TWOLAS - 08 - Stormed Fortress

  The sword stayed, a line scribed against fire where the wrack of breached timbers crackled, ablaze. 'Then talk!' snapped Fionn Areth. 'Convince me! You have until we reach the stone pier. That's more time then you've ever listened to me, and twice over your brute fists have trampled civility.'

  'You're a cheeky wee rat!' Cattrick grinned, eyebrows raised despite his dire straits, until the quick blade darted in and snicked through the points on his jerkin. Since his blood would spill next, he added, quite cool, 'The only reason I stayed on that dock was to secure the winch on the weir gate. We keep Sevrand's trust! With his sentries called off to bolster the battle-front, we shouldered the watch, here. Now the cussed lock shaft's blown open, the upper conduit has to be closed against the invasion!'

  'Your claim holds no proof,' said the goatherd, unmoved.

  Cattrick heaved on the oars. 'I don't know what went wrong!' Strained to the limit of muscular prowess, his anguish might still mask deceit. 'Our effort was genuine. Alestron's our home. The shipworks are my livelihood. I held the rear-guard to cover my crew. The fire-ship was meant to be launched in the open!'

  Fionn Areth's disparaging glare made the shipwright unburden. 'Only the men who volunteered to lob flour through the galleys were to be at risk of deadly exposure. The hulk's other hands had my orders to disembark! Let the brig go on under sail with her tiller lashed for self-steering as the slow fuses ignited. They were meant to come in! Shut the lower lock, and stay safe as the sortie began. My timing should have seen them inside the defences far ahead of the final explosion. Are you listening? I am not spouting nonsense! The sluices that flood the main shaft only operate from inside the dry dock's cavern.'

  'How convenient.' Fionn Areth refused to withdraw. 'Nobody's left to gainsay your story. You could be spoon-feeding me a sweet pack of lies.'

  'No knife in your ribs!' Cattrick snapped, vicious. 'Thrash out the self-evident truth, you blind fool! You've been holding that sword all along by my grace! Because between us, however that foray turned bad, the break in the lock's wrecked the Sea Gate's integrity. Before giving the accursed Alliance free passage, I need your help! There's no one but us to secure the postern from the sewer until Sevrand's company sends in armed relief.'

  'How do I know you'll fight and not run?' Fionn Areth hurled back. 'Or was there another reason why you sold Arithon off to Koriathain, then turned again on Tysan's crown interests and scarpered from Riverton on charges of felony?'

  The shipwright glared daggers. Sweat slicked his craggy temples. Speech would not come freely past his seething rancour, or the breathless exertion that bucked the long-boat against the rushing current. Inch by hard-won inch, his strokes managed headway, the splash of lapped oars gouging bubbles of foam through the sucking black eddies.

  'Speak fast!' cracked the goatherd, the replicate image of Arithon's features a more searing advocate than he imagined.

  Cattrick admitted in stiff discomfort, 'I had a demonstrative point to be made. Koriathain used their oath of debt on my name in dishonour, and made me their unscrupulous tool to cause harm.' His next enraged oar-stroke plunged the long-boat through the arch to the underground water-way. 'Nobody ever has owned me, that way. I wanted my stand on that matter made clear.'

  "That's cold.' Yet even as he let fly with denouncement, Fionn Areth was raked by a chill.

  'You say, bantling!' The master shipwright barked a sour laugh. 'We're far more alike than indifferent over our desire for fierce independence. Whose side will you take? Don't claim you can't choose. I won't cut you slack if you're dithering.'

  Yet this pass, the grass-lander could not be provoked. 'If you worked for yourself, or decried the shame on your character, that doesn't forgive your smeared record, today. How do I know you weren't out for sabotage?'

  'Gut-ripping shark!' Cattrick's face twisted. 'My dead aren't enough? You think I set the spark off that slaughtered them?'

  Silence answered. The targeting sword never wavered, despite the hard thrust of the oars that slapped wavelets against the slimed passage-way. Now the plunge of each stroke stirred up plumes of muck. The water was dropping. Once, then again, the long-boat's keel scraped over the sediment shoaling the channel.

  'All right!' snarled Cattrick. 'I'll give. But first, I'll have your promise you'll stand at the pier in defence of the citadel.'

