by Nathan Hawke
‘Old One-Eye sired a great many bastards, I’d say.’ Gallow crept sideways. ‘He was a fine brother of the sea. One of the best. Be proud to have his blood in your veins.’
‘I’ll have yours on the—’ Gallow’s spear flew straight at his face, so fast and hard that Bedris didn’t see it coming. He screamed and staggered back. Gallow caught the spear by its butt and pulled it back. Bedris collapsed onto the roadway, hands clutching at his head, blood running between his fingers. Gallow turned to face the other Lhosir but Mirrahj was already moving. One-Eye’s warriors had lowered their guard to watch the fight and her horse jumped straight into the middle of them. She stabbed down and a Lhosir screamed and she stabbed again. Then she was past them and on the road the other side and two more Lhosir were on the ground. Blood dripped from the tip of her javelot. Gallow eyed the men left guarding the bridge. Four of them and they would still fight. He aimed his spear at them but when they drew no closer he lowered it and pinned Bedris to the road, his spear point at the Lhosir’s neck. ‘Do you know how Jyrdas died? It started when he was hacked in the back with an axe. He killed the man who did it. Then he took a Marroc arrow in the side but he still killed three more and he was standing when the rest of them fled. He would have faced the Screambreaker himself had there been a need, without a doubt or a moment of second thought. He called your king nioingr and died with Medrin’s dagger through his one good eye. I built his pyre and I spoke him out and then I found Medrin and I took his hand. Now I’ve taken your eye, Bedris One-Eye, and so you’ve earned your name. I’ll not kill you today but I might just come for you again.’ He turned to the others. ‘Stand and fight us if you want. Only two of us and four of you, though you might remember you were seven a moment ago. And you might wonder if a Lhosir might serve his king better by living, by telling him that Gallow Foxbeard has crossed the bridge and waits for him in Varyxhun. Or not. Either way, as you wish it, brothers of the sea.’
He started to move, creeping towards them, covering himself all the time with his shield and with his spear aimed at their faces. If they were going to fight then they’d split and come at him from all sides, and then he’d have to run and it would all depend on Mirrahj, still on her horse, and how she could fight four men when they were packed so close around him. But the Lhosir only turned their shields to face him as Gallow circled past and stood beside Mirrahj and clucked for his horse. Nor did they move as he climbed into the saddle; and when he turned and took the Aulian Way to Varyxhun, the Lhosir by the bridge were still standing there, watching him go.
22
VALARIC THE WOLF
Trouble always came in threes. The first trouble was the trouble Valaric had expected: Sixfingers had left Tarkhun and come to the valley with his army of forkbeards. Well, that was the way it was supposed to be and the Wolf had known this day would come ever since his Crackmarsh men had slipped away from the Reach and helped themselves to Varyxhun instead. That had been a slap in Sixfingers’ face and a taunt too: The Widowmaker never took this castle. Can you? Valaric had been preparing for the siege since the day he’d arrived. If was honest with himself, he was itching for it.
He sighed. There was always someone in the shrine to Modris up at the top of the castle – Sarvic or Angry Jonnic or one of the others quietly praying for the Vathen and the forkbeards to fight to a bloody stalemate. Valaric hadn’t bothered. He’d been at war with the forkbeards for more years than he had fingers and that was never how it went. The Lhosir were charmed. Luck never sent a plague to make their armies vanish into smoke or made the rivers flood and wash them away. The best luck he’d ever had was a bit of mud that made a forkbeard shield wall back up a hill a bit more slowly for fear of slipping, and what the mud had given, the rain that made it had taken away with what it had done to the Marroc archers. It hadn’t surprised him when he’d heard that Sixfingers was in Witches’ Reach, that he’d turned his back on the Vathen and chosen to crack Varyxhun first. No surprise that his iron devils had come with him either. Could have done without the shadewalkers. Even the whisper of them put the shits up his men. The Aulian would deal with them though. His men needed to see that.
