Callotec’s own third of the attack would move first, Yulan assumed. That would be what the two bands out on either side were waiting to see. So it was, eventually. The ranks of Armsmen and Clade warriors closed up, and came marching forward in decent order.
The other two, lacking the training, would move more slowly and clumsily, he imagined. And so that was too. They were coming at the village across fields, with only the most meagre of footpaths to follow. Irrigation channels to jump or splash across. Well and good. He trusted to Rudran to shield his left flank. The men coming from the orchard upon his right would not be the ones that killed him, killed the Free and Towers’ Shadow. It was those Armsmen coming right down the main track who would do that. They were the piece upon which this game turned.
Yulan stood on a handcart abandoned by one of the cottages to get a better sight of them. Sixty, he reckoned.
He whistled three times. The signal for arrows to the front. Hamdan’s hidden bows obliged him. They were too few to do more than thin the first rank or two, but they did that well. Men stumbled. Dropped to their knees. Those around them kept coming, with hardly a break in their strides. They began to trot.
Yulan darted across the roadway to join Drann and the villagers at the barn. He knelt amongst them. So few, he thought. All he had, therefore it had to be enough.
“Won’t be long now.” He smiled at them. “We’ll give these Hommetic bastards a sharp surprise and send them off with a kick twixt the legs.”
It raised a few smiles in response, but they were false. Much too shallowly rooted to convince. He had not had the time to prepare these people for what was coming, to stir their hearts or sow the seeds of self-belief. They were fragile as frost jewels.
“You want to pat my head for luck?” he asked them.
They stared at him.
“Always works, doesn’t it, Drann?” He grinned and ducked his head to show them all his smooth scalp. He slapped it himself, making the noise loud. “Smooth as a maiden’s cheek.”
“It does work,” he heard Drann saying, and was grateful for it, since the youth had looked no happier than the rest of them a moment ago.
Drann gave his scalp a couple of quick pats. That was enough to crack the dam. The villagers shuffled and jostled to get close enough. Rained down slaps and taps on Yulan’s head.
“Right, then,” he said when they were done. “You’re luck-heavy now, for sure. There’s going to be fire, and when those folk out there pluck up the courage to step through it, me and Drann are going to make them wish they hadn’t. You boys are coming along, and if any one of you gets to them before I do, I’ll let you keep this bald head of mine for a trophy to hang on your wall. You won’t, though. I’m the fastest runner you ever saw.”
He heard Rudran going. Hoofbeats sweeping around, out of sight behind the buildings. He could see it easily enough in his imagination. The maces waving, the horses reaching. Bounding over ditches, scything through the grain. The spears sprouting to meet them. He put it out of his mind. He could change nothing about any of that. Only what was before him, within his reach.
The first of the Armsmen were almost at the outer ditch. Almost into the village. Yulan could see Callotec riding at the back of them. The man was no coward. No fool either, sadly, as he held a tall shield high to guard his face and body. Two arrows were already standing in it.
Yulan whistled twice. Waited. Watched the trot become a charge. Watched those sixty fell warriors come running towards him.
Flaming rags, knotted about stones, came out from between the cottages. Every one of Hamdan’s bow boys had a better throwing arm than did Yulan, and not one of them missed. The pennants of flame dipped down and disappeared into the pits where dead men and horses still lay. Nothing happened.
Yulan held his breath. You could never be sure how this sort of thing was going to work. How long it would take. The first few swordsmen were rounding the pits, Yulan already surging to his feet, when the flames took. The oil took. Fire licked and then surged up from the trenches. Thick black smoke vomited forth. Pitch and firewater and flesh caught light.
Yulan screamed wordlessly and raced for the nearest of his enemies. Those following him – he was glad to hear their feet there – took up the howl, as he had hoped. The stinking smoke made his eyes blur even as he ran. What breeze there was should carry it away from the village, but the heat was so intense it churned the air and sent curls of acrid, stench-laden smoke rolling in all directions. He did not need to see clearly to do what he did.
