by Janny Wurts
The culverin,’ muttered Parrien, and trailed off with a guttural curse.
A furtive scrape, a muffled sneeze, and a muted jink of metal betrayed the forecast’s astuteness: the intruder was one shelf over, and moving fast in the opposite direction from the doorway. Mearn’s lunge to flank his progress down the aisle immediately fouled in a crash, as meshed crossbows dropped minutes earlier to foil soldiers mired his ankles in turn.
‘Entanglements, snares, and misfortune,’ the spy chided in unabashed hilarity; well aware the phrase was borrowed from a ribald ballad about an adulterer’s mistimed assignation, Bransian aligned his gaze to match the sound. A whoosh combed through the air above, knitted through by a soprano clink of curb chain. Caught flat-footed and staring upward, the duke was clobbered by a snaking mess of harness. Half-throttled by the drag of the horsecollar, laced head to foot in oiled strap-goods, he ripped out his dagger and began in frantic bursts to dice leather.
Having clattered through the last of the crossbows, his woodcutter’s hatchet cocked to slash, Mearn poised in the darkness, listening. The armoury threw back a sullen stew of echoes. Bransian’s quick and murderous breaths timed to the chink of dropped buckles, offset by Keldmar’s exhortations to Tharrick’s soldiers, engaged in grumbling effort to regroup and string longbows, to refrains of smacked shins and stubbed toes.
A finger of breeze brushed Mearn’s skin. Then his ears caught a telltale creak of wood. A whispered brush of cloth chafed over metal; the spy had alighted from the shelving but a half-pace away from his position.
Mearn dropped his arms in a powerful down-swing. The torches burst back to a dazzle of full flame, and a lithe, compact body folded to one knee under the descent of the hatchet. Black-haired, green-eyed, and merrily sardonic, the spy met the stroke, a sword upraised in each hand. Steel screamed as the hatchet sheared and grabbed on crossed blades braced to guard.
‘Bad luck,’ said the spy on a grunt as the shock knocked him breathless. He let go of his weapons.
Mearn’s backstep, and his jerk to clear the helve from his opponent’s entangling parry met no resistance.
The hooked blades obliged and flew airborne. Inherent fine balance lent their trajectory vengeful life as they arced toward shocked and widened grey eyes and a mouth etched with grim determination. Mearn jumped, cat-quick in avoidance, while his quarry tucked, rolled, and disappeared through the space beneath the shelf. Mearn’s thrown weapon hissed a half-beat behind, nailed wood, and bit off an appalling gouge.
Still meshed in looped harness, Bransian lost patience and charged. Helmets pealed, thrashed back to belling life as his progress raked the scattered debris in a snaking wrack of traces and hames. Bit-rings and buckles snagged on bowstocks and flanges, and the racket drowned all hope of tracking.
‘Dharkaron’s Black Spear!’ Parrien screeched. ‘Will you shut those things up?’ Irate enough to abandon his post by the tunnel, he rolled onto his toes, then stopped his rush as the armoury went dark a second time.
Bransian ground to a halt amid a petulant chime of dragged steel. Captain Tharrick and Keldmar had used the brief respite to regroup the soldiers. The intermittent rattle of strayed slingshot betrayed their closing move to quarter the one aisle left untrammelled.
While over the stealthy brush of footsteps, the muted grate of weapons and mail, a soft voice pattered in monologue: ‘Halberds, four score, admirably polished. Daggers for swordplay, eight dozen, boxed. Longswords, less quillons and pommels, two chests’ worth.’
‘By Ath, he’s taking an inventory!’ cried Keldmar in hoarse incredulity.
‘Very good,’ the spy remarked. ‘Only a lunatic would come here to count your nice sharp swords for his health.’ A distinctive, ratcheting clank issued from the bowels of the dark.
Always quickest with details, Mearn remarked, That’s the large arbalest he’s cocking!’
Keldmar yelled orders, and Captain Tharrick’s men deployed in a two-pronged assault intended to sweep the third corridor. Running feet slapped stone, punctuated by the ping of a trigger latch, a creak of laminated wood, and a whine of taut-strung wire.
‘“Peppermint, rosemary, thyme, and mace”,’ the spy chanted. ‘ “Beware evil weeds that grow apace”! His weapon clicked and discharged.