He stared at himself in the mirror – another Aulian treasure left behind when they’d abandoned the valley to the Marroc warlords who’d claimed the castle until the first kings of Sithhun had tamed them. It was gold and a finer silver than you ever saw in Andhun. Every time he looked at it, he felt a warmth inside him, a reminder of who he was and why he was here, for not long ago a Lhosir had sat where Valaric sat now. Braiding his forked beard, no doubt.
The Aulians had left other things too. Like a great big cave right behind the sixth and last gate to the castle with great big bars across its mouth and, if you believed the stories, a great big dragon inside which would drown anyone who broke those gates down if you could somehow find a way to wake it up.
He sighed. Stories like that kept his men happy but stories didn’t kill forkbeards. The Aulians had left behind a library too – the biggest on this side of the mountains. Not that Valaric cared, but Oribas spent half his time there and the other half wandering the castle, looking and poking, although what he was looking and poking for only the gods knew. So far all he’d managed to do was find some underground pools and get soaking wet. Books. Books wouldn’t save them from Sixfingers any more than stories. Was it too much to hope that Oribas would find some other treasure, something he could actually use?
An angry fist banged on the door. Valaric glanced out the window at the sun and yes, it was about time. His second trouble was more straightforward on account of being locked up in the castle prison, but doing that had made his third. He took a deep breath. Stared at himself in the mirror and sighed again and then turned to face the door. At least it had a latch on the inside so she couldn’t just barge in. ‘No!’ he shouted. ‘And still no, and I’ll have some more no for you later. Now go away!’
‘It’s not right, Valaric, and you know it.’
‘He killed a Marroc, Arda Smithswife.’
He waited to see if there’d be more today but after a pause he heard her walk away. Maybe she was giving up. And then he looked at himself in the mirror again and laughed. Arda Smithswife? Give up?
Five minutes later he was breaking his fast with the Marroc who’d lead the defence of the castle: Achista and Addic of Witches’ Reach, who spoke for the Marroc of the valley; Sarvic and the two Jonnics, who’d come with him from the Crackmarsh; and the Aulian, whom everyone said was a wizard, dragged away from his books. They’d all fought the forkbeards before but he always got the same feeling whenever he sat with them: they were too young. They were brave and they’d fight and they’d stand on the walls of Varyxhun until someone cut their legs from under them, but they barely even remembered the days when the Screambreaker had rampaged. Except for Sarvic and Angry Jonnic, who’d been with him at Lostring Hill, none of them even knew what a real battle looked like.
‘Sixfingers is moving up the valley now,’ said Achista. Her men were watching them come. ‘He’ll be in Varyxhun tomorrow with five hundred men.’ She didn’t say anything about the iron devils but all the Marroc except for Valaric made the sign of Modris anyway. Valaric didn’t bother because Modris wasn’t going to help them, not this time. He closed his eyes. No point banging the table.
‘As many men as we can spare. Get them down into the city and sweep it one last time. Food, arrows, weapons, oils, anything that burns.’ He glanced at Oribas. ‘Salt. If there’s anyone still left they can keep whatever they can carry but nothing else. Forkbeards will just take it anyway. Make sure they understand – the gates close when Sixfingers comes and they don’t open again for anyone. Anyone.’ Felt like he was plundering his own people. He knew he was right – whatever he left he was leaving for Sixfingers – but that didn’t make it any easier to do. ‘Might be shadewalkers in the city tonight.’ He glanced at Oribas while the others all quietly made the sign of Modris again. ‘Salt. Do you have enough?’
>
‘Enough to fight them, yes. Enough to bar them from the whole city?’ Oribas shook his head. ‘It cannot be done.’
Valaric’s foot twitched. Oribas had laid lines of crumbly brownish powder across every entrance to the inner castle but people kept forgetting. Kept treading in them and scuffing them and Valaric was no better than anyone else. He wouldn’t even have considered it if Achista and Addic hadn’t told him how Oribas had faced down Sixfingers and all his ironskins armed with nothing else.
‘There are more than a thousand forkbeards in the valley now.’ Achista passed her hands over the table where a map lay spread out, another relic of the forkbeard Cithjan. Valaric had found it helpfully marked with all the places where forkbeards had been killed on the roads, and so the first thing he’d done was send his Crackmarsh men out looking for the Marroc who’d done it to see if they wanted to do it some more. Forkbeards had a thousand men in the valley? Fine. He had about half that, but most of them were proper fighting men with decent arms and he had an impregnable castle too and enough food for months. Sixfingers would have to do better.
