Stormed Fortress

by Janny Wurts

  Emergency gave them no time to organize. Every war-hardened veteran Mearn could haze must salvage the grit to respond. ‘Halve the numbers who were standing watch on the walls! Draw lots for the duty. The rest will retire at once to the streets! Get the populace out! Brandish arms, threaten bodily harm if you must! Damn your eyes! Rouse yourselves! To Dharkaron, the slackers who falter to stare! Surmount this, or die! Every second we crumble to terror hurts our chances of long-term survival!’

  Mearn kicked the prostrate weepers. He slapped men’s slumped shoulders, then snatched up a dropped halberd to prod on the stunned, all the while shouting in vicious language to roust the numbed and immobile. ‘You louses, get up! We cannot mend today’s blast of destruction. All of our safety depends on swift action! You and you! Pick ten others. Commandeer every hand-cart and wagon! Seize any transport to shift the infirm.’

  For no grace was given: already the screaming and cries in the streets surged towards riot. Worse, Mearn tripped over a man on his knees. The fellow moaned with inconsolable pain. Both sticky hands were pressed to raw burns, his blistered face utterly ravaged.

  ‘Ath’s pity,’ Mearn gasped, jolted sick. Hapless men on the walls had been struck blind. Trusty sentries, caught wide-eyed in the breach, in the moment the light burst before them. Already, their scorched sockets and agonized torment gutted the nerves of their fellows.

  ‘Hold on, man! Bear up! We’ll get you a healer.’ Mearn’s biting grip on the stricken man’s shoulder was no less than brutally desperate. He must restore reason, no matter the cost. Or else terrified confusion was going to claim more than the slain caught outside the defences.

  Spurred by necessity, Mearn handed the wounded man off to his comrades. Then he sprinted through the disarray on the battlements, yelling sharp orders to rally. ‘You! Lieutenant! Get the injured together. Have one sighted man keep them calm. Send a sensible sergeant to commandeer someone skilled to treat them! You there, no snivelling! March your squad through the streets. Man, woman, and child, everybody moves out of here! I will have no stragglers. No one gets left behind! The least grandame and elder must not be overlooked in the crush! I want the craft quarter emptied by sundown, with no one’s excuses for failure!’

  The task lying ahead was enough to crush dauntless spirits, beforetime: not only were the non-combatants unsafe. Now unbridled fear posed the s’Brydion clan holding a lethal liability. In dread for their lives, or the well-being of their children, what forthright citizen or threatened merchant might not sell out to appease Lysaer’s ruthless ferocity?

  Then Talvish arrived, a rock in a storm, in the soot-blackened rags of his surcoat. A rash of blisters disfigured his cheek where the light’s strike had glancingly brushed him. Though his fair hair was singed, and his jade eyes, struck numb by awareness that Vhandon had been caught outside with Keldmar’s slaughtered field troop, he needed no part of Mearn’s hoarse entreaties to grasp the huge scope of disaster.

  ‘I’ve got teams of men working through house to house.’ Rasped raw, he coughed; swiped let blood from his brow, laid open by fragmented debris. ‘Jeynsa and Fionn Areth were packed off straightaway. They suffered no harm!’ he reassured, fast, before Mearn recoiled to worry. The ghost of a rueful shrug, as he added, ‘Though Daelion Fatemaster’s judgement bear witness! The goatherding idiot wears a bruise on the jaw for the privilege. Nothing would make him stop yammering but my fist.’

  Mearn swallowed. He had no stomach left. Only the jagged ache of despair, which found no direction to lean for reassurance. ‘You know the s’Ilessid will strike us again. How we can possibly move to secure the bone and marrow of our skilled tradesmen?’

  Talvish shook his head. He could offer nothing beyond the tact he had learned the hard way, serving Arithon. ‘You were never the fool, Mearn,’ he prodded, most gently. ‘As the ambassador sent to Avenor, what do you think from experience?’

  And the brutalized, youngest s’Brydion brother shivered, as the pain stared him down. Wreathed in stinking smoke, he allowed, ‘Lysaer will serve justice. You think we were spared to be offered reprieve? Then woe betide us when we turn a blind eye. For as I stand here, I already know. My brother Bransian will be crazed with rage. Family pride will not let him surrender.’