The bolt hissed through the darkness and struck, its target a packed store of breastplates. Their shelf disgorged them in thunderous, skull-splitting noise. The three leading soldiers were scythed down outright, while plate armour spun and clattered on to unmercifully whack heads and batter elbows. The disarrayed ranks carried forward undaunted. The arbalest ripped out a second shot. Stacks of targes swayed and upended; their leather covered frames were spiked and studded with bronze, a punishing hindrance as they rolled every which way, and pared the soldiers’ ranks even further. Survivors dispatched to complete the advance tripped a pace later and crashed flat. The spy, while he counted, had strategically jammed halberd poles in the bracing. Spurred on by white fury and Keldmar’s imprecations, the soldiers scrambled upright, charged three steps, and blundered through a musty string of signal flags. Mould dust billowed up. The assailants staggered on, folded in virulent sneezes, while the spy clambered up a pike rack and slung himself sideways into the farthest tier of shelving.
Bolstered by Bransian and Mearn, his pursuers recovered their impetus and converged like a wolf pack down the aisles on either side. The frustration scalded, that sixteen men could be quartering the finest collection of weaponry in East Halla, and still find no target to skewer.
‘“Cailcallow tea, for easing the cough”,’ the spy resumed in mad recitation. ‘“Groundsel and willow, for fever”!
A flurried agitation in darkness, the soldiers manoeuvred to flank his lofty perch.
The recipes for herb potions and tisanes suffered a jagged break in metre. ‘For threats, we’ll just have to improvise.’ Unseen hands heaved something. A hamper of buckles upset; then a cask of tempered steel broadheads hissed down and burst, followed fast by two crates of crossbow bolts. Men swore and leaped and pussyfooted through another jangling impediment, while their luckless lieutenant howled and fell to his knees to find an arrowhead jammed through his sole. His wounding was unlikely to be received as an accident.
Dakar alone guessed differently as a coffer of loose rivets showered earthward: Arithon seeded the floor with anything at hand to contrive noise. Master of Shadow he might be; but with his mage-sight blinded, the dark of his own making must slow him. He strove to compensate through his masterbard’s ear, to wrest every nuance he could wring out of sound and to map the proximity of his enemies.
Dakar’s thwarted spite allowed no admiration, that despite an unpardonable betrayal and a rude disadvantage in numbers, the Prince of Rathain seemed determined to finish the review asked by the Fellowship sorcerers.
‘Spears, maces, morningstars.’ A heavy something plummeted and struck off a burst of red sparks. The soldier poised halfway up the shelving grunted and dropped, a fist-sized dent in his helm. His demise ripped down two companions while darkness flowed back, and Keldmar, poised like an owl on a bracing, flexed his knife-wielding forearm and stabbed.
His blade met a belling parry. His next stroke gutted a field hammock. He lunged again, nicked flesh that bled, and snatched. His knuckles barked into a tossed sack of flints. ‘Curse you! Your accent’s not townbred. Who sent you?’
A rattle of seasoned yew issued from the blackness in reply.
‘He’s into the new stock for longbows!’ Keldmar shouted. ‘Close in from the west. We’ll have him boxed against the stairs.’ A stealthy touch at his shoulder made him flinch and curse: his younger brother had joined him on the scaffolding.
‘Better kill before you ask questions,’ Mearn advised. ‘Another blunder, and Parrien’s sure to lose his reason and abandon his guard by the passages.’
Keldmar gave a noncommittal grunt. The boards beneath his knees began to shake; Captain Tharrick had set more men to climbing.
Keldmar peered outward, knife cocked above his head. A sour reek of leather flared his nostrils, then a piquant bouquet, chokingly laced with ammonia.
‘Rats have been nesting in your hide stores,’ the ruffian remarked.
Keldmar curled his lip and threw. His dagger smacked into something soft; leather, or maybe, human flesh; the angle was awkward to be certain. He leaned out to check. A supply net lashed up, caught, and whipped around his waist. Laced like a whore in a corset, he struggled and clawed at twining hemp, thumped an elbow into Mearn, and got himself tackled from behind by an overzealous soldier just arrived.
‘He’s ours, you fool!’ Enraged as a singed cat, Mearn seized a mace and clubbed the blunderer unconscious.
Keldmar sat back up in a slither of slackened mesh. Dazed and rubbing a skinned shoulder, he chuckled. That was a bit harsh, brother.’
