by J. V. Jones
Samlo was a Faa man: he didn’t know how to lie. “I can’t say, chief. It’s armored. It’ll take more than fire to break it.”
Vaylo looked to the spearmen and bowmen. “To me.” He took the stairs to the East Horn three at a time, his heart drumming against his plate.
At five storeys high the Horns were the tallest structures in the clanhold. The East Horn boasted archers’ roosts and look-out slits, and Vaylo commanded his warriors to man them and fire at will. Taking the topmost embrasure for himself, he put an eye to the slit and looked out upon the army massing on the northern shore of Blue Dhoone Lake.
Dun Dhoone! Dun Dhoone! DUN DHOONE!
Hundreds of Dhoonesmen and Castlemen, war-dressed and mounted, were forming themselves at the gate. Their mantles rose in the wind, and the torches they held trailed white flames. A war drum was leading the chant, and as Vaylo looked on a standard was raised: the Bloody Blue Thistle of Dhoone. Vaylo searched for a leader, but could not discern any particular warrior to whom the others deferred. That worried him. The Dhoonehouse was huge and sprawling and he did not know all its ways. Quickly, he gauged their numbers, and then made his way back to the entrance hall.
Another explosion rocked the gate as he took the last stair. The sharp stench of smelted lead made his eyes burn. “Oddo. Where are the weaknesses?”
Oddo Bull stood ready by the gate, his red hammer chained and in his hand. On the Dog Lord’s orders he had taken count of the Dhoonehouse’s defenses and if anyone amongst them knew this place it was him. “Stables and kitchens. Both have doors leading in. I’ve sent crews to cover them.”
Vaylo nodded. He didn’t want to ask the next question, and he breathed deep for a second or two to put the moment off. “Did the grooms have time to pull in the horses?”
Oddo Bull shook his head.
Dog Horse. “Did they bar the doors?”
“Aye.”
Vaylo left it at that. They both knew the external stable doors were great flimsy wooden things that wouldn’t withstand an assault. Horses were brought into the roundhouse’s fold during a strike, and all stables abandoned as indefensible. You needed adequate warning for such a strategy, and without manpower to watch your borders you were undone. Vaylo ran a hand through his braids. It is my failing.
Out loud he said, “I won’t have them burn the horses, Oddo.”
“Aye, chief.” Oddo understood what this meant; they had to unseal the internal door and bring them inside.
Vaylo accepted his war hammer from the same boy who’d fastened his plate. “Fetch the dogs,” he bade him. “They’re in the kitchen chained to the hearth. Bring them to me at the stable door.” Vaylo looked at the boy a moment. No more than eleven or twelve, he was wearing a motley of unmatched armored pieces and carrying a kitchen knife as a weapon. “What’s your name, lad?”
“Brandin.”
“Here,” the Dog Lord said, pulling his four-foot longsword free from its hound’s-tail scabbard. “Take this for the journey.”
The boy hesitated, his eyes wide.
Vaylo glowered at him; sometimes it was better to scare the young ones. “It’s a swap, lad. I take the knife, you take the sword. Now quick about it.”
For some reason the idea of a swap made sense to the boy, and he came forward and took the sword. His mouth fell open as he inspected the patterned steel edge.
“Go,” Vaylo commanded him, claiming the kitchen knife.
The boy ran. He knew how to hold a sword; that was something.
Vaylo turned to the company of men in the hall. “Oddo. Nevel. You’re with me.”
As they made their way to the stable run, a great thud sounded from behind. Vaylo and Oddo exchanged a glance: the Dhoones were ramming the gate. Vaylo quickened the pace.
The eastern quarter of the roundhouse was little used and poorly lit. Leagues of tunnels were accessed by ramps, not stairs. Probably for the horses, Vaylo concluded. The place felt like a tomb. He didn’t like the way his footsteps echoed. There was too much empty space here. And not enough men.
Seven swordsmen stood watch by the stable door; more of Cluff Drybannock’s twenty by the look of them. Their faces were tense, their weapons drawn. Vaylo felt for them. Waiting was always worse than fighting. It gave a man’s fear time to come to the boil.
The door linking the roundhouse to the stables was tall and strangely shaped, narrow with a bulb-shaped top like a keyhole. Three iron bars guarded it, held in place by iron cuplets bolted into the stone walls. Vaylo motioned toward the door with his head. “Any word?” he asked the swordsmen.