  ‘Best pray that you’re wrong,’ Talvish stated then, sorrow braced by war-hardened tenacity. ‘But should you be right, I think we’ll be given as much time as we need. If only to set the hook in the fish. Lysaer’s a strategist. He’ll hang back. Allow us to stew, until we’re worn-out by our agony.’

  Few could match Mearn for bravado. He nodded once; swiped back his soaked hair. Amid ugly shouts risen from the clogged streets, through the echoes slapped off the stone revetments, he clapped Talvish’s back. ‘You’re cruel as Dharkaron’s Chariot, my friend.’ Reckless causes sparked off his penchant for gambling. ‘We can’t give way, now. Just spike the odds higher. Upset the presumption, that more mouths in the citadel will starve us to submission the faster.’

  Talvish rubbed his temples to ease his pounding head, then reset his helm with grim purpose. ‘Nobody’s fooled. But the trust of the populace has to be kept.’

  Mearn’s hollowed face tightened. ‘Well at least we won’t be afflicted by troops gripped in the throes of vile practice!’ Since Arithon had raised the grand chord at Etarra, the hideous threat posed by the Kralovir’s meddling had been unequivocally routed.

  Yet on that reprieve, Talvish spoke no word of false platitude. Unlike the high-strung intelligence before him, he had witnessed Prince Arithon’s personal torment, just after the Fellowship’s charge was accepted. For the dread future, who but a Sorcerer dared measure the price of the miscast blame that now impelled Lysaer’s Alliance to war?

  Alestron might yet bear the terrible cost of that shining victory.

  Yet a self-possessed man with Mearn’s sensitive character, who had also just lost a brother, was no spirit to be forced to reckon with future intangibles.

  ‘Let us do what we can for your people.’ Hard-set, dedicated to practical mercy, Talvish shouldered his captaincy. He was no sorcerer, no musician, no blood-born seer stung by the vista of far-sighted consequence. He accepted that he had naught else to give but the conviction of human resolve.

  Autumn 5671

  Consequence

  Night followed night, while the townsfolk of Alestron held their collective breath. Under confusion and back-breaking labour, the lower citadel accomplished its evacuation. The winds stank of ash. The drays that stripped the emptied homes of their blankets and food stores moved through air clogged like tarnish, with each breath men took made harsh with silted dust and the scorched taint of debris. Keldmar’s distraught widow could not be consoled. At Dame Dawr’s behest, Parrien’s wife shouldered the burden of loss, making rounds to acknowledge the field garrison’s bereft families.

  Pitched sleepless by Duke Bransian’s white-heated rage, the elite guard held their posts on the innermost walls, while Mearn’s captains oversaw the chaotic influx of distraught refugees without faltering. The looming spectre of siege was not new. Behind the massive keeps that guarded the Mathiell Gate, amid starlit dark, Alestron’s stalwart companies imposed order. They kept watch, while the inner citadel’s burdened resources became strained, then overwhelmed by the crush of displaced families and craftsfolk. Through the night hours, when torches were doused to sharpen the night-vision of the sentries, the story-tellers spoke in the overcrowded encampments jammed into the open baileys. They recited the course of bygone history, passed down through each generation.

  The citadel’s inhabitants were reminded again: they were a proud people, descended from the deeds of high hearts and war heroes …

  * * *

  The first flame of the uprising remained unforgotten, when insurgent townsmen had crept through the houses and halls, slaughtering resident clanborn. On that dread night, the reigning s’Brydion duke and his family had died in their beds, betrayed by their own merchants’ henchmen. The
clan heir who survived to stand off the assault had escaped execution because he had jilted his wife to indulge himself with a mistress. Naked, sprung from bed by a panicked page, he had rallied the Mathiell garrison. Alongside the watch captain, he and the skeleton company on duty had barricaded themselves inside the flanking drumkeeps. They had cocked the catapults. Hurled flaming bladders of oil into the rioters sweeping the streets.

  To the screams of the dying, friend, family, and foeman, they had hardened their nerves. In cold desperation, to foil snipers with crossbows, they had loaded the massive arbalests with fire-bolts and torched the wood span to the Wyntok Gate.

