by Nathan Hawke
Oribas couldn’t see the gates themselves, only the Marroc on the walls over the top of them hurling spears and shooting arrows at the Lhosir trying to work the ram. He saw one ladder crest the wall only to be thrown back, and another and another, and then in one place further around a Marroc tumbled into the yard with a spear through him and then a second, and a moment later a Lhosir helm and shield appeared over the battlements. But then Addic was there. He drove his sword at the Lhosir and kicked him back down, and the ladder was quickly gone.
On the other side of the mountain the three groups of Lhosir were approaching the wall. Oribas shouted down to the handful of Marroc keeping back from the fight around the gates. They ran up to where he pointed and peppered the Lhosir with arrows. Among the rocks, the Lhosir were having a hard time holding their shields up as well as climbing and carrying ladders. The first group gave up after two of them were stuck with arrows fifty paces short of the walls. The second group got a little closer. The third, Oribas saw, tried a good deal harder: they almost reached the wall before they dropped their ladder, turned and fled, three arrow-pierced corpses littered among the boulders and the snow.
Around the gates the Lhosir pulled back, but then a rock the size of a man’s head flew over the wall and smashed into the yard. Oribas squinted down the trail at the trees beside the road from where the stone had come. He couldn’t make out what the Lhosir had there until it jerked and fired again. A simple onager and not a particularly big one, not even quite out of range of the Marroc archers, but that didn’t seem to bother the Lhosir. The second stone was low, thudding into the slope beneath the wall. The third and the fourth hit the wall, and then suddenly three ladders came up at once at the same place, arrows showered the wall and half a dozen Marroc fell at once. Lhosir with bows! They almost never used them, but now they’d taken the Marroc by surprise and Lhosir were cresting the wall with no one in their way. Two of them reached the battlements and turned to face the Marroc running along the walkway. Three more scrambled up the ladders, lowered themselves to dangle off the walkway and jumped down into the yard. They ran for the gates to throw them open while arrows flashed past them, but then saw the ice and snow and stopped, unsure what do to. The Marroc on the battlements pushed back the Lhosir and threw down their ladders. The three trapped inside were scythed down, a few Marroc running across the stained snow to finish them off. Three more heads for Achista to mount on the Aulian Bridge.
The Lhosir withdrew not long after that. Oribas came down from the tower to tend to the wounded but there were few. Eight Marroc were dead and six injured, three with simple cuts that would mend easily enough if they didn’t turn bad, one with an arrow though an arm that would probably mend, and two for whom the best Oribas could do was make them comfortable and hold their hands together while they prayed. As well as the three Lhosir in the yard Achista said she counted thirty dead outside. Oribas, when he looked for himself, thought it more like twenty, but he kept quiet. It didn’t matter. The Marroc had beaten the hated forkbeards again, and whether there were fifty or sixty or seventy of them left outside on the ridge, it made no difference.
She caught him at twilight and pulled him down to the Aulian tomb and they made love for an hour as the sun set. ‘Tonight,’ she told him as they lay together afterwards. ‘You go tonight.’
Oribas said nothing. The Lhosir would grow stronger and stronger. It made sense, before going was no longer possible. ‘I wish you would come with me.’
‘You know I must be here.’ She kissed his ear and stroked his hair. ‘I’ll send the men who are too wounded to fight but who can still walk out through the passage. They’ll hang our three forkbeard heads over the bridge and seek Valaric the Mournful in the Crackmarsh. Then the doorway must be sealed. If they’re caught, the forkbeards will find it.’
He held her tight for a long time. They both knew it would be the last night they had. ‘I will not die first,’ he whispered in her ear as they rose and dressed.
‘I’ll hold you to that.’ They both knew it would be her.
‘The Lhosir will come in the night.’ Oribas was thinking of the three groups that had attacked the wall at the back of the tower earlier in the day, particularly of the band that had pressed harder than the rest. ‘The south-west corner. They left a ladder there.’
