by Tad Williams
“Anodis!” Strangyeard shouted, plunging into the mockfoil. “Bishop!”
The screaming stopped. Strangyeard halted a moment later, standing over the bishop’s huddled form. Slowly, as if the old man were revealing the end of some elaborate trick, the bishop rolled to one side.
Part of his face was a wash of red blood. A black head sat on the ground beside him, like a doll thrown aside by a forgetful child. The head, chewing rapidly, turned grinning toward Strangyeard. Its tiny eyes were white as bleached currants, the scraggly whiskers shiny with the bishop’s blood. As it reached a long-fingered hand out of the hole to pull the bishop closer, two more heads popped from the ground on either side. The archive-master took a step backward. A scream lodged in his throat like a stone. The ground convulsed again—here, there, on all sides. Thin black hands wriggling like molesnouts pushed up through the soil.
Strangyeard stumbled backward and fell, dragging himself toward the path, certain that any moment a clammy hand would close on his ankle. His mouth was stretched wide in a rictus of fear, but no sound came. He had lost his sandals in the undergrowth, and he lurched up the path toward the chapel on noiseless bare feet. The world seemed damply blanketed in silence; it choked him, and squeezed at his heart. Even the crash of the chapel door behind him seemed muffled. As he fumbled the bolt home a curtain of featureless gray came down before his eyes, and he fell into it gratefully, like a soft bed.
The flames of countless torches now rose among the Norns like blossoms in a poppy field, throwing the horridly beautiful faces into scarlet half-silhouette, adding grotesquely to the stature of the battle-garbed Hunën lurking behind. Soldiers clambered up onto the castle walls, only to stare down in shocked silence.
Five ghostly figures on horses pale as spider silk rode out into the open space before the curtain wall. The torchlight played on their hooded white cloaks, and the red pyramid of Stormspike glimmered and pulsed on their long rectangular shields. Fear seemed to surround these hooded ones like a cloud, reaching out into the hearts of all who saw them. The watchers on the walls felt a terrible, helpless weakness fall upon them.
The lead horseman lifted his spear; the four behind him did the same. The drums sounded three times.
“Where is the master of Ujin e-d’a Sikhunae—The Snare That Traps the Hunter?” The first horseman’s voice was a mocking, echoing moan, like wind blowing down a long canyon. “Where is the master of the House of a Thousand Nails?”
The hovering storm breathed for long moments before the reply came.
“I am here.” Josua stepped forward, a slender shadow atop the gatehouse. “What does such a strange band of travelers want at my door?” His voice was calm, but there was in it a faint quaver.
“Why…we have come to see how the nails have rusted, while we have grown strong.” The words came slowly, forced out in a hiss of air, as if the horseman was unused to speech. “We have come, mortal, to have a little of our own back. This time it is man-blood that will spill on the soil of Osten Ard. We have come to pull your house down about your ears.”
The implacable power and hatred of the hollow voice was such that many of the soldiers cried out and began to scramble down the walls back into the castle below. As Josua stood on the gate, unspeaking, a cry shrilled above the groans and frightened whispers of the Naglimunders.
“Diggers! There are diggers within the walls’”
The prince turned at a movement close by. It was Deornoth, climbing up on unsteady legs to stand at his side.
“The gardens of the keep are full of Bukken,” the young knight said. His eyes were wide as he looked down on the white horsemen.
The prince took a step forward. “You speak as though of revenge,” he shouted to the pale multitude below. “But that is a lie! You come at the bidding of the High King Elias—a mortal. You serve a mortal, as a tickbird does a cockindrill. Come then. Do your worst! You will find that not all the nails of Naglimund are rusted, and that there is iron here that can still deal death to the Sithi!”
A ragged cheer went up from those soldiers still atop the walls. The first rider spurred his horse forward a pace.
“We are the Red Hand!” His voice was cold as the grave. “We serve no one but Ineluki, the Lord of Storms. Our reasons are our own—as your death will be your own!”
He waved his spear above his head, and the drums burst out again. Shrill horns wailed.
“Bring up those wagons!” Josua shouted from the gatehouse roof. “Block the way! They will try and throw down the gate!”
