TWOLAS - 08 - Stormed Fortress

  'I'll hold your retreat!' Talvish cried in ripped anguish, while the clash of stressed metal commingled with blood scent, and the reek of the dying befouled the corridor.

  Vhandon objected. 'You have one task left!' To the other grown man he had taught, who dauntlessly matched his prowess in battle, and who claimed the respect of a lifelong friendship, he pleaded, 'Talvish! Get topside! Aid Sevrand's relief. Then go on and serve where you're oathsworn! If you can, if the garrison holds, tell my son that I pass with no thought but a father's love for him.'

  'I'll do better than that' Talvish snapped, streaming tears. 'I will take the same word to your daughter and grandchildren, after my liege is delivered alive and seen safe past the citadel walls!'

  Nothing remained but to turn, after that, and race hell-bent back up the conduit. Talvish slammed shut the massive, grilled gate. He shot the bar with numbed fingers, then rammed closed the iron-strapped siege doors beyond. He sealed off the breached corridor, scant seconds ahead of the battering storm that assailed the locked barrier with screaming ferocity.

  Duty accomplished, cheek laid against the cold, studded oak, Talvish grieved in anguished salute: to a comrade more treasured than kin, and also for Fionn Areth, who would never receive his apology, or know a peer's due respect for a man's place, served on the battle-line. As Sevrand's reserves arrived in reinforcement, Talvish wept still. Naught more could be done. Tears were too small a thing, and too bitter, to honour his fallen. The unflinching courage of Vhandon, and Arithon's brash double, Fionn Areth Caid' An, who wrote his last act in crossed steel and smoke, without ever disclosing his purpose in life or discovering his innate identity. As Sidir once foretold, the untried bow had been strung. The arrow, now launched, had flown true.

  * * *

  Accosted by women on both exposed flanks, while squared off with the duke front and centre, Parrien s'Brydion looked up from the noisome task of cleaning his befouled field gear. All eyes watched him, expectant. Poleaxed with surprise, he stared at his brother, brows raised and blunt jaw dropped open.

  Bransian simply glared, forearms folded and his back jammed against the shut door. Whether the lordly request just delivered singed his brother to outrage, the crisis at hand forced the risk.

  'You're loonie, man!' Parrien groused at due length. 'Daft as a dog yipping under the moon' Even stripped down to his breeches and boots, he posed a menacing adversary. Early sun streaming in through the casement exposed his chafed skin and patched blisters. Over these, blotched in plum, the bruises from his berserk foray mottled his strapping torso. His scarred shoulders crowded the pastel chamber, knavish against the fussy rosettes a past carver had gilded to adorn a lady's tea room.

  This morning, the pretty nook served as an armoury, claimed for its east-facing windows. A cast-plaster ceiling conserved the sun's heat without fuel, for which Parrien endured the squawks of his wife to dry the soaked fleece of his gambeson. The cosy scents of patchouli and rose were lost under the reek of wet sheepskin, and the rancourous bristle of argument.

  Anger building in volcanic waves, Parrien rammed his stained rag in the sand bucket and stabbed a grimed finger at his elder brother. 'You'll be kissing up to a dumb sack of rocks before I'll behave like a whining ambassador. Not again! I will not lick the carpet for Arithon's favour, or plead your case for his cantankerous pardon. Not while we've got sappers and rams crawling over us like teeming lice on a trollop! I'd lay down my arms, first. Wave my bare arse at the forsaken enemy before mincing talk like a slithering lawyer.'

  'You're afraid of him,' Liesse accused: a mistake. Parrien's wife clamped her lip in pearl teeth, her hissed inbreath a stifled explosion.

  Parrien slammed down his clogged byrnie. 'Easier to suffer a mule with a cow kick than listen to your claptrap dithering.' Furious to be kept from the fighting, he locked horns. 'Does nobody recall the wrecked state of our flagship the last time I tried reasoning with Arithon? Send Vhandon! By now, he ought to know how to cosset the pesky runt. And, forbye, he won't drag our family name to disgrace.'

  Silence answered. Even Liesse's raw-boned features whitened.

  Parrien narrowed unforgiving, grey eyes. 'Spit me on a pike for telling the truth. We could yet find ourselves raked over live coals, under censure by Fellowship Sorcerers.'

  The duke's calm smashed precident. "Vhandon's dead.'