Later they stood at the top of the shaft and watched the wounded Marroc climb down, three of them, each with a Lhosir head slung over his shoulder. They kissed and held one another and then Achista stepped back through the round stone door and together, one either on side of it, they rolled it back into place until it lay between them.
‘Goodbye, Oribas. Fare well,’ he heard her call on the other side of the door, then heard her walk away. He turned the four seals, stood and looked at what he’d done and almost opened them again. It felt as though this was her tomb, that he’d sealed her in to die.
She’d left a torch burning at the edge of the shaft to give him some light. He moved it carefully away and waited until the other Marroc had gone ahead and then threw a few things down into the water. Easier that way than carrying them. By the time he reached the bottom, the faint flicker of orange light from the top was dim and fading. He worked quickly, doing what needed to be done, and then waited for the fire to go out. In the darkness he left, picking and sliding his way through the caves to the mountainside. The other Marroc were already long gone. They’d each choose their own path lest the Lhosir catch them and none of them would know that he’d followed. Achista’s last try at keeping him safe.
But he didn’t follow. Instead he turned the other way and trudged as quietly as he could around the edge of the mountain, towards the Lhosir camp.
35
THE AULIAN WAY
Skilljan Spearhoof had a few hours of bad and uncomfortable sleep. He’d started the day with some hundred fighting men and now he was down to more like seventy if you included the ones with wounds trivial enough to keep going. Bloody bastard Marroc with their bows. They were supposed to be farmers and beggars but half of them were in stolen Lhosir mail with shields and helms and swords and they didn’t seem to have any shortage of those cursed arrows. Worse, the gates were stronger than he’d thought, which left scaling the walls and he’d already seen how badly that was going to go. He’d sent a rider back towards Varyxhun to say he was going to need more men – a lot more men – and that left him seething. Yes, there goes Skilljan Spearhoof who couldn’t deal with a few angry Marroc farmers even with a hundred hardened Lhosir warriors at his back. And if it was true that the Marroc were led by a woman . . . He held his head and shuddered.
He led the night-time sortie himself, creeping up the mountain round the back of the tower in the dark to get to the ladder than Foddis Longbeard had left for him and lost three men doing it. And it seemed as though the Marroc had crept into his thoughts and read his mind. They let him climb all the way up the blasted crags and set the ladder against the wall before a dozen of them popped up over the top and threw a hail of arrows at them and he was lucky to get away with no worse than his tail between his legs and two more men sent to the Maker-Devourer’s cauldron. In the middle of the night he finally he got to his tent and tried to sleep, and tossed and turned and set his plans as best he could. The Marroc hadn’t left him with much of a choice. In the morning he’d build his pyres for the men he’d lost and lick his wounds, and then he’d wait and pen the Marroc inside Witches’ Reach until he had another two hundred men. After that he’d go for the walls again. It would be a bloody business scaling them, but with that many men he’d do it and then the Marroc could see what it meant to defy him.
‘Oi! Spearhoof!’
Skilljan felt as though he’d only closed his eyes a minute ago. When he looked it was still dark, so maybe he had. He recognised the voice. Hardal Daggereyes. ‘This had better be very important.’
‘Oh, you’ll like this.’ Hardal didn’t sound like he liked it. Skilljan sat up and rubbed his face and then wished he hadn’
t. His skin still stung like the lash of a whip from when he’d been working the ram and the Marroc had poured scalding water over them all. The hide roof had kept the worst of it off, but by then it had had its fair share of rents and tears from all the arrows and spears the Marroc kept throwing at it. There weren’t many who’d worked the ram who’d come away unscathed.
‘Well, what then?’
‘Best you come out.’
His legs didn’t like it much, nor the rest of him either, but Skilljan hauled himself out of his nice warm tent. The furs he’d worn all day still kept him warm but on bare skin the cold at this time of night was like being flayed. Hardal had two of the night sentries with him and three others. Two battered-looking Marroc down on their knees and whimpering and – Skilljan blinked – the Aulian.