‘There’s more crossing the Aulian Bridge all the time.’ Sarvic had been the one to come up with the idea of putting watchers on the other side of the river. The western side of the valley was wild and rugged and hardly anyone lived there. The forkbeards had never bothered much with it except for Boyrhun. Sarvic’s men lit torches each morning before dawn to say how many forkbeards had crossed the bridge the day before.
Addic’s fists were getting tighter every minute. ‘You can’t just—’
His sister put her hand over his. You can’t just abandon the town. That’s what stuck in Addic’s throat. Truth be told, it stuck in Valaric’s as well, but if they tried to fight out in the open then the forkbeards would smash them to pieces and they all knew it. The road from the city to the castle, on the other hand, was a series of switchbacks with a gatehouse in the middle of each all stacked one on top of the next and walls overlooking every inch. ‘Jonnic, lead the sweep of the town. Achista, go with him.’ Maybe the sight of their Huntress would give the Marroc of the valley who hadn’t already run some heart; he’d not say no to a few more fighting men. ‘Addic, the salt. Sarvic, sort him out some men.’ Addic might never walk properly again and he certainly couldn’t fight, not yet, but he understood the Aulian wizard’s protections and railed about them more than the wizard himself. ‘Sarvic, go to the fourth gate and work your way up one more time. Make sure everyone understands when to close the gates and yes, yes, I know they’ll be bored to tears hearing it by now but they can hear it again. I’ll be at the lower gates doing the same. Oribas, you can come with me.’ They’d both be standing watch with the men at the first gate tonight but he didn’t need to say that just yet.
He left the others to it and walked through the castle, taking his time, stopping to talk to the men whose names he knew. There was a chance, after all, that he wouldn’t see them again, and so wherever there was any problem he stayed until it had been resolved and it was past noon before he even got out of the sixth gate and onto the road. There he looked down.
The sixth gate was different. The first five barred the middle of each switchback and made a neat line up the mountainside, with ladders running up from the top of each gatehouse to the next. When the forkbeards started up the road and began their assault on the first gate, the men behind the second would be standing fifty feet over their heads, shooting arrows and dropping rocks and whatever else they could find. When the first gate fell, the men behind the second would fall back to the third and do the same again. As Oribas had shown him, the Aulians had designed their fortress so that each gatehouse could be left and allowed to fall, one after the next, while the attacking army would be bombarded all the way to the top, and even the men who manned the roof of each gatehouse could escape after it was overrun by climbing the ladders so their feet would never touch the road. The sixth gate was separate, built right at the end of the castle road, a notch of wall jutting out from the battlements with a small space behind it and then the Dragon’s Maw, while the castle yard opened up to one side. The forkbeards, if they reached the sixth gate at all, would be exhausted, battered, bloodied, the road behind them littered with their dead, and not a single Marroc would have had to raise his shield to defend himself. And yet when Valaric looked at the piles of stones and firewood, at the pots of fish oil carefully lined up along the roadside, it left him with a hole in the pit of his stomach. Their defence was based on an assumption that none of them spoke but all quietly made. One by one the gates would fall; one by one the forkbeards would take them, and in the end the forkbeards would win because the forkbeards always did, and all Valaric was doing was making it as bloody as possible. The feeling stuck with him right down to the first gate, looking down the castle road to Varyxhun. A grubby muddy market town when you put it beside Andhun and Sithhun and Kelfhun, not even a big one; but to the valley folk Varyxhun was a city and it was hard to imagine anything greater. Now a steady stream of carts was heading up the Aulian Way to the higher valleys. He watched them, suddenly not having much else to do, while Oribas wandered the gatehouse for what must have been the tenth time. When he came back he still hadn’t found whatever he was looking for.