But instead of bringing up a ram to try and shatter the heavy steel and stout timbers of the gate, the Norns stood silent, watching as the five horsemen rode unhurriedly forward. One of the guards atop the wall loosed an arrow. It was followed by a score of others, but if they struck the riders it was only to pass through them: the pale horsemen faltered not a step.
The drums beat furiously, the pipes and strange trumpets groaned and shrieked. Dismounting, the riders appeared and disappeared in flashes of lightning as they strode the last few steps to the gate.
With dreadful deliberateness, the leader reached up to pull open his hooded cloak. A scarlet light seemed to spill forth. As he tore it away, it was as though he turned inside-out; suddenly he was all formlessness and smoldering red glare. The others did the same. Five beings of shifting, flickering lines grew and stood revealed—larger than before, each tall as two men, faceless, billowing like burning vermilion silk-A black mouth opened in the leader’s eyeless face as he lifted his arms to the gate and placed his burning hands against it.
“Death!” he bellowed, and his voice seemed to shake the very fundament of the walls. The iron hinges began to glow a dull orange.
“Hei ma’akajao-zha!” The massive spars blackened and smoked. Josua, tugging frantically at the dumbstruck Deornoth’s arm, leaped down to the top of the wall.
“T’si anh pra INELUKI!”
As the prince’s soldiers dove shrieking down the staircases there was a burst of light, a deafening crack louder than drums or thunder, and the mighty gate burst into steaming, sparkling finders. The shards hissed down in a deadly rain as the wall collapsed on either side, crushing men beneath it even as they tried to flee.
Armored Norns leaped into the smoking gap in the walls. Some lifted long tubes of wood or bone, touching them at the end with flaming brands. Horrible gouts of fire leaped out of the pipes, turning fleeing soldiers into jigging, wailing torches. Great dark shapes pushed through the rubble: the Hunën, swinging long iron-studded clubs in their shaggy hands, howling like maddened bears as they crushed all in their path. Shattered bodies flew before them like ninepins.
Some of the soldiers, courageously resisting the choking fear, turned to fight. A giant went down with two spears in its guts, but a moment later the spearmen were dead, feathered with white-fletched Nom arrows. The pallid Norns were pushing through the fuming breach in the wall like maggots, shouting as they came.
Deornoth pulled a stumbling Josua toward the inner keep. The prince’s soot-blackened face was wet with tears and blood.
“Elias has sown the dragon’s teeth,” Josua choked as Deornoth pulled him past a gurgling soldier. Deornoth thought he recognized the young pikeman Ostrael, who had stood sentry at the king’s parley, buried beneath the squirming black bodies of a score of diggers. “My brother has planted seeds for the death of all men!” Josua railed. “He is mad!”
Before Deornoth could reply—and what reply, he briefly wondered, could he possibly make?—two Nom soldiers, eyes fire-gleaming within the slits of their helms, rounded the corner of the inner keep dragging a shrieking girl. Spotting Deornoth, one hissed something, then reached down with his dark, slender sword and dragged the blade across the girl’s throat. She dropped twitching to the earth behind them.
Deornoth felt the bile rising in his throat as he threw himself forward, sword upraised. The prince was there even before him, Naidel flickering like the lightning that etched t
he black sky—afternoon, it was only afternoon!
This is the hour at last, then, he thought wildly. Steel rang on polished witchwood. There must be honor, the thought was desperate. Even if there is no one to see it…God will see…
The white faces, hateful and hating, swam before his sweat-stinging eyes.
No dream of Hell, no woodcut in any of his many books, no warning of any of his Aedonite teachers could prepare Father Strangyeard for the howling inferno Naglimund had become. Lightning sizzled across the sky, thunder roared, and the voices of slayers and victims alike rose to the heavens like the babble of the damned. Despite the wind and driving rains, fires were leaping up everywhere in the darkness, killing many who thought to hide behind stout doors from the madness outside.
Limping along in the shadows of the inner hallways, he saw Norns clambering in through the shattered windows of the chapel, and stood helplessly by while they caught poor Brother Eglaf, who was kneeling in prayer before the altar. Strangyeard could no more stay to watch the horror to come than he could do anything to help his fellow man of God. Slipping outside with his eyes full of blinding tears and his heart heavy as lead in his breast, he headed for the inner keep and the prince’s rooms.
