by Greg Curtis
His own family were there according to what he'd been told, and he'd hoped they might grant him some shelter. Blood counted after all. But he'd already seen Marcus' patrols out riding through the land, engaging in battle with Vesar's hounds, and he knew when he saw the ferocity of the battles that they had no more love for him than anyone else. He was a prize for both groups. The soldiers would have picked him up in a heartbeat if they'd spied him, and quite probably strung him up on the spot. He had no idea at all what his family might do to him even if he could get through to them in the city, but he doubted they'd protect him.
If he could get to his father on his own – perhaps. That had been his hope. His father was soft when it came to his children. He surely wouldn't have handed him over to the soldiers. But now that hope was gone. He couldn't get through.
The veiled soldiers guarded every road, even the small ones. They watched and patrolled the fields. They had sentries posted throughout the forests and the swamp. No one was getting past them.
Simon had remained free as long as he had only by being intimately acquainted with a number of smuggler's dens. It had been a part of his life back when he had first been starting out in business. When he had first bought and sold his illicit wares in person. Before he had set up his own markets.
So he knew most of the abandoned mines, hidden caverns, secret camps and ruins that were being used by the various gangs, and he sought them out.
But smuggler's dens weren't safe for him either. Many people there knew him from the black markets he ran, and every single one of them would cheerfully have handed him over to the veiled guards for the reward. There was no loyalty among them. So he had had to use the ones that had been emptied out. But even when a den was old and long since abandoned, he could not stay for more than a handful of hours. The hounds would track him to them and he had to secure the front entrances and escape though the hidden back passages they all had. It was just lucky he knew them.
What wasn't so lucky was the fact that he was running out of them. One by one as he was tracked to them the dens were being destroyed. The veiled soldiers would arrive and not long after he was gone he would hear the sounds of destruction. Terrible destruction. He knew that they were making sure he could never return to those dens.
Occasionally he'd risked covering himself in mud to darken his hair and hide his face, and then crawled inside a den that was still occupied. Dressed as he was in rags and covered in filth no one had recognised him. Presumably they had assumed that he was another thief hiding from the soldiers. But he hadn't stayed there either. Only long enough to eat because he was starving, and then travel on. But after he'd left he'd heard the sounds of battle behind him. And he knew that the thieves and smugglers hadn't won. Not when he heard the sounds of rocks exploding behind him and knew that those armoured wind monsters were also on his tail. Apparently Vesar hadn't lied when he'd said he could build him an army after all. He could and he had. It just wasn't Simon's army.
After eight days on the run, wearing stolen farmers clothes and coated in dirt, being cold, tired and hungry, Simon was running out of places to hide. And as he watched the patrol setting up their checkpoint in exactly the worst place he could have wanted, he knew that his time was running out.
Soon, in a few more days, a week maybe, they would have him. Then Vesar would have him, and he could already feel the pain as his former advisor leapt on him and tore his throat out with his teeth.
But not yet. Simon promised himself that as he started crawling away through the scrub. Vesar wouldn't have him just yet. He would deprive that treacherous monstrosity of his prize for as long as possible. Even if he had to crawl on his hands and knees through the entire realm he would make that creature wait until the very last.
Then his foot snagged on a branch, the bush shook a little, and his heart almost stopped beating. Had they heard? Simon didn't know. He couldn't see the soldiers while he was on his hands and knees in the long grass and scrub. And to see them he'd have to raise his head. He didn't want to do that. If nothing else it would mean that they might see him.
So instead he lay there very quietly and listened, trying to work out if anyone was heading his way from the sounds of their foot falls. And praying desperately to the Seven that they weren't. He didn't really believe in the gods. But even if he had he knew that they wouldn't help him. Not after he'd helped destroy their temples. But they were still all he had to pray to.
The seconds dragged by like hours as he lay there, hearing nothing. He saw no one approaching either. Eventually he started breathing again. He was safe. For a little while more. But as he turned around and started crawling around the bush he'd snagged his foot on, heading for the safety of thicker bush, he knew he'd barely avoided capture. And he knew as he heard the sound of Vesar's soldiers yelling at one another about wind directions and not wanting to be caught in the fire, that the next time it would be even closer.
He couldn't afford that. He couldn't get much closer to being caught without actually being caught.
Which meant he had only one chance left.
Suddenly it was beginning to look as though he would have to fall back on his original desperate plan to go to the one place they couldn't follow. He would have to go to Breakwater, try to get through the spell and then convince his little brother to take him in. It was his only remaining chance. And it was only a chance assuming that Vesar's new soldiers couldn't get through the spell and that he could. Naturally there was no guarantee of that. Because that was one thing that Vesar had promised him. That his new army would be able to pass through the magical wards that kept his brother safe. He could have been lying. But it could also be that the fort had fallen and Edouard was already dead.