“Banging a few minutes back,” one of them replied.
“We’ve been smelling smoke a while,” said another.
Vaylo looked long and carefully at his men. Ten here, including himself. Eight swordsmen and two hammermen. By rights he shouldn’t be even considering opening this door. But being Clan Bludd meant something. It had to, and perhaps he’d forgotten that these pasts few months, sitting as cozy as a king at Dhoone. Perhaps he’d thought too much and done too little, and perhaps Pengo was right: he should have moved to raise an army before now.
Taking a deep breath to steady himself, the Dog Lord made his decision. “Unbar the door. We’re going in to fetch the horses.”
Every one of them, from the oldest—Oddo Bull—to the youngest, a slip of a swordsman not much older than seventeen, nodded without hesitation. Vaylo felt the pain and beauty of it deep inside his heart. As Nevel Drango drew back the bars, Vaylo spoke the boast. “We are Clan Bludd, chosen by the Stone Gods to guard their borders. Death is our companion. A hard life long lived is our reward.”
“Bludd! Bludd! BLUDD!” the nine shouted in response, raising their weapons. And then the door was opened and the chaos began.
Air was sucked through the door with such force that Vaylo felt it lift his braids. All was darkness. Black smoke churned in noxious clouds, making it impossible to see. A few safe-lamps were lit, glowing yellow like cats’ eyes, doing nothing to illuminate the murk. Vaylo took a breath, his lungs filling with hot foulness. Acid tears sprang to his eyes.
The horses were screaming, kicking at their boxes, mad with fear. Wood splintered with a deafening crack as one of them broke free. Vaylo moved forward with his men, his sense of resignation growing. The horses would not come into the house in such a state. Their terror was too great. These were Bludd horses: None had passed through the internal door before. They did not know it, and when a horse was panicked it needed the comfort of things it knew.
Vaylo squinted into the darkness, trying to discover the source of the smoke. He couldn’t see any flames, and decided that either the roof or the front of the double doors was afire. Possibly both.
“Unbolt the boxes,” he ordered, keeping his position close to the door. The younger ones had better eyes than him, and that was a fact he could do nothing about. “Give the horses plenty of space. Stay close to the walls.”
The sharp retorts of swiftly drawn bolts followed, like the firing of quarrels. Men coughed and hacked. Horses sprang out, bucking and rearing, blinded by fear and black smoke. One swordsman screamed as a panicked horse kicked out at him. Vaylo damned Dhoone. They had turned the stables into a hot, choking hell.
“Nevel. Oddo,” he commanded, the moment the bolts ceased firing. “To the double doors, one a side. Everyone else, behind me.”
Madness, that’s what this was. Then I am mad and my clan is mad . . . and that seemed just about right. As seven swordsmen formed up at the internal door behind him, Vaylo gave the word for Nevel and Oddo to lift away the bar on the great double stable doors of Dhoone.
Wind howled through the stables as the two Bludd warriors set the doors in motion. Smoke funneled around itself, forming a vortex that was sucked through the opening. Flames sprang to life, spilling along the edges of the doors, dripping onto the hay-strewn floor and shooting out fountains of sparks. As Oddo and Nevel ran back, the horses of Clan Bludd charged through the double doors
. In the crush of horses, Vaylo made out the hard black form of Dog Horse, his head low and his ears pinned back: he’d trample some Dhoonesmen along the way. When Oddo and Nevel were behind him, Vaylo called the retreat. The horses were on their own now. Stone Gods save their souls.
Almost they made it to the internal door before the first Dhoonesmen rode in. Five there were, with the thornhelms turning their heads into grotesque shapes and the blue axes of Dhoone in their grips. Vaylo set his three-stone hammer in motion, and stepped forward to meet them.
“BLUDD!”
Horse blood sprayed in Vaylo’s face as his hammer blasted into the first Dhoonesman’s mount, making contact deep in its chest. The horse reared and fell back, and the Dhoonesman lost his saddle and was unseated. Vaylo whipped his hammer back, circled it once to gain momentum, and then sent it flying into the Dhoonesman’s guarded face. The thornhelm crumpled inward, and the man fell to his knees, vomit spewing from the helmet’s mouth hole. Vaylo swung his hammer back into motion and picked another target. His men were fanning out around him, forming a protective wedge around the door. The advantage was theirs, Vaylo realized, at least until the Dhoonesmen’s eyes grew accustomed to the dimness and the smoke.