Hiding in the black depths of a hedge he saw stout Ethelferth of Tinsett and two of his guardsmen smashed to a red pulp beneath the cudgel of a barking giant.
He watched trembling as Lord Constable Eadgram bled to death standing upright, swarmed by squeaking diggers.
He saw one of the court ladies ripped limb from limb by another of the shaggy Hunën while another woman crouched on the ground nearby, face black with madness.
All through the shattered freehold these tragedies were mirrored a thousandfold, a nightmare seemingly without end.
Weeping out a prayer to Usires, certain that God’s face was turned away from Naglimund’s death throes but praying nevertheless in desperate, passionate reflex, he staggered around to the front of the inner keep. Two scorched, unhelmeted knights stood there in a tangle of corpses, eyes showing hunted-animal white. It was a long moment until he recognized Deornoth and the prince, and another heart-freezing wait before he could convince them to follow him.
It was quieter in the residence’s maze of hallways. The Norns had broken in; a few bodies lay crumpled against the walls or splayed out on the stone flags, but most of the people had fled toward the chapel or the dining hall, and the Norns had not stayed to search. That would come later.
Isorn unbarred the door at Josua’s shouted command. Isgrimnur’s son, with Einskaldir and a handful of Erkynlander and Rimmersman soldiers, stood guard over the Lady Vorzheva and the Duchess Gutrun. A few other courtiers were huddled there as well, Towser and the harper Sangfugol among them.
While the prince pulled himself coldly from Vorzheva’s weeping embrace, Strangyeard discovered Jarnauga lying on a pallet in the comer; a blood-soaked bandage was twined haphazardly around his head.
“The roof of the library fell,” the old Rimmersman said, smiling bitterly. “The flames, I fear, have taken nearly all.”
For Father Strangyeard this was, in some way, the worst blow of all. He burst out in fresh weeping, tears even trickling down from beneath his eye patch.
“Worse…it could be worse,” he gulped finally. “You might have gone with them, my friend.”
Jarnauga shook his white head and winced. “No. Not quite yet. Soon, though. I did save one thing.” He pulled from out of his robe the battered parchment of Morgenes’ manuscript, the top page now ribboned with blood. “Carry it safe. It will be of some use still, I hope.”
Strangyeard took it carefully, tying it with a cord from Josua’s table and slipping it into the inner pocket of his cassock. “Can you stand?” he asked Jarnauga.
The old man nodded carefully, and the priest helped him to his feet.
“Prince Josua,” Strangyeard said, holding Jarnauga’s elbow. “I have thought of something.”
The prince turned from his urgent conferral with Deornoth and the others to stare impatiently at the archive-master.
“What is it?” His eyebrows singed away, Josua’s forehead seemed more prominent than ever, a pale lunar bulge beneath his closecropped hair. “Do you wish me to build a new library?” The prince sagged wearily against the wall as the clamor built outside. “I am sorry, Strangyeard. That was a foolish thing to say. What has come to your mind?”
“There is a way out.”
Several of the dirt-streaked, desperate faces turned toward him.
“What?” Josua asked, bending forward to stare intently. “Shall we march out through the gate? I hear it has been opened for us.”
Strangyeard’s sense of urgency gave him the strength to stare the prince down. “There is a hidden passageway leading out of the guardroom to the Eastern Gate,” he said. “I should know—you have had me staring at Dendinis’ castle plans for months in preparation for the siege.” He thought of the rolls of irreplaceable brown parchment, covered in the fading ink of Dendinis1 careful notes, ashes now, charred in the rubble of the library. He fought down more tears. “If…if we c-can get there we may escape up the Stile into the Wealdhelm Hills.”
“And from there what?” Towser asked querulously. “Starve in the hills? Eaten by wolves in the Oldheart Forest?”
“Would you rather be eaten here and now, by less pleasant things?” Deornoth snapped. His heart had sped at the priest’s words; the faint return of hope was almost too painful, but he would hear anything to get his prince to safety.
“We will have to fight our way out,” Isorn said. “Even now I can hear the Norns filling the residence. We have women and some children.”
