was black like the darkness of the grave. The most astonishing thing was his head, which seemed to be made of metal.
Her hesitation lasted only a moment, but already the second arrow was fitted to the string and she leaped with all her strength for the shelter of the ruin. She was not quite quick enough, yet again. The second arrow struck her in the calf, passing through it and clattering away on the stones beyond. But Sithmaree had made the sanctuary of the wall, and her attacker was fifty yards away. She had a brief respite.
The rush of the moment had kept the pain at bay, but now it stormed her mind, prevented her from doing what she knew she must do. She fought back, pushing it away, denying it. She had always been good at the Sirash, at getting there. It was something that she shared with Passerina, and she thought it had to do with being a woman, but now it would not come. She dragged a deep breath into her lungs and closed her eyes.
Beyond the wall she could hear death approaching, stepping across the rubble with bow in hand. She took a second breath, and sank into the darkness. She did not bother to search for a suitable destination, but seized on the first snake mind that presented itself, and translocated.
The ruins were gone. She lay by the side of a pond somewhere out on the great plain, and a deer that had been drinking leaped up and fled through the long grass, startled by her sudden appearance. She ignored it. For a while she ignored everything but the pain. She pulled the broken arrow from her shoulder and passed out.