  'For my part, that issue was never in question.' Fionn Areth need not wait to prove his resolve. The boat grounded out. Their forward progress must continue afoot, breasting the flood in the shallows. Prepared as the shipwright abandoned his seat, the Araethurian leaped overboard.

  His feet sank into mud. The icy water swirled knee deep, and wrung the very breath out of him. Rocked by the swift current, he snatched left-handed and braced, as the boat slewed and threatened to sweep him off balance. His sword-arm stayed trained: the disingenuous craftsman had not plunged in after him.

  In trust, or necessity, Cattrick had turned his broad back to salvage the cask from the bow. 'Loose the boat, goat-boy. She's no use to us, now. For sweet luck, she might hammer a few foes downstream. Best if she dives off the edge of the weir and knocks some armoured grapplers off their boarding ramps.'

  Past question, the margin for bickering philosophies had to be running thin. The echoing clash of a ram boomed behind: one of the galley-borne siege towers closed in. Assault would tear through the remains of the weir gate. With the ferocious ebb drawing down the high water, the conduit where craftsman and grasslander waded would fast be spilled dry, wide open to hostile invasion.

  Yet even the closing promise of ruin did not move Fionn Areth. Bone stubborn, or else suicidally brave, he continued his interrogation. 'If your good intentions oppose the Alliance and Lysaer's declared cause, I'd know why!'

  Cattrick swore murder and shouldered the keg. The steel at his back was no bristling feint, but aimed by rampaging emotion that might strike to kill in a heart-beat. Slogging ahead, each fled second precious, he spoke fast. 'I was just a paid craftsman who carried a grudge, until the day of the official inspection that followed Lysaer's misplayed foray at Corith. The Blessed Prince sat in my chart loft and examined the ships' plans I'd sketched in false lines. Lysaer had scant knowledge of deepwater craft. He lacked the expertise to recognize the subtlety of my sabotage. I thought him self-blinded enough to be gulled, until Mearn s'Brydion made his entry and forced the conversation into exposure.'

  Cattrick snatched a deep breath. The rough features shadowed by the hefted cask perhaps matched his ringing bitterness. 'I was shown the creature behind the state mask. The manipulative brain clothed in flawless charisma. Lysaer knows men! Reads us with the ease of a mariner's chart. Past all question, he sensed that I would play him false. My calm reserve was all poisoned duplicity, yet he did nothing. Said nothing! Never once guarded the lives of his own jeopardized sail crews. He let them walk into my trap just to leverage a plot for his own strategic benefit. Lysaer s'Ilessid has mind, but no heart! Whether such nerveless conviction is caused by Desh-thiere's curse, or if the flaw springs from calculated ambition, I committed my course, then and there. I could serve with a pirate who valued his people. But not bow down, knowing, for no more than coin, and watch my life's work become used in live chess for a righteous quest without mercy'

  They had reached the stone pier. Cattrick stopped, braced for the sword's finishing thrust. He chose not to plead. 'If you won't defend to buy time for the citadel, you will have to strike. I won't change coat now for coercion.'

  The moment paused, hanging, fraught with the echoing, triumphant shouts of armed enemies, burst through to the unmanned dry dock. Against the oncoming noise of invasion, a thin ring of steel sheared the gloom.

  'I saw Arithon's face, after bearing your word that Feylind's brig was pinned down with all hands aboard.' The truth written there had surpassed all deceit: that Rathain's prince had no shield against honest tears for the unalloyed sorrow of casualties. Fionn Areth stepped forward, sword sheathed at his side, and offe
red his steadfast apology. 'I've got tinder, if you need my help with the oil. Then count on my stand in the passage.'

  * * *

  Paired as they had been through much of their professional lives, Vhandon and Talvish matched desperate strides through the tangled streets of the dock quarter. They had outdistanced the cohort of garrison men, stripped by necessity from the melee on the walls: a fighting force that could ill be spared, called away to thwart the imminent threat to the shipworks' broken rear postern. Pounding at a sprint, strained lungs burning in the frigid air and feet skidding on icy cobbles, the two captains shared the grim certainty that the Koriathain's made decoy of Arithon would be found embroiled at the site of disaster.

  'I'll kill him,' gasped Vhandon, ripped raw with remorse.