He spun and slashed, lunged one way and then another. Cut a man across the face, hamstrung a second. He gave himself up to this dance he knew so well and let it possess him and carry him. He was the still and unthinking observer of the carnage his body wrought upon his foes.
Searing heat washed over him, and coils of black vapour swept down towards his face, so he swung about to judge the fate of those who had come after him. He found Drann close behind him, his spear stuck in the belly of an Armsmen who refused to fall, who was lashing out with a sword that cut the air no more than an inch from Drann’s face. Yulan stepped up and hacked his own blade into the back of the Armsman’s neck.
The villagers were falling back, not out of fear but to escape the foul stench of burning meat and the blinding smoke. They had overrun a couple of Callotec’s men, leaving their pierced and ragged bodies in their wake as they retreated. Leaving one or two of their own as well. Drann was still struggling to free his spear from the fallen man’s stomach. Yulan stood on the corpse to hold it down and snarled: “Pull harder.”
Drann staggered backwards as his spear sprang out from the grip of dead flesh. He drew his sleeve across his eyes to wipe away the tears the needling smoke had called forth. He gagged as bile surged in his throat, not knowing whether it was summoned by the stink of burning flesh or the act of killing a man.
That thought was snatched away, for as his eyes cleared he beheld the smoke coming for him. Not as a formless cloud, but a huge bunched fist. It hit him square in the chest and knocked him from his feet. He flew backwards, arms and legs flailing, and landed hard. Yulan ducked under the sweeping black limb and ran to him, hauled him to his feet.
“It’s a Clever,” he hissed. “They’ve still got a Clever.”
Together they backed away from the wall of smoke that was no longer rising but swelling and sinking, flinging out thick tendrils that swept back and forth like blind snakes seeking prey. One found the last two laggards from amongst the villagers, slower than their fellows to fall back. It toppled them and writhed around and pounded down on one of them, crushing him to the ground.
Drann staggered forward, still fighting for breath, and seized one of the man’s arms that extended from under the black cloud. He pulled, but could not move him. Yulan dragged him away.
“Leave him. He’s dead. Can’t fight this.”
And then, suddenly, they did not need to fight it. Every semblance of form and solidity to the great mass of smoke fell away as if it had never been there. It dissipated. Became once more nothing but the product of the fires, streaming up and drifting.
“Stand still,” Yulan was shouting to the villagers. “Keep together and stand firm. You live if you keep together.”
Dazed, feeling as if his mind was drifting somewhere close to but no longer within his body, Drann went to stand with them. He could think of nowhere else to go but amongst them. Nothing else to do but hold his spear ready. Yulan stood beside them. He did not seem to be breathing hard. Drann was gasping. The smoke was scratching and burning in his chest.
The first ferocity of the fires set in the pits was dwindling as the oil burned away. The corpses still threw up a few gouts of flame, but that initial conflagration was spent. The Armsmen came through the smoke again.
“Charge them!’ cried Yulan, and rushed forward.
Drann went with him. Some of the villagers did too. Not all, Drann was dimly aware, but he could not look back. He ran at a swordsman, mi
ssed the mark and watched the point of his spear go wide. The sword came sweeping down towards his shoulder. Yulan’s shield caught it before it could strike home. He bore Drann’s assailant backwards, through a sweeping veil of smoke and out of sight.
Drann made to follow, but he stumbled on a fallen helmet, his ankle turning painfully. He almost fell. Suddenly there was another of Callotec’s warriors rushing down on him, this one bare-headed, smoke-blackened, wielding a cudgel. Drann lurched out of the way and tried to fend off a blow from that wicked club with his spear. It was knocked from his hands, stinging his palms. He grappled with the man, fumbling for a hold on his weapon arm, and to dig at his eyes.
The two of them tumbled down. Drann managed to get a knee across the man’s arm, another on to his throat. But he could already tell he was not strong enough to make this work. A hand seized the front of his jerkin and he knew he would be thrown away in mere moments. He glimpsed the rolling helmet, still loose on the ground. He snatched it up and hammered it, over and over, into the face of his opponent.
