She caught her breath, but Kunrad grew grim. ‘Well, there’s one thing! I’ll not leave them our hard-won steel!’ he growled. ‘Not till I must!’ He ran to the wall, where the men were huddled, casting fearful glances into the night. Some were already slipping away down the hill.
‘A blessing to be single-minded!’ said Kermorvan sourly. ‘What about you lads?’
Anguish stood on Gille’s face, but he shrugged helplessly. ‘We’re with him!’ he said, and the prentices turned sheepishly to follow their master.
Alais pulled free of her father, and unslung her bow. ‘I’ll keep an eye on him, Father. Raven bring the sun for you!’
Kermorvan grunted. ‘I fear we’re due for something else first! See down there?’
It seemed shockingly close, less than a thousand paces down the shore. Lights were breaking out, as if lanterns cunningly shielded were being suddenly unveiled, and torches kindled. From a narrow gap the lights spread backwards like a train of fire, right back into the shapeless shadows. The night sparkled with sudden dazzling glints of burnished metal.
‘The whole force, for sure!’ whispered Alais.
‘Aye, but stretched out at length, the fools!’ rumbled Kermorvan. ‘just as I’d guessed! So they must come at us in small files, with the rest pressing at their backs. That’ll cost ’em dear!’
‘Unless they can break us on that first push. And if our fears are true …’
Kermorvan snorted. ‘We’ll find out soon enough – What in Hella’s name?’
Light flared, voices gabbled, men scattered ‘It’s nothing!’ came Kunrad’s voice. ‘The grass is heat-dried, the slag-tap set it afire!’
There came a sudden blast of icy wind, so chill it made even Kunrad catch his breath. The sothrans had never felt anything like that fire in their lungs; they coughed and yelled. The grass blazed and blew out, the furnace drank it in and blazed high, flooding the hill with light.
‘A fine target that’ll make us!’ roared Kermorvan. ‘Put it out!’
Again the gust, colder this time, stinging men’s faces and sucking the moisture from their eyes; and again. Olvar swore, and pointed. Down along the shore, not five hundred paces distant, the trees had turned a silent, shimmering white beneath the moon.
Against the wind that bowed their fellows they stood stiff and still, as if they were made of glass. A faint icy music shivered from their leafy crowns. The grassy shoreline shimmered. The low lake swell froze even as it climbed the narrow beaches, and did not fall back.
And suddenly, as if the sky mirrored the earth, pale light awoke there also, and men howled with fear and hid their eyes. Rippling curtains of light were drawn across the stars, shivering sheets of transparent radiance, one moment in faint cool rainbow hues, the next in dazzling white edged with green or blue. To impossible heights they flew and shook, the banners of cold, dwarfing the distant mountains with ethereal, potent majesty.
In the lake they danced, as if pointing a way or outlining a path, so that the castle no longer seemed a separate solid thing, but a tiny speck at the centre of a vast enweaving web.
‘They’re nothing!’ roared Kunrad. ‘Only North-Lights! We see them all the time! Stand and don’t fear them!’
‘You hear?’ bellowed Kermorvan to his forces below. ‘Stand, my brave lads! Nothing to fear! Just a mountebank trick, see? Stand, you sons of bitches! See me pissing my britches? Stand as I do, and keep ranks. Morvan morlanhal!’
Had he been down among them, he might have had some effect. The archers on the hill held firm, by the old man’s iron will and the aura of his name; but the men below heard him only from afar, and they faltered. As well they might; for they saw, now, what was coming upon them, racing with that tide of terrible frost.
All along the shore a mile or more streamed the corsair host, men of fell and terrible name, and for the most part in war-gear as hardy as any in the lands. Swords of Nordeney many bore, and Northern armour upon many backs, and the fell wind whitened the steel with a faint rime, so that they shone ghostly in the auroral glare.
They were running, in time to that drumbeat, heavily but steadily. The narrow strip of open shore forced them to come in narrow files, as Kermorvan had predicted; but those files seemed endless, for what came on was a force of above three thousand men, with only a few left behind to hold their ships. Against the full strength Ker Bryhaine the City might have mustered, it was small; but Ker Bryhaine lay far to the south, and this was the greatest force then in those lands. And out before the corsair files, like a spearhead, ran what was worth many a thousand more; and it was named terror.
Among their vanguard there was only one horseman, riding at their head; and in the auroral light he shone above their shouldered spear-points like a god of war. From head to toe bright steel ensheathed him, yet he rode with fluent ease, as if it weighed no more than silk. His high-crowned helm hid his face with a mask of such calm, commanding aspect that few men could have endured the contrast with their own; yet so poised was he that it seemed wholly natural and right. Up to a rise above the shore he rode, where he could be seen, and there rose in his stirrups and brandished his long lance with pennons flying at its tip, shouting a command to his men like the personification of righteous wrath. The men of the castle-lands who stood against him felt their hearts falter. Doubt gripped even those who had so long suspected him. They had raised their hands against their lord, which had long been made the basest of crimes in sothran lore. What now advanced against them looked like the retribution their hearts had been taught to fear. Mouths dried, throats choked up, and they shrank back in dumb dismay.
From the hillside broke a great cry in answer, but in one voice alone. Kunrad stood there, shaking in his rough mail, panting with open mouth. Alais seized his arm. ‘Is that it? That which you made? That draws you on?’
Unable to speak, he nodded, breast heaving. She held to him fast, but could not tear her eyes from the shore. ‘I begin to understand, at last,’ she said, and her voice also shook. ‘And not you alone. Poor Merthian, to see such a thing presented to him; and as soon snatched away! He believes he is strong, you know. But no man is stronger than his dream. Now he has clad himself in it.’
Kunrad’s voice, when it came, was bleaker than the winds. ‘And not poor Kunrad, to have shaped such a dream, and had it torn from him?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Not wholly. For Merthian only has what he could take. He wears it, but he has not become it. You made that awful, awesome thing, and yet you have it still. You poured yourself into it, body and spirit, that I see. But what I see there he could not steal, for I see it here also, in that mighty flame – and in its creator.’ She laughed. ‘I am given better sight than Olvar’s. Kunrad, you said once it bore no man’s face, that armour. Did you not recognise your own?’
He stood in blank astonishment, until a sudden outcry from below turned every head. For the figure of the Marchwarden was only a harbinger of fear; and his command had been a summons, to the still greater terrors at his hand. They came now; and the ranks fell wide apart to let them pass.
There were two great beasts there, that loped along on heavy legs, so fast the teams of men who clutched their trace-chains could scarce restrain them. Like outriders they ran out before the column, scaly beasts, long of body, wide of jaw, like dragons bound to the earth. But for all that, they moved as beings of hotter blood, high on their legs; and among their snout-scales, over their wide-spaced dagger teeth, long bristles stood stiff. Bright red were their eyes, bright as lacquer, rolling and flashing as the creatures snarled their goaded fury. Spawn of the elder ages they were, from one of those ancient eras when the Powers of Ice, it was said, had in their extremity called down the Celestial ice, causing the heavens themselves to fall, and for a brief while thrown back the Eternal Winter about the world. Such terrible times bred strong and savage creatures, and the worst of them the Ice would sometimes preserve and nurture, in wastelands such as the Marshes, that they might be hurled against it
s foes, striking at the Life it hated with the raw stuff of life itself. About their scale-lined legs steel claws were bound, across their bony brows and on their thrashing tails steel spikes were set; but it was those steaming, snarling jaws that awoke the primal fears of men as brand or blade could never do.
Yet overtaking them, so that they bayed and bucked, and Merthian’s great horse reared under him and screamed, there came a vision that struck deeper still, deepest of all into the hearts of those who had heard rumour, or remembered. A vision; for even the chain-beasts were natural things of flesh and blood; but this had the semblance and movement of a nightmare. Stark, scrawny, twice the height of mortal men, though it leaped and danced and capered like a demonic ape, it was a woman still. Its likeness seemed a deliberate distortion, its very derangement shaping an image of insane fear.