At his left Oddo Bull was matching his hammer against a Dhoonesman’s sickle-bladed ax. No weapon could match the hammer for strength, but it had a short reach and needed space to be properly swung. The Dhoonesman knew this, and was forcing Oddo back. Vaylo was torn between aiding Oddo and saving himself from a newly arrived Dhoonesman bearing a longsword of blue steel. Swinging his hammer above his head, Vaylo loosened his grip on the hammer loop and let the weapon fly. It smashed into the longswordsman’s chest with the force of a battering ram, sending the man flying backward in the saddle. As he fell into the line of Dhoonesmen behind him, Vaylo took the kitchen knife from his belt.
“To the door!” he screamed, springing toward the axman engaging Oddo. Sometimes a small knife was best, he thought, as he rammed the blade into the axman’s kneecap. “Oddo. Back,” he commanded, as he yanked the knife free of bone. Ahead of him the seventeen-year-old had fallen, his shoulder cleaved off by another blue ax. Vaylo shuddered, stepped back.
Seeing his chief no longer had his warhammer, Nevel Drango stepped forward to cover him on the retreat. Nevel’s sword was an ugly bastard, no doubt about it. Black and curved, with six separate fullers running like plowlines down the blade. It had one purpose—chopping off heads—and Vaylo saw the Dhoonesmen shy away from meeting it. Covered, Vaylo risked a backward glance at the door. All but he and Nevel were through.
“On my word, Nevel,” he cried, his voice hoarse. “Now!” They stepped backward together in a strange sort of dance. An ax was loosed and chunked into the door frame. Nevel swept his executioner’s sword in a half circle as Vaylo edged toward the opening. Shooting out a hand, Vaylo grabbed Nevel’s gear-belt and dragged the swordsman through the door.
Then, mercifully, the door was closed, six men throwing their weight against it as the bolts were shot. It would not hold. Vaylo knew it would not hold, but it would give them precious minutes to rally and reform.
Turning to his men, he wiped the film of sweat and blood from his face. Two of them were gone; forever lost on the other side of the door. Oddo had taken an ax slice to the side of his jaw, and his earlobe was hanging off. Another man’s face was deathly pale, and Vaylo looked down to see the man’s fist digging into a hole in his armor. Blood pooled around his fingers. Sweet Gods, he’d taken a longsword to the gut. Vaylo put his arm out for him, and the man came to him. “You’re a brave lad,” Vaylo said as he drove the kitchen knife through the man’s armor and into his heart.
The six remaining warriors stood in silence, their breath coming hard, sweat dripping from their chins and noses. They knew all about the different ways to die, knew that wounds to the gut were amongst the worst of them.
There was no time to think or grieve. The assault on the stable door had begun.
Vaylo glanced around. Surely there was some way to seal this section off? A wooden door standing between you and your enemies didn’t rank highly on anyone’s list of defenses. He noticed he was pressing the flat of his hand against his chest, and stopped himself. Some pain there. Probably indigestion. Even before he could decide the next course of action, a cry came from west of him.
“Dhoonesmen in the roundhouse!”
The Dog Lord looked to his men. This night was turning from one kind of hell into another. He could ask no man to stay here and guard this door—it was certain death for little reward—but it turned out he didn’t have to. Oddo Bull and a small, fair-haired swordsman stepped forward.
Vaylo suddenly felt old and damned, but he could not let them know it. In silence, he clasped both men’s arms. Oddo Bull wished him a life long lived, but Vaylo could not say it back to him. Their fingers held for a moment. Vaylo found his voice. “Tell the bastards we sunk their guidestone.”
Oddo smiled. It was enough, it had to be.
Vaylo turned and made his way west through the roundhouse, a crew of four swordsmen flanking him.
The main gate still held but fighting was under way in the entrance hall. Hammie Faa ran to meet them. A door in the kitchen had been breached. Dhoonesmen were forcing their way in by the dozen. Bluddsmen were dead. Samlo was dead, Vaylo could see that for himself. Hammie’s younger, bigger brother lay in a bloody pool by the stairs to the East Horn.
“He stopped a Dhoonesman from raising the gate,” Hammie said.
“He was a strong fighter,” Vaylo murmured, touching his pouch of powdered guidestone. “Just like his father before him.”
Hammie’s shoulders began to shake. Vaylo vowed then to kill his second son. Pengo would die for this; it was as simple as that.
“Hammie,” he commanded. “You’re with me. Nevel. Lead the crew to the kitchen, see if it can be sealed. Protect the women. You know what to do if it comes to it.”
Nevel Drango nodded: Kill the women rather than let the Dhoonesmen despoil them first and kill them later at their leisure. “Chief.”
The word was a farewell. Vaylo knew in his heart he would never see Nevel or the other three men again. We have been routed. Vaylo put his arm around Hammie’s shoulder, and headed north to the chief’s chamber.
They met only one invader along the way; a Castleman who looked like he didn’t know where he was going or where he’d come from. Hammie was armed with a nine-foot spear, and saw him off with a vicious blow to the lower gut. The spearhead smelled of shit when Hammie yanked it free.
Vaylo pounded on the chief’s door when they reached it. “Nan! Let me in.”
Nan Culldayis opened the door, holding a two-foot maiden’s helper in her hand. It made Vaylo proud to see it.
“Nan. Get the bairns. Quick now.”
She moved swiftly, asking no questions of him. Tension lines drawn in her forehead made her look older than her forty-eight years, but to Vaylo she had never seemed more beautiful. She would have killed herself and his grandchildren rather than let the Dhoonesmen have their way with them. This was a woman worth loving.
The two bairns clung to her skirts, and Vaylo crouched down for a moment to talk to them. “We must all be quiet and swift. Like foxes. Can you do that, for your old Granda? Be quiet and swift?”
Pasha nodded, pale and frightened. The youngest made no reply.
Vaylo had no time for more. He stood. “Hammie. You’re in the lead. I’ll bring up the rear.”
“Where we going, chief?”
It was a good question. “To the Tomb of the Dhoone Princes.”
Hammie accepted this as if it were perfectly sane and logical; Vaylo loved him for that. “Lead on.”
The entrance to the tomb lay further north of them, in the great barrel-vaulted guidehouse. It was a short walk, but Vaylo knew luck wasn’t with him this night. When two helmed Dhoonesmen appeared on the path in front of him, blocking the entrance to the guidehouse, he couldn’t say he was surpri
sed.
“Bludd Lord,” came a voice through the thornhelm. “All your men lie dead and dying. I’d say it was time you yielded this house.”
Vaylo scanned the man’s weapons and battle dress. Fisher fur, a fine blued longsword, plate bossed with copper: it was the Thorn King himself, Robbie Dun Dhoone.
“Yes,” Robbie said, reading the knowledge on Vaylo’s face. “The king has returned.”
Vaylo heard something then that quickened his blood and gave him hope. “Hammie,” he murmured. “Forward on my say.” To Nan he sent a look that said, Easy. To the Dhoone King, he said, “You got my name wrong, Robbie Dun Dhoone, I’m not the Bludd Lord, I’m the Dog Lord.”
And then his dogs rushed in. “Nan! To the tomb,” Vaylo screamed, as five hounds, part wolf, part dog, streaked past him in a single body of bunched snouts, bared teeth and flattened ears to get at the men who threatened their master. Straightaway they brought the Dhoone King’s companion to ground, one bitch springing as high as the man’s neck, sinking her teeth into his carotid arteries, whilst another fastened its mighty jaw around his ankle. Robbie Dun Dhoone stepped away, his expression hidden by the thornhelm, his blue sword sweeping in a protective circle around him.
Hammie rushed up to him, pinning him at a distance with his nine-foot spear whilst Nan, Vaylo and the grandchildren moved through. Hammie and the dogs held the Dhoone King there while Vaylo rushed into the guidehouse and pulled on the great iron ring attached to the flagstone that formed the entrance to the tomb.
Cold, still air rose to meet him as the flagstone fell back. “Down!” he commanded Nan and the bairns. “Hammie. To me!”
Two of the dogs were tearing the Dhoone King’s companion limb from limb, and the other three were snapping at the king’s heels, feinting and snarling, their eyes shrunken to dots. Hammie lowered his spear and ran for the tunnel. Vaylo heaved the great flagstone on its end, so the face with the ring was now facing down, lowered himself into place, and then called for his dogs. The dogs, hearing a tone in their master’s voice they had never heard before, obeyed instantly, breaking contact and hurling themselves toward the tomb. Vaylo felt their dog heat as they passed him.