Corsair

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Corsair Page 4

by Brian Ruckley


  He ran straight for the opening on the right-hand side of the passageway. He could see the empty courtyard beyond the inner gateway but he ignored it. Such places could be made into killing grounds by even the most inept of defenders.

  He bounded as fast as the darkness would allow up the spiralling stair. The wound in his arm did not enjoy it, but speed was everything now. Every passing moment was another in which Kottren’s followers might find some courage from somewhere, and another bringing Lake closer – the only one of them who probably had courage to spare. If he chose to apply it to a dead man’s cause.

  Pale daylight above told Yulan he was nearing the end of the stair. He slowed, lest he run onto a spear awaiting him. He quietened his tread, and heard Hamdan and Corena below him, beginning their own more cautious ascent.

  A low opening gave out onto the footway atop the wall. The stair carried on, coiling its way up to the roof of the gatehouse itself. Yulan stopped and looked out along the battlements. There was a man there, sure enough. He must have been squatting down to hide himself from Hamdan’s view before. Now he was in a half-crouch, waiting for someone to appear just as Yulan was doing. He had an axe – more of a hatchet, really – in one hand, a short knife in the other. And he had fear in his eyes.

  ‘We’re not here for you,’ Yulan said levelly, staying back within the confines of the staircase. The moment when he had to crouch to pass through the narrow aperture between them would be the other man’s chance, if he had the wit to recognise it.

  ‘Get out my way,’ the man rasped.

  He was not just afraid, Yulan realised. He was terrified. An agitation boiled within him, making his eyes jerk and his hands tremble. It could not just be Yulan’s arrival that made him so, could it?

  Yulan stepped quickly out onto the battlements. The man shuffled back a little, but did not yield.

  ‘Set down your weapons,’ Yulan commanded. ‘I can’t let you pass with them still in hand.’

  For a couple of breaths, Yulan saw before him a man who did not know what to do; then that man was gone and replaced by one who did.

  ‘Your king is dead,’ Yulan snapped, and suspected his words were not even heard.

  The axe was raised, the knife withdrawn ready to stab in low. As the man rushed him, Yulan went to meet the axe. Clamping his hand about the upraised wrist and holding it there awoke darts of pain in his upper arm. He blocked the knife easily enough with his sword as it came in. He smashed his forehead against the bridge of his opponent’s nose, putting all the strength and weight into the blow he could. Bone and gristle crunched beneath the impact. It was so hard that Yulan himself was a little dazed.

  Kottren’s man was much worse than dazed. He staggered back on legs that had gone loose and soft. Blood bloomed across his face. The knife fell from his hand. Yulan lunged in and ducked under the still high axe-arm. He got his shoulder into the man’s armpit, his free hand onto the back of the man’s belt, and heaved. He could only manage a couple of steps like that, but it was all he needed. He lifted and shoved the man backwards to the battlements and with a last great effort from arm and legs toppled him over. The man howled as he fell, a brief cry that crumpled into a dull thump.

  Hamdan led Corena out onto the battlements. He came cautiously, eyes darting this way and that like a wolf approaching bait. Yulan looked down at the man he had flung out of the castle. He had thought he might ask Hamdan to end any misery he saw down there with an arrow, but there was no need. The man was folded and broken in a way that spoke only of death.

  Hamdan glanced down at the corpse.

  ‘I’m surprised you found someone to kill,’ the archer muttered. ‘This place is quiet as quiet gets.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Corena asked, and the two Massatans turned.

  They all three stared across at the keep, not one of them knowing at first what it was that they saw.

  A black shape pulled itself out from one of the windows partway up the structure. It was like watching a huge, thick-haired spider with only four legs scale the skin of the keep. The great stone blocks had been eroded and fissured by time, leaving a profusion of handholds and crevices. Though the creature moved slowly, it did so with little apparent effort. Just a measured, gangly ascent in the morning sunshine. Climbing towards the crenellations that surmounted the keep.

  ‘What is that?’ Corena asked softly again.

  ‘An ape,’ Yulan and Hamdan said at the same time.

