Stormed Fortress

by Janny Wurts

  Most of the lamps he remembered were gone. By the fluttering light that remained, he discovered his long sword, jutted over the stern seat. The hilt was placed within easy reach, a reprieve that earned no forgiveness. Fionn Areth muttered another ripe curse, and awkwardly manoeuvred himself upright. As he suspected, the brig’s berth was empty, the weir gates cranked shut and locked since the vessel’s stealthy departure.

  Outraged as he wrestled to unsheathe his steel, Fionn Areth made out smatterings of muffled talk beyond the strapped grille and planking. His savage ignominy galled all the worse for the fact that some loudmouth still cracked jokes at his absent expense. ‘Dharkaron spear those two-faced rats for the maggots!’

  Cattrick’s covert foray had scarcely been launched: the primed hull was settled inside of the closed lock, forced to wait while the sluices let down the water. The sea-level egress, which accessed the harbour, had yet to draw clear of immersion.

  The Araethurian braced his blade and hacked rope with fever-pitched fury. Head down and back turned, he encountered changed fortune: the sturdy curve of the long-boat’s thwart shielded him. He was not battered flat as a boom like trapped thunder blasted a breach through the weir gates behind him.

  Early Winter 5671

  Breach

  Entrained on the warfront from her distanced vantage, Prime Selidie ends her incantation, then bids Lirenda to cut the tie of compulsion forced onto a dying shipwright; while before her, a ship’s ceremonial effigy burns, incited to premature explosion, she praises her Senior Circle: ‘Out of set-back, we triumph! Alestron’s sea-side defences are weakened for the Alliance attackers to seize fatal access …’

  Still thwarted by the ornery watch at the lift, the Mad Prophet cries warning, overcome as Seer’s vision shows the lower lock gateway torched into ruinous flame; the disaster he fears does not stem from Fionn Areth, but springs instead from a latent imprint in crystal, held over a shipwright since Riverton: a discarded pawn and an innocent man, until passage outside the Paravian defences left him prey to the wiles of Koriathain …

  Shocked by the unforeseen blast that demolishes the shipwork’s lower weir gate, Vhandon and Talvish take pause on the wharf-side battlement, their search for Fionn Areth lapsed in the face of staring disaster: below their snatched vantage, white water thrashes out through the breached cut, while enemy war galleys equipped with siege platforms ram upstream for aggressive assault …

  Early Winter 5671

  XIV.

  Sortie

  The concussive force of the blast lurched the long-boat, and tossed Fionn Areth onto his side. Half-trussed and still helpless, he cringed under the pelt of exploded debris. Burst iron and flaming splinters raked overhead and splashed, hissing, extinguished to steam. Strong current spun the craft’s keel as the gaping hole in the lock’s upper gate flooded water in a violent gush from the cavern. His danger turned urgent. The boat where he languished had ferried the flour: for ease of unloading, her painter had been snubbed tight to the dockside. As the reservoir dropped, the shortened line would upend the bow and dangle the boat from the mooring cleat. Fionn Areth would be spilled from the stern. Unable to swim, or cut his bonds loose, he would drown in the fierce eddy sucked out through the weir.

  Frantic fear clutched him, that he would die here, victim of the master shipwright’s betrayal.

  The canting floor-boards gave him no purchase. Toppled over again, he sprawled, face-down on bruised wrists. Worse, the sword that might free his tied limbs had tumbled under the stern seat.

  ‘Damn your name, Cattrick!’ he gasped through his teeth.

  ‘Aren’t you short-sightedly quick to lay blame?’ an irascible voice remarked from the catwalk above. The long-boat rocked sharply. The treacherous craftsman himself leaped aboard, returned like the fiend to bedevil him. Cattrick paused to wedge an oil cask in the prow, then drew his rigger’s knife and cut the painter away from the bollard.

  Fionn Areth recoiled as the same blade licked towards him. Convinced a rife traitor had returned to finish him, he shouted. But the sharp steel that flashed down only nipped the frayed cords at his ankles and wrists.

  ‘Move!’ Cattrick snapped. ‘Shift your useless arse off those oars!’ Hurled onto the bench seat as the drifting craft slewed, snatched by the rough ebb, he unshipped the looms. Shot the shafts through the rowlocks and dug a hard stroke against the roiling water.

