by Ian Irvine
“We’re planning to strike a deal with him, for his support,” said Dillible. She gave Tali a meaningful look. “We’re bringing the rebellion forward. We rise within the hour.”
“But you don’t have the numbers,” said Tali.
“Lyf’s so desperate to stop Grandys that he’s pulled most of the guards out of the streets. The moment we start the uprising it’ll spread like fire in the shanty towns. We’ll pin Lyf’s army between Tumbrel Town and the old palace, and hack it to bloody shreds.”
“But… rebellions have to be organised. Every leader on the street has to know what to do, and when to do it. If you rise now, there’ll be the most sickening massacre—”
“There’ll be a massacre all right,” said Dillible, and went out.
Tali’s heart was going a hundred and fifty beats a minute. She slumped onto the nearest chair. “I know what Dillible’s deal is going to be—she’s going to offer me to Grandys.”
Glynnie paced up and down, waving her arms. “All right. This is what we’ll do. The next time someone comes to the door, I’ll attack them.”
“What with?”
Glynnie picked up the largest piece of the collapsed chair, a length of carved timber two feet long.
“This,” she said, testing it over her knee. “The timber’s solid in this chair. It just came to pieces.” She swished it through the air. “I’ll knock them down. You disarm them. We lock them in and run… run for Benn.”
“We don’t know where he is.”
“We’ll thrash our prisoner until he, or she, tells us,” Glynnie said fiercely. “We’ve got to do whatever it takes, Tali. And the moment we get Benn, we run for it.”
The plan had more holes in it than Cython, but Tali could not think of a better one. They sat down to wait.
Minutes passed, and hours. The corridor outside, which had been bustling earlier in the day, was silent.
“The rebellion must have failed,” said Glynnie after five or six hours had passed. Her fingers were knotted around her piece of chair. “Lyf’s troops will come down any minute, to round up everyone who stayed behind.”
“If Grandys doesn’t beat him to us,” said Tali. “I don’t know which fate to hope for.”
CHAPTER 47
Grandys reached Flume in the early hours and ordered his troops to rest until dawn. When it came he entered the fortress and called out the survivors of Rufuss’s army, some 2300 exhausted, hollow-eyed men, many of them carrying badly tended or infected wounds. They looked desperate; they knew his retribution was going to be dire but such was his power over them that not a man thought of disobeying.
“Line up around the inside wall of the fortress,” said Grandys in a voice devoid of emotion. His own troops stood to attention behind him, though they were not needed to reinforce his orders.
The soldiers of Rufuss’s defeated army lined up, sick with terror mostly, though some looked defiant and a few were resigned to their doom.
“Every tenth man will step forward,” said Grandys. “Beginning with you.” He pointed to a short, burly man with a bandaged head, chest and shoulder.
“I fought bravely, Lord Grandys,” said the man, desperately. “Anyone will tell you so. See how many wounds I took—and every one of them from the front.”
“I know you’re a brave man, Gudgin,” said Grandys in a voice that would have carried throughout the fortress. “And yet you’re here, which proves that you shamed yourself, and your fellow men, and me, by running from the enemy. Step forward!”
Gudgin stepped forward, shuddering and leaning as far away from Grandys as he could. Grandys did not move for twenty seconds, then he calmly drew Maloch and thrust it through Gudgin’s chest to the right of his heart.
He fell, though it took some time for him to die. Grandys studied the blood on his sword blade and walked to the next tenth man, a lean, rat-faced, prematurely bald fellow.
“You shamed yourself, Fendur, and your fellow men, and me, by running from the enemy. Step forward!”
“I heard you shamed us all by running like a dog from Legless Lyf,” sneered Fendur.
With one furious blow, Grandys cut Fendur’s head off, then hacked the body to pieces. He stared at the bloody chunks that had been a man, breathing heavily, looked round almost furtively, then stormed to the next tenth man.
Grandys killed him the same way as he had the first, and the tenth man after that, repeating the condemnation each time so that no one in his army could be in any doubt as to why it was being decimated.