‘Don’t go soft on me just because you feel faint.’ Mearn gave his brother’s wrist an insistent jerk. ‘If that spy breaks through Tharrick’s cordon, he’s going to run over our culverin.’
‘You think we should drop at the north end and cut him off?’ Keldmar was a large man who hated to move in a hurry. Opponents tended to forget that he could, which made for lucrative bets on his wrestling; and Mearn disliked being still.
The pair hit the floor running. Two steps, and Keldmar’s toe struck an object that launched off a stunning, bell-tone clash of steel.
‘Damned helmets.’ Mearn cursed again, much louder, as Captain Tharrick mistook his presence for the spy’s, and barely reneged his order to attack.
The shadows lifted without warning.
Torchlight surged back to flood shelving and stone walls; a limp fringe of signal banners; the jerked sparks of reflection off jumbled up swathes of spilled metal. Soldiers clung to the scaffolding, fish-eyed and blinking, while Bransian waved a fresh cresset toward the cranny that lay dimmest and farthest from the stairshaft. ‘He ran that way.’
Mearn whirled in tandem with Keldmar; and the fleeing spy charged straight into them.
‘Demon!’ Keldmar side-stepped, snatched a quarter-staff from a barrel, and laced into a whistling attack pattern that blocked all escape down the aisle.
Meant drew his belt knife and threw.
The spy dropped, tucked head over heels. He struck the floor rolling, a blur of packaged motion, while the knife flew high and stuck quivering in a ballista. Keldmar spun his stave upright, vengeance-bent as a farm wife harrying a cockroach with a poker. One steel-shod tip rapped a near-miss against flagstone and snagged out a twist of black hair. Shouts and a clatter of running footsteps converged. Tharrick’s least flustered soldiers lined up and fired off arrows. The barrage battered stone and rebounded. A better shot by Bransian snatched a rip in a sleeve already ragged.
Cracked a glancing blow by the stave, the spy shot out both hands and grabbed.
Over a hotly contested length of wood, stance braced to wrench free his quarterstaff, Keldmar caught a wide, green-eyed glance that blistered in joyful irony. Then the torches blinked out again. Caught blind in the instant the miscreant released his grip, the yank he achieved sat him down hard on his buttocks.
Mearn yelled, leaped his brother’s crashed bulk and pounced. His knuckles skinned through the ballista’s crossbrace. The intruder had gone under, but Mearn was as fast, and very nearly as slight. Undaunted, he wormed through the streamered silk of cobwebs in pursuit. His brother Keldmar’s quarterstaff banged his heel with a sting that half-lamed him, and a second blow caromed off a stmt. Deafened by the impact, Mearn yelled, ‘You’ll break the wrong skull, you oaf!’
Keldmar’s disgruntled rejoinder entangled with the tardy arrival of Tharrick’s benighted soldiers. ‘Ath! Why not get out of my way, then?’
Mearn snatched a breath, lost wind to a maniacal burst of laughter, and scrabbled on after his quarry.
He re-emerged at the end of the aisle, panting hard enough to spoil his hearing. A pole racked with war gear tipped up. Mearn caught a faint, hissed scrape and a dusky whiff of old leather. Reflex turned his head, and sliding, a dozen studded saddles hammered straight into his face. Bowled over backwards and pummelled half-senseless, he heard through the creak of abused leather what he thought was a breathless apology.
Rage turned him berserk. He heaved up, shucking girths. A field lance jabbed his gut, butt first. He sat. Bereft of wind, close to paralysed, he could do nothing but gasp like a trout. The dropped weapon clanged next to him, followed hard by a fusty quilt of barding, which flapped down from above and battened him in wool and old horsehair.
‘Sweet dreams,’ wished a faint, merry voice.
Mearn punched at the fabric, coughed out the salty taste of scurf, and yelled as a running soldier rammed him flat over backwards. A scuffle erupted, and ended, with Tharrick’s man moaning in agony; the stray lance had turned and stuck in his thigh, which to s’Brydion sense of justice served him right.
On his feet spitting venom and blood, Mearn blinked. The torches were burning again; or one was. Past the bare frames of the war chariots, limned in a gush of yellow light, the spy held a filched brand aloft in a scuffed and dirty hand. He was staring at the most dearly held secret in Alestron, the great weapon painstakingly created from the proscribed writings left by Magyre.