  The jerk overset the goatherd again. Cracked into the thwart, he was reviled by the southcoaster’s curses, then blistered for clumsiness.

  ‘Right yourself, ninny, and unsnag that sword!’ Cattrick snarled, beset. The vicious current slapped waves at the bow, for each battled surge of seized headway. ‘By Dharkaron’s Black Spear, you’d best know your business at arms! I’ve no stomach for hauling deadweight.’

  Already pummelled to bleeding indignity, Fionn Areth snatched for his fallen weapon. Hilt clenched in hand, he whipped the blade free and turned on the rogue who tormented him. ‘Give me one reason to keep you alive! That was a cowardly underhand blow you have dealt the s’Brydion garrison!’

  ‘Put up that steel, you blow-hard ram! I have not left the duke’s service.’ Gashed on his brow where a billet had grazed him, Cattrick showed teeth as he wrestled the oars by main strength. ‘Rave on as you like! Just forget about killing. If my stroke lags for an instant, we’re dead, threshed to rags in the weir gate.’

  The sword stayed, a line scribed against fire where the wrack of breached timbers crackled, ablaze. ‘Then talk!’ snapped Fionn Areth. ‘Convince me! You have until we reach the stone pier. That’s more time then you’ve ever listened to me, and twice over your brute fists have trampled civility.’

  ‘You’re a cheeky wee rat!’ Cattrick grinned, eyebrows raised despite his dire straits, until the quick blade darted in and snicked through the points on his jerkin. Since his blood would spill next, he added, quite cool, ‘The only reason I stayed on that dock was to secure the winch on the weir gate. We keep Sevrand’s trust! With his sentries called off to bolster the battle-front, we shouldered the watch, here. Now the cussed lock shaft’s blown open, the upper conduit has to be closed against the invasion!’

  ‘Your claim holds no proof,’ said the goatherd, unmoved.

  Cattrick heaved on the oars. ‘I don’t know what went wrong!’ Strained to the limit of muscular prowess, his anguish might still mask deceit. ‘Our effort was genuine. Alestron’s our home. The shipworks are my livelihood. I held the rear-guard to cover my crew. The fire-ship was meant to be launched in the open!’

  Fionn Areth’s disparaging glare made the shipwright unburden. ‘Only the men who volunteered to lob flour through the galleys were to be at risk of deadly exposure. The hulk’s other hands had my orders to disembark! Let the brig go on under sail with her tiller lashed for self-steering as the slow fuses ignited. They were meant to come in! Shut the lower lock, and stay safe as the sortie began. My timing should have seen them inside the defences far ahead of the final explosion. Are you listening? I am not spouting nonsense! The sluices that flood the main shaft only operate from inside the dry dock’s cavern.’

  ‘How convenient.’ Fionn Areth refused to withdraw. ‘Nobody’s left to gainsay your story. You could be spoon-feeding me a sweet pack of lies.’

  ‘No knife in your ribs!’ Cattrick snapped, vicious. ‘Thrash out the self-evident truth, you blind fool! You’ve been holding that sword all along by my grace! Because between us, however that foray turned bad, the break in the lock’s wrecked the Sea Gate’s integrity. Before giving the accursed Alliance free passage, I need your help! There’s no one but us to secure the postern from the sewer until Sevrand’s company sends in armed relief.’

  ‘How do I know you’ll fight and not run?’ Fionn Areth hurled back. ‘Or was there another reason why you sold Arithon off to Koriathain, then turned again on Tysan’s crown interests and scarpered from Riverton on charges of felony?’

  The shipwright glared daggers. Sweat slicked h
is craggy temples. Speech would not come freely past his seething rancour, or the breathless exertion that bucked the long-boat against the rushing current. Inch by hard-won inch, his strokes managed headway, the splash of lapped oars gouging bubbles of foam through the sucking black eddies.

  ‘Speak fast!’ cracked the goatherd, the replicate image of Arithon’s features a more searing advocate than he imagined.

  Cattrick admitted in stiff discomfort, ‘I had a demonstrative point to be made. Koriathain used their oath of debt on my name in dishonour, and made me their unscrupulous tool to cause harm.’ His next enraged oar-stroke plunged the long-boat through the arch to the underground water-way. ‘Nobody ever has owned me, that way. I wanted my stand on that matter made clear.’

  ‘That’s cold.’ Yet even as he let fly with denouncement, Fionn Areth was raked by a chill.

