Distraction could not matter; death and sorrow could not claim even tears of acknowledgement. Jussoud, who was brother, and Vensic, who was protégé, and Taskin, who held his respect, and not least, the meek physician who displayed such terrified courage—all must suffer their fates without salvage. One man and a dog bore Isendon’s charge to safeguard a royal daughter. Now, nothing less than the peace of a kingdom rode on the unwritten outcome.
Mykkael forged ahead, though he ached for the price of necessity. Since the disastrous defeat of Prince Al-Syn-Efandi, he had fought to bury his wounded heart in sealed solitude. Sessalie’s peace had leached through that resolve. His circle of newly forged friendships had made inroads, and were now, yet again, all he had resembling a family.
‘Benj, Benj,’ he whispered, torn ragged, while the gelding splashed and scrambled up the ravine. ‘I always understood how you felt about Dalshie.’
How much harder to bear, when the next sacrifice claimed was likely to be a perceptive and talented young sergeant.
XXII. Assault
THE ODD SENSE OF URGENCY REACHED OUT OF NOWHERE AND SEIZED JUSSOUD BY THE HEART. HE HAD BEEN BORN TO A TRIBAL TRADITION that honoured the unseen world known to shamans. On trust and impulse, he moved at speed, grabbed Vensic’s surcoat and yanked backwards with all of his strength.
The garrison man’s attacking lunge was jerked short. The brisk parry effected by his crown guard opponent whistled short of connection.
Vensic crashed off balance into Jussoud’s braced shoulder, shouting his outraged surprise. There, the huge nomad pinned him, just as the rising spell line fully unfurled. The three men guarding Taskin’s downed litter came under attack by a crackling explosion of fire. The shielding geometry written into three talismans turned its brute force, deflecting the thrust from the party surrounding the litter. No natural conflagration, the licking whirlwind that engulfed them seemed to feed upon nothing but air.
Enveloped by the shrieking noise and scalding heat of a shredding assault, besieged by a relentless power that surged to consume, Jussoud screamed into Vensic’s ear, ‘Cross that flame with a blade, you’re a dead man!’ He kept his arms locked until the young man’s furious struggle subsided to understanding. Then the healer added, ‘Take up the litter and give me your sword.’
Trained touch countermanded the stiff surge of resistance. ‘Now!’ Jussoud cried. ‘No argument, Vensic! I carry protection. You don’t hand me your weapon, we die here.’
The spelled fire closed in. Its uncanny, mindless surge to destroy ripped and seared with a savagery beyond parallel. The thin ring sustained by Perincar’s defences withstood the onslaught, just barely. Its limited range hemmed them in like trapped rats. Such tight shielding could not ground the roused force of the element, or break the cast line of demonic power summoned in from the shadow realms of the unseen. Fire howled and raged, balked but not quenched. Its heat would scorch cloth and peel skin, if not scald the lungs with each drawn breath. By now the Fane Street physician was shouting with ragged hysteria.
Vensic released the sword, just as Jussoud’s fierce yank wrenched the weapon’s grip from his hand. ‘Bear up the litter,’ the nomad gasped, frantic. ‘Then stay at my heels. Rely on the vizier’s pattern we carry, no matter what mayhem should happen!’
Jussoud shouldered ahead. The blade in his grasp was an ill-suited match, too small and too lightly balanced. The swords he had used to train on the steppe had been curved, forged with more weight at the tip to make slashing strokes more effective. Sanouk warriors always wielded such weapons in pairs. One blade left him hamstrung and guardless.
Worse, the nomad dared not pause to mourn his broken integrity. He must cast off the grace of his healer’s oath, that forbore to cause harm through violence. A failure to act would destroy three more lives, with the innocent populace of a whole kingdom left to the plot of a sorcerer.
Either the geometry worked into the talisman could withstand the line of spell-cast destruction, or within seconds, Taskin’s protectors would succumb to a fate beyond horror to imagine. Standing firm was no option. Delay would see them all roasted. Jussoud closed his eyes, stepped forward, and trusted: first the defences Mykkael had left, that had once held strong through all but the worst lines of hot conjury spun by Rathtet’s bound sorcerers. The nomad relied on his tribal ancestry, that understood the deep realms of the spirit world. Last, he fell back upon childhood training, that had taught him the warrior’s way of the sword.
