Stormed Fortress

by Janny Wurts

  Bid and Opening

  A terrier would release a live rat from its teeth, before Fionn Areth gave up a chase driven by an obsession. Never mind that the moment was inopportune, with the Sea Gate’s defences at wharf-side being stormed under full-scale assault. The roaring noise all but deafened thought. Unfazed by strayed quarrels that hissed down and cracked, striking sparks off the cobbles and chimneys, the goatherder scuttled through the deserted fish-market, and ducked into the darkened alleys laced through the dock quarter. His footsteps passed the shuttered fronts of the wine-shops, and the galleries of emptied brothels. Scarcely one street removed, the enemy siege platforms rammed in and engaged Alestron’s defenders. Steel clashed, and men shouted, where skirmishers raged in close combat. Through the ink palls of smoke, under the notched peaks of the dormers, the Araethurian raced in furtive quiet, while the scream of hot stone-shot creased the night air, and starved rats skittered into the culverts.

  No torches burned in these tangled by-ways, the oppressive gloom flitted with shadows cast by the red arcs of fire-arrows. Against the shoreside bedlam, and the officers’ trumpet blasts, the Araethurian found what he sought: two men calling comments in broad-vowelled southcoast accents.

  Fionn Areth changed course and followed. From doorway to warehouse, past the silled well by the cooper’s shack, he tailed his quarry: a pair of muscular sawyers bearing tools on their shoulders, split away from the crew just returned from demolishing the trade wharf. Unaware that two crack field-captains scoured in search of his whereabouts from liftside, the Araethurian chased in single-minded pursuit of the rogue master shipwright, Cattrick.

  That errand led down a ramp through an arch, customarily kept locked and guarded. The entry to Alestron’s secretive dry dock did not admit prying strangers. Yet tonight, with the walls under dire assault, Fionn Areth crept through, unchallenged. He plunged down a dank stair tunnelled beneath the paved street. Ahead, the sawyers’ voices threw muddled echoes off vaulted brick, where the passage intersected the sewer laced under the cliff head. A pine knot blazed in a fixed bracket by a stone landing, jutted into the eddied black current. Several empty pole skiffs were left moored to crusted green rings. Again, the short garrison had upset the roster. The routine sentries were reassigned elsewhere, with the men he shadowed already afloat and making headway downstream.

  Fionn Areth muffled the chink of his sword, untied the next boat, and launched off through the underground drain that unfolded in darkness ahead of him. Swift current nudged his craft down the closed water-way, then into the high, buttressed cavern where Alestron’s warmongering dukes berthed their ships for refit and laid the new keels for their rapacious fleet.

  There, also, Parrien’s seamen had warped the charred hulk that remained of the Evenstar. Sorrowfully ravaged, she floated, lit by the gleam of fish-oil lamps that winked into view past the low mouth of the channel. The once-graceful curve of her stern-rail was shattered. Fionn Areth saw that the wheel mount was gone, and the mizzen rat-lines burned wholesale. Beyond her wracked foredeck, her shorn bowsprit jutted over spangles of yellow reflection. Her jib-boom still trailed tattered rigging. The parted port chain stay dangled, submerged, beneath the singed breasts of her star-crowned figure-head.

  Nestled in the wreckage, also, was a man, slung in the gloom of her beak-head. Expert hands were quite busy, threading new blocks to the freshly spliced bobstays. Beside him, the flash of a knife showed another, clearing away the snapped cordage.

  If the ghosts of her crew seemed scarcely departed, the wracked main-deck crawled with activity. The lantern hanging above the main pin-rail rimmed the heads of more men, wielding tools at the mainmast.

  ‘Steady on! Lower as she goes!’ The booming command, unmistakably Cattrick’s, raised the creak of a burdened sheave. Movement stirred overhead, as the shipwork’s massive tackle and rope eased a net of casks towards the open hatch.

  The sawyers in the pole-boat up ahead skimmed alongside the berthed hull. They hailed their fellows, tied off to the bollards, then collected their saws and debarked. Someone’s comment raised rowdy laughter. To more ribald whistles, the pair crossed the plank gangway and boarded the derelict brig.

  Brazen as brass, Fionn Areth did likewise. He first presumed the work aimed for a salvage, until he stumbled over a pile of burlap. Experience with Talvish’s troops made their musty scent too familiar: the sacks contained lint floss. His blunder fetched him up against a cache of split pine, green and sap-sticky with pitch. The wrecked hull packed torch kindling, taken from weapon stores, and wound over for business with oil-soaked rags.