  ‘It was in the menagerie,’ Yulan said. ‘It must have got loose somehow.’

  The animal made its slow way to the battlements and lifted itself almost casually atop them. It sat for a moment, legs folded away out of sight, spindly arms draped across the stone. It looked around, and for a moment it seemed that its gaze met Yulan’s across the wide space between them. He imagined it to be squinting against the light. Nothing hostile in its regard, just a simple momentary observation. Then the ape slipped down behind the stonework.

  ‘Well, that’s not a thing I expected to see,’ Hamdan said, puffing out his cheeks.

  ‘There was worse than apes caged in there,’ Yulan said thoughtfully. ‘If they’ve all got out …’

  Screams cut him short. Not cries of pain, or anger: terror, from the mouths of children. The shouts of men were mixed in there, but it was the children Yulan heard. The raw sound made him wince. It was coming from within the keep, low down. Perhaps from the menagerie hall, Yulan thought.

  ‘Sounds like something worse might have come out to play, sure enough,’ Hamdan said as he drew an arrow and set it to the bowstring. ‘What else did he have in there?’

  ‘Lion, wolf, corpse-lizard,’ Yulan said. He was already moving towards the nearest tower, and the stairway that would carry him down into the courtyard. ‘Other things I didn’t know or couldn’t see.’

  ‘We want to go down there?’ Hamdan asked. He sounded doubtful, even though he followed.

  The screams were moving, echoing, spilling out from the keep through windows and doorways. There were thumps and crashes, and the sound of running feet.

  ‘We do,’ Yulan said over his shoulder.

  ‘I’m not hearing any animals,’ Hamdan observed.

  Figures were spilling from the keep’s main door. Men and women came rushing out into the courtyard, one after another. The children – Kottren’s children and a few others – were there, running on bare feet with their ragged clothes flapping about them. Still screaming, some of them.

  Yulan flew down the tight spiral of the staircase, smacking his injured arm more than once against the stone. He saw himself as if from outside his body, just for the space of a few heartbeats, and recognised that there was excitement coursing through him. There was, in all this, a terrible kind of urgent aliveness he had seldom known before.

  He ran out onto the cobblestones of the courtyard. Some of those who had fled from the keep were already stumbling or running beneath the gatehouse, making for the bleak open ground beyond. Others had paused and turned to look back at the towering stone mass. Three of the children were among them. They stood close to Yulan, their backs to him. Two of them were holding hands.

  Yulan put his own, huge, hand on the shoulder of the nearest.

  ‘What’s happening?’ he asked.

  She – it was a girl, beneath the smudges of dirt and the matted, knotted hair – looked up at him in fear.

  ‘I’m not going to hurt you,’ he said at once. ‘We can help.’

  Hamdan and Corena arrived beside him, but the girl paid them no heed. Nor did she reply to Yulan. She only looked once more at the keep, and began to back away from it slowly and with hesitant steps. Yulan let his hand slip from her shoulder, feeling the bones of her shoulder sharp and hard beneath his fingers. She had not eaten well for a long time.

  ‘I suppose we can kill a lion, if that’s what it takes,’ Hamdan said, though he did not sound enthusiastic about the prospect. And even as he said it, they all saw that it was not a lion they faced.


  The walls of the keep came alive. One section of the stonework shrugged, spilling grit and dust. It bulged out, the great rough-hewn blocks grinding against one another. The stones shifted and shaped themselves, swelling like a bubble in a thick soup. Then the movement raced across the face of the keep, a wave in granite, and swept onto and along the curtain wall. In its wake debris fell, the wall swayed, cracks erupted in all directions.

  A sound like a rockfall, or of boulders being rolled along in a flood, boomed around the courtyard. Yulan and all the rest stood transfixed, turning their heads slowly to follow the impossible sight. It was as if some mad giant had taken hold of the stone walls and shaken them, sending a ripple rushing through them. That ripple surged through and around a corner tower, shaking it so violently that its top split asunder and collapsed in on itself in a pluming cloud of mortar and dust.

  That was when Yulan decided it was time to run.

  ‘Come!’ he shouted above the rumbling ruin, and pulled at the children who still stood beside him.