The culverin was not much to look upon: a mere tube of cast bronze, strapped to a wooden frame conveyed by a harness of pull ropes. Stacked to one side were its missiles: round spheres of stone at a crude weight of thirty pounds; and slung in a barrel, the accoutrements of its firing, assorted wands and hooks whose use was not obviously apparent. Ramming tools, touch matches, and a half-dozen hundred-weight casks that wore a faint reek of brimstone, lay stacked alongside some sewn canvas bundles the size of a man’s doubled fists.
The spy was too clever not to guess the strange contrivance held a purpose connected with warfare. ‘Behold, Sethvir, your rare siege weapon,’ he murmured.
Then, in stunning ignorance, he tossed his torch in a hard throw over his shoulder. His intent was to divert the guards who secured the aisleway behind him; then he spun, the conflagration as his cover, to bolt and make good his escape.
Fire spat through a long, burning arc. It landed, malicious in accuracy, in the maw of an upset cask, rolled the full length of the armoury and wisped with the loose straw that had bedded the garrison’s spare helmets.
Mearn screamed, snatched the barding from his legs, and plunged to stifle the flames.
The spy ducked from his path with faintly raised eyebrows, and an expression of madcap surprise. He had expected to divide his pursuit to fight the blaze, but the panic that ensued seemed disproportionate as Bransian converged from another aisle, Alestron’s red bull banner ripped from its standard and flapping like an apron at his knees. In single-minded effort, the duke smothered his offering over Mearn’s smouldering horse-cloths, unconcerned if he blistered his flesh.
The air recoiled in smoke and a reek of singed wool and silk. Low and urgent, Tharrick set his soldiers running to converge and cut off access to the underground passage. A barrel of oil upset in their path. The flooded stonework shimmered black and gold in spreading ripples. Their quarry took to the scaffolding, unsullied. While the skirmishers skidded and splashed and collided, and went down in a thrashing tangle, his chin pocked a triangle in the gloom above the leaned shelf where the recurve still swung on a nail. His quick hands snatched the bow. A wisp of lint floated down; the sort a besieger would wind overtop of a broadhead to make fire arrows.
‘No,’ Keldmar croaked. The fumes clogged his voice. He raised blackened hands and gestured to flag down the brother still posted by the passage doorway.
Parrien saw. Galvanized to instantaneous fear, his flesh prickled by the proximity of a danger unimagined by the fugitive in the bracing, he ripped out a pealing yell. ‘Ath’s grace, man! Do
n’t be setting off sparks in this place.’
‘For my pains and your trials, a gift,’ said the spy, a catch to his tone that at last revealed his cornered desperation.
A touch match hissed. The first arrow arched down in a sizzling line, traced by a fluffed trailer of smoke. Then the shaft struck, and splashed roiling flame on the upset staves of another barrel. Red, gold, and yellow flowered up in a welling spree of wild light.
The armoury had no ready source of water, little cloth beyond dust-dry canvas, and horse barding too eaten with moth holes to smother the air from greedy flame. Of least concern, now, was the enemy who launched the disaster. To prevent an explosion that would decimate their keep now preoccupied the s’Brydion to the exclusion of everything else.’
‘Get the chariots,’ Bransian shouted. ‘We’ll use them to wheel the powder kegs clear!’
Parrien charged in, still gripping his war axe. A glance showed the duke’s plan would be hampered. The shafts won’t clear the turn around the shelving.’
‘Hack them off.’ Mearn snatched back blistered fingers and yelled over his shoulder. ‘Tharrick, set your men to help!’
But the soldiers, under Keldmar, were already busy throwing field tents, camp stools, and infantry banners in frenzied effort to dam the oil from its downhill trickle toward the stone shot. A wafted bit of fletching snagged in an updraught, flared alight, and disintegrated into a falling rain of sparks. Flame sprouted, stinking of singed hide, and an oil-soaked chest of woollen gambesons whooshed up in the hellish, crackling tongues of a bonfire.
Charged with innocent intent, Arithon seized his chance and scuttled like a thief from the shelving. ‘You’ll want to leave while the bully boys are busy,’ he said to Dakar, who had jettisoned the spent stubs of three torches, and now laboured to rise, no easy feat for a fat man with his wrists lashed in leather.