One of the villagers pulled him off the limp form – dead or unconscious Drann did not know – and pressed his spear back into his hands. They plunged together through smoke and flame, to emerge on to the path where it crossed the village’s ditch. And there they found Callotec’s men streaming away, Rudran and four of his lancers plunging back and forth through the last of them, laying all around them with their maces.
Yulan was standing in the centre of the track. Three dead men lay before him. Villagers were on either side of him, coughing and retching. One was cheering.
“Rudran!’ Yulan shouted. “Rudran! Break off!”
The lancers must have heard, even through the din of their pursuit, for they came galloping back at once. Rudran was leaning low and lopsided, pressing one arm in against his side. Drann sat heavily down.
“Get your wound tended,” Yulan said to Rudran. “Is this all of you?”
The huge man only nodded, and rode slowly past the guttering fires, through the smoke and into the village.
“Anyone seen Hamdan?” Yulan asked, looking this way and that.
He sounded calm, but Drann thought there might be a flicker of fear there, not far beneath the surface.
The archer came striding, sodden, up out of the fields. He was covered from crown to toe in mud and flecks of grass and leaves. He was grinning.
“Told me to hunt Clevers, didn’t you? Was never going to be able to do that except out there.”
“I’m guessing it was a good hunt,” said Yulan.
“I’d say so. Everybody was so busy trying to kill you, I got close enough to that wagon out there to try a long shot. Lucky I was there. Saw someone sitting under that tree who looked a lot like he might be playing some games with an entelech. Couldn’t really tell what was happening, since I was breast deep in a ditch at the time, but was it the smoke?”
“It was,” grunted Yulan, putting an arm round Hamdan’s shoulder. “Might have undone us, if it hadn’t stopped as soon as it started.”
“That’d be because I put an arrow in his eye.”
Yulan gave a little laugh, and one or two of the villagers took it up.
“Back to shelter,” Yulan said, and shepherded them all towards the houses.
Drann glanced into one of the fire pits as he passed. He could hardly tell what had been in there now. It was just a mass of charcoaled flesh, all crisped together.
“What happened out on the flanks?” Yulan was asking Hamdan. “You see any of that?”
“Not much. Saw Rudran turn up to lend you a hand, so I’m guessing they won their little discussion. The other lot, out by the orchard, just turned about and ran back for the wagon once I shot a couple of them and they saw the fire. No stomach for it.”
Drann could understand that. He would never think ill of anyone who fled in the face of this, he thought. Not all the stories in the world could hide its cruel misery. He took that misery and folded it away, buried it deep inside. Not to be forgotten, he resolved.
They were granted the boon of some small time to bathe wounds, and take food. Count their dead. Four of Rudran’s horsemen had fallen to the spears of their foes before they managed to drive them off. Rudran himself had taken a sore wound on his hip. Drann thought he glimpsed bone there, before Hamdan pressed a bandage in place.
Lebid had an arrow in him. Right through the meat of his forearm. He made no sound when Hamdan broke both ends of it away and pulled the stub clean through and out, but sweat beaded across his brow. There were only ten of the village men still willing to fight. The rest were either dead or had slipped away, disliking this taste of what it meant to be the Free.
The sadness was that there was fighting still to do. Looking out over the fields, Drann could see close to a hundred men massing around the lone tree, and the wagon beside it. What he had thought a great victory, as he watched those same men tumbling back from the village, flying for their lives, had been but a staying of the execution. Many of the Hommetics had been killed. Others had flown. Too many remained, he feared. Far too many.
Then Hamdan was laughing behind him. Whooping, bizarrely. Drann made to turn about and see what was happening, but then he understood, and could have whooped himself.