  In the event, they had all gone no more than a couple of paces before the destruction ended, with all the sudden violence it had begun. The moving contortion of the stonework swayed across the front of the castle until it collided with the gatehouse and there it snapped out of existence, blowing huge chunks of masonry apart. The gatehouse itself shivered and slumped. One half of it groaned and sank into a slide of disarticulated blocks and rubble, spitting out a great choking blast of dirt and pulverised stone which engulfed the courtyard.

  Caught in it, just as he had more than once been caught in a desert sandstorm, Yulan covered his nose and mouth with one hand. Beside him, he heard Hamdan hawking and spitting.

  ‘We’re in trouble now,’ the archer said, and Yulan had never before heard such grim sincerity in his voice.

  ‘Of the worst kind,’ Yulan coughed. ‘They’ve got a Clever.’

  VIII

  Corena had asked them what an Orphanidon was. She did not need to ask about a Clever, of course. Even the most isolated, most far-flung of folk knew about Clevers: the few people who could tap the raw stuff of the four entelechs, the pure and inchoate essences that made up the world and all its contents. Bearers of great power, and of great burdens since the exercise of that power leeched away their own strength and life.

  In all likelihood, Corena had never seen a Clever, unless it was some untrained hedge-witch wandering the land in defiance of the strictures of the School. Yulan had, though. The Free counted several among its ranks, and upon that simple fact was built much of its great reputation and might. He had seen them do things beyond imagination, channelling the pure, formless essence of the entelechs and giving it shape and power in the physical world. And he had seen them pay the price for those deeds in fevers and slumbers, frailties and withering.

  So Corena knew what the word meant. But as Yulan watched her, he suspected that it was possible to know without really understanding. She did not look frightened enough for full understanding.

  They were huddled – Yulan and Hamdan and Corena and the three children, with half a dozen others – in what had once been a stable. It leaned up against an undamaged stretch of the castle’s wall, off to one side of the keep. Its timbers were so rotted by worm and rain that it would probably have collapsed without that support. Certainly it had not served as a stable for many, many years. There was nothing there but a midden piled up in one corner that stank of decay and human excrement.

  The whole courtyard had a fine layer of dust spread over it now. So too did Yulan’s face and clothes. He tried to brush it away, but it was stubbornly persistent stuff.

  From where they crouched, they could see the doors to the keep. They could see as well the half-wrecked gatehouse. It might be possible to climb out over or through the mound of rubble there, but it would not be easy or fast.

  At Yulan’s side, Hamdan was shouting questions. It sounded like anger, though Yulan knew it was as much alarm. Perhaps even fear.

  ‘Who’s the Clever?’ Hamdan shouted at the men and women cowering in the furthest corner of the stables. ‘Who is it? Are they an Aestival? A Vernal? What?’

  He was asking what kind of Clever they faced. Which of the four entelechs – Vernal, Aestival, Autumnal, Hibernal – he or she was most in tune with, most capable of calling forth. It was obvious from the faces of those Hamdan addressed that they did not know the answer, perhaps did not even understand the import of the question. In truth, it hardly mattered. A Clever was a Clever.

  ‘Hush,’ Yulan murmured.

  Hamdan looked at him.

  ‘I’d say we’ve got roughly no time at all to come up with a way out,’ Yulan said. ‘Lake’s close, if he’s not already here.’

  ‘Time’s not favouring us, right enough,’ Hamdan conceded.

  ‘Maybe Corena was right,’ Yulan said. ‘She said it’s all coins and caution for us, and she’s not wrong. Maybe I should have taken Kottren’s head the first moment I set eyes on him.’

  ‘No, you shouldn’t,’ Hamdan hissed. ‘You didn’t take his head because we didn’t know what would happen next if you did. Doing something without knowing what’ll follow is the last arrow in your quiver, not the first. Everyone’s got their own reasons for fighting, but people give us the coin because we’re supposed to be good at it and caution’s a part of that.

  ‘Look around you. Doesn’t this look like a bad idea from top to bottom? The mad bastard’s dead and he’s still managed to trap us in one of his cages, sure as any of his beasts.’