The effort to walk was like ploughing into a padded wall. Resistance arose at the interface, where the talisman’s guarding influence ran against the hurled balefires summoned by cold-struck spell lines. Jussoud firmed his will and leaned into the pressure.
‘Stay with me. Follow!’ he gasped, then blessed the response as the others rallied behind him. Sterling result of Mykkael’s tempered discipline, Vensic had managed to calm the physician. The pair of them resumed the delicate task of bearing up Taskin’s litter.
Jussoud pressed forward, and the fire line shifted. The combined advance of three matched vizier’s talismans pressed into the gyre of spelled forces and yielded a grudging span of clear ground. Another thrust forward, another hard step. Each footfall felt set in glue. Jussoud steeled his courage, and leaned on the strength of his nomad heritage. He was the son of a Sanouk royal house, born to an ancient and honourable ancestry. Through closed eyes, using mind, he groped for the shape of the otherworld, the unseen context of subtle energies that underlay the solid existence known to the animate senses.
He expanded his awareness outside human flesh. Across the first veil, he encountered the desperation and fear mirrored by his committed companions, then their more subdued counterpart: the one man, gravely wounded, lying helplessly unconscious. Jussoud traced out the ephemeral threads, where his thoughts and theirs ran in sympathy. He used mental imagery to refigure the weave, where jeopardy spun common lines of need and survival. Then he embraced those strands shared by his companions, mentally wound them into his own, and projected the flow of them forward. He angled their matrix to strengthen the forces that actively stood off the fires; and Perincar’s pattern captured that willed influx, and flowered, and resurged to a blaze of cold blue.
The fires roared and fell back. Streaming sparks, and flaring in unnatural colours, the aimed brunt of the long spell yielded. The barrier gave way in grudging retreat as Jussoud pressed his advance. He gained one step, two, over stinking, charred earth. Heat blistered his soles. He stamped out the flare of caught embers as his grass-soled sandals ignited.
The next moment, Jussoud sensed a sharp shift in the hostile conjury Deflected by the reverse spin of Perincar’s geometry, the line of demonic attack streamed into live contact with the thrusting steel of two sword blades as the lead pair of palace guardsmen bore in on the misguided chancellor’s order.
Their blades flared up, instantaneously consumed. The flash of ignition raised tearing screams, as the nexus of otherworldly destruction flowed across the bridged steel, and claimed the hapless men holding the weapons.
Their suffering described unimaginable agony. The Fire, elemental, unbound living matter. It left not a wisp of charred ash. No smoke billowed. No crackle of flame masked the victims’ shrill cries. As the flux of wild energy immolated their bodies, Jussoud beheld the abomination in its wrenching entirety. He had known the spell lines of a sorcerer drew on demonic intelligence. Never, before this, had he grasped the foul truth: that such power was bartered in exchange for men’s souls, devoured in shredding torment.
To die of the body brought healing peace. To be killed by the unclean forces of hell was to suffer a fate that transcended time.
While the screams of the guardsmen shocked through the scorched air, Jussoud sensed their wailing echoes resound past the boundary of the unseen. Demons served sorcerers, so men said in their ignorance. Made witness to the act of forced crossing at first hand, a healer’s perception beheld the reverse: that the hunger of such beings h
ad no limit. Their ‘masters’ in harsh fact existed as slaves, perpetually constrained to feed them. If a sorcerer exhausted the lands under his conquest; if ever his supply of fresh victims fell short, he would, in his turn, be consumed. Each innocent death let the sorcerer live, one half step removed from the powers that sealed his irreversible pact with damnation.
The cruel irony that Mykkael must have borne from the Efandi defeat crashed hard against humane preference, as tribal knowledge let Jussoud comprehend the poisoned victory bought by his survival. A successful defence against sorcery permitted no saving grace of empowerment. Like the desert-bred captain before him, Jussoud could protect helpless lives, yet do nothing to spare suffering as the doomed guardsmen were inducted by the spun fury of a sorcerer’s cold-struck spell line.