  Even after six and a half centuries, the echo of horror still lingered: of the hour that the floors in the ducal palace ran wet with the blood of the slain. As the cries of their murdered kinsmen and children shrilled under winter starlight, the trapped guard, who were fathers lashed insane by grief, had forced through a suicidal sortie. Their berserk rage had burst from the barricaded keeps, leading the charge that smashed through the insurgent force holding the palace gate. A few knots of fighting survivors rallied to their initiative. Half-clad, or armed, or bearing the stubs of smashed furnishings, they cleared the streets of the inner citadel by killing all comers who failed to fall in at their side through the melee.

  By dawn, the flag with the s’Brydion bull blazon still streamed from the height of Watch Keep. While angry factions denouncing the Paravian presence still ravaged the craft district down-slope, the assault that had murdered the reigning duke was repulsed, and its backing ringleaders faced with a siege …

  The legacy inherent in Alestron’s oldest revetments had withstood far more than the savagery of human rebellion: the innermost walls had been crafted by Paravians, centuries before the Fellowship’s compact had granted surety for mankind’s refuge on Athera. History spoke, in sealed stones: the mysteries of centaur masons and the flutes of the Athlien singers had laid down defences against concerted attacks by Khadrim, themselves errant offspring spun into form by the dreams of grief-maddened dragons. The sea-tides that ripped through the sluice from the inlet had flushed the let blood of besiegers, even before the Third Age insurgents cast down the high kings enthroned by the Sorcerers.

  Alestron guarded her freedom, this day, by the gift of her forebears’ resiliency.

  So the spinners of tales and the bards reassured the frightened mothers and their clinging children. Brave epics were offered to bolster the uprooted families who faced horror, and certain privation …

  When the next traitorous assault tried to storm the high citadel from beyond the burned span of the bridge, the attackers had been shattered by archers and sliced to ribbons in routed defeat. Starvation served as the enemy’s weapon, then. The innermost defences were forced to endure a dreadful four months, spent besieged. Children were taught to overset scaling ladders. Grandames boiled oil to flush out the sewers encroached on by enemy sappers. As supplies failed, the populace ate the garrison’s horses, then turned to trapping the rats in the culverts. The hale learned to wield weapons, regardless of age. Dress-makers used their thread to wind fletching and refurbish arrow shafts. Each wave of attack had been broken at harrowing cost, in the tidal chasm under the cliffs of the Mathiell Gate. Names were remembered, and acts of selfless sacrifice, until the town rebels’ resources were mangled, and finally worn to exhaustion …

  The duke’s restored banner had never been struck. Men on the embrasures, and grandsires making shift to watch toddlers were told over the fact as a litany.

  Yet where yester-year’s brutal rising against charter law had accosted the s’Brydion by stealth, the offensive waged now by Lysaer’s Alliance resumed the ominous massing of troops. From the upper walls and the sea-misted battlements, Alestron’s penned citizens watched their industrious enemy, unlading timbers from galleys. They heard the chants, as the work crews dragged lumber over the blackened earth of their wrecked farm-steads. Wind carried the groaning of the log carriages that fed the insatiable saws of the carpenters. Hammers banged, to the shouts of the engineers’ overseers. Just out of weapons’ range, swarms of conscript labourers constructed the wheeled shelters for sappers; the frame slings for the rams; and the squat, spring-cocked arbalests, that would fire pronged grapples or incendiary arrows over the crenels and walls.

  Such activity was not reserved to the ground scorched lifeless by Lysaer’s first overture.

  Wooden structures notched the hills, where no timber grew: a leafless framework of scaling towers, the throwing arms of wheeled trebuchets, and the squatter beams that would mount the notched winches that cocked back the mangonels.

  The Light’s forces closed by the muscle of ox teams. Their inexorable, creeping pace advanced less than a league, in a day. Soon, only hours remained, before the duke’s stronghold became surrounded.

  At the last moment, three furtive, cloaked figures ran the Alliance gauntlet. Their desperate mission aimed to enter the citadel, before the poised war host established position. They skulked by the eyes of the enemy; slipped under the arcane vigilance of Lysaer’s initiate priesthood by crawling through middens. They slunk, heads down, where the rank-and-file recruits sweated in drill with the shock troops.

  Petty officers waved the intruders along.

  Masked by Dakar’s knowledge of Fellowship wardings, and Elaira’s skilled use of hedge glamouries, the trio traversed the naked acres scorched sterile by Lysaer’s assault. They threaded the gamut of unquiet haunts, disoriented still by the horror of life’s savage ending.