When all two hundred and thirty men were dead, the bodies had been hauled to a pyre for burning and the blood was being scrubbed away, he said, “Justice has been done and every surviving man is forgiven. See that the lesson is learned. Rest now. Tonight we go on a forced march to war, to restore our glorious name.”
And so commanding was his presence, and so powerful his rhetoric, that despite the decimation, the forced march, the exhaustion and the lack of a supply train, they would have followed him into the jaws of hell. They may have been terrified of him, but they were as much in his thrall as Rix had been when Grandys had laid that unbreakable command on him.
Rufuss came up to him, his long face fissured with pain lines. “What about me?”
“You’re one of the Five,” said Grandys.
Rufuss’s bony fingers clutched at the stump of his arm. “What are you saying?”
“You ran first; you deserve decimation more than any of them. Unfortunately, because of the pact I can’t touch you.”
“Then what are you going to do?”
Grandys took a wine skin and squirted the red fluid into his mouth. Should he order Rufuss into the fray, despite his severed arm? No—as a proven loser, he would cost more in morale than his cold battle ferocity added.
“I’m leaving you with a hundred men to mind the house, and the surgeon, Holm. I hope you can be trusted to do that much.”
Rufuss’s face turned grey; he whirled and stalked off.
“Was it wise to insult him?” said Lirriam. “He’s close to snapping as it is.”
“He let me down,” said Grandys. He turned to her. “As did you.”
She met his eyes. “I’ve never run from a battle in my life.”
Was it a challenge? He decided to ignore it for now.
That night they crept up on Caulderon in a lake fog that lay heavily over the city, reducing visibility to less than twenty feet. Lirriam and Grandys put aside their differences for the moment to create a joint attack with magery. Using her most subtle spells and his brute power, they sought out and killed all Lyf’s scouts and outriders—but so cleverly and so late that none had time to give warning or set off an alert.
The army of five thousand wormed its way to within two hundred yards of the walls of Caulderon, and waited. Lirriam paced, her red cloak flapping, unable to disguise her anxiety. The troops took no notice; Grandys was leading them, not her.
Those who could sleep dozed on the ground. Grandys was one of them. He lay in the middle of his men on the damp ground, pillowed his head on his hands and put on a good show of sleeping.
When the hour was up, he rose and his men rose with him. He walked along the lines, speaking words of encouragement. In the case of one of the new recruits, though, a skinny young fellow who could not contain his terror, Grandys drew Maloch and, without word or warning, thrust it through the soldier’s heart.
“He was no good to anyone,” said Grandys. “Including himself. He’s better off dead.”
From the looks on their faces, his men agreed with him.
“When the top of the rising sun tips the horizon,” he said quietly, “we hit the wall.”
He looked east. The light was growing, though it would be some minutes yet. He laid his hand on Maloch’s hilt and his doubts resurfaced. What if he wasn’t its true master? What if the sword would not come to his hand when he needed it? Last time its failure had been due to Lyf’s reversal spell, and Grandys had since crafted defences against all other
kinds of spells. There was no way Lyf could get to Maloch again. Surely not…
He dismissed the worry and raised his hand. They waited. It looked as though every man in the army was holding his breath. Then Grandys slashed his arm down, turned towards the city wall and ran. And they went with him.
Ah, the joy of war! He could not get enough of it. They burst through the broken wall into the city before the sentries realised they were there. Killing squads on either flank stayed behind to deal with the wall guards and make sure no one sent out an alarm. The main force, led by Grandys and Lirriam, pounded through the back streets where there were few people at this time of day, and even fewer of Lyf’s troops. They cut down everyone they came to, to be sure.
Grandys’ vanguard was half a mile into Caulderon before the great clangours sounded, but not even Lyf’s highly trained troops could dress and run from their barracks to the point of conflict, armed and armoured and ready to fight, in less than fifteen minutes. By then Grandys and his advance guard were a mile further on, driving inexorably towards the prize: Lyf’s personal temple in what had once been the grounds of Palace Ricinus.
