‘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 on-coming 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 accuracy. 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 grass-lander’s rhythm. He compensated by professional instinct. Allied with his protégé, 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.
‘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 discover ing 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. Whethe
r 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 cross-fire 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, unremitting: 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?’