  Against reeling shock, the Lady Tiassa regretted her neglect for civility, despite today's barging intrusion. A servant should have had mulled wine at hand to ease breaking word of fresh tragedy.

  As if any token refreshment could soften a loss such as this: raw pain now exposed, unbearably sober, the Lord of Alestron rubbed his temples. 'We lost Vhan to heroics down in the conduit. He was holding the postern gate from the shipworks. That's why I'm tasking you; Parrien. The sea quarter's falling. Our straits turn from worse to desperate.'

  Parrien recoiled in stunned disbelief. 'Ath! I never imagined we'd come to this.' For Vhandon, an inconceivable rat's end in a culvert, with no friend at hand, and no veteran's honours to brighten the torch at the pyre side. Savaged by heart-break, Parrien's voice burred for the stalwart captain who had finished the edge on his sword-play. 'If we've jettisoned pride, and we're going to go down, I might as well be the first on my knees. Though Daelion wept! It's a miserable case we've got left, and cold grounds to try bargaining with Rathain's crown prince.'

  * * *

  Reclad in full arms, now respectably polished, Parrien s'Brydion emerged at midmorning to handle his brother's request. His frame of mind stayed unpleasantly volatile, result of the fur-ripping row with Tiassa that still nipped his heels on departure. Beyond his hazed nerves, he itched in fine wool, tongue-lashed into his parade surcoat.

  'She won't be appeased. I should gag her tart's mouth,' fumed Parrien under his breath.

  The wife's sniping rang on, despite the oak door he slammed shut behind him.

  'You barbaric lummox!' she bawled through the planks. 'Who should listen to you? Whirling your sword like a windmill in a squall, and breathing fire to lambast the tapestries! Mule-brained ox! You'll need every trapping of decency just to be let into the prince's apartments. That's if Arithon's disposed to receive you at all, misused as he's been on the excuse of diplomacy.'

  From eight strides along, the offended husband bellowed over his shoulder. 'I'll be nobody's fawning lap spaniel, woman! You might have gotten me tricked up in bows, but don't expect I'll nose up to yon royal bastard, ears perked and curly tail wagging.' Still bristling, Parrien tramped under the carriage arch. 'The gold thread just makes the bull on my chest a prime target for cross-fire, besides!'

  Outside, the crammed street held convulsed pandemonium. Noise and misery rode with the crawling progress of supply from the lift: stock from the warehouses needed for war, cleared away from the encroaching enemy. What could not be salvaged, the men-at-arms burned. The acrid fumes of torched oil and searing hides dimmed the sun, and deadened the notes of the horn-calls. The bass roar from the battle-front pounded on, unrelenting since the breach at the cut was disastrously widening. The boom of the rams now beat deep refrain to the quick-time drums on the galleys.

  Parrien ached as never before. Always, Alestron's brutal campaigns had been fought in the field, the wrack of fresh losses at remove from the ancestral seat. At every familiar street-corner and shop-front, Sevrand's begrimed officers pushed their mauled companies through the throes of a routing retreat. Hand-carts bore the wounded, if only those hale enough to survive the extraction. Parrien beheld the ghastly pallor of the smoke-poisoned. He heard the moans of the unconscious burned, swathed amid the seeping stains fouling their blankets. Not all were fighting men. Some were street beggars and matrons; worse than these, the scorched team of boys, who had been hauling water to replenish the fire buckets. Non-combatants fell as readily to the withering crossfire launched where the siege platforms landed.

  The procession stitched horror the length of the thoroughfare, until Parrien wished he
could stifle the groans of the dazed. Many sprawled, stricken with arrows or crossbolts the overtaxed healers could not snatch time to draw. Delayed treatment of any war wound brought on poisoning that demanded intervention by trained knowledge or birth-gifted talent. This was not open ground, where the rear-guard reserves could maintain a safe camp for convalescent recovery Truth pursued, unrerriitting: Vhandon's death had been the first of too many. On the harbour-side battlements, and in the breached weir, Alestron's best would be dying. More would be sacrificed for every agonized minute the lift winch stayed operative. Each countryman spared, and each casualty withdrawn, exacted a cost in let blood.

  Parrien elbowed through the grim press, buffeted by the mauled and the battered. The charnel reek made his errand seem a futile appeal against ruin that loomed beyond salvage. Beneath the bronze lamp where he had kissed his first sweetheart, a child with a singed arm and a bucket of crossbolts wept tears on a stalled wagon's buckboard. A grimy bread-baker stooped on the cobbles nearby, wrapping clay pots for the catapults. His bony frame seemed unfamiliar and sad: once the fellow had been merry and fat, dicing in comfort with Mearn.