  The shut, unmanned gates at the lower wall posed the arrivals a strategic difficulty: the singed timbers and stout grille-work had been left secured, too massive for Dakar’s light fingers. That forced a return visit to raid Lysaer’s encampment, where Sidir’s forest-bred stealth purloined a stout rope, some twine, and a bow. Better prepared, they waited for nightfall, crouched near the stripped bones of dead sentries. Dakar whispered cantrips to settle the shades, while Sidir kept sharp watch. Darkness did not relax their protections, as they poised to slip over the barbican.

  ‘I don’t fancy being done like a seamstress’s pincushion,’ Dakar grumped, nursing a heel with burst blisters. He distrusted the duke’s archers. Year upon year spent in hair-trigger drills made them shoot at the first sight of movement.

  ‘The s’Brydion won’t have winched in the span bridge,’ he argued, against Sidir’s doubt. ‘That precaution will be held until the last moment, since they hope to draw in the Prince of Rathain.’

  ‘Over the stinking meat of my carcass,’ Sidir snapped under his breath. The murderous glint that sparked his pale eyes did not bode well for Jeynsa. ‘I would be done here. Soonest is better, that my liege should never behold this sorrowful place.’

  Still thin from captivity, the tall clansman shouldered his work with bow and arrow and unreeled the twine after the shot used to thread their rope through the battlement. Once the knots were secured, Dakar kept his counsel. While Sidir lent his strength to assist Elaira through the arduous effort of scaling the outer grille, they climbed, breathless, and breasted the gate arch.

  Then reached the far side, scraped by rough stone, with tough leathers snagged by the slice of embedded glass. No sentry emerged to call challenge.

  ‘Learned their lesson,’ wheezed Dakar, overcome by exertion, and starting to sicken from excessive use of fine spellcraft.

  ‘Is that blessing or curse?’ Sidir whispered back, through the sea-mist that curled through the lanes. The full moon was rising, a set-back beyond any forest-bred skill. Since the Mad Prophet looked ready to snooze where he sat, the Companion extended a firm hand and raised him.

  ‘Why haven’t they burned this place down?’ he snapped, fretful. ‘These houses can only shelter the enemy.’

  ‘Don’t ask,’ murmured Dakar, braced on a yard gate, and white as rolled dough.

  The three of them slunk through a craft quarter emptied of people. Nothing moved but the foraging rats and a gaunt cat, stalki
ng for vermin. They climbed, while the incoming fog lapped the shop-fronts, and moonlight carved shadows deep as Sithaer’s pits, and glanced in mercury ripples off the roundels of the unlit windows. S’Brydion reigned with an iron-clad fist: no looters had rifled the deserted craft shops. Doors and shutters remained locked, while strained silence hung in the streets.

  ‘Ath’s own grace, don’t ask,’ Dakar repeated at a mumble.

  Sidir voiced his rattled thoughts anyhow. ‘Be seen here, we’re apt to be cut down for thieves.’

  ‘Dakar’s spent out,’ Elaira protested. ‘After settling the dead, he’s left unfit to weave wardings.’ She raked a wisp of hair from her face, forced to quell the clansman’s raw nerves on her own. ‘I don’t sense any presence. Since Bransian’s men trust main strength before talismans, my old hedge wife’s skills ought to serve.’

  Cloaked against stabbing chill, touched by a desolation that bit to the bone, the three skulked under the ephemeral veil of Elaira’s suggestive illusion. Stray sound was less biddable. Dakar’s staggered footfalls cast echoes before them, up the zigzagged streets, and through closes, past the dead chimneys of the forges and the vacated barracks that loomed still as the sealed vault of a tomb.

  The pervasive quiet unnerved, even words an unnatural intrusion.

  Ahead, carved in jet silhouette, the lead roofs of the upper citadel drumkeeps notched the indigo sky. No watch lamps burned, there. If candles lit the alcoves for healers, attending to births and infirmities, not a gleam pierced the pervasive black-out. Only moonlight painted the empty lanes. The air smelled of oil, perhaps leaked from stores at the gatekeep, though the oddity grated, with no imminent sign of attack yet in evidence. Nor did the saving blanket of sea-mist wreathe the height of the promontory. The clear night exposed knife-edged shapes without mercy: in fraught stealth, the party of three crept upward to the gap at the Wyntok Gate. Under its inky shadow, Elaira came forward with her woman’s voice to approach the sentries.