Up on the ridge beyond Callotec’s band, a familiar shape was breaching the crest. A wagon with a heavy cargo, hauled by an animal too broad and stout to be a horse. There were riders coming up alongside it. Shouts of alarm and command told them that Callotec and his men had seen these new arrivals too. There was sudden movement, shifting and turning to face both village and ridge.
Up there, two or three of the riders had dismounted. They were busying themselves about the wagon. Loosening and pulling back canvas sheeting, Drann knew. Opening a cage.
35
Witness
The Clamour came down from the hill like a bounding, leaping boulder. Or some knotted thundercloud fallen from the sky. It was too far away for Drann to make it out clearly, but it put him in mind of a vast, grotesque naked ape rushing down on foot and knuckle. And he heard it. Heard its rising, keening call as it came.
A sound unlike anything he had ever known before. Not one sound, but many all woven together like rope. A thick, piercing wail of anger and hunger. It was a dagger, a physical pain knifing deep into Drann’s skull. He clapped his hands over his ears, pressed them flat. It made hardly any difference. The cry came through his flesh and bone.
Callotec’s men did just as Drann would have done, had he been out there on the flat ground with them. They scattered. In all directions, in disorder. They fled as fast as their legs would work, and it was not fast enough, for the Clamour was lightning as well as thunder. Bursting down upon them and amongst them.
Drann saw bodies flung high into the air, spinning with arms and legs splayed. He saw huge sweeps of those monstrous arms cast aside two, three men at a time. He saw a horse beaten down, first on to its haunches and then to the ground, by a flurry of terrible blows. Then raised up and flung, to break against the side of the wagon.
The Clamour surged this way and that, relentless. Insatiable. A storm had come for those hundred men, and it consumed them. Some tried to fight it. Drann saw men who knew there was no escaping the horror at their backs turn to face it and attack it with blades, wound it with arrows. They went down, all of them. Torn apart. Flung away. Crushed.
The Free gathered, at the edge of the village, and bore witness to this. The Clamour was theirs, after all. One of them, in its awful way. Standing there, Drann realised that this was what he had fought alongside them to bring about. This was what the villagers who had helped them had, without knowing it, died to bring about. This wild slaughter.
The Clamour caught up the wagon, raised it. The horse still harnessed to it was lifted off the ground. It twisted and writhed, to no avail. Horse and wagon alike were beaten against the ground, again and again, until the first was still, the second shattered into a thousand thousand splinters.<
br />
“The Bereaved,” Drann wondered. “Shouldn’t we…?”
“Nothing we can do,” Yulan said beside him. Loud, to cut through the Clamour’s howl. “We go out there, we die at the Clamour’s hands just like all the rest.”
“Can’t Hestin…?”
“She cannot control it. She’s surrendered that, released it to its natural state. This is the Clamour as it is. That’s the peril, always: we can never know, she can never know, whether she can take hold of it again and subdue it. Each time it becomes harder. One day, it’ll run free and rage on, doing this and only this wherever it goes. That’s what she’s protected the world against, these last few years. That’s what I make her risk, when I ask her to set it loose.”
And by the time that had been spoken, the killing was all but done. There were men running still, back down the road and up the surrounding slopes. A few of them. The Clamour ranged to and fro, hunting them. Wailing.
One group held together. A single rider, with eight or nine Armsmen running alongside him. Surrounding him. Making for the escarpment and the road that climbed it.
“Callotec,” said Yulan. “Archers!”
Drann watched them gallop out to intercept that last desperate attempt at escape. He kept glancing nervously back to the still raging Clamour. That was why he saw Akrana, and the four lancers who had stayed with her, coming cautiously down from the ridge. He could just make out other figures hunched behind two of the riders. Hestin and Kerig.
He looked back towards Yulan and the others. Saw Hamdan and the archers, darting out unerringly accurate arrows as they rode, fell one, two, three of Callotec’s escorting guards. And Callotec’s own horse, in the end. They feathered its neck with arrows, until it stumbled and collapsed and threw the last heir to the Hommetic throne to the ground.
“It’s coming,” Lebid said.
The Free Page 31