‘These two we found near the Varyxhun Road.’
‘Runners.’ Skilljan nodded. He’d expected a few, which was why Hardal had been out there in the first place. He’d hoped for more than two though.
Hardal shook his head. ‘No. Look what this one had on him.’ He held up a severed head. It took Skilljan a moment to realise he was looking at Geryk Frostbeard. Or what was left of him.
Skilljan growled and drew his sword, then stilled himself. He bent down and grabbed the Marroc’s face instead, twisting it to look at him. ‘We’ll make a raven of this one in the morning.’ That would make him feel better. It would make the others feel better too.
‘On his way to cross the bridge, he was. Taking messages to the outlaws in the Crackmarsh. So was the other one. Apparently there were three, so we missed one.’
Skilljan clenched his teeth. So be it. He’d have more men before any band of outlaws could come crawling out of the swamp and maybe that would be just the thing to lure them. He frowned. ‘I count three, not two, so how did you miss one?’
Hardal shoved the Aulian forward. ‘We found this one on the way back, creeping into the camp. He says he wants to bargain with you.’
‘I wasn’t creeping, Skilljan Spearhoof. I was walking as any man would in the dead of night across moonlit snow.’
The Aulian looked scared, though, despite the defiance in his words. After the day Skilljan had had, anyone within range of his spear had a right to look scared. He laughed. ‘There’s no bargaining now, Aulian. We’re long past that. Your Marroc are all dead men.’
‘I wish to bargain for myself. For my own life. The Marroc inside Witches’ Reach may all be dead men but I’m not Marroc, Skilljan Spearhoof.’
Scared, but he wasn’t quivering and he stood still and spoke for himself, which in Skilljan’s eyes spoke of at least some courage. ‘I have to suppose that Cithjan sent you to the Devil’s Caves for a reason, Aulian, even if I don’t know what it was. For myself, I have no grudge against you.’
‘I’ll tell you why your ram failed if you like. The Marroc have piled up all the snow from the Reach against the gates. They packed it down hard and poured water over it through the night. The gates are frozen shut with a block of ice behind them as large as a shed.’
Skilljan looked at the Aulian and then turned back to his tent. Ice! Clever little nioingrs. So much for making a bigger ram. Maybe the Maker-Devourer knew how to smash a way through, but Skilljan didn’t. ‘Make those Marroc as uncomfortable as you like, Hardal, but don’t let them die. I want their screams to reach the river when we gut them in the morning. The Aulian can have a clean death. Feed him.’
‘Don’t you wish to hear what I have to offer, Skilljan Spearhoof?’ asked the Aulian.
‘Not unless you have a way to get me into Witches’ Reach.’
There was a long silence before the Aulian replied. ‘And what, Lhosir, if I do?’
Oribas sat bound beside a fire in the Lhosir camp. Fear didn’t stop him from sizing up their numbers and it didn’t stop him listening either. They were angry, simmering with rage and impatient to avenge their fallen. In the morning they walked to the walls and waved a flag of parley to ask for their dead but the Marroc had already crept out in the night and hauled the bodies closest to the walls back inside. Skilljan’s face turned thunderous. They all knew what that meant.
They tried a second time, easing into reach of the walls behind a line of shields and with one of their Marroc prisoners held in front of them. The Marroc asked for their man to be set free and then the Lhosir could have their bodies. When Skilljan refused, the archers in the fort killed the Marroc and drove the Lhosir away. Oribas’s face went white when Skilljan told him that. ‘They’re madmen,’ he whispered.