Josua stared around the room at nearly a score of weary, frightened faces.
“Better to die outside than to be burned alive here, I suppose,” he said at last. He lifted his hand in a gesture of benediction or resignation. “Let us go swiftly.”
“One thing. Prince Josua.” Hearing him, the prince came to where the priest was aiding struggling Jarnauga. “If we can make our way to the Tunnel Gate,” Strangyeard said quietly, “we have still another problem to solve. It was built for defense, not escape. It can be as easily opened as closed from the inside.”
Josua wiped ash from his brow. “You are saying that we must find some way to block it behind us?”
“If we are to have any hope of escape.”
The prince sighed. A cut on his lip dripped blood onto his chin. “Let us reach the gate at all, then we shall do what must be done.”
They burst through the door in a pack, surprising a pair of Norns who waited in the corridor. Einskaldir crashed his axe through the helmet of the nearest, throwing sparks in the darkened hallway.
Before the other could do more than raise his short sword, he had been skewered between Isorn and one of the Naglimund guardsmen. Deornoth and the prince quickly herded the courtiers out.
Much of the din of slaughter had died away. Only an occasional scream of pain or rising chant of triumph floated through the empty hallways. Eye-stinging smoke, licking flames, and the mocking songs of the Norns gave the residence the look of some terrible underworld, some labyrinth on the edge of the Great Pit.
In the savaged ruins of the castle gardens they were set on by cluttering diggers. One of the soldiers fell dead with a jagged Bukken knife in his back, and as the rest of the company fought off the others, one of Vorzheva’s maidservants was dragged squealing down into a gash in the black earth. Deornoth leaped forward to try and save her, impaling a squirming, whistling black body on the end of his sword, but she was gone. Only her delicate slipper lying in the rain-spattered mud showed she had even existed.
Two of the immense Hunën had discovered the wine cellars, and were fighting drunkenly over the last barrel before the inner keep’s guardhouse, clubbing and scratching each other in roaring fury. One giant’s arm hung limp at his side, and the other had gotten such a terrible wound to his head that a flap of skin hung free, an
d his face was a sheet of blood. Still they tore at each other, snarling their incomprehensible language in the wreckage of shattered casks and the crushed bodies of Naglimund’s defenders.
Crouched in the mud at the edge of the gardens, Josua and Strangyeard squinted against the driving rain.
“The guardroom door is closed,” Josua said. “We might be able to get across the open yard, but if it has been bolted from the inside we are doomed. We would never burst it open in time.”
Strangyeard shivered. “Even if we did, we would not then…not then be able to bolt it behind us.”
Josua looked at Deornoth, who said nothing.
“Still,” the prince hissed, “it is what we came for. We shall run.”
When they had formed up the small company, they set out at a stumbling dash. The two Hunën, one of them with his great teeth fastened in his fellow’s throat, were rolling on the ground, locked still in howling battle like gods of the primordial past. Oblivious to the humans passing by, one of them threw out a massive leg in a paroxysm of pain and knocked the harper Sangfugol sprawling.
Isorn and old Towser hurriedly turned back and picked him up; as they did so a shrill, excited shout came from across the courtyard.
A dozen Norns, two of them on tall white horses, turned at their fellow’s call. Seeing the prince’s party they gave a great cry and spurred forward, galloping past the now-senseless giants.
Isorn reached the door and pulled. It sprang open, but even as the terrified company began to push inside the first rider was upon them, a high helm upon his head, a long spear poised in his hand.
Dark-bearded Einskaldir dashed forward with a snarl like a cornered dog, ducking the serpentine strike of the lance, then leaping and throwing himself against the Norn’s side. He caught the Norn’s flapping cloak in his hand and pushed away, tumbling to the ground and bringing his enemy down after him. The riderless horse skidded on the wet cobbles. Kneeling over the fallen Norn, Einskaldir brought his axe down hard, then crashed it down again. Blind to all around him, he would have been pierced by the spear of the second Norn rider, but Deornoth hefted and threw the lid of a broken barrel, knocking the rider off his horse and into one of the hedges. The howling foot-troops were bearing down fast as Deornoth pulled the foaming Einskaldir off the Norn’s hacked corpse.