by Nathan Hawke
In the middle of the day the Lhosir came to take the bodies of their fallen. Valaric spread his best archers along the walls to pick off any they could. Even collecting their dead would be a misery for the forkbeards. Everything. For ever. Until they left.
But they didn’t leave. A few hours passed, that was all.
From the fifth gate Gallow watched the Lhosir march up the castle road for the second time that day. There must have been a thousand of them, snaking up through the tiers, and they had huge wooden shields with them this time, peaked things like the roof of a house and almost as wide as the road itself. Not many but he could see how they’d huddle under them, hidden from the Marroc arrows and stones and even from the fire, not that Valaric had much of the precious fish oil left. Boiling water and rocks then, the two things they had in abundance, and cloth from the morning’s dead, soaked in pitch and set alight. It would stick, and their wooden shields would burn.
The Lhosir turned the elbow of the road into the fourth tier. As the barrage from above began, the shields moved to the front of the column. The rest of the army stayed where it was and the shields came on like a giant armoured cockroach inching towards the gate, maybe enough to hide a hundred men if they were packed tight together.
‘Is there a ram under there?’ Valaric stood beside him. Gallow looked but there was no way to know. ‘If your Aulian wizard was here, he’d have thought of a way to turn that against them.’
And that might have been true, but Oribas was gone. Gallow picked up a stone and waited as the shield-roof came closer. It reached the gate stuck with arrows like a hedgehog but there wasn’t a single dead man left in its wake. He put the stone down. Wasted. Any minute now the ladders would come and—
‘What are they doing under there?’ There were no sounds, no battle cries, no axes striking the gates.
‘I’ve never heard of—’
‘The salt!’ hissed Valaric. ‘They’re clearing the salt. They’ve got another iron devil under there!’
Of course they were. Gallow turned away from the battlements and looked to the rope ladder that ran down from the gatehouse to the road below. If they were clearing the salt then there’d be an ironskin in the vanguard of the Lhosir. He’d face them, and Sarvic and his Crackmarsh men would face them too, and they might die or they might not. ‘Open the gates again, Valaric. The fight comes either way. We broke them once this way and we can break them again.’
‘Wait.’ Valaric put a hand on his shoulder. ‘It’s not too . . . Jonnic!’
A burly Marroc had climbed between the merlons. He had an axe in each hand and he grinned at Valaric with a mad gleam in his eye. ‘Tell my sister how I died, Mournful. Tell her I went well.’
‘Jonnic!’
The Marroc dropped. He landed on the first of the shield roofs and slid, and then slammed first one axe and then the other into the wood and caught himself, pulled himself up and sat astride the thing. ‘Throw me a rope, Mournful!’ At first Gallow had no idea what Jonnic meant to do. Valaric threw him the end of a rope and the Marroc tied it around one of his axes. The shield bucked and heaved beneath him but he sat fast, grinning like a madman and beckoning for more, and now Gallow understood and so did the Marroc. They tied axes to lengths of rope and threw them down, and Jonnic struck each axe into the wood as deep as it would go. A forkbeard slipped out from underneath and tried to grab him and a dozen arrows took him down. The back of the shield dropped almost to the ground and then tipped sideways as the forkbeards tried to roll him off, but Jonnic just held on to the axes and moved on to the next and the next until the shield was held fast in a dozen places. He gestured to the men on the gatehouse to lift it up.
Valaric threw another rope. ‘Get back here you stupid Marroc!’ Fat Jonnic shook his head and jumped down from the shield-roof and vanished beneath it, a knife in his hand. A shout went up from the Marroc as they heaved at the ropes and the shield lurched and shifted and then suddenly tore free of the Lhosir beneath and swung away. The forkbeards were like ants nested under a rock with their shelter pulled aside. They fell under the storm of stones and arrows, but not quickly enough for Jonnic, who fell, flailing in the midst of a handful of stabbing Lhosir as the second shield roof moved forward over him.
‘Drop it! Drop it on them!’ Valaric was seething, and Gallow half expected him to go over the edge as Jonnic had done. But he didn’t, and the Marroc pulling on their ropes let go and the first shield-roof crashed onto the front of the second and brought it down, scattering the Lhosir yet again. Yet amid the scrambling chaos Gallow glimpsed the rusted and broken remains of a Fateguard’s armour lying still and empty beside the gate.