No horror prepared the initiate observer. Jussoud recoiled, retching, while unspeakable, fell forces chained the matrix of two human spirits, and denied them the transition of death. Shrieking in agony that had no voice, their shades were sucked down, shackled into undying captivity to fuel the insatiable will of the demon.
‘Jussoud!’ screamed Vensic. ‘Go forward. You have to! Like it or not, we’re all Sessalie has on the front lines guarding the breach!’
Taskin alone held the power to stop this; wrest command of the guard away from the council, and out of the sorcerer’s influence. Yet the cool course of logic justified by necessity could scarcely assuage raw emotion. Jussoud pressed ahead, but not out of courage. He jammed his heart closed, shut his eyes and stepped over the razed ground out of shrinking cowardice. At the crux, he could not bear to face the abyss that yawned under his sister, Orannia.
In that dreadful moment, her brother understood the full scope of the terror that pursued her. For the first time, he realized why Mykkael had been adamant to stay by her side to prevent her from suicide. Half trapped, still alive, her madness suspended her over a death that was not going to buy her deliverance.
Worst of all, as Jussoud lived the choice that consigned two human spirits to perpetual suffering, he knew that Mykkael his brother would forgive him. Of all men, the captain well understood this moment’s poisonous self-loathing.
How many times had the desert-bred been forced to enact such hideous destruction? How many strangers and loved ones alike had been delivered to perpetual bondage by his sworn charge to save the Efandi princess?
The tainted thought followed with punishing clarity: that his decision to distribute Perincar’s talismans had invited fate to replay his most terrible nightmare. Alone, Mykkael had weighed the unbearable choice. How long had he wrestled the face of his nemesis? Where, amid screams as wrenching as these, had he found the fibre to repeat the untenable past, and attempt to guard Isendon’s daughter from the perils of a sorcerer’s conquest?
How many others must be consumed, or go mad? How many must shoulder the price meted out, suffering past the reach of a lifetime, beyond hope of reprieve, like Orannia?
For two more palace guards blocked the garden path in the company of the chancellor. One of them would be the puppet claimed and used by the sorcerer’s minion, to sustain the potentized spell line.
‘Jussoud!’ Vensic shouted. ‘Keep moving! You must! Lose ground now, and the sorcerer kills wantonly. What fate will befall the people of Sessalie if their king goes down in defeat?’
A thought fragment answered, arisen from the unseen fabric of the otherworld. Its source was no ghostly reflection prompted by ancestral wisdom. The vibrant echo received by Jussoud held the searing, explosive remorse of Mykkael’s living experience…‘my brother, by the stars of your ancestry, may you never hear such screams as these from the throat of an infant, or a child
Jussoud shuddered. Horror forced him to assay the next step.
The third stride saw the wall of fire collapse with a whistling rush of stressed air. The forces driving the demonic assault ripped away like a curtain of tissue.
Two more armed guards faced them, a half step behind the stoop-shouldered old man who served as Sessalie’s most venerable chancellor.
‘Be wary, Jussoud!’ the physician cried.
Yet the son of an ancient nomad bloodline would sense peril birthed from the unseen. Instinct raised the hair at Jussoud’s nape the instant he locked eyes with the spellbound creature before him. The frail gentleman in his fussy silk doublet had once been a timid, retiring philanthropist. He would not have stood firm through such fire and storm, except as the used glove for a minion. The immediate presence of danger roused Perincar’s talisman to spontaneous heat. Jussoud felt every scored mark in its pattern as though graven into his skin. He acted before thought, before fear, before primal reflex prompted panic-stricken flight. He balanced his mind inwards, and cried out for the guidance of ancestral instinct to steer his raw will to survive.
The timid old noble who was a live catspaw cracked out his imperious demand. ‘Guardsmen! You will set this party of traitors under arrest!’
‘We go nowhere for the hell-spawned puppet of a sorcerer,’ Jussoud said, teeth clenched with desperate defiance. Then he levelled the sword, and touched the rounded steel pommel to the talisman disc at his breast. Contact inducted its searing vibration through the forged length of the weapon. Jussoud sensed the timed moment. As the stressed metal sang aloud in his hand, he moved in the way of the warrior, and ran the elderly chancellor through his thin breast and defenceless heart.
