by Matthew Ward
Your lot. The words stung. “And if not?”
Drenn froze, expression hard as flint. “Then I’ll flay every scrap of skin off that one you left alive, and you’ll do well to stay out of my way.”
A crash of glass and a whoosh. Orange flame leapt into the night.
Even as Rosa turned, a blazing bundle shattered a second barracks window. Arms spread against the kindling fire, Athaga bellowed wolf’s-heads into a line across the doorway.
A shadowthorn ran into the night, half-dressed and unarmed. He made it three paces before Edran hacked him down.
Missiles rained down, bottles stuffed with oil-sodden rags and alchemist’s powder. A few struck the barracks’ walls, liquid fire dribbling along brickwork. Others lodged in roof tiles and crackled merrily away. Most went in through the windows, feeding the dry, hungry roar of the flame.
The first screams sounded.
Rosa snatched Drenn to her feet and slammed her against the wall. “I didn’t agree to this!”
“They’re the enemy,” gasped Drenn. “They deserve whatever we give ’em.”
A trio of Hadari burst from the barracks door, swords drawn and smoke gouting on their heels. Bowstrings hummed, and they fell dying in the muddy snow.
Athaga tossed another fire bottle through the doorway. Shadowthorns stumbled out of a side door and died beneath the open sky. Still the screams raged inside, fires leaping against the dark sky.
“This is how we win,” hissed Drenn. “By treating them exactly how they treat us.”
Rosa stared, a sick feeling worming through her gut. Killing warriors was one thing. She’d led her share of ambushes. In war you took what advantage you could. But in an encampment this size there’d be servants, perhaps wives, children… none of whom would have ridden out to pursue Solveik. That was different to her, even if it wasn’t to Drenn.
She took refuge in the mission. “You’re not thinking! The shadowthorns will see the flames! They’ll know!”
Drenn glowered, unrepentant. “No point to a message gone unseen. If Solveik’s done his job, there isn’t a shadowthorn closer than Yelska. We’ll be long gone before anyone arrives to mourn the ash. We know all about mourning ash in the Southshires. You saw to that, Lady Orova.” She held up a rusted key. “Now, you gonna let us get this done?”
Rosa growled and stepped back.
“Oi, Castir! Magram!” shouted Drenn. “Give me a hand, would you?”
Drenn set key to lock. Not trusting herself to speak, Rosa turned away. It didn’t help, not with the barracks blazing into the sky and shadowthorn dead clustered about the doorways. All looked to be warriors, but that made no account of the poor souls screaming within.
Steeds slewed in the mud beneath the stockade gate. Carts rumbled in behind, the better to bear away any captives incapable of walking. Assuming any still lived.
Rosa scowled, riven by disquiet.
Chains rattled behind her. The bar hit mud. Swollen timber creaked on hinges.
“No!” gasped Castir. “This can’t be…”
Rosa stared through the open storehouse door. Not at the lifeless bodies she’d dreaded to see, but something that was, in its way, even worse.
Empty.
Drenn stalked across the threshold, hands spread to encompass broken crates and rotting machinery. “Where are they, Castir?”
“I don’t understand,” he moaned. “They were here. I was told they were here.”
She sprang, dagger at his throat. “Where are they, you worm?”
Rosa started towards them. “Let him alone, this—”
A wolf’s-head turned from the rampart, hand cupped to his mouth. “The signal! The signal!”
An arrow blazed against the northern sky, heralding a shift in the wind and a rumble of thunder.
No. Not thunder.
Drenn forgotten, Rosa ran for the rampart and took the ladder’s sagging rungs two at a time. The woman at the summit ignored her, eyes wide as she stared at a hillside of horsemen riding at the gallop. Not wolf’s-heads, but Hadari – lightly armoured outriders at the fore, and the golden scale of cataphracts gleaming in the moonlight. Easily three hundred. Probably more. Far more than accounted for by the absent garrison.
Instinct blamed the fire from the barracks, whose light would travel far on such a cold, clear night. Reason acknowledged that there’d been no time for reinforcements to muster, much less travel.
Thirava had baited a hook and they’d swallowed it.
