by Jim Butcher
In that moment, the swordsman moved. Aldrick slipped inside the Parcian’s slow thrust and lashed out with his foot in a short, hard kick, a simple stomp, as though he’d been driving a spade into the earth. But it wasn’t a spade his boot hit. It was Pirellus’s already wounded knee. The bones broke with a clean, sharp crack, and Aldrick drove his shoulder into Pirellus’s, throwing him to one side.
The Knight Commander’s face showed nothing but determination, but as he stumbled, he put weight on his knee, and it simply could not support his body any longer. He crumpled to the ground, turning for another cut at Aldrick as the swordsman stepped toward him.
Aldrick parried the blow aside with casual power, more indigo sparks erupting.
Then, with a step to one side and a swift cut, he took Pirellus’s head from his shoulders.
Blood spurted in an arch as the Knight Commander’s body fell to the stones of the courtyard. His head rolled to a stop several yards away. His body lay twitching, his sword arm, even in death, slashing left and right.
Amara stared at the fallen Knight in horror, as her instincts screamed at her, forced her to remember that Fidelias was still on the move and had not been stopped. She rose, uncertain what she could do to stop what was happening in the courtyard. Aldrick turned on a heel and, without even pausing, began to stalk, alone, toward the legionares guarding the gates.
Before he could reach them, the wood of the barricade groaned, let out a tortured scream, and began to warp and writhe. Splinters and shards of wood exploded out, sending legionares reeling back from them in stunned horror. Then the wood itself began to writhe and move, the legs of tables twisting and clutching, planks shattering, the wagon letting out a tortured scream and then collapsing upon itself.
The Marat, on the other side, began to shove hard against the barricade, and without the hastily constructed stability of the various pieces, the barricade itself began to wobble and crumble in.
Fidelias appeared, not far from Aldrick, and then turned to signal one of the Knights in the air. The man swept down and grabbed Fidelias beneath the arms, lifting him back to the roof of the barracks, and Aldrick ex Gladius stepped over Pirellus’s fallen corpse to lead the other handful of mercenaries after them.
The legionares at the gate formed up to face the incoming Marat, but the invaders leapt on them with an unyielding savagery and began to drive the men near the gates back step by slow step.
Amara rose and rushed into the stable to shout to the archers, “Take up a shield and sword! Hold the gate!” Men rushed about in the stable’s interior, taking up weapons and rushing outside to join the defense at the gate.
When Amara returned to Bernard, he had regained his feet. “What’s happening?”
“Their Knights came in. We bloodied them, but they managed to weaken the barricade. Pirellus is dead.” She looked at him. “I’m not a soldier. What do we do?”
“Giraldi,” Bernard said. “Get to Giraldi. He’ll send more men to reinforce the gates. Go, I’m not up to running yet.”
Amara nodded, and fled, sprinting across the courtyard and up the steps to the wall. The fighting there was more hectic, and she stepped over the body of a Marat, proof that they had gained purchase on the wall at least once.
“Giraldi!” she shouted, when she reached the command area over the gates. “Where are you?”
A grim Legion shieldman, his face half-masked in blood turned to her. It was Giraldi, his eyes calm despite the bloodied sword in his hands. “Countess? You said you were looking for the hordemaster. And there he is, finally,” grunted Giraldi. “There, see?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Amara said, her voice numb. “Pirellus is dead.”
“Crows,” Giraldi said, but his voice was too tired for it to be much of an oath. “Just seems like someone should pay him back for this.”
Amara lifted her head, something hot and hard and terrible pulsing in her belly. The fear, she realized, had vanished. She was too tired to be afraid, too afraid to be afraid anymore. There was a sort of relaxation that came with inevitability, she realized, a sort of mad, silent strength. “Which one is he?”
“There,” Giraldi said, pointing. An arrow shattered on his shield, and he didn’t flinch, as though he was too tired to let it bother him. “See, the tall one with the birds all around him and the Aleran spear.”
Amara focused on him and saw the Marat hordemaster for the first time. He was marching steadily through the ranks of Marat hurling themselves against the walls, his chin lifted, an arrogant smirk on his mouth. Black feathers had been braided into his pale hair, and several of the herdbane stalked behind him like some deadly guard of honor. Other troops went before, chanting.