The temple guard had been reinforced with detachments from a dozen places, but the walls of the former palace were a mile long and they were designed to keep out thieves and malcontents, not armies. Grandys’ men came storming through the myriad alleys of Tumbrel Town, re-formed outside the gates and cut down all the guards in a single minute. It took another minute for Grandys’ magery to smash the locks; then they forced the gates and poured through into the palace grounds.
Down across the lawn they raced, joining another battalion that had come over the wall from the lake side, and pelted towards the circle of column-mounted buildings enclosing Lyf’s amphitheatre-like private temple. Hundreds of guards stood in tight ranks around it, determined to protect the temple, and Lyf, no matter what it took.
They fought desperately, and even more strongly than Grandys’ Herovians. The Temple Guard had trained for years to defend their king and their highest honour was to spend their lives in his service. Grandys knew they would never give way. The only way through was to kill every man and every woman.
The bloodshed was so horrific, and the casualties so high, that progress stopped. Grandys’ front line faltered and for a moment it looked as though his men were going to break and run, abandoning him to stay and die… or run, as he had when Maloch had failed him on the Field of Reffering—
No! What was he thinking?
“Our line does not break,” bellowed Grandys. “Herovians never yield. Forward!”
Without waiting to see if anyone was following, he hurled himself into the most desperate mêlée, the strongest concentration of resistance, directly in front of the temple entrance.
“Forward! Follow my example!”
After several more minutes of desperate battle, Grandys, through sheer strength, with Maloch’s aid and by iron force of will, gained a yard, then another. He struck the temple guardsmen down to left and right, and advanced another yard, and another. His men came with him, driving the enemy ever backwards.
The guards retreated inch by inch, tightening the ring around the temple and spending their lives gladly in defence of their king, but hundreds could not hope to stand long against thousands. Their line thinned, the last guards in front of Grandys fell, the ring broke and in a minute they were overwhelmed.
He let out a roar of sheer euphoria, “Herovia, Herovia forever!”
Life was wonderful, the day almost perfect.
Almost—it could still get better.
It would be perfect once he brought Lyf down, and the only thing stopping him was a layer of brass and wood. He ran for the brazen doors. Lirriam matched his pace even though his stride was a foot longer than hers. Though he hated her, he had to admire her courage; she had fought beside him all the way. They were both exhausted, covered in blood, and gasping as though they could not find enough sustenance in the cold air, but on they went to the glorious finale.
Yet Grandys could never allow a rival to beat him. He let out a roar and raced ahead, leaping into the air and driving an armoured shoulder at the doors with all his weight behind it, as if to burst them from their hinges.
When he was in mid-air Lirriam pointed to the door and muttered a command, “Hold firm!” The hinges froze; Grandys slammed into the door with an almighty thump that rattled his teeth and audibly snapped a rib. His shoulder armour cracked and fell off. He hit the ground, cursing her.
“You always have to win,” said Lirriam softly, so the men coming up behind them would not hear. “We Heroes never get the victory; it’s always Grandys and his Heroes.”
“I’m the one who brought us all this way!”
“Because I manipulated you into it.”
She extended a small hand as if to help him up. He knocked it aside. She laughed. Grandys rose, wincing, rubbed his shoulder, probed the broken rib with a fingertip, then thrust Maloch at the lock. It shattered. He kicked the doors open, turned and held up a hand to his men.
“Hold this temple, no matter what. Allow no one in or out.”
Grandys strode in and turned to close the doors, but before he could do so Lirriam was inside. He considered throwing her out, decided that would not be wise, and sealed the doors with magery. She was the most minor of irritants in a glorious day, an unprecedented victory.
“This is a personal battle, just me and Lyf,” he growled. “Don’t interfere.”
She bowed and said ironically, “As you command, master of the sword.”
He clenched a fist, but released it. He would deal with her in the endgame. Let it not be long in coming.