“Close the gate!” Rosa shoved her way past a gawping wolf’s-head. “Raven’s Eyes! Close the bloody gate!”
With the gate shut, they might hold the camp long enough for some – perhaps most – to escape through the flooded mine. But if the Hadari breached the walls…?
No one moved, paralysed by the prospect of galloping death. Others fled into the night, snow churning from their boots as they scrambled for illusory safety. Arrows whistled from the walls and vanished into the mass of riders. Others thudded into the palisade as outriders offered reply.
Screams split the night. A stray shot plucked at Rosa’s sleeve. A woman collapsed at her feet, mouth full of blood.
At last, the west leaf of the gate was closing. Someone in the throng had kept their wits. The east hung ajar. Shinning down the gatehouse ladder, Rosa threw her good shoulder against the heavy timbers and heaved. Boots skidded in the mud. The gate barely moved. Snarling, Rosa planted her feet anew and heaved again. Timber shuddered beneath arrow strike. The ground shook to the rising tremor of hooves.
Another shoulder planted against the timber alongside hers. The gate inched inwards, picking up speed as the newcomer found firm footing.
“So much for this being a rescue,” rumbled Edran.
“There was never anyone to save,” said Rosa.
The big man grunted. “A trap, was it? I’ll wring Castir’s scrawny neck.”
She thought back to Castir’s pallid, horrified face. “He didn’t know. He was used. Like these poor souls on the hill were used.”
The most callous of traps – one that required a sacrifice of one’s own kind to sell the illusion. One more reason to hate Thirava.
Almost closed. Barely space for two men to walk abreast.
Rosa glanced behind. “Stand ready with the crossbar!”
The gate bucked, hurling Rosa to her knees and Edran sprawling into the mud.
An Immortal crashed through the gap, tasselled sword flashing. “Tirane Brigantim!”
Blood streaming from his neck, Edran slewed into the gate approach and vanished beneath the hooves of newly come shadowthorns. As Rosa struggled to stand, the gate swung inward beneath a mass of men and steeds and flung her against the wall. Her head chimed against stone. The world upended into a mouthful of mud and snow.
Rosa’s thoughts rushed red and black, drowned by the pulsing, throbbing clamour of hoofbeat and scream. Vision blurring and gut crowded with nausea, she grabbed at the wall. Trembling knees pitched her forward as she tried to stand. By the second attempt, the passion of battle stirred. It drove out the cold, the uncertainty – the ache of the old wound and the horror of unfolding events.
Strength returned to a body sorely in need.
Eyes regained focus, and gazed upon slaughter.
Bodies clogged the space between gate and barracks. Athaga Varalon’s mismatched garb was recognisable in the leaping flames. Others too. Men and women whose faces Rosa knew, even if she’d not yet learnt their names. Shadowthorn horsemen roamed the buildings, running wolf’s-heads to ground with sword and spear. Screams choked the air, within the walls and beyond. She’d have been dead already, but for the shelter offered by backswung gate and stockade wall.
Movement in her peripheral vision set Rosa spinning about, sword ready. Her head throbbed.
Jonas. Pale. Harried. A lad barely clinging to his wits. “What do we do? They’re killing everyone!”
Rosa clapped a hand over his mouth and dragged him deeper into the relati
ve safety between gate and wall. Another band of cataphracts trotted into the camp.
An arrow whispered from the south. The leading cataphract pitched from his saddle. A second. A third. The survivors milled about, voices raised in alarm as they sought their assailant. A masterless horse cantered past Rosa’s hiding place, spattering her and Jonas with mud.
She glimpsed a lone archer atop the canalside storehouse, silhouetted against moonlight, arms ablur as she nocked and shot. Outriders’ bows sang in reply. The silhouette shuddered, the longbow falling to rest in the gutter. Transfixed by four arrows, Silda Drenn toppled from sight.
Rosa tightened her grip to stifle Jonas’ gasp of dismay. Cataphracts spurred toward sporadic fighting beyond the pithead cabin.
Rosa counted to three, and relaxed her grip.
“What do we do?” she breathed. “We get out of here, if we can.”