  ‘You say, bantling!’ The master shipwright barked a sour laugh. ‘We’re far more alike than indifferent over our desire for fierce independence. Whose side will you take? Don’t claim you can’t choose. I won’t cut you slack if you’re dithering.’

  Yet this pass, the grass-lander could not be provoked. ‘If you worked for yourself, or decried the shame on your character, that doesn’t forgive your smeared record, today. How do I know you weren’t out for sabotage?’

  ‘Gut-ripping shark!’ Cattrick’s face twisted. ‘My dead aren’t enough? You think I set the spark off that slaughtered them?’

  Silence answered. The targeting sword never wavered, despite the hard thrust of the oars that slapped wavelets against the slimed passage-way. Now the plunge of each stroke stirred up plumes of muck. The water was dropping. Once, then again, the long-boat’s keel scraped over the sediment shoaling the channel.

  ‘All right!’ snarled Cattrick. ‘I’ll give. But first, I’ll have your promise you’ll stand at the pier in defence of the citadel.’

  ‘For my part, that issue was never in question.’ Fionn Areth need not wait to prove his resolve. The boat grounded out. Their forward progress must continue afoot, breasting the flood in the shallows. Prepared as the shipwright abandoned his seat, the Araethurian leaped overboard.

  His feet sank into mud. The icy water swirled knee deep, and wrung the very breath out of him. Rocked by the swift current, he snatched left-handed and braced, as the boat slewed and threatened to sweep him off balance. His sword-arm stayed trained: the disingenuous craftsman had not plunged in after him.

  In trust, or necessity, Cattrick had turned his broad back to salvage the cask from the bow. ‘Loose the boat, goat-boy. She’s no use to us, now. For sweet luck, she might hammer a few foes downstream. Best if she dives off the edge of the weir and knocks some armoured grapplers off their boarding ramps.’

  Past question, the margin for bickering philosophies had to be running thin. The echoing clash of a ram boomed behind: one of the galley-borne siege towers closed in. Assault would tear through the remains of the weir gate. With the ferocious ebb drawing down the high water, the conduit where craftsman and grass-lander waded would fast be spilled dry, wide open to hostile invasion.

  Yet even the closing promise of ruin did not move Fionn Areth. Bone stubborn, or else suicidally brave, he continued his interrogation. ‘If your good intentions oppose the Alliance and Lysaer’s declared cause, I’d know why!’

  Cattrick swore murder and shouldered the keg. The steel at his back was no bristling feint, but aimed by rampaging emotion that might strike to kill in a heart-beat. Slogging ahead, each fled second precious, he spoke fast. ‘I was just a paid craftsman who carried a grudge, until the day of the official inspection that followed Lysaer’s misplayed foray at Corith. The Blessed Prince sat in my chart loft and examined the ships’ plans I’d sketched in false lines. Lysaer had scant knowledge of deepwater craft. He lacked the expertise to recognize the subtlety of my sabotage. I thought him self-blinded enough to be gulled, until Mearn s’Brydion made his entry and forced the conversation into exposure.’

  Cattrick snatched a deep breath. The rough features shadowed by the hefted cask perhaps matched his ringing bitterness. ‘I was shown the creature behind the state mask. The manipulative brain clothed in flawless charisma. Lysaer knows men! Reads us with the ease of a mariner’s chart. Past all question, he sensed that I would play him false. My calm reserve was all poisoned duplicity, yet he did nothing. Said nothing! Never once guarded the lives of his own jeopardized sail crews. He let them walk into my trap just to leverage a plot for his own strategic benefit. Lysaer s’Ilessid has mind, but no heart! Whether such nerveless conviction is caused by Desh-thiere’s curse, or if the flaw springs from calculated ambition, I committed my course, then and there. I could serve with a pirate who valued his people. But not bow down, knowing, for no more than coin, and watch my life’s work become used in live chess for a righteous quest without mercy.’

  They had reached the stone pier. Cattrick stopped, braced for the sword’s finishing thrust. He chose not to plead. ‘If you won’t defend to buy time for the citadel, you will have to strike. I won’t change coat now for coercion.’

  The moment paused, hanging, fraught with the echoing, triumphant shouts of armed enemies, burst through to the unmanned dry dock. Against the on-coming noise of invasion, a thin ring of steel sheared the gloom.

  ‘I saