TWOLAS - 02 - The Ships of Merior

  'Do you suppose Tharrick forgot his sword, too?' Parrien murmured. He twitched at the belt that secured Dakar. 'If so, I'll just flay the intruder at my leisure.'

  'You say,' Keldmar shot back. The leather tails of his fighter's braid snapped to his vehemently turned head, his shout dwindling behind as he left to skirt the base of the keep. 'What prissy bits of swordplay you practise are much better suited to helping the scullions shell peas.'

  'Hah! So we'll see!' Parrien flung back in challenge. Left no other outlet for his spirited temper, he gave another jerk at Dakar's bonds.

  Keys still in hand, the Duke of Alestron elbowed past his sentries and disappeared. The Mad Prophet blinked stinging sweat from his eyes. Snapped through a splaylegged stagger by the belt, he managed to make out a dank, narrow doorway under the shadow of the postern.

  Within that maw of gloom, at the base of a shallow stairwell, Bransian's lips split in unholy delight through his unkempt bristle of amber beard. Then he turned the oiled lock and tripped up the latch. 'Come on. Or else Captain Tharrick and our brother are going to snatch all the fun.'

  'Over one spy's dead body.' Parrien dealt Dakar a neckcracking push that plunged him down through the darkened doorway and into the throat of an underground shaft.

  There followed more flights of stairs, ranged downward or up in patterns that seemed random; they crossed over landings discoloured from the slow seep of springs, or ones caked in dry-rotted fungus. The tunnel reeked of mould and stagnant water. Oil from the cressets that flamed in iron sconces threw off a murk of fine soot. Bransian helped himself from the casks filled with unlighted spares. Burning brands clamped upright in both fists, a dozen more thrust cold through his belt, he looked like a warder from Sithaer itself, primed for mayhem from his hobnailed boots to the crimped frizz that haloed his crown. Like demons, his two brothers pressed at his heels. They hauled their stout-bodied prisoner in his flamboyant clothes over the streaked, black water that flashed molten bronze and crimson agate; past the whickering flames dragged flat and torn dim by their hasty passage down the corridor.

  They stopped at short intervals to question the guards posted along the way. Men armed with daggers, crossbows, and swords who stood their turns of duty, locked in. An enemy who sought entry could kill them or try torture; their watch captain alone held the keys to the doors they defended. Bransian's inquiries were hasty and rough. His impatience hammered echoes above the clang of locks and bars, while the sentries answered back in fearful care.

  The last one to be pressured was emphatic. 'My Lord, there's been nothing alive in this passage. Not even a cockroach or a rat.'

  'Well that may be,' snapped the duke. 'But we've been told there's a spy in the armoury. You'd better think well before you speak.'

  The guard stared back in straight courage. 'A spy? Dharkaron strike me dead, my Lord, I've seen nothing!'

  'Nothing is it? Blind and deaf, both, are you?' Parrien launched forward, Dakar still in tow. He snatched the guard's surcoat with his free fist and twisted until the man's mail cowl crushed painful links into his throat. 'Were you bribed, man? We'll have the truth.'

  'Letup, brother,' Bransian boomed in complaint. 'How can he talk if you choke him?'

  Parrien released fast and kicked the man sprawling on a floor slimed with silt from past flooding. 'No bribe, Lord,' the guard gasped. 'No spy. On my life, I swear this.'

  'Your life will be asked, if you've lied,' muttered Mearn, his blade withdrawn from Dakar's back as he thrust past to tongue-lash the guardsman.

  In a rushed and grating jangle of iron, Bransian unlocked the next portal. The steel-bound grille swung wide to admit sucking draughts. These flagged the torchflames to sullen embers, and split shadows danced like cavorting gargoyles. Shaking with sick fear, Dakar flexed numbed muscles against the pressure of Keldmar's belt. While still another lock, latch and bar were unfastened, and a braced oaken panel yielded to Bransian's heave with a pealing rasp of stiff hinges, the Mad Prophet fretted that his spurious plot had placed him in more than dire straits.

  For a man to slip past this keep's defences defied the sane bounds of credibility.

  Arithon was blinded to mage-sight; that left his masterbard's gift to raise the pitch which Named steel. But any sound ventured in this underground warren would have stirred echoes to roust up a corpse. And even if such heavy defences could be jostled open by resonance; even given the vicious scope of s'Ffalenn cleverness, the last stretch of passage lay blocked by a massive, geared iron gate. This ground tortuously upward on tracks, assisted by mechanical counterweights and a windlass worked by brute strength that made Bransian's sinews bulge like corded meat.

  If the promised spy had not gained his entry, Dakar would be treated to the nasty sort of death he had angled to gain for Arithon s'Ffalenn.

  Over the ratcheting din of rusted chains, Mearn ventured, Will you look? I see no footprints in the moss.' He shot a scathing glare at Dakar.

  The portal screeched to rest with a reverberating clank. Bransian jabbed a chewed wedge of wood through the gears to lock the windlass, then stooped unperturbed to fetch his torches. 'You want to take chances? That herb witch we hired made less sound than a spider. Likely sorcerers don't leave any tracks.'

  A more distant groan of steel and a crash through the upper bowels of the keep evinced Keldmar's progress abovestairs. Parrien sidled, impatient. 'You're blocking the passage, Mearn. If you don't step aside to let this fat man squeeze past, I swear I'll use your knife to end the problem.'

  'You may need to slit his throat anyway,' Mearn said tartly. 'If the armoury's secure, the odds would suggest that perhaps this wretch is the spy.'

  'Stop talking.' Bransian planted himself, bearded chin thrust forward. 'I want to listen.'

  No sound met his stillness. A catspaw of draught teased the torches, then passed. The weave of the flames crawled upright and held, sparkless and steady and hot. Crowded by his brothers with Dakar leashed in tow, Bransian plunged into the pit black cavern of the dungeon.

  There followed another long pause, filled by the buming hiss of oil-soaked rags and half-suspended breathing. No other light or sound stirred the dust-laden air. The nearest racks of shelving loomed dark as catacombs, twelve feet high, and picked out in the teased play of light. Floor to ceiling, the velvet darkness lay stamped with dull gleams where steel, riveted, hammered, and forged in the myriad shapes used for war, chipped back intermittent reflections.

  'Nobody's in here,' Parrien said in cracking, incredulous fury.

  Bransian slapped him in the chest to make him quiet. To the prisoner who wheezed at his elbow, he said, 'How long do you guess your spy's had access?'

  'An hour or less,' Dakar answered.

  'That's if he exists at all!' Mearn's stiletto flashed a hot line in the dimness as he snared one of Bransian's torches.

  'Oh, but he does,' the Mad Prophet insisted in grim desperation. 'Be careful, he's clever as a fiend.'

  Then, with a vindication that both maddened and humbled, a bright voice called answer from behind a wedged pile of barrels. 'Why Dakar, how wonderfully imaginative!'

  Like windvanes in a stiff change of breeze, the brothers s'Brydionspun about.

  Just beyond sight, the speaker was blithe. 'What did you trade for my emeralds, my friend? Arbalests? Lances? Shall we count?'

  Dakar gulped air to retort. Before he found words, a twist at his wrists bent him to his knees on the floor. A heartbeat later, he struggled to accommodate as Bransian thrust all three smoking torches between his nerve-dead fingers and rattled low orders to his brothers.

  Their chase would be hampered: the low shelves were too tightly packed to step through; and the intruder could be armed with whatever style weapon he might find amid the stores to strike his fancy.

  While the brothers fanned out in a stalking pattern, Arithon resumed his ripping satire. 'A high king's crown jewels for a load of tempered steel, or Dakar! Could my life be the stakes that you bargained for?'
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  A stitch of reflection in stygian dark revealed Mearn in position to pounce. The voice paused in its monologue. A barrel canted to a rasp of shifted contents. A slight hesitation, like a held-back breath; then the cask toppled, upsetting its contents in a cascading, earstunning crash. Steel helms bounced from straw nesting. Numerous as the sins of the damned, they rolled on in a burst of winnowed chaff, to scatter across the stone floor.

  Parrien shied clear, swearing. Bransian's path toward a lashed stock of spears was rudely disclosed as a nasal hooked on his instep. While the intruder's dancer-light footsteps pattered back out of range, Mearn brandished his stiletto and pranced to keep his footing amid a glorious, belling clamour of raw noise.

  'Over there,' Dakar yelled as a shadow crossed his sight. 'He went right.'

  'What? No honour among spies? 'Nimble as a sailor, Arithon swarmed up the nearest rack to hand. 'Well, look, what have we here?' Poised near the ceiling, first his shoulders, then his feet vanished through a crack into gloom.

  A spear bit the wood he had clung to. A second shaft cocked back to throw, Bransian skidded to a stop beneath the shelving, braced his stance, and took better aim. A sack of spare fletching ripped above. His cast went wild as a blizzard of feathers frothed down over his head. Spitting sour dust, snagged with small quills like a fox run amok in a goose pen, he roared out a blasphemy, while his airborne lance rapped jagged splinters off a post, and glanced off a hanging cuirass.

  Metal screamed on metal, with Parrien forced to dive flat to escape the plunging fall of his brother's weapon. Furtive rustles sounded the length of the shelf. The fugitive was moving again. Mearn elected to try climbing, while over the cuirass's diminished vibration, his brothers traded curses in tandem. Their imprecations were defeated as a banshee shriek creased the air. Arithon had discovered the sheaf of signal arrows. A short recurve bow designed for mounted archers strung and poised in his hand, he watched his fast missile silence itself with a vengeful crack a fraction shy of Dakar's posterior.

  'There's one from behind, for treachery,' he chided. The bowstring creaked into another draw. 'And a second for predictable obsessions.'

  The next screamer knifed across the dark, sliced a dry thong, and cut loose a suit of old chain mail. The mass descended, jingling, and snagged Mearn like a cod in a lead-weighted net. Ripped off his perch, he went down. A thump, a grand puff of dust, and a screech of rude words through the byrnie marked his landing across the furled canvas of his grandfather's mouldered field pavilion.

  'Slings, two dozen, for small stoneshot,' the intruder listed cheerfully. He slithered on and read another label. 'Leather bracers with brass studs, six score.' A faint sniff pocked the recitation. 'Dryrotted, for shame. Someone neglected their goose-grease.' A box sailed down from the heights, struck another barrel of helmets, and the subsequent grinding avalanche of metal cut Parrien off at the ankles. He staggered, measured his length, and slammed himself dizzy on the strut of a handcart packed with sand-bags.

  The racket masked the grind of a bar from the stairhead. Across the fifty foot chamber, the upper level postern crashed back. Light cracked the dark, and soldiers poured through, Keldmar in the lead. Captain Tharrick raced a half-step behind, the spill of his torch a gleam on pale hair like blood on a sheaf of hackled flax.

  'Our enemy's up in the shelving,' warned Mearn. Another box flew and burst, this time against the wall above the stairway. Objects rattled and pinged down the risers. Peppered by ricochet, the soldiers lost impetus, windmilled, and yelled as their boots turned on footing made treacherous by a deluge of small stoneshot. Swords flashed helter-skelter. The scrape of blades and armour struck sparks against the wall as men collided and crashed on their buttocks.

  Unscathed on the landing, Keldmar embarked in cold fury to light torches. Cloaking darkness burned away in the blaze. Too dazzled by glare to make use of his bow, the instigator became a backlit target.

  Bransian hurled another javelin.

  The sheaf of whistle arrows toppled over the shelf rim as Arithon shed the recurve and dropped flat. The weapon skimmed over his head, nicked a ceiling beam, and clattered end over end into the aisle adjacent.

  Battered into retreat yet again by the shower of jettisoned signal arrows, Bransian shouted to his brothers. 'Axes! Hack through the braces to the shelving and let the whole tier collapse.' To the soldiers who sorted themselves to rights on the staircase, he ordered, 'Find bows. Set up a crossfire. I want that spy pinned down.'

  Parrien reappeared from a side aisle, his braid leaking blood, and fists locked around the haft of a double-edged war-axe. Mearn, more resourceful, had raided the field pavilion's gear for the woodcutter's hatchet in the cooking kit. In paired force, their first crashing strokes hewed at the braces, to a sullen, clanking chime of jarred contents; while in a stirred blaze of cressets by the landing, Keldmar and Tharrick regrouped the soldiers in teams and dispersed them on course to fetch longbows.

  That moment all the torches flicked out.

  A few ragged shouts, cut off by Tharrick's order; then no sound beyond the echoing thunder of axe blows, and a low-voiced, insolent remonstration. 'Mind your feet.'

  Keldmar became noosed in a snarl of flung bowstrings. Then a crash of wood and metal set the soldiers into howling disarray. 'Crossbows, ten dozen, and be careful the cocking latches don't get bent to perdition by the hobnails you wear in your boots.'