  Parrien sidled past, overwhelmed. He could not shake the upset of Vhandon's passing, or watch as the misery of slaughter overran the inner walls of the citadel: revetments and gates he had never imagined could yield by force to hostility. More wounded limped by. Then two women in tears, bearing a brother laid out on a litter. Their fate would be sealed, as the defences crumbled: to die fighting or to suffer alive, forced as spoils amid brawling conquest. Both seemed tenderly young. Under age to be married, Parrien agonized. Why should they have stayed? With sweet life before them, why had they not seized the freedom once granted by Arithon's mercy?

  'Bless your caring, we couldn't.' A fearful glance in a soot-streaked face met his unwitting question, just spoken aloud.

  'Our father was ailing. Too weakened to travel. We had no one else to take care of him.'

  'I'm sorry,' snapped Parrien. His gruff pity did nothing to ease their plight. Unwanted, the blazing reflection resurged, of the Masterbard's exhortation: 'Your defence at Alestron will be written in blood. I foresee this!'

  Pride stung. Iron nerve faltered. Parrien plunged into the by-way. Head down, mailed grip locked on the hilt of his sword, he gave way to retching distress. All of these faces were known to him. Even here, he could feel the pounding of enemy sappers assaulting the cliff-head. Sows with steel-tipped rams chewed into the stone that supported the oldest bastions. Inexorably, now, the Sea Gate was crumbling. Beneath full sun, in the sparkling north wind that should have gouged diamonds out of fresh snowfall, the heart of the town he had known all his days wore the harrowing cloth of a nightmare.

  Never more clearly, and desperately late, he encountered the pain in the Masterbard's cry of forewarning. To face the same man in today's flooding shame required unparalleled courage. Parrien stumbled. Reeling on towards the keep that housed Rathain's delegation, he shook off the hand that grappled his arm; ignored the brusque shout that waylaid him.

  Whoever accosted him, he turned his back.

  Until a mailed fist clamped his shoulder and spun him about: that wrenched a berserker's roar from his throat. He failed to draw steel, because Talvish's blow chopped his wrist with disabling ferocity.

  'His Grace is not here!' cracked the duke's former captain. 'If you seek my liege, I'll take you myself. Though with fairness, be warned, you may risk being cut off from your family'

  Parrien blinked. 'Arithon's running amok in the sea quarter? Ath wept! Whatever for?'

  But Talvish's urgency brooked no delay. Parrien pushed to match the harsh pace, hampered by his state trappings.

  One stride back, and still shouting, he chased Talvish's lead up the revetment ladder that short-cut the packed streets. 'Sevrand's post is withdrawn. The rear-guard's coming in. War-horn's sounded the signal already, and depend on my word, the winch lift will be ashes by noon! What feat can yon shifty rat's cunning achieve when the harbour keep's swarming with enemies?'

  Talvish vanished into the coiling smoke billowed up from the wrack at the water-front. 'You'll ask that in Arithon's presence! If you dare.' Through hacked coughing, he added, 'Trust my guess? His Grace doesn't plan to come back. The guest suite's stripped bare. The enchantress and Rathain's feal following have gone downside, every parcel of remedies packed along with them.'

  * * *

  They found Arithon s'Ffalenn in the sail-loft at the chandler's, made over as hospice to succour the injured too stricken to move. There, where the crash of the enemy's incursion shocked vibrations through walls and floor-boards, Parrien first heard the notes that a masterbard's skill wrought to fuse shattered bone and torn ligaments. The sweet clarity pierced the dust-sifted air like the chime of steel rings, dropped onto sheet glass. The harmonics sheared the dross from the mind, and lifted the spirit into ineffable joy.

  Caught within the dimmed stairway, Parrien s'Brydion lost a gasping breath and crumpled onto his knees. Mailed fingers pressed into his face to stop tears, he tried and failed to recover. One gasping shudder followed the next, until he was helplessly weeping. If he thought he had ever known beauty before, the musician's winged mastery reformed him.

  Talvish, beside him, was better prepared. Aboard the Khetienn, seventeen years before, he had witnessed the first, explorative measures an exacting practice had shaped to enact today's healing. In matchless splendour, the bard's talent redressed suffering, bleak disharmony knitted to wholeness. Now, farsight and initiate mastery evoked a fresh edge of refinement: the cascading melody brought to full flower might have balanced a stone on the wisp of a moonbeam.