‘My people liked to dig,’ he said. ‘I thought there would be tunnels. We were always good with stone.’ He brightened. ‘Sometimes when my people built a defence like this, there would be a stone with a chain. A dozen strong men pulling on the chain would bring the stone down and without it the building would fall in on itself and block the road. A last defence, you see.’
‘Not much fun for the men pulling the chain.’
‘In those days they were usually slaves. Sometimes even the officers didn’t know. Famously so, in the battle of Iri—’
Valaric cut him off. ‘Will the Vathen be any better?’
Oribas stared, mouth still open at what Valaric had just said. He shrugged. ‘I don’t know the Vathen. The only one I’ve ever seen is the one you have in your cells.’ He paused, and Valaric already knew what the Aulian was thinking before he spoke it. ‘Gallow would fight for you. You should let them both—’
‘Don’t you start on me too, Aulian!’ Oribas was right though, and Arda was right. They were all right. Gallow would stand and fight Sixfingers to his last breath, and maybe the Vathan woman would too. And he could use every sword he could get, especially ones that had seen their share of fighting. But to have this castle defended by the very enemies he was trying to kill? He struggled with that. ‘I suppose you don’t know whether there’s any truth to what the Vathan says about the sword either.’
‘I’ve looked through the histories my people left in your library, but . . .’ Oribas only shrugged. ‘There’s a secret to this castle.’ He nodded up the slope to the tarn lake above it and then tapped the sacks of salt by their feet. ‘A secret to its stories, to why my people came here and what they brought and why they built this castle where they did.’ Salt. The castle cellars had been full of it, a thousand sacks, a hundreds years old. Valaric saw no reason not to drop it on the forkbeards when they came. Sack of salt was as good as a rock, after all.
‘When you find out, you let me know,’ he said, after they’d both been quiet for a bit.
‘I will.’
Together they settled down to wait. To see what the night would bring.
23
SHIEFTANE
Spring came late to the mountain valleys, but it came at last. The sun shone bright and the air was warm and scented with pollen. Under his mail Reddic was sweating. On the top of the first gate beside him Valaric the Wolf and Sarvic and the three Jonnics and a dozen other men were probably sweating too. He hoped so, because that would mean it was the sun and the heat and not fear. On the road beneath the gate, within easy range of an arrow, stood a single forkbeard. He carried a shield and a spear with a white streamer tied to its top and he was just standing there. Further down the road, outside Varyxhun and awa
y from the castle walls, another thousand forkbeards lined the valley, a single solid mass of shields blocking it from the Isset to the mountainside. The forkbeard on the road had Reddic’s attention though, all of it, because the forkbeard on the road was Medrin Sixfingers and the shield he carried was the Crimson Shield of Modris.
Nearly three weeks since the ghuldog had bitten him and his arm still hurt. Nowhere as bad as it been on the way to the Devil’s Caves but still sore. He hid it as best he could.
‘I could shoot him,’ muttered Sarvic. ‘It wouldn’t be any bother.’
Valaric growled, ‘He comes to parley.’
‘Fine. I’ll take that up with Modris when I see him.’ But he didn’t lift his bow and they all watched in silence a while longer, sweat dripping off them. Reddic wiped his eyes. He didn’t understand why they were all just standing and looking at each other and no one was talking. Down on the road Sixfingers looked bored and was leaning on his spear.
‘Oh, get on with it.’ Fat Jonnic nudged Valaric. ‘He might not have sweated enough but I have.’
Reddic winced, but instead of throwing Fat Jonnic off the top of the gate Valaric sighed and closed his eyes and lifted the spear that had been sitting beside him all this time with its dirty white shirt knotted beneath the blade. He took one step closer to the edge and looked down at King Sixfingers. Took a long drink of water and then spat on the road below. ‘Well then, Sixfingers?
Medrin squinted up at them. ‘I’ve heard your voice before.’
‘You have. In Andhun I stood against you on the beach and behind the city gates, and I stand against you now. Poxscarred prince of filth! Twelve-fingered son of the Mother of Monsters. I’m Valaric of Witterslet. Valaric of the Marroc. Valaric the Wolf and I carry the red Sword of the Weeping God. Do you care to face me this time, Sixfingers, or are you the coward that even your own men know you to be?’