  His racket drew notice. Someone’s hard fists seized his collar and wrist from behind. Twisted into an arm-lock, Fionn Areth was hauled up, yelling, and dealt a shove that staggered him onto his knees. More angry craftsmen closed in a circle. Then a capped sea-boot hammered him flat, grinding into his spine and pinning him helpless.

  The light shifted sharply. Somebody lifted the hung lantern down and thrust the hot glass towards his face.

  ‘Daelion’s black cock and my arm left for shark bait, here’s a right fish’s tit!’ The observer ran on, thick with dock-side vernacular, in answer to Cattrick’s piqued question. ‘It’s the goatherding doggo come snooping back to get himself fleeced for a gelding!’

  The master shipwright said, whetted by malice, ‘He’d best have a sharp reason. I don’t toss the prize to a mudclod who’s hell-bent on crossing my bow for a second time.’

  Fionn Areth refused to be cowed. As more hecklers clustered, he demanded, ‘Does Arithon know you’re here scuttling this brig?’

  ‘Scuttle her? Us?’ Another jab from his captor, then more grumbles, as rough fingers twisted his sword-belt and seized his prized weapon as forfeit.

  ‘Stripling may know how to butcher a billy,’ someone sneered to a companion. ‘Can’t thole a fished mast from a gate-post!’

  ‘I haven’t slaughtered a goat in two years,’ Fionn Areth protested. ‘Mind that steel carefully. It’s made to hack flesh. Should honest ignorance make me an enemy?’

  The offensive grind of the boot-heel let up. Disarmed and permitted to scramble erect, the Araethurian dabbed scuffed blood from his chin. He glared, while the bullying shipwrights weighed over his fate.

  ‘Aren’t proven our friend,’ the most baleful declared. ‘Don’t say you’re not poking your hayseedy snoot into what isn’t your business.’

  Such guarded industry effected impressive repairs: already, new timber rose from the stump of the mainmast, the splice fastened by a girdling of spars and strapped iron. The supports had been nailed, then woolded in place with overlaid wrappings of hawser. Cattrick’s barked order drove three sweating men back to their neglected labour. The boom of their mallets resounded, as wedges were hammered under the rope to tighten the coils.

  As others sauntered back to their work, Fionn Areth sighted another party, mounting a replacement rudder under the sterncounter.

  ‘Salvage?’ he asked, not wholly convinced. ‘Then what’s in the casks you just dropped off the lift? Don’t mistake my inexperience for stupidity. Nobody loads on dry lint and oil for caulking the seams in sprung planking!’

  ‘What’s your stake?’ challenged Cattrick, shouldered in to take charge. His jutted jaw and frowning squint forgave nothing of the bungled impression begun at the chandler’s. Clad in tar-grimed motley, a spliced cluster of dead-eyes clutched in his massive fist, he declared, ‘My take’s no murky secret. If Sevrand’s watch fails and the Sea Gate goes down, I won’t be leaving a seaworthy prize for the enemy. Sweet keel that she is, the Evenstar’s going back under sail. One last run to remember her slaughtered crew, my own blood cousin among them.’

  The belated truth dawned. ‘Dharkaron Avenge!’ Fionn Areth grinned. ‘You’ll launch her off and crash through the Light’s water-borne siege towers as a tinder-box fire-ship?’

  No one answered. The round of furtive glances instead suggested a vengeful conspiracy: neither Duke Bransian
nor Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn had issued these craftsmen with orders. The opportune chance, seized while Sevrand’s crack sentries were fighting elsewhere, left Fionn Areth caught in predicament. These shipwrights dared not risk that his loose tongue might foil their free-booting sabotage.

  ‘Why not ask for my help?’ the grass-lander suggested with cheerful humour. ‘No question, you folk are doing what Teive and Feylind would have wanted.’

  The lantern-jawed joiner who had knocked him down turned in appeal towards his master. ‘Could use the hand, truly. Don’t need our skilled knowledge to run the waxed string we’re threading for the slow-match fuses.’

  Cattrick’s bunched scowl darkened. ‘He’s your trouble, then, and the nails in your coffin should aught go wrong. Mark me! If the blighted yokel yaps off, I’ll club him senseless and drown him.’