Simon hoped not. Because that would leave him without any refuge at all.
But even if it still held, Edouard's fort had always been a place of last resort. And it would not be easy to reach.
First he would have get there, and he didn't fancy crawling however many leagues there were between here and there. And all through countryside infested with Vesar's inhuman soldiers. Especially when they had to know it would be the one place he would try to go to. But he was going to have to walk just as far anyway even if he didn't head for Breakwater. Then he'd have to find a way past any number of other blockades, all of them filled with soldiers that could smell him.
Then, when he finally reached Breakwater and passed through the spell if he could he would somehow have to persuade Edouard to let him in. And his brother would likely be angry. Angry enough to not let him in. Persuading him to his cause would not be easy. Edouard was sometimes difficult. After having been whipped and thrown in the dungeon, he would be more so.
But Simon did have some strong arguments in his favour he thought. Things he could use on his weak minded little brother. He hadn't killed Edouard when he could have. That had to count for something and he could tell him that Vesar had demanded his execution. But he had spared him because he was family. The simple minded fool would fall for it as he always had. Edouard had always wanted to find the best in people, and especially his family. He took after their father in that. Marcus was far more cynical.
He also had information about Vesar and the rest of the veiled guards that would be invaluable to those fighting them, and the one thing he was certain of was that Edouard would be in the battle against Vesar with the others if he could be. In that regard he was every bit as stupid as Marcus. Reckless and unable to see that a battlefield was never the place a smart man should be.
And then there was the fact that Simon also knew the secret ways in and out of the castle and the city. Also valuable information.
But in the end one thing would count in his favour above all else. He was family. While that meant little to him, to Edouard and the others it was everything. That he knew would have to be his final argument. If all else failed. And this time he knew it might.
Simon only wished he had another choice as he finally crawled the la
st of the way back into the thick bush.
Chapter Thirty Seven
“Lord Edouard!”
One of the women yelled down to Edouard while he was busy in his workshop, and his immediate reaction was to tell her to stop annoying him. He was busy. But then he realised she was yelling out of fear, not calling him to lunch. It was hard to make out a lot about a voice from upstairs when the sound had to weave its way through several passageways, then shelves full of equipment and over the noise of the steam engine polishing the musket balls to reach him. He didn't even know who had called. But he understood the sound of fear.
“Coming.”
Edouard got up and hurried to the stairs, weaving his way through the benches of equipment and free standing shelves filled with books and more technological bits and pieces, and finally reached the bottom of the stairs. When he got there he found Mara at the top landing, looking worried.
“Mara?”
“There's something coming.” Her words didn't tell him a lot but they said enough. Someone had made it through the ward Kyriel had placed and now they were in danger. His only hope was that it was only one person and not the entire army waiting below. But surely she would have said if it was the army. And as he suddenly realised she had said something, not someone. What did that mean?
Edouard rushed up the stairs, grabbed the musket he had left by the door and rushed outside, heading for the ramparts. Then he took the stairs leading up to them three at a time, frightened of what he might find. When he reached them though and stared out at the approaching thing, he was even more confused.
He had no idea what he was staring at. A suit of armour, or at least a lot of the body plates of a suit of armour were standing perhaps a hundred yards from the wall, not connected to one another but still somehow acting as if they were. Moving as if there was a giant man inside them, walking. But there was no man. What there was was a wind storm. A tiny little twister, or maybe several little twisters linked together in a rough man shape, covered by steel armour. He could see them from the dust they had gathered up in their spinning fury.
“What is it?”
Janus was there on the wall beside him, asking the stupid question. The entire house was there on the ramparts, probably wanting to ask the same stupid question. Sadly Edouard had not a clue as to what the thing was. But he knew exactly where it had to go. Away.
“Ascorlexia spoke of the rock gnomes' infernal devices,” Kyriel answered the healer.
She was surely guessing. But for all Edouard knew, she might be right. Actually she probably was, even if it explained nothing. Still, what it was was less important to him than what it was doing. And that seemed to be nothing. For some reason it was standing there, as if it actually had legs, spinning slowly on the spot like a drunken dancer. And while it stood there, it made an excellent target.
“Load the cannon.”
Immediately he said it several people rushed to do as he asked, while others asked him if that was wise. The truth was that he didn't really know. But he could guess that the reason it was standing there, slowly spinning, was that it was searching for them. Hunting. It had made it part way through Kyriel's ward, but not all of the way. But that didn't mean it wouldn't sooner or later find its way through the last of it. And when it did he was sure that the giant, whatever it was, would prove deadly. It was best that that didn't happen.
“Loaded.”