  Talvish just ran, having nothing to say. Both men had given their friendship to the surly Araethurian. They had done their utmost to mentor his conflicted character, beyond any other green recruit because, like Arithon, they had believed in his salvage. The trauma that had mauled his innate identity and twisted his idealism into contentiousness had been a flaw born from cruel exploitation.

  To the end, all had striven to keep an unbroken integrity with the victim, that he might build his own footing for trust.

  Now that kind-hearted mistake came to roost. The reckoning impelled the most harsh acknowledgement: that, all along, the grasslander was the made instrument of the Prime Matriarch's fashioning. In life, his sole purpose had been viciously crafted to snare the Prince of Rathain. Excuses were forfeit, before the staring fact: danger stalked Arithon without remission in the long shadow cast by his enemies. The anguished captains spurred their brutal pace. However the weir at the cut had been breached, that event posed the crippling blow to drive Alestron to final defeat.

  Once invaded, the cavern defences could not be recouped. The dry dock gave the enemy a defensible access, with the warren of sewers too extensive to flush without crippling losses. A mass influx of sappers would mine under the cliffs. Before the walls crumpled, no more could be done but hamper the final incursion. Allow Sevrand's forces enough borrowed time to stage a doomed retreat to the upper citadel. The crushing impact of impending conquest could scarcely be mourned, far less measured.

  The heroic effort of two driven men could not cross the sea quarter any faster. Past the wharf-side's dark shop-fronts, through the cramped gutters between masonry warehouses, and under the railed balconies of the back-alley brothels that no longer roared with the lusty abandon of deck-hands on leave, Vhandon and Talvish rushed ahead with a will fit to burst mind and sinew. The awareness, that all they had done was for naught, added torment to searing exhaustion.

  'Think of your brave daughter!' gasped Talvish, not able to bear the mute agony on Vhandon's face. 'She is far from this place, and quite free. She chose life! Arithon's summoning granted that grace. Remember her, above failure!'

  Alestron might fall. But the Light's hollow cause could never obliterate the record of Bransian's unbroken defiance. Because Arithon had come, Vhandon had a legacy: grandchildren who would grow up in peace, informed of the citadel's resistance. Unlike his lost eldest, a son who had farmed and been killed by the blast of Lysaer's suborned power; or his tempestuous youngest, who served yet under arms with the duke's elite guard.

  'For Fionn Areth?' snapped Vhandon, not one whit consoled. 'The Teir's'Ffalenn shall not be told! Let his Grace never know whose black-handed ingratitude caused our undoing.'

  Around the next corner, both veterans coughed, eyes streaming under the roil of smoke choking an avenue well-known since their boyhood. Guided by instinct, lashed by cruel grief, they pressed forward on guts and necessity.

  Their fight must deny the Prime Matriarch's prize. Accord between them required no words: Desh-thiere's curse, and the meddling of Koriani politics drove Alestron towards hostile conquest. Citizens would be on fire to lay blame. As their anguish turned in reproach on the Masterbard, they would accuse Arithon for the suffering heaped on the undermanned garrison.

  'Can't spare his Grace from public censure unless we take the grass-lander first,' Talvish said in grim assessment.

  'Too much has gone wrong,' Vhandon agreed.

  Brothers in arms, they raced past the shut doors of the guild-hall, where excise stamps with the s'Brydion blazon had endorsed fair commerce throughout an unbroken succession. Beyond lay the arched postern that guarded the maze of the underground sewer.

  The night street between as yet remained empty. No hordes of armed enemies charged from the gap, yet.

  'Ath bless!' gasped Vhandon.

  He and Talvish drew their swords as one movement. Shoulder to shoulder, they rushed down the ramped passage. The steel gate within was not locked or guarded. But an oncoming clangour of weapons scattered echoes off the vaulted conduit. Somewhere ahead, a living defender sweated in hard-fought retreat.

  Talvish forced his reserves and quickened pace. 'If that's the sentry, he's sorely beset'

  'Tiring, also,' Vhandon observed, his trained ear attuned to the sword-play. 'Else wounded.' Through the stressed ring of steel, hazed to frenzied crescendo, he added, 'Won't leave him to enemies, whoever he is. Hold at the grille!' Without further word, he shoved onwards into the gloom.

  'Damn your fool heroics!' Talvish followed, fraught to match Vhandon's gruelling lead. 'You're not going alone!' As fragmented swearing sliced back up the corridor, he flashed his most insolent grin. 'No, friend! I don't take your ranked orders, since I'm no longer Duke Bransian's officer.'