  The laughing voice issued from the right, no longer in the swaying mass of shelves. Mearn stopped hewing, too late. A rope had been strung from the top tier. Hemp gave a wasp-thrum in warning; the unstable mass teetered, then cracked and heeled over to bash into the next row of racks. A sandpaper rasp of slipped contents continued, and a spill of boxed, baled, tied and crated contents rocked airborne in a cataract that thudded burst wire and litter across the flooring.

  The soldiers sent off to string longbows were blocked or hammered flat by a matchwood bristle of splintered wreckage.

  Keldmar gave fast orders to seal the upper doors, while Dakar was kicked and half-trampled by Parrien's sprint to block return access through the passageway.

  Too encumbered to nurse his bruised shin, assured by the blistering fan of heat across his knuckles that the torches in his hands remained alight, if blackened by Arithon's weave of shadow, Dakar said, 'I warned you, this spy is a sorcerer. Whatever's in this armoury to attract the eyes of enemies, he'll go there before he tries escape.'

  'The culverin,' muttered Parrien, and trailed off with a guttural curse.

  A furtive scrape, a muffled sneeze, and a muted jink of metal betrayed the forecast's astuteness: the intruder was one shelf over, and moving fast in the opposite direction from the doorway. Mearn's lunge to flank his progress down the aisle immediately fouled in a crash, as meshed crossbows dropped minutes earlier to foil soldiers mired his ankles in turn.

  'Entanglements, snares, and misfortune,' the spy chided in unabashed hilarity; well aware the phrase was borrowed from a ribald ballad about an adulterer's mistimed assignation, Bransian aligned his gaze to match the sound. A whoosh combed through the air above, knitted through by a soprano clink of curb chain. Caught flat-footed and staring upward, the duke was clobbered by a snaking mess of harness. Half-throttled by the drag of the horsecollar, laced head to foot in oiled strap-goods, he ripped out his dagger and began in frantic bursts to dice leather.

  Having clattered through the last of the crossbows, his woodcutter's hatchet cocked to slash, Mearn poised in the darkness, listening. The armoury threw back a sullen stew of echoes. Bransian's quick and murderous breaths timed to the chink of dropped buckles, offset by Keldmar's exhortations to Tharrick's soldiers, engaged in grumbling effort to regroup and string longbows, to refrains of smacked shins and stubbed toes.

  A finger of breeze brushed Mearn's skin. Then his ears caught a telltale creak of wood. A whispered brush of cloth chafed over metal; the spy had alighted from the shelving but a half-pace away from his position. Mearn dropped his arms in a
powerful down-swing. The torches burst back to a dazzle of full flame, and a lithe, compact body folded to one knee under the descent of the hatchet. Black-haired, green-eyed, and merrily sardonic, the spy met the stroke, a sword upraised in each hand. Steel screamed as the hatchet sheared and grabbed on crossed blades braced to guard.

  'Bad luck,' said the spy on a grunt as the shock knocked him breathless. He let go of his weapons. Mearn's backstep, and his jerk to clear the helve from his opponent's entangling parry met no resistance.

  The hooked blades obliged and flew airborne. Inherent fine balance lent their trajectory vengeful life as they arced toward shocked and widened grey eyes and a mouth etched with grim determination. Mearn jumped, cat-quick in avoidance, while his quarry tucked, rolled, and disappeared through the space beneath the shelf. Mearn's thrown weapon hissed a half-beat behind, nailed wood, and bit off an appalling gouge.

  Still meshed in looped harness, Bransian lost patience and charged. Helmets pealed, thrashed back to belling life as his progress raked the scattered debris in a snaking wrack of traces and hames. Bit-rings and buckles snagged on bowstocks and flanges, and the racket drowned all hope of tracking.

  'Dharkaron's Black Spear!' Parrien screeched. 'Will you shut those things up?' Irate enough to abandon his post by the tunnel, he rolled onto his toes, then stopped his rush as the armoury went dark a second time.

  Bransian ground to a halt amid a petulant chime of dragged steel. Captain Tharrick and Keldmar had used the brief respite to regroup the soldiers. The intermittent rattle of strayed slingshot betrayed their closing move to quarter the one aisle left untrammelled.

  While over the stealthy brush of footsteps, the muted grate of weapons and mail, a soft voice pattered in monologue: 'Halberds, four score, admirably polished. Daggers for swordplay, eight dozen, boxed. Longswords, less quillons and pommels, two chests' worth.'