The hordemaster’s troops began to part for him, crying out in a steady chant as they did. “Atsurak! Atsurak! Atsurak!”
Amara brought up Cirrus in a visioncrafting, determined to learn this man’s features, to find him and at all costs to kill him for leading the horde against them this day. She memorized the shape of his nose and cruel mouth, the steady breadth of his shoulders beneath a thanadent-hide cowl, the —
Amara caught her breath, staring, and willed Cirrus to bring her vision even closer to the hordemaster.
Riding at his hip, through a thin braided twist of cord he used as a belt, was the signet dagger of an Aleran High Lord, its gold and silver hilt gleaming in the morning sun. Even as Amara stared, Cirrus let her see the dagger’s hilt, the crest wrought in steel upon it: Aquitaine’s falcon.
“Furies,” she breathed. Aquitaine. Aquitaine himself. No one more powerful in the realm save the First Lord. Aquitaine’s Knights, then, Aquitaine who subverted Fidelias, Aquitaine who had attempted to gain knowledge of the palace from her, in order to—
In order to kill Gaius. He means to take the throne for himself.
Amara swallowed. She had to recover that dagger at any cost. To bring such a damning piece of evidence before the Senate would finish Aquitaine and terrify anyone working with him into loyalty again. She could prove who the true culprit behind today’s vicious deaths had been, and though she had thought she hated the hordemaster now striding toward the buckling defenses of Garrison’s gates, she felt a sudden and furious rage against the man whose ambitions had engineered the events of the past several days.
But could she do it? Could she recover the dagger?
She had to try. She now realized why Fidelias had wanted her out of the fortress. He had wanted to hide this very thing from her, knowing full well that only she and perhaps two or three other people in the fortress would recognize the signet dagger for what it was.
She shook her head, forcing her thoughts to focus, to take one thing at a time. “Giraldi! We need reinforcements,” she stammered. “The gate is about to fall!”
Giraldi grimaced, and as she watched, his face fell, the lines in it deepening, making him look as though he had aged years in the space of a breath. “Doesn’t matter,” he said, and jerked his chin toward the field below the fortress. “Look.”
Amara looked, and when she did, the strength went out of her legs. She leaned hard against the battlements, her head swimming, her heart pounding in light, irregular beats.
“No,” she breathed. “No. It’s not fair.”
Out on the plain, beyond the savage horde of Marat below, there had come another horde, every bit as large as the first. This one included elements of cavalry, though she could make out little beyond that. Cavalry, useless for taking a fortified position, but the ideal troops for raiding into an enemy’s lands. Fast, deadly, destructive. The sheer numbers of the newly arrived enemy had, she knew, abruptly changed the fight from a desperate battle to a hopeless one. She looked up at Giraldi and saw it in his eyes.
“We can’t win,” she said. “We can’t hold.”
“Against that?” He shook his head. He took his helmet off and wiped sweat from his brow, replacing it as arrows buzzed through the air.
She bowed her head, her shoulders shaking
. The tears were hot and bitter. A stone-headed arrow shattered on the merlon above her, but she didn’t care.
Amara looked up at the Marat, at Atsurak about to take the gates, at the enormous number of Marat still fresh and un-bloodied, now moving quickly over the plains toward the fortress. “Hold,” she told Giraldi. “Hold as long as you can. Send someone to make sure the Civilians have started running. Tell the wounded to arm themselves to fight as best they can. Tell them—” She swallowed. “Tell them it looks bad.”
“Yes, Countess,” Giraldi said, his voice numb. “Heh. I always figured my last order would be ‘pass me another slice of roast.’ ” He gave her a grim smile, turned to swing his sword at a climbing Marat almost absently, and headed off to follow her commands.
Amara climbed back down off the wall, taking absent note of the courtyard. Fidelias and his men were nowhere in sight, probably gone again, safely lofted up by their Knights Aeris. At the barricade, more Marat had pushed through, and though they had trouble advancing over the corpses fallen on the ground, yet they came on, despite the desperate cries of the Alerans pitted against them.
She drew her sword, the sword from the fallen guardsman in the Princeps Memorium, and stared at its workmanship. Then she looked up, at the Marat pushing through the gates, sure that in time she would see their hordemaster, here to claim the fortress for himself.