Shock followed. The pierced body wrenched backwards and toppled. No catspaw remained, and no danger. Only an old man, dying. He sprawled on to the white gravel, convulsed by traumatic agony. Warm blood and vomit gushed at Jussoud’s feet. He recoiled, gagging, while the sword locked fast in his grip jerked free with a sucking wrench. He staggered back, overcome by the raw stink of slaughter, and crashed, numbed with shock, into Vensic.
Nor did the untried garrison man fall short as the demands of necessity fell on him.
‘Take the litter!’ The breveted sergeant’s shout struck a note of command to shore up faltering nerves. ‘Do it now! Jussoud!’ He jammed a pole into the nomad’s left hand. When the easterner’s shocked fingers failed to respond, Vensic let his grip slide. He used crisis and forced stunned confusion to resolve, engaging the healer’s instinctive reflex to guard the gravely wounded from jostling harm.
Then Vensic reached over the salvaged litter and wrenched the blooded sword out of the nomad’s stunned fingers. ‘My job, now, fellow!’
The garrison man twisted. His stopgap parry just blocked the first guardsman’s attacking lunge. The fouled steel turned the murderous thrust, barely. The bind of stressed metal slid screaming, past Jussoud’s silk-clad shoulder.
‘You handle Taskin!’ Vensic gasped, rushed. ‘I’ll clear the pathway’ As the remaining pole of the litter changed grip, he surged to the fore, sword raised to guard point to engage the assault of both palace guardsmen at once. They came on, crying treason. Their shouts rang on the night air, charged with chilling conviction. Belief fuelled their aggression. They were convinced they had just witnessed clear proof: the uncanny slaughter of two fellow guards, and the murder of an unarmed high chancellor.
‘Sure enough,’ Vensic gasped through the chiming clash, as his angled steel hammered into the first lunging blade. The turned sword shrieked aside. He ducked under the second, and lashed out with a kick. The blow caught the opposing swordsman’s wristbone. As the weapon sailed free of the victim’s bashed hand, he finished, ‘we have no choice but get out of here.’
Taskin’s guardsmen were superbly taught. Yet Mykkael’s matchless training had instilled the savagery required to survive on a battlefield. Eight months of the captain’s ruthless surprise drills had found Vensic a gifted pupil. Even disadvantaged by green nerves and stacked odds, even thrown the uncertainty of darkness, he closed in with deft speed. Once inside a man’s reach, a longsword became either a cudgel, or a disastrous hindrance. Brute infighting let Vensic turn fists and battering knees against opponents best schooled for elegant b
lade work. He struck to disable. Smashed joints could stop a skilled swordsman faster than landing a stroke with an edged weapon.
The two guardsmen were down, moaning, and the fouled steel wiped clean on the dead chancellor’s robe before anyone noticed: the sword that had been a garrison-forged blank now bore the faint tracery of Perincar’s geometry on the pommel.
‘Resonance,’ the little physician explained, as the litter supporting Taskin’s slack form was rushed onwards through the dark garden. ‘Jussoud picked up the aroused vibration of the talisman through sympathetic touch. Then he thrust the blade into the suborned flesh of a sorcerer’s acting catspaw. Passive protection encountered a potentized line of spellcraft, and reconfigured that energy, forcing an imprint.’
‘Do you think the new mark might grant shielding properties?’ asked Vensic, all at once overtaken by shivering dread, and the shock of his desperate action. His face looked haunted as he cut his own question short. ‘Never mind. After this, I’d be a stark madman to invite the fool’s chance to find out.’
Paused to water his mount at a freshet, Mykkael rested his brow against the forearm braced against the packhorse’s lathered shoulder. The black-and-tan hound he had borrowed at need sprawled panting next to his feet. The poor beast was likely as hard-used as he was. He had covered the last league to the ridge crest on foot to spare his exhausted gelding. The stony ground had savaged his knee, and done the stabbed thigh with the compress no favours. Plagued now by the running fire of pinched nerves, Mykkael cursed the brute legacy left by his scars. If he pushed too much harder, the leg would collapse. Here, he would have no saving help from Jussoud if his overstressed resources failed him.