‘We were too slow,’ he whispered.
Further down the road the forkbeards were moving again, the first hundred of them coming forward at a run. They had a ram. Quietly Gallow turned away and climbed down the ladder to the road. When the Lhosir smashed the rusted hinges down and were swarming over the stones then he’d be there to meet them again, with Sarvic and the Marroc of the Crackmarsh, sword for sword with nowhere else to go.
The flash blinded the forkbeards a second time. For a moment Oribas was free. He shouted what must be done to Mirrahj and saw her run. Then he scrambled to Achista and lifted her head, terrified by all the blood on her face, but she moaned when he shook her and so he held her tight and cradled her in his arms and by the time he could think again the Lhosir had hauled him up and pulled them apart. Oribas supposed they meant to kill him right there and then but they didn’t, and after a few moments the Lhosir King came away from the shaft and looked at Oribas. A smile pinched his lips. ‘I remember you. The Aulian wizard.’
Oribas dipped his head. ‘I would bow properly if your men did not hold me so tightly.’
‘After we met on the road I did tell them not to kill you if they found you. I said nothing more.’ Behind the smile there was strain in the Lhosir king’s face. He was in pain. He held up the iron hand he wore in place of the one Gallow had taken. ‘What have you done, Aulian?’
‘The creature my people entombed here left behind two pieces of itself when it escaped. I have encased them in salt. A common enough preservative.’
King Sixfingers pointed. ‘You. Go and see if he lies.’
A Lhosir crawled into the tunnel to the crypt and a few moments later crawled out again. ‘There’s one piece there. Covered in salt.’ He sounded bemused, as though wondering why anyone would do such a thing. Oribas smiled.
The king cocked his head. ‘And the other piece, Aulian? Where’s the other piece?’
They’d seen Mirrahj go and they were neither stupid nor deaf. Oribas bowed his head. ‘The Vathan women took it. If she does as I asked then she will take it to Gallow Foxbeard who will melt it down and forge it again in salt.’ He shrugged. ‘The Mother of Monsters will be weakened. Perhaps together we can defeat it.’ He looked about the tomb. ‘I had imagined it would still be here. That is why I came. To kill it. Tell me, King of the Lhosir, do you serve the monster, or does the monster serve you?’
Sixfingers laughed and a twitch of a smile lingered on his lips. ‘Come with me, Aulian wizard, and I’ll show you something.’ He turned away and addressed his men. ‘Keep them alive. Strip the woman of her weapons and the Aulian of everything but his clothes but don’t throw anything away.’ He took a step back and then stopped and gave Oribas a queer look. ‘I knew you’d come here, Aulian. But I was certain it would be Gallow who brought me the red sword. Then we might have talked some more about what you came here to do. Might even have been the three of us could have reached some accord.’
‘The Edge of Sorrows is not yours, King of the Lhosir.’
Sixfingers laughed again. ‘A Vathan? A woman? Alone in the valley? Shall we make a wager, Aulian, on how long it is before I have her?’
*
The ram smashed down the fifth gate as it had smashed the third and the fourth. Under the shelter of the gatehouse another iron devil spent itself turning the portcull
is to rust and the Lhosir poured through the ruins. Gallow met them as they climbed through the debris scattered across the road. Grim-faced Marroc with spears and shields locked together stood either side of him. They’d beaten Medrin’s Lhosir once today so they knew it could be done and the knowing fired their blood. When the soldier beside Gallow fell to an axe buried in his helm, another stepped up to take his place, and when he too fell, a spear stabbed through his foot, another came forward. Gallow and Sarvic held the Marroc line together and close to the rubble in the road, so close that the Lhosir had no space to make a wall of their own to face them. For every Marroc that fell, two Lhosir died.
Gallow’s legs ached, his shield arm had turned to lead, his shoulders ground like broken glass, yet the arm that held his spear lunged and slashed and stabbed with the same strength it ever had. He remembered how the red sword would sing to him when he held it, softly in his head and only he would hear. It sang of the end it brought to suffering and pain and woe, of the sweet nothingness of oblivion that was its gift. He had a dozen cuts and bruises: a slash on his arm from a Lhosir spear, a throbbing in his shoulder from being hit by the Marroc beside him jerking his shield, a twinge in his ankle where he’d trodden on a stone in the fighting and turned it, but they were holding. Barely, but they were.