Sir Reginald was suddenly standing by the cannon, ram in hand and for the first time Edouard was glad of his presence. He was a ladies man as all the gossip had said, and he seemed to spend a lot of his days either preening himself or pursuing the handmaidens. The Seven only knew what the handmaidens thought of his advances. Maybe they considered him a defiler like his brother Marcus. But for all that he seemed to know his way around a cannon, and just then that was all that mattered.
“Aim.”
Even as he said it Edouard rushed over to help with the aiming. These were very old style cannon. They didn't have wheels and they didn't turn easily. Instead they stood on crude wooden stands which only allowed a limited range of movement up and down and sideways, and that had to be done by levering them around with long poles. There was a reason they had been left behind when the fort had been abandoned. And he still hadn't finished crafting the new stands for them. There was simply so much else that he needed to do. Still, with three of them working together it was a task quickly done and soon the cannon was lined up.
“Everyone over to the other side.”
Edouard gave the command even as he ran for the other side of the wall with them. It was necessary. The cannon hadn't been fired in at least two hundred years. He had no idea if it would even work. It could just blow up in their faces. And he didn't want to be anywhere nearby if that happened. And thanks to his gift he didn't have to be.
A few seconds later they were all standing at least forty feet away from the cannon, and he drew his flame to him. Then he let it loose, a tiny little fireball that touched the fuse on the cannon.
The underworld screamed its fury a moment later in response. The entire fort shook, there was smoke and fire, and a blast of something hot and furious leapt screaming from the cannon's snout to smash into the thing.
A direct hit! Edouard wanted to jump in the air and scream for joy as he saw the creature smashed apart in front of them. If his knees could stop shaking. But then he realised the thing wasn't down. It was damaged for certain. Many of the steel plates that formed its body were hanging off it at strange angles. Some had been torn completely free and were scattered far and wide over the road behind it. And it was spinning in a strange unbalanced way, almost like a drunk barely able to stand. But even a direct hit from a cannon hadn’t destroyed it.
Fergis took the opportunity to launch a small fireball at it, but he like Edouard was only a spark. His magic smashed into the thing with a satisfactory noise and a burst of flame, but soon faded leaving the steel colossus undamaged. Edouard had expected that, and for Fergis to try again as he did a few moments later. But in the end there was only one way to kill the thing.
“That cannon – double load!”
Edouard pointed to the cannon on the other corner of the wall. It was a risk of course, and everyone knew it. But apparently the thing was not going to die easily. Neither was it intelligent enough to run or take cover. So they quickly rammed two measures of gunpowder into the cannon, two loads of shot and some wadding, lined up the shot and then ran back to the other side of the ramparts before he sent another tiny fireball its way.
This time when the cannon spoke, it roared so loudly that Edouard thought his ears had shattered. And the blast of smoke and fire that leapt from the cannon's snout was a good fifty feet at least. But none of that mattered. The cannon hadn't exploded and the aim was good. So he like the others waited impatiently for the smoke to clear. And when it did clear, it showed him a sight he very much wanted to see.
This time the creature was down. Not dead – he wasn't sure anything could actually kill it, or that it had even been alive – but little of it remained. Just a couple of legs held up by whatever strange magic wind storm it was built of. And they wouldn't last long. He knew that as he watched the legs trying to twist around and failing. Without a body they simply couldn't lift off the ground and so they ended up doing some sort of drunken shuffle.
Then a plate fell off the back of one of the legs, and immediately after that the rest of the leg fell apart, leaving only the other leg standing. A leg that couldn't seem to move at all. It just stood there, completely helpless. As he stood there staring at it, wondering if they should load the cannon for one more shot, Edouard understood a little more of the creature.
It was some sort of wind demon, summoned somehow and then contained within a suit of armour. But the armour wasn't there to protect it. The creature was far beyond needing any protection. The armour was part of a containment enchantment, there to hold it together. Once they shattered the armour the enchantment failed
. And when it failed the wind dissipated. What was left of it was only standing there because there was still a back plate and a front plate to the leg.
It was then that Edouard remembered the musket he'd left by the wall, and he quickly picked it up and sighted his target. The gap between one plate and the other. A moment later the lead ball smashed into the inside of the back plate, knocking it away from the front one, and the twisting wind between them dissipated. It was then that the front plate fell down and he knew that the creature had been destroyed.
The battle was over.
People started cheering then, and he almost felt like joining in. Almost but not quite. Not when he realised that the creature had been sent after them. That it was surely more dangerous than anything they'd ever seen, and that only Kyriel's ward had protected them. But for that it would have been on them, and he doubted the walls would have been any protection at all. More important than that however, was the understanding that this thing had likely not been alone. If you could build one of them then you could build many. And wherever the others had been sent he doubted they would be so fortunate as to have Kyriel's wards in place.