Lyf was at the altar with a black-haired, remarkably pretty young woman in an adjutant’s uniform, and a scar-faced, burly general. Hramm, Grandys assumed.
He stalked up the open centre of the temple, past the scarred and time-worn redwood table where the Five Herovians, as they had been known at that time, had sat that fateful evening two thousand years ago. When Lyf, in naïve friendship, had invited them into his personal sanctum.
Fool! Grandys thought. He deserved everything we did to him.
Lyf turned, smiling, and Grandys faltered. Lyf’s eyes were on Maloch and his two ebony pearls were in his open right hand. What if he could attack the sword? What if he could make it abandon Grandys? No, that was absurd. Maloch had come to him; it had served him faithfully all this time. He was its true master…
“Go, Moley,” Lyf said to his adjutant when Grandys was twenty yards away.
“I won’t leave you, Lord King,” said Moley Gryle.
“If you stay, you will die.”
“I will gladly give my life to defend my king,” she said faintly.
“I reject your sacrifice. Get going! That is my order.”
She did not move. Lyf sighed.
“Carry her with you, Hramm. Take charge of my armies. Defend our city and our land.”
“Yes, Lord King,” Hramm said reluctantly. He swept Moley Gryle up in his arms and carried her out the secret way.
Lyf turned to Grandys and Lirriam, and held up a hand. They stopped, Grandys several yards ahead. “Like curs, you return to the scene of your foulest betrayal,” said Lyf.
“You pathetic fool,” said Grandys, “words mean nothing. Only one law matters, and I hold it in my hand.” He raised Maloch.
“Until it finds its true master,” said Lyf.
“I broke your deception days ago. I know you used a reversal spell at Reffering, but it won’t work this time. I’ve protected Maloch against the workings of all spells.”
Lyf seemed to sag a little. Clearly he hadn’t expected Grandys to break his deception spell.
“All known spells,” said Lyf.
Grandys, detecting a note of bluster, smiled grimly. “There’s no spell in the world that can touch Maloch now. This is where it ends, Lyf.”
CHAPTER 48
“I saved your lives two thousand years ago,” said L
yf. “Saved all five of you from your folly. I befriended the Five Heroes when the rest of the First Fleeters turned the shoulder to you. I helped you. Advised you.”
“In lofty condescension,” said Grandys.
“Liar! With my own hands I served you meat and bread at that table,” said Lyf, nodding towards it. “And in return, you magicked my signature onto a parchment purporting to give you the best half of Cythe. Then your brave Heroes held me down while you hacked my feet off and walled me up to die, alone and unshriven, in the catacombs. All to get king-magery for yourself.”
Grandys bared his teeth in a savage grin. “It was a good plan. It should have worked.”
“It could never have worked. You misunderstood the very nature of king-magery. It’s not like any other kind of magery—it’s solely a healing force.”
“That restriction can be broken.”
“Only by breaking the very thing that makes king-magery what it is—and only a fool would do that.”
“Magery is just another form of power. It does what the magian commands.”
“I swore eternal vengeance on the Five Heroes, Grandys, and I will have it.”
Grandys yawned. “Yet here we are. With less than five thousand men I’ve invaded your city and taken your sacred temple, and all you can do is make empty threats.”
“Do you truly think I didn’t anticipate your return to the scene of your greatest infamy—and prepare for it?”
Grandys’ throat constricted, though only for a second. “In under twenty minutes I broke the best defences you could create in months.”
“Not all of them,” said Lyf, smiling.
Behind Grandys, Lirriam drew in a sharp breath and he heard her moving backwards. He felt the faintest shiver of unease, but dismissed it.
“I’ve beaten you in every encounter,” Grandys sneered.
“Except when you ran like a whining mongrel dog from the Field of Reffering,” said Lyf.
Lirriam snorted, and it burned Grandys. Oh, how he was going to make her pay!
“I didn’t run,” Grandys said coldly. “I made a strategic retreat so I could return today—”