And then the Lhosir in front of Gallow pulled suddenly back, and out of the stones strode the iron-skinned men – Fateguard, nine of them. For a moment Gallow thought the Marroc would hold, but then the Fateguard closed on the line and spear thrusts sparked off their iron skins, swords skittered aside, axes dented but didn’t slow them and they came as though they didn’t care. One grabbed a Marroc from the centre of the line by the arm, pulled him out and rammed a sword though his chin before throwing him over the edge of the road to the tier below.
‘Salt!’ Gallow dropped his shield and threw salt from the bag at his hip into a Fateguard’s face. It reeled, and he rammed the iron point of his spear through the slits of its mask. The metal split and the Fateguard fell. When Gallow looked down, he saw its face disintegrate before his eyes. There was no blood. ‘Salt!’ They had it – Sarvic and Gallow and dozens of others. Oribas had seen to that.
Two of the Fateguard turned on him. Around him the Marroc fought on but he felt the fear wash through them like a river in flood and then in a moment they were breaking, screaming at the men behind them to run, to flee back to the castle and safety of the sixth and last gate.
‘And what then?’ Gallow screamed at them. ‘What when they rot that one too and smash it down like all the rest?’ But the Marroc didn’t hear, or couldn’t, or chose not to, and now they were all running and five of the Fateguard were marching up the road, battering aside the missiles thrown at them from above. Three others had him pinned, cutting off his retreat, but they paused for a moment instead of killing him. They seemed to eye him with interest.
Suddenly a single screaming Marroc sprinted down the road, hurling fistfuls of salt into the faces of the Fateguard as he passed. He reached Gallow and two of the Fateguard lurched away, caught in clouds of the stuff, but the last stepped up and ran the Marroc through. The Fateguard and the Marroc stood together for a moment, and Gallow saw the Marroc’s face and knew he’d seen this man twice before, the drowning Marroc pulled out of the Isset in Andhun three years back, and then in Varyxhun when Angry Jonnic had meant to hang him.
The Fateguard threw the dead Marroc over the edge into the road below. Gallow turned back, stabbing his spear into the salt-blinded face of the ironskin in front of him. He drew out his axe and hacked the hand off the second and then its head, but now the Lhosir had returned. Shields locked together, they swallowed the Fateguard into their ranks as they came up the road at a slow run towards the sixth gate, the last before the castle of Varyxhun itself, and Gallow retreated before them. At the open gates of the castle with the Dragon’s Maw at their backs, Sarvic had managed to rally the Marroc at last.
‘Salt! For the love of Modris, who carries salt?’
The Lhosir stopped a dozen yards short. The last handful of Fateguard stepped forward again. Before the Marroc behind him could break and run a second time, Gallow stepped forward too. The ironskin in the middle took another step and saluted him. ‘Gallow Truesword.’ He took off his helm and his mask and crown. The face underneath was as sallow and as pale as Beyard’s had been.
‘Do I know you?’
‘You were meant to be one of us, Truesword. My brother the Screambreaker was meant to bring you to us. Fate gave him that time for that purpose.’
‘Your brother? Who are you?’ But the Screambreaker had had a brother – everyone knew that. It just wasn’t possible, for the Moontongue had been drowned at sea almost twenty years past.
‘You know my name, Foxbeard. All Lhosir know my name and spit upon the sound of it. I am Farri Moontongue, brother to Corvin Screambreaker, and I am dead.’ He levelled his sword at Gallow’s heart and came forward, and Gallow backed away because, even before someone had wrapped him in an iron skin, there was no man alive or dead except the Screambreaker himself who could beat Farri Moontongue, the thief of the Crimson Shield. Gallow caught the first blow on his shield but the Moontongue was already lunging again, and Gallow moved barely in time; and then the ironskin had an axe in his other hand, and it came so fast that Gallow hardly even saw it before it smashed into the mail over his ribs and knocked the breath out of him; and Moontongue’s sword was already flashing at his face, and Gallow lunged, not caring that he was about to die as long as he might take this abomination with him.