The words fell sour. Retreat was bad enough, but to abandon comrades? But the battle was over, even if it wasn’t wholly done. It had been over from the moment the Hadari had breached the gate. Maybe before the signal arrow had been shot. More than ever, she was glad to have talked Drenn out of rousing the border villages.
“Have you seen Fenner?” she asked.
“He’s dead. Talar too.” Jonas shook, though with fear or anger, Rosa couldn’t say. “They’re all dead.”
No sense trying for the mine. Not without a guide. If there was to be a choice between a spear in the back or drowning in the darkness, she’d choose the former.
“Stay close.”
She crept to the edge of concealment and glanced about. Not safe – nowhere in the mining camp was safe any longer – but no obvious eyes either. She broke cover and ran for the cataphract’s masterless horse.
The first guttural cry rang out as her hand closed around the trailing bridle. “Surrender!”
Swinging up into the saddle, Rosa pulled Jonas up behind and drew her sword. “Hold tight, farm boy.”
She kicked back her heels. The stolen horse galloped for the gate. Cataphracts – newly come to the slaughter – rowelled their steeds to the charge.
Jonas tightened his grip about her waist. Old memories flashed. Riding into the teeth of a shadowthorn charge on the border, only then she’d a sturdy shield and chamfered plate armour. The Fall of Ahrad, where she’d crawled from the rubble and battled Ashana’s antler-helmed demon. Only there, she’d been a bloodless eternal, strong and fast beyond ephemeral ken. But still, she’d a sword, and a steed. As complete as a knight of Essamere could wish.
“Death and honour!”
She swept the leading cataphract’s spear aside and left him dying in the saddle. The rider behind him scraped a parry, and then Rosa was through the gate, howling vengeance as she reached the road.
Bodies littered the hillside, black against snow, the panicked wolf’s-heads ridden down without mercy. Their slayers roamed the slope between Terevosk’s fire-levelled ruin to the north and the dark eaves of Elmgran Wood further west. More curious was the knot of cataphracts a quarter mile along the road, their posture that of bodyguards, not pursuers. Had Thirava come to see his trap sprung?
“Rosa!”
The thump of galloping hooves accompanied Jonas’ warning. An outrider rowelled his steed, sword levelled in challenge. Rosa tore her gaze from the distant entourage and goaded her horse towards the new threat. His sword buckled beneath Rosa’s first strike. Her backswing took his spine.
Rosa circled her horse about, eye again on the distant cataphracts. It was Thirava, his opal-set armour black among the golden scales of his escort. A coward claiming glory for a one-sided slaughter without even drawing his sword.
The outrider’s horse made to canter away. Rosa snatched up its reins. Wild voices and the drumbeat of hooves warned of approaching Hadari. “This one’s yours.”
Jonas clambered across to his new mount, eyes darting at the closing riders. “Where do we go? We can’t fight them all.”
“Ride west. Keep your head down, and don’t look back. Do you hear me?”
His brow creased. “Me? What about you?”
“Go!”
She slapped the flat of her sword against his horse’s haunch. The beast took off as if all the revenants of Otherworld were on its heels, Jonas clinging to the reins for dear life. Maybe he’d have a chance. Maybe he wouldn’t, but where Rosa was bound, there was no chance at all.
Sword high, she sprang away along the road.
Now the cataphract escort broke formation, a rank of three spurring to intercept the upstart who sought their prince’s head.
“Until Death!”
Rosa’s cry dissolved into wild laughter. Gods, but there was glory in a lost cause! More in a good death. A good death for her, and a bad one for the self-styled monarch of Redsigor. The red of battle rose within her, and she let it bear her away.
She felt the first cataphract’s death. The parry of the spear. The crunch of steel against golden scale. Blood hot across her sleeve. Not so the ones that followed. Those, she lost to the red, to the rhythm that cared not where the sword fell, only that it bit deep and slid free. Pain was a distant sensation, and one discounted so long as arm retained strength. There was only the road, and a shadowthorn tyrant who’d lived too long.
Arrows whistled through the night.
Rosa’s horse screamed.
The strike of the roadway scattered the red of battle and drove breath from Rosa’s lungs. Her sword skittered away across the icy road. Blood seeping from a dozen small wounds, she dived after it. A galloping horse barged her to the snow.