  'You won't die, though your heart's fit to burst' Talvish managed. His fraught grip braced the larger man's weight, while the seconds flowed past, gilded in exquisite sound. Thoughts wrung still, the chance-met observer could only endure, while the dynamic framework of life was made whole, and the revivified spirit unfolded and ached for a balance precocious and glorious.

  Scarcely bearable, the onslaught found closure at last. Spent strings dwindled into taut silence. Roughshod against calm, the clamour of war continued its harsh storm outside. Within, the stark cry for retreat reached crescendo: felled on the stair, Parrien shuddered, unable to rise.

  Talvish hauled him erect. 'Your doing taught my liege that entrained sequence. He wasn't born knowing the key to access those rarefied octaves.'

  'I once broke his leg?' cracked Parrien, bitter. 'Ath's own mercy!' The depth of such fierce sensitivity daunted. 'What brought your crown prince to return here?'

  'His friends, and a life debt.' Talvish climbed onwards, beyond resolute. 'You couldn't have realized. But Arithon renounced your family's alliance for reasons of love. The Seer in him would not be reconciled.'

  Which truth fitted too well: laid open by his receptive talents, a masterbard of such stature could never endorse the destruction that ravaged the citadel now. The failing sea-walls were soaked in let blood. That held line could not last. Before sunset, the harbour-side keep would be shattered by the invasion. The brother charged as the ducal ambassador struggled to rally his bludgeoned wits. If he would appeal for the grace of an interview, his plea must be made before the musician engaged the next healing.

  Kyrialt kept steadfast guard at the threshold. In forest leathers and clan braid, his formal stance stayed immaculate, until sight of the scarlet s'Brydion colours jabbed him to wary antagonism. State manners could not curb the frowning glare he shot Talvish.

  'Let his Grace determine!' the blond liegeman murmured. 'Allow us to pass.' Wan light at the threshold illumined his face, unveiling the fact he was haggard.

  Kyrialt's umbrage dissolved into shock. 'Tell me! What's happened? Where's Fionn Areth?'

  This time, as grief locked Talvish's speech, Parrien tendered gruff answer. 'I've not seen the goatherd. Vhandon fell holding the breach in the shipworks, and I am not sent with the message for consolation.'

  But the High Lor
d of Alland's past heir proved too seasoned to bait. 'Where his Grace of Rathain is concerned, your family's entangling history predates me. Never show me fresh cause!'

  Parrien acknowledged the challenge, teeth bared. Pleased not to be misjudged for his court-dress, he bulled ahead, knowing Talvish would hound every byplay stirred up in the sail-loft.

  Two steps stopped him cold. No rife bluster could ease the sight of the torment laid on the rows of stained pallets.

  There, shorn of arms, and outside secured walls, the man reviled as the Spinner of Darkness chose to spend the matchless gift of his resource. With Elaira beside him, and Glendien's assistance, he bent his royal knee to administer to the abandoned, the wrecked, and the hopeless. Groaning men lying gutted by pole arms and steel; bundled forms butchered senseless, that laboured to breathe; others scorched beyond recognition by fire. Children bled limp by the loss of a limb, or afflicted with crushed ribs and the cyanotic pallor of flail chest. These lay side by side with brawny smiths and prime craftsmen, once gainfully busy supporting their kinsfolk, and now at death's door from the mangling accidents that struck when the torsion ropes strained and snapped under load on the arbalests and catapults.

  The ugliest face of the war sheltered here, where expedient logic begged for the clean end of a mercy stroke.

  'Why?' Parrien pealed, riven numb. 'Heal them or not, you can't possibly save them!'

  'I would be here, anyway, given what's passed.' The slight figure bearing the lyranthe overheard, aroused from the languor of after-shock. Arithon stood. The state cloth that met his turned glance shouted warning. He touched Elaira's lips in swift reassurance, then handed his heirloom instrument off into Glendien's keeping. Alone by discreet choice, he approached the intrusive s'Brydion petitioner.

  Close up, beyond artifice, his severe features were stripped: wide open still to the insight that tapped the well-spring of deep mystery. In unguarded green eyes, Parrien saw his own sorrow, unbearably mirrored. More, the tuned range of subtle awareness mourned every tear yet to be written, the more vividly seen by rogue-talented s'Ahelas vision.