  Despite the contempt for his back-country origin, a man born and raised on the downs knew how to shoulder hard work. Service with Alestron’s veteran troops had thrashed out the habit of petty complaint. Fionn Areth bored holes and fed string with a will through the confines of sail-room and steerage. The craftsmen alongside of him shared his discomforts. They cursed the same banged shins and skinned knees, crawling over the grates in the bilges. Stressed under tight quarters, even their stiff, southcoast attitude must acknowledge his diligence.

  ‘Why did you come sniping after us, anyhow?’ asked the bearded fellow who unreeled the waxed string past the stanchions to the starboard chain-locker. With cable removed, the rust-stained compartment reeked of mildew, damp with chill to numb ungloved fingers.

  Fionn Areth crawled in and accepted the passed ball of twine. Jammed against the gouged wood, working by glimmered light through the hawse-hole, he said cautiously, ‘I wanted to consult with Cattrick.’

  ‘Did you now?’ The ruddy caulker beside him squirmed sidewards, busy applying a brush of hot tar to stick the floss batting under the overhead deck-beams. ‘Whatever for, butty? He’s never passed griff for the asking before.’

  ‘You wanted to try a new trade besides goat sticking?’ gibed the little sail-maker, crammed farthest forward.

  ‘No.’ Fionn Areth disregarded the next round of laughter. He fed the treated string to the man, who stitched through the affixed tinder with a curved needle, grunting to the odd jab from his neighbour. ‘I wanted to ask why you lot chose Alestron above the royal shipworks in Tysan.’

  By Parrien’s word, Cattrick and his labourers were the only others who had seen paid service under both Lysaer s’Ilessid and Arithon s’Ffalenn. His portion completed, Fionn Areth squeezed out, stretching his kinked back as he finished his contentious point. ‘The s’Brydion duke had cause to turn, bound under a title that’s tied to clan law.’

  The dangling puzzle remained: that Cattrick was a town citizen from Southshire, with family and kin ties in Shand. Since the coastal ports had declared for the Light, his choice to betray the Divine Prince had stranded him as an exile. If the sacrifice was made in Prince Arithon’s behalf, there had been no reunion, and no warmth extended in fellowship.

  ‘You don’t have to like a man to respect him,’ the caulker remarked, head poked out of the chain-locker. Tar-brush clamped in his teeth, he emerged before granting his dour admission. ‘Master o’ Shadow worked the crews plenty hard. But his silver was timely. No one could say that his terms weren’t fair.’

  ‘You sweated under his Grace, also?’ Fionn Areth inquired, then caught the bundle of batt sacks he was thrown. Choked by puffed dust, he heard his answer through a paroxysm of sneezes.

  ‘Most of us did, son. Though make no mistake, we don’t bow and scrape over titles. Mostly our loyalty’s given to Cattrick, and Ath bear witness, the affray back in Tysan left him and us on raw terms with the Koriathain.’

  Since the reference applied to a past oath of debt, discharged against Arithon’s interests, Fionn Areth wisely withheld from untoward comment. As the work progressed down the starboard decks, the laid fuses and oiled kindling made ready for reiving, the story was left to surface in unforced conversation: of the underhand plot that had placed the shipyard labourers under arraignment at Riverton, then the brutal ordeal that put them to the question by the order’s coercive spellcraft.

  ‘Sisterhood used their trained seers with spelled crystals to break a man’s mind!’ the sail-maker said in cold anger.

  The caulker shuddered, and brandished his brush. ‘Shrinks my gut to remember. No breathing human should suffer such horror, nor any creature born living in Ath’s creation.’

  ‘Damned witches want the Teir’s’Ffalenn taken down as their captive trophy,’ the stout sail-maker ran on with fresh venom. ‘For spite’s sake, I’d thwart them. All here who survived their cruel handling would deny the Prime Matriarch’s satisfaction.’

  ‘Nothing to what the bitches did to your face!’ Unbent enough to show brutish sympathy, the caulker clapped Fionn Areth on the shoulder. ‘Can’t have liked being rigged out as their decoy.’

  ‘Less than you know,’ Fionn Areth allowed, beyond words for the depth of his rancour.

  The labour crept forward in the cold dark, by the trembling flame of the lantern. The very fact the activity passed unquestioned bespoke a garrison pressed hard by short numbers. No one mentioned the fear that the cavern might be cut off if the battle outside changed to rout. Now and again the force of the assault rumbled echoes beneath the stone vaulting. The massive, grilled gates of the tidal lock shuddered on their tracks, jostled by disturbed eddies of current as siege rams shocked the harbour-side wall. Othertimes, muffled shouts filtered in, or the distanced clangour of weapons, as the enemy galleys thrashed in at full stroke, and ploughed into bitter resistance.