When she stood, it was into a ring of spearpoints, levelled from horseback by golden-helmed Immortals. Failure coursed cold, bringing with it pain that refused to any longer be ignored.
“Lady Orova,” said Thirava, safe beyond the thicket of spears. “It’s been too long.”
Maladas, 5th Day of Dawntithe
A man is naught but memory clad in rot;
History seldom more than ambition draped in lies.
from Eldor Shalamoh’s “Historica”
Twenty-One
A week earlier, Paszar had been a thriving village tucked into the shoulder of the hillside, bright with Midwintertide decorations. Now, charred timbers and stone walls jutted from a black, ashen stain in the snow. Dawn’s bloody light spilled across churned mud, conveying Lumestra’s wrath at the slaughter.
Bile thick in his throat, Zephan Tanor slowed his steed as he reached the gate’s remains. Haste helped no one now. He barely noticed the knights of his thin column do the same. They’d ridden hard from the Tarvallion vigil on unbarded horses – the 7th mustering in their wake – without time to don more than gambeson and breastplate. Few matched a knight’s romantic ideal in such a state, much less Zephan himself. He knew all too well that below his shock of black hair his face was lined and weary.
“I want sentries to the east,” he shouted. “If the shadowthorns return, they find us ready, do you understand me?”
Though if the Hadari returned they’d gobble up thirty knights no less easily than the half-dozen who’d fought and died alongside Paszar’s militia at the ford.
The rear ranks peeled away. Zephan spurred on. Bodies lay where they’d fallen. Some were burned beyond recognition, charred, skeletal hands scrabbling at filthy cobbles or reaching skyward. Others bore only the spear thrusts that had stolen their lives. Once the one-sided battle had reached the gate, it had become slaughter.
Taradan trotted his horse alongside Zephan’s, his expression grim. His left arm, bandaged about the wrist and hand, twitched in its makeshift sling; blood crusted his hair. Unlike the rest of the column, he wore full plate. A shieldbearer stationed at Paszar’s tiny vigil, he’d carried warning to Tarvallion. His fellows had joined the defence and thence gone to the Raven’s keeping.
“I should have stayed.” Emotion absent from Taradan’s face crackled in his voice. A knight had a family of steel as well as blood, and there was no fa
mily tighter than that of a vigil. Especially in these days of Essamere’s waning.
“They’d have killed you too.” Zephan clasped his shoulder, receiving a taut nod in return. “You did right.”
Zephan was far from certain he’d have done the same. Sometimes it took more courage to run than to fight.
He wheeled his horse about and gazed back at the column Taradan’s warning had rousted. Thirty men and women. Nearly half the knights left at his command, and most of them yet to see a twenty-fifth summer. All bore expressions similar to Taradan’s, though few were as accomplished at concealing emotion. Sorrow, frustration… and above all, rage. The same corrosive brew ate away at Zephan’s labouring heart. The Essamere of old, of Orova, Izack – or Tassandra, under whom Zephan had learnt his bloody trade – would have stopped this. The Essamere of today – his Essamere – would be fortunate to avenge it. The grandmaster’s circlet felt heavier than ever.
Perhaps it was time to set it aside, as Sarella’s letters insisted. To leave the futility of the border to another’s care, and return to their manor house on the Karakeld coast. Raise daughters he hardly knew and worry over quarrels of fisherfolk and winter storms. He was yet to reach middle age, but the last five years had ridden him hard. And grandmasters of Essamere seldom made old bones. Would it really be so wrong to think of family first?
But that was the problem. He’d two families, and the family of steel needed him more than the family of blood he almost never saw. What right had he to speak to his daughters of honour if he abandoned those in need?
The circlet grew more burdensome still as they reached the church’s remains. The trampled mud of the lychfield bristled with makeshift gibbets fashioned from beams and lamp posts – a man-made forest, hung with bitter fruit of ravaged bodies. Fifty or more in mismatched and ill-maintained armour, and the stag banner of Redsigor flying at the very centre. Not villagers. Something else.
“Merciful Lumestra,” breathed Taradan.
Back along the column, someone retched. Zephan urged his steed closer.
Taradan spurred to join him, face hard. “Who do you suppose they were?”