Bernard stepped up beside her, still looking tired, but holding a double bladed woodsman’s axe in his broad hands. “Do we have a plan?”
“The hordemaster, I saw him. I want to take him down.” She told him about the dagger at his waist, the second horde coming on.
Bernard nodded, slowly. “If we get to him,” he said, “I’m going to try a woodcrafting on you. Take the knife and run. Get it back to the First Lord, if you can.”
“You’re exhausted. If you try to work another crafting it could k —” She stopped herself and took a slow breath.
“Pirellus was right,” Bernard commented. “The good part of being doomed is that you have nothing left to lose.”
Then he turned to her, slipping an arm around her waist, and kissed her on the mouth, with no hesitation, no self-consciousness, nothing but a raw hunger tempered with a kind of exquisite gentleness. Amara let out a soft sound and threw herself into the kiss, suddenly frantic, and felt tears threaten her eyes again.
She drew back from the kiss far too soon, looking up at him. Bernard smiled at her and said, “I didn’t want to leave that undone.”
She felt a tired smile on her own mouth, and she turned from him to face the gates.
Outside, there came a blaring of horns, deeper, somehow more violent, more angry than the first ones had been. The ground began to shake once again, and shouts and rumbles outside the walls rose into a tidal wave of sound that pounded at her ears, her throat, her chest. She thought she could feel her cheeks vibrating from the sheer volume.
The final defense at the gate began to crumble. The Marat began to force their way into the courtyard, their eyes wild, weapons bloodied, pale hair and skin speckled with scarlet. One armed holder went down before a pair of enormous wolves and a Marat fighting with nothing but his own teeth. A great herdbane pinned a crawling Aleran to the ground and with a birdlike bob of its head seized the Aleran’s neck and broke it with a quick shake. The Marat poured in, and there was sudden bedlam in the courtyard, lines disintegrating into dozens of separate smaller battles, pure chaos.
“There,” Amara said, and jabbed her finger forward. “Coming through the gate right now.”
Atsurak strode through the gates, his beasts all around him. With a casual motion of his captured Aleran spear, he thrust it through the back of a fighting legionare and then, without watching the man die, withdrew the spear to test its edge against his thumb. Several Alerans rushed him. One was torn to shreds by one of the huge birds. Another dropped to the earth before he got close to Atsurak, black-feathered Marat arrows sprouting from both eyes. No one got within striking distance of the hordemaster.
Bernard growled, “I’m going in first. Get their attention. You come right behind me.”
“All right,” Amara said, and put her hand on his shoulder.
Bernard gripped the axe and tensed to move forward.
Sudden thunder shook the air in a roar that made what came before sound like nothing more than the rumbling of an empty belly. Screams, frantic, howling cries, rose in a symphony. The walls themselves shook, just beside the gates. They shook again, beneath a thunderous impact, and a web of cracks spread out through them. Again, the thunder rammed against the outer walls, and with a roar an entire section gave in. Alerans on the battlements had to scramble to either side, stone tumbling down in huge and uneven sections, dust flooding out, light from the newly risen sun pouring through the dust in a sudden flood of terrible golden splendor.
Through the sudden gap in the walls came a thunderous bellow, and the vast shape of a black-coated gargant, a gargant bigger than any such beast Amara had ever seen. Bloodied, painted in wild and garish colors, the beast seemed something out of a madman’s nightmare. It lifted its head and let out another bellowing roar and tore down another ten feet of wall with its vast digging claws. The gargant bellowed again and shouldered its way through the wall and into the courtyard itself.
A Marat warrior sat upon the gargant’s back, pale of hair and dark of eye, with shoulders so broad and chest so deep not even the largest breastplate could have fit him. He bore a long-handled cudgel in his hand, and with an almost casual sweep he leaned to one side and smote it down onto the head of a Wolf Clan warrior strangling a downed Aleran, dropping the Marat to the earth with a broken skull.
“ATSURAK!” bellowed the Marat on the back of the maddened gargant. His voice, deep, rich, furious, shook the stones of the courtyard. “ATSURAK OF HERDBANE! DOROGA OF GARGANT CALLS YOU MISTAKEN BEFORE WE-THE-MARAT! COME OUT, YOU MURDEROUS DOG! COME AND FACE ME BEFORE THE ONE!”