  Fionn Areth blinked sweat from his eyes, galled to have been disbarred from the fight with the veterans in Vhandon’s company. Ever and always, his spell-turned appearance placed his character under question. Few trusted his loyalties. No one he befriended asked for his thoughts. However he strove for a life of his own, wherever he wished to grant loyalty, his place was presumed, either hobbled or cast into bitter eclipse by the dictates of the Teir’s’Ffalenn.

  Now masked in the shadow of the brig’s lower hold, the young grass-lander served unstinting amid the rough company of the shipyard labourers: men well-respected for their independence, who argued with forthright opinions. Already, his stubborn grit earned their praise. His quaint quips prompted chaffing and laughter. When the fire-ship sailed, and he volunteered, he avowed that this time he might win an acceptance on the unbiased strength of his merits.

  His bold moment approached. The topside repairs now finished apace, the pounding of mallets replaced by loose talk. The splashing thump of oar strokes from outside the hull signalled the launch of the long-boats. At Cattrick’s brusque order, the unreeled warp lines hissed down. Spliced ends slapped the water, to bumping scrapes as the men in the tenders made fast the tow cables to warp the brig into the lock.

  ‘Best wrap up here,’ urged the sail-maker, while the last batt and wick string was tarred into place, and the joiner collected his tools.

  Fionn Areth followed the crowd at the hatch, using touch where the lantern’s gleam faltered. Emerged on the main-deck, he brushed off his grimed clothes. Shoulders squared and chin raised, he lit off to appease Cattrick.

  The irascible master shipwright stood braced at the portside railing, the frizzled hair in a sailhand’s queue set apart from the caps of his fellows. The Araethurian’s confiscated sword had been shoved through a loop in his apron. His back stayed turned as he shouted praise over the dusty sacks bearing mill stamps, tossed up to the deck by his ankles.

  ‘Flour?’ Fionn Areth said in puzzled inquiry.

  ‘Aye, lad.’ The sail-maker flashed a blood-letting grin. ‘Loft that stuff into the air down below, you’ll witness one baleful explosion.’

  ‘Not our hold, peggy,’ a bystander decried. ‘We’re sending the long-boats with picked crews, ahead. They’ll scull in and grapple
those Sunwheel galleys, then waft flour in pokes through the oar-ports. While everyone’s folded double and coughing, our Evenstar slips in behind. She’ll serve up our prearranged packet o’ hell, and torch off Dharkaron’s own vengeance.’

  ‘I want to go with them,’ Fionn Areth announced, unable to check-rein his eagerness. ‘Let me pull an oar. Or at the least, bide on Evenstar’s hulk with a slow match.’

  Talk froze. Through the choked silence, Cattrick spun from the rail to dress down the impertinence. ‘Why?’ A step forward brought his narrowed stare closer. ‘Why?’ The stripped demand blistered. ‘You’ve shared our company for less than one hour! What did you think? That the counterfeit mug of a prince gives you the born right to collaborate?’

  Fionn Areth burned scarlet. ‘No! Like you and yours, I’m not sworn to Rathain, or reduced to a Koriani pawn dropped into the Teir’s’Ffalenn’s pocket!’

  Cattrick gave back his least civil smile. ‘I’d say not,’ he agreed.

  No warning was given, nor any kindly support from the craftsmen clustered behind. Fionn Areth never saw whose hand turned against him. He felt only the blow that hammered his nape, and dropped him straight down into darkness.

  Awareness returned to a shattering headache and the misery of numbed extremities. Fionn Areth groaned. His shuddering breath brought the smell of damp wood, and his hearing, the slosh of salt water. Queasy with dizziness, and hounded by pain, he found that Cattrick’s wrangling scoundrels had dumped him in the bilge of a long-boat. Spinning vision showed him that the craft was moored to a piling by the dry dock. His wrists were bound, hands in front of him. Another rope lashed his ankles. The deserted quiet meant the Evenstar had already embarked.

  ‘Motherless sons of a goat-humping dog!’ Fionn Areth shivered, furious. If he laid eyes on the shipwrights again, he would carve that vile ancestry into their livers. But before retribution, he had to win free. His untoward bout of unconsciousness left him half-stunned by the cold.