The Lhosir built their pyres and dragged away all the bodies they could reach. When they’d done that, they started on the last Marroc, and Oribas realised then why Achista had killed the first prisoner when she’d had the chance. For most of his life Oribas had been proud of his knowledge of the human frame. He’d worked with skeletons of men and cadavers. He’d been taught what organs were what and where they were to be found and what their importance was and what would happen if they were to fail. Now he tried to close his eyes and forget. The Lhosir stripped the last Marroc and laid him on his belly in the mud, close enough to one of the fires that the snow had all melted away. They held his arms and his legs while one of them took a knife and opened the skin on his back, one long deep cut on each side of the spine. They opened the cuts up wide and deep until bone showed beneath, and the screams were a thing Oribas knew he’d never forget. Then one of the Lhosir brought a strange-looking tool like a pair of long-handled tongs with cutting blades instead of metal fingers. One by one they pushed it into the screaming Marroc’s wounds and pulled the handles apart, and each time they did, bone cracked and splintered. They were separating the Marroc’s ribs from his spine. Oribas shut his eyes then and clamped his hands over his ears but he couldn’t stop the sounds, couldn’t stop that awful screaming. Worst of all though, he couldn’t stop himself counting, to see if the Lhosir snapped every rib or only some, and he couldn’t stop himself from wondering how many they’d cut before the Marroc could no longer breathe and so died.
The screams slowly faded. When it had been quiet for a while he opened his eyes and wished he hadn’t. The Marroc was lying where he’d been before, only now he was lying on a wooden wheel with two fat stakes driven right through him and sticking out of the gaping wounds on his back near the shoulder. The dead man’s lungs had been drawn out through the wounds and the Lhosir were draping them from strands of wire to make them look like wings. The blood raven. He’d heard Gallow talk of them.
When they were done they ran ropes around the two stakes and hung the dead Marroc from a pole. Three Lhosir carried him up towards Witches’ Reach. Oribas didn’t see what they did with him. Dangled him from a gibbet like the Marroc he’d seen in Varyxhun, perhaps.
They burned their own dead after that, standing beside each pyre to speak the deeds that each man had done in life and offering their souls to the cauldron of the Maker-Devourer. Skilljan Spearhoof had ignored Oribas until now, but as the dead burned and the Lhosir settled to an afternoon of feasting and remembering and watching the walls of Witches’ Reach, he came at last. An old Lhosir came with him.
‘Well then, Oribas of Aulia. Speak.’
‘Witches’ Reach was built by my people. There is an old Aulian tomb beneath it.’
Spearhoof looked to the old Lhosir. ‘Sharpear here has been inside the tower. Tell us what you know.’
So Oribas described the parts of the tomb the Lhosir had turned into a storeroom and the round stone door they’d never been able to open. He told them of the caves on the other side, how the Marroc had made him open the door for them and entered the tower and taken it. How these men that Skilljan had caught and killed had sealed it shut again.
‘So you’re the one who let them in?’ Skilljan bared his teeth. ‘I should make a raven out of you too, Aulian.’
‘I will open a door to anyone who has a knife at my throat and offers to remove it. The Marroc were good to their word. They meant to leave it
to you to kill me.’
‘Careless of them to let you go, then.’
Oribas shook his head. ‘They didn’t let me go, Lhosir. They were careless with the ladders they were using to go over the walls and rope up all your dead so they could cut off their heads and scatter them on the Varyxhun Road. Tonight I dare say they’ll slip over the walls again and deliver their presents to you.’
Skilljan’s eyes narrowed. ‘Why did you come here, Aulian, when you could have run away?’
‘And go where?’ Oribas shrugged. ‘I have nothing to do with this fight and no wish to be a part of it, but between you and the Marroc I have no choice but to choose a side. So I choose the side that will win. I will show you the way into Witches’ Reach and open the door for you if you will swear in blood two things. You will let me live. I did nothing wrong but befriend a nioingr without knowing who he was, and for that I was sent to the Devil’s Caves. You will become my kinsman and speak for me. You will swear in blood and I will lead you into Witches’ Reach. Afterwards, while you bask in your victory, I will help you as best I can and you will shelter me until the snows melt in the spring and the Aulian Way is clear. Then I will go home.’
Skilljan Spearhoof laughed. ‘I’ll do all those things, will I? I have a different offer. You show me the way into Witches’ Reach and I won’t kill you as I killed that Marroc.’ He crouched in front of Oribas and glared.