Whirling with insane grace, the gargant spun to one side, great forelegs rising together. The beast brought his clawed feet down on top of a charging Herdbane Clan warrior, simplysmashing him flat against the courtyard’s stones. At that, though the din outside the walls continued to rise, the battle in the courtyard fell into a sudden, shocked silence.
As the great beast turned, letting out another defiant bellow, Amara saw, in the golden light pouring through the breached walls, the boy Tavi clinging to Doroga’s back, behind him on the great gargant, and behind the boy sat the scarred slave, clutching at him and gibbering.
Tavi looked wildly around the courtyard, and when his gaze flicked toward them, his face lit with a ferocious smile. “Uncle Bernard! Uncle Bernard!” he shouted, pointing at Doroga. “He followed me home! Can we keep him?”
CHAPTER 41
Isana took a pair of quick steps back, pressing Odiana along behind her, and lifted her chin. “I’ve always thought you a pig, Kord, but never an idiot. Do you think you’ll get away with a killing, right here in Garrison?”
Kord laughed, a rough sound. “In case you didn’t notice, they’ve got bigger fish to fry. I just walked right on in like all those other fools who came to die here.”
“It doesn’t mean you can escape, Kord. Assuming that one of us doesn’t get to you when you try it.”
Kord laughed again, the sound of it dry, rasping. “One of you. Which one would that be? Come here, bitch.”
Isana faced him evenly and did not move.
Kord’s face flushed red and dangerous. “I said come here.”
“She can’t hear you, Kord. I saw to that.”
“Did you?” His eyes moved from Isana to the huddling woman behind and beside her. Odiana flinched, even at the glance, haunted eyes widening.
“No,” Isana said, though she knew the words were useless. “Don’t look.”
But Odiana glanced up at Kord. The murderous expression on his face, a finger he jabbed at the ground in front of him, were apparently enough to activate the disci
pline collar. Odiana let out a sudden breathless shriek and fell to the ground, clawing at the collar. Even as she did, she struggled against her own convulsing body to crawl closer to Kord, to obey the command he’d given her. Isana reached down to hold her back, but the sudden wave of terror and unbearable anguish that washed up through that touch nearly blinded her, and she stumbled back and away.
Kord let out a harsh laugh and took a step forward, taking the woman’s face in his hands. “That’s better,” he said. “You be a good girl. I’m going to break your pretty neck and then put that collar on Isana. Hold still.”
Odiana whimpered, body still twitching, and did not struggle against him.
“Kord, no!” Isana shouted.
The door suddenly rattled on its frame. There was a hesitation, and then it rattled again, as though someone was trying to get in and hadn’t expected to find it bolted. Kord whirled to face it.
Desperate, Isana cast the globe of the furylamp in her hand at Kord. It struck the Steadholder in the back of the head. The furylamp shattered, the spark imp inside it flashing into brilliant light for a moment, and then gone. The interior of the warehouse sank into darkness, and Kord began to curse viciously.
Isana swallowed her terror and hurried forward, through the darkness. There was a horrible, frantic moment of feeling in the dark, listening for Odiana’s whimpers and Kord’s heavy, snarling breathing. Her fingers found Odiana’s hair first, and she dragged the slave woman against her. She got the woman to her feet and started dragging her farther back into the warehouse, hoping that she moved in the right direction. Odiana began to whimper, and Isana clapped one hand firmly over the woman’s mouth.
“Don’t do this, Isana,” growled Kord’s voice, from somewhere in the dark, back toward the door. “You’re just drawing things out. We both know how this is going to end.”
Isana felt a ripple in the ground beneath the wooden floorboards, but knew that Kord’s fury would have difficulty locating them through the wood, just as it had through the ice. She continued to draw Odiana deeper back into the warehouse, until she bumped against the back wall. She felt her way with her hands, and though the predawn light was showing through cracks in the wall, there still was not enough light to see. She pressed the woman down into the dubious shelter between two crates, then lifted Odiana’s own hands and pressed them over the woman’s mouth. The slave shook almost violently, but managed to nod. Isana drew her hands away from the woman and turned to face the darkness.