  'Alestron might suffer for that change in loyalty!' Yet Vhandon's barked protest failed to shake off the blond swordsman's insistent protection.

  At the bend, where a pine-knot torch should have burned, they encountered an empty bracket. The mooring rings wore severed knots: someone's ingenuity had taken the pole-boats and rigged them for incendiary tinder. A cloud of black smoke billowed up the drained passageway, rank with burned oil and noisome, singed meat. The screams were not pretty as men burned alive, ambushed by the conflagration.

  Talvish coughed. 'You hear? They're cursing the Spinner of Darkness for sabotage.'

  'Here's hope!' Vhandon snarled. 'Perhaps they've mistaken the rat-handed goatherd for somebody else! Confusion to the enemy.' He ploughed into the murk and bellowed ahead. 'Friends of the citadel!'

  The feat with the oil was not going to last. Fouled air and dizzying exertion sapped stamina. Ragged footsteps approached, in flight where the glow of set flame stained the fumes lurid orange. Backlit by the pall, two blurred figures rushed upward, both of them doubled and choking. As the fire subsided, more stymied enemies pursued, crowding in numbers behind them.

  The man in rear-guard whirled at bay. Sword steel spoke again: alone, without armour, that berserk defender challenged the on-coming fray. 'Go on! You can't help!' he screamed after his running companion.

  The other, still wielding an oar as a bludgeon, dropped the shaft and clenched a ripped forearm. His clothes were a craftsman's, sodden and rent. He belted onwards up the drained sewer, determined and rasping for breath.

  'Run! Shut the grille!' The yell was Fionn Areth's. Unable to glance backwards, engaged beyond fear, he reeled through lightning parries, forced into back-stepping retreat. He fought beyond hope. No swordsman's prowess could surmount such pressure. Only slow the inevitable, a harried bone in the teeth of the crushing onslaught about to roll over him.

  'Cattrick?' snapped Talvish, wrenched out of stride as the wounded fugitive slammed headlong into him.

  "We're undone.' Through blood and soot, carved bone deep and in agony, the burly southcoaster sagged to his knees. 'Koriathain kept a secretive hold on my shipwrights. Must have done, since the affray at Riverton! They were suborned. Forced to suicide and made to turn our own fire-ship against us. I'm sorry. The dry dock's overrun by the enemy! We were two, up against a pitched company.'

  The whine of a quarrel creased through the clogged air. Unarmoured flesh caught the marksman's cruel accurac
y. Cattrick jerked and crashed over like a kicked post, wracked to spasms in Talvish's arms.

  Ahead, Fionn Areth still laboured, engaged on all fronts by Alliance shock troops. Brute men in full arms, outfitted for hacking assault on the walls, with straight blade and spiked axe. However brave, no single hand with a sword could hold the tight corridor against them. Somewhere down the passage, the enemy bowman would be furiously cranking to span his discharged weapon. That one would, at cool leisure, pick off the nuisance that snarled the Alliance advance.

  'My fight!' Vhandon shouted over his shoulder. 'Tal, I'm equipped for this fracas. You're not.'

  Painful truth: still on posted duty, the older captain wore his breast-plate and mail; his blond partner, reassigned as crown liegeman, had no more than strapped bracers and studded brigandine.

  'Talvish, no nonsense!' Vhandon cried in the breach. 'Save your prince. Take the rear-guard. For all of our sakes! You must go back and secure the postern!'

  Before Talvish could shed the killed weight of the shipwright, Vhandon's forward charge clashed with the brute swing of the axe-man. His solid parry came in saving time. Fionn Areth recouped his slipped footing, rallied, and resteadied his stroke in the grace of relief.

  'Go back, Tal!' Vhandon pealed, now committed past argument. 'Man the gate!' Matched shoulder to shoulder in practised defence, the grey-haired captain sensed the grasslander's rhythm. He compensated by professional instinct. Allied with his protege's strength and untried weaknesses, he matched stroke for stroke in the gruelling press. Trusted fate, as if his left side relied on the skill of a veteran comrade.

  One instant, for sight to record the bright moment, as the Araethurian reached for his latent potential, quickened by confidence to skilled refinement. Given his place, he rose to match the dauntless experience of the man beside him.