And at that moment, in the tomb beneath Witches’ Reach, Achista poured salt over the armour of the Eyes of Time, the first of the Fateguard. On the top of that same tower King Medrin dreamed that his iron hand burst into flames, while somewhere not far from there the Eyes of Time felt a pain that seared through all its creations, and on the road outside the gates to Varyxhun castle the last of the Fateguard staggered and clutched their heads and fell to their knees, and the thief of the Crimson Shield paused in the blow that would have killed Gallow but Gallow’s spear did not. He drove it through Farri Moontongue’s throat and twisted. There was no blood.
‘I did not mean for this, Gallow Truesword,’ said the creature that had once been a man, ‘when I did what I did.’
Gallow’s axe rose and fell, he bellowed and roared, the Marroc swarmed over the other writhing Fateguard with salt and iron and fire until the ironskins were done, and then it was the Marroc who charged, not the Lhosir, and the forkbeards who melted away, too stunned by what they’d seen to stand and fight.
31
THE EYES OF TIME
‘I will tell you a story, Aulian, and then perhaps you’ll tell one to me.’ The king of the Lhosir rode on his new horse and Oribas rode beside him, wrists tied to his saddle. Behind them some five hundred Lhosir fighters were marching up the Aulian Way to Varyxhun. ‘I don’t know how the Eyes of Time came to our land. Your people brought it here, whatever it is. They buried it in salt. It was meant to stay here for ever.’ He fixed Oribas with a look that bored into the Aulian. ‘I have to imagine they didn’t know how to destroy it, otherwise they would have done so, but then how is it that you do?’
Oribas met his eye. ‘I came here to do what I could, King Medrin of the Lhosir. I had thought the Mother of Monsters had made you its slave. I see now I was wrong. It is the other way around.’
‘No, Aulian, you still have that wrong. My mind is my own and always has been, though a fine battle we’ve had on that score, but the Eyes of Time serve a mortal?’ Medrin smiled up at the sky. ‘I think not.’ He chuckled to himself. ‘Aulian, I’ll kill you if I have to, I won’t pretend otherwise, but I’d prefer you alive. Maybe it lightens your thoughts to know that. You travelled with Gallow a while so I suppose he must have told you about the day he and Beyard and I entered the Temple of Fates?’ His six-fingered hand tapped the Crimson Shield. ‘All we wanted was to see it, not to steal it, but we were found and taken f
or thieves. I ran and left Beyard and Gallow behind. I don’t know what happened between them – something very noble, I suppose. Somehow Gallow escaped as well. I didn’t know him then, had barely even heard his name before that day, but Beyard was my friend and he was taken by the Fateguard, and I was a coward, too afraid to own up to my part in it. When I begged my father the king to save my friend, he told me I must do it myself. And he was right, and I should have gone to the temple and given myself to them. Both of us should, Gallow too, but neither of us did. No one else knew, of course. To this day no one else does. Beyard took our names with him to his pyre.’ He looked across at Oribas from the back of his horse. ‘Gallow was only there because his father was a smith. We needed helms that made us look like the Fateguard and someone who could climb the temple walls, and he could give us both.’
For a long time the Lhosir king stared into the distance, into the past. There was shame in his face, Oribas thought, and pain and regret and perhaps a little longing, and it took a while before he shook himself and came back. ‘After Beyard was gone I came across the sea to fight with the Screambreaker. I asked him for his help. I thought, after the Fateguard had stolen King Tane’s shield from him, he might harbour a grudge, but he only looked at me with scorn and shook his head. I fought beside him anyway, with the passion of a shamed man and in due course I found the punishment I was looking for.’ He patted his ribs. ‘It was a bad wound. I didn’t even see what did it. They say it was a spear, but whatever it was, it punched through my mail and ripped me open. The wound went bad. My flesh started to rot. If I’d been anyone else they would have let me die and burned me and that would have been the end, and if an honest man who knew the truth had spoken me out, they’d have said that I’d abandoned a friend to die and remorse drove me to follow him. The Maker-Devourer doesn’t take a man like that for his cauldron, Aulian. Deeds are what matter, not remorse.’