  ‘All of us,’ Yulan agreed with a brief backward glance.

  ‘You want to try and get them all out,’ Hamdan said. Not challenging this time.

  ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘The children. Yes.’

  Hamdan had left a son behind in Massatan lands, Yulan knew. He had never asked why the archer had left, for it was not in his nature – or Massatan habit – to delve into another man’s history or heart. He had the sense, though, that it had not been a hard choice or a source of much regret save for that one thing: the child.

  ‘We have to get down to the boats, and do it before Lake reaches them, to have much of a chance,’ Yulan said.

  He turned about and said to no one in particular, to everyone, ‘Is there a way down to the harbour without going through the keep?’

  Several of those who had lived within these shabby walls nodded. One of the children – the oldest perhaps, though Yulan still found age hard to read amid the grime and ill health – quietly and cautiously said, ‘There’s a door at the …’

  But she fell silent as if a knife had cut her voice, staring with wide eyes over Yulan’s shoulder. He turned to see what had so alarmed her, even as he heard Hamdan cursing and felt the archer surging to his feet.

  In the midst of the courtyard, the ground was heaving. A section of cobblestones the width of a man’s outstretched arms was lumping up as if alive. Yulan stood beside Hamdan. Behind them, people were crying out in fear.

  ‘That’ll be us out of time, then,’ said Hamdan.

  What arose before them, what shaped itself from the stone and dirt and dust of the ground, was horrible. A memory gone awry of the human form. Stunted and contorted, blunt-limbed. A cankerous outgrowth of the earth itself, clad in the yard’s cobbles like plated skin.

  ‘Run for that door, wherever it is,’ Yulan shouted over his shoulder.

  He heard them doing as he commanded, vaguely aware of the direction of their flight, but he reserved his attention for the monstrous apparition that lurched towards him and Hamdan. The thing’s short legs never parted from the ground. They merged with it – they were of it – so that it should not have been able to move. Could not have, were it not a manifestation of the entelechs given shape by a Clever and thus unmoored from the laws of the possible.

  Hamdan launched an arrow at the unnatural form, and the shaft shivered and rebounded from its stone armour. Dust shook loose at the figure’s every stride, wreathing it. I
ts bones of earth and rock sighed and scraped as it moved.

  Hamdan slung his bow across his shoulder and drew his short-sword.

  ‘Arrows won’t serve,’ he said glumly.

  ‘Put some space between us,’ Yulan said, already drifting sideways himself.

  He frowned at the impossible opponent before him. It was all wrong. Nothing like anything the skilled Clevers who served the Free would ever make from their power. To clothe the limitless potential of an entelech in this mockery of the human form was needless. To choose a form so small – the figure barely stood as tall as his chest – was oddly half-hearted.

  Yet it was enough to kill both him and Hamdan, of course. More than enough, with its stone hide and cudgel arms. Only if it could catch them, though. There was the glimmer of hope in this darkness. It was – so far – imprecise and heavy in its movements. It would be too much to hope that it would remain so; it could be as fast and strong as the Clever who made it wished, if they were willing to spend enough of their own vitality on its making. But they might be able to occupy it long enough that the others could reach the boats alive.

  Hamdan, it seemed, had greater ambitions than mere delay. He darted in and put a savagely precise slash into the seam between two cobblestones, midway along the thing’s outstretched arm. His blade cut through and burst out the other side in a cloud of dirt and loose earth. Parts of that arm fell away. What remained re-formed itself.

  The earthen figure twisted and lashed out at the archer, a sudden vigour to its movement. The blow caught him across the back. Glancing, but hard enough to spin him about and stagger him and have him crying out in pain.

  Yulan rushed forward. His eyes mapped that rocky skin as he ran. He tracked the shifting and sliding of cobbles across its flank, the flowing of the earth and pebbles beneath them. The moment came, the opening, and he swept his sword through its side, where the ribs would have been were it a living thing. The blade rattled against stones, inside the mass, shook in his hand, but it did not stop. Gouts of earth and rock burst out. The Clever-made monster slumped and sagged.

 

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