Wild hair streamed grey as glaciers, bejewelled with rime and alight with green sky-fires. In the taut dark skin, seamed with strange traceries like an arcane script, the eyes blazed the green of lucent ice-caves, lustrous as corrupted pearl. Thin black lips yelled and gibbered words in breath that rolled like heavy steam, colder far than the air, and boiled around her curses. Great spidery hands clawed and clutched their black narrow nails at the air as if to tear the last warmth out of it. It was at her passing that the forest stiffened and shone white; and beneath her very feet the ground cracked and shattered like ground glass. Any leaf or twig that brushed her sagged, blackened and shrivelled even as the rime enveloped it. Even the running beasts cringed low as she passed; and the men fell back, and raised their shields to hide their averted eyes.
Save one; for, mastering his frightened mount, Merthian rode down proudly at her back, between the beasts, as if it were the natural place for such a lord among men.
It seemed for a moment as if Kunrad the Mastersmith would hurl himself down from the height into their path. Instead, pulling free from Alais, he turned, he ran, across the scarred brow of the hill to the front of the fiery coronet he had set there. He seized one of the labourers’ great mattocks, and threw himself upon the tall stone that crowned its central vent. ‘Stop the channels!’ he yelled to his men, and even as the prentices leaped to obey, he swung the mattock like the hammer of Ilmarinen.
One blow, and the stone cracked and sagged; but the pick flew asunder, and men ducked the fragments of the blade. Then Kunrad, armoured as he was, sprang from the ground and threw his main weight upon the stone, and with his great strength pulled it backwards over and on to himself.
A woman shrieked aloud. Tearing through the earth, driven by the pressure behind, the stone slab sagged out ward and crashed to the ground, and with it opened a narrow gap to the heart of the furnace. Even the freezing wind that blasted through it had only served to revive and freshen the fires that seethed within, and the gap was like an artery opened in the living earth. The release was sudden and violent, far greater than the gradual tapping it was made for. A sear-white stream bubbled, boiled and fountained outwards in exultant freedom, overleaping the stone that blocked the channels dug deep to contain it. The spout of white-hot steel spewed defiantly into the freezing air, and, like the avalanche that gave it birth, went racing down the slope in a torrential waterfall of pure fire.
No cold could have withstood it. The very winds had fed it, and the heart of trees, and the will of a mastersmith. And that will, perhaps, held it to its path, and the trees that were dead and whitening sprang up before it in a sudden blossoming of fire. Beneath an arch of flame the stream raced onward, struck the low rise Where Merthian had stood, and leapt again with the force of the fall behind it, into a spattering, searing rain.
So swiftly it came that none was ready, least of all the leaders. The great beasts, touched by its first fine spatter, screamed and plunged, and beyond all restraint swept among their handlers, even as they too were borne down by the fiery rain. They stumbled screaming and beating at themselves, and were rent and crushed by the claws of their fell charges. One, snapping furiously at the burning spots, plunged into the lake and sank, towing its last handlers, tangled in the traces. The other reared up, flailing at the air, and charged straight at Merthian. His horse rose and kicked, and that alone saved him, for the beast ran by beneath and so, oblivious to the bite of spear and blade, into the horrified men behind. The horse bolted for the lake.
Not so the creature of Ice before him. Like some thrown beast it also sprang high in the air to avoid that glaring rain, higher than a man could leap; and came close to missing all but the lightest touch. Yet a single such agony would shrivel any mortal flesh; and to the strange body that a spirit of the endless chill had shaped around itself, its kiss could have been far more devastating. However that may be, the leap was broken. The tree above spurted fire, and the grey shape convulsed and fell, even as the main stream of steel welled down in one wash of scarifying light across the narrow shore before it.
The creature’s feet landed square in the spreading stream.
The scream that went up drowned the howlings of the beasts, drowned the very roaring of the fire, split the very air around men’s ears. The exhausted howl of the furnace vents, like some creature bleeding to death, was lost in it. It shook the air as a thunderclap might; and the eerie glows above were blasted out like a guttering candle. The grey shape staggered and capered like an unstrung puppet. Still the metal poured, lower now yet still white at its heart, spilling swiftly down a conduit formed of its own cooler self, spreading in fiery pools across the path.
Around it even the damp soil sprang into flame, as if it were peat. From tree to tree the fire leaped, like lightning through the clouds, and the white stain that had blighted the forest’s crown flared swiftly to leaves of licking orange, more fair, more alive, more perilous. Branches already dead where they hung burst asunder in the sudden change and crashed flaming among the heads of the outlaws. A wall of fire sprang up around the pooling metal; and at its heart the ice-witch swelled, blackened and sank down. The mouth gaped wide, and spewed a shrieking jet of steam skyward to the hidden stars.
The white column blasted upward. The shape was momentarily borne up within it, stiffened like a bow drawn taut. The sound shrank to an ear-piercing whine. The column shot skyward, free of the flames, while on the path beneath something that no longer had a shape folded, shrivelled and fell in a swift spurt of fire. Yet the column did not disperse, but lifted, sourceless but clinging, neither widening nor dispersing, till it caught the moonlight high above the lake. Then a warm gust off the mountains took it, toyed with it like a stray leaf and sent it tumbling off outwards, towards the Marshes and the endless sea beyond. No trail of ice followed it, no blast of frozen air; and no one marked its passing.
On the hill, all eyes were upon that awful stream, and upon the stone that had unleashed it. Even as the first outpouring slackened, Alais and the prentices were leading a chain of men with water-butts. Yet as they reached it the stone lifted, and again she screamed; for it seemed as if the armoured figure climbed from the heart of the flame. ‘The channel!’ she screamed, as if it was an accusation. ‘You dove into the channel!’ And she threw the water she carried anyway, for sheer joy, and rushed into his arms.
‘Of course!’ said Kunrad, a little surprised, shaking his dripping head. ‘What’d you expect? I’m a Northerner, I’m not that daft!’
She let him go at once. ‘Be thankful I don’t bloody well push you in!’ she yelled, and then grabbed him and hugged him again. Together they stared down at the havoc on the path below.
‘Waste of good metal!’ grunted the mastersmith. Then she heard the blare of trumpets, and felt him grow tense in her arms. She had no need to ask; that was a warning from the castle, and their peril was all too clear.
Their own ranks, unprepared for the fire, were as scared and scattered as the foe’s, and beginning to break for the castle. Among the corsairs, no more than thirty paces off, there was terrible disorder, yet not one man fled; they could not. So long was their column that the rear
ranks, far back around the curve of the shore, had seen little of the terror of the iron-fall, or the eventual bloody slaying of the war-beasts. They held, blocking their fellows’ flight, and even pressed on, edging them closer to the fire. Panic was spreading, nonetheless; those in the vanguard were threatening those who pressed them, some even turning their weapons on their fellows. Others were running down into the lake, throwing off their arms to swim. But at the trumpets they halted, and turned to point down the shore.
Riding in a wash through the shallows came a little knot of horsemen, led by the shining rider, his armour still gleaming bright in the starlight. He had no trumpeters, and they could hear him shouting to crack his voice; but men saw him in that glittering array, an image of command and strength, and in their blindness they heeded him. He and his captains reined in around the disordered vanguard, railing them, berating them, crowding them back in line with their horses. He bade them stand fast, form up and follow to a swift victory; and clearly they heard. Even those already fleeing faltered and looked back.
Kunrad’s heart grew cold within him. Order forgotten, discipline gone, banners fallen, courage broken; yet there was that armour, and even that band of cutthroats would follow it still. Bile rose in his throat. Where was Kermorvan? Now was the time to strike. He could see it, just as he could see when it was right to pour metal or lay down the first decisive hammer-stroke, that would make a piece or mar it. He forgot all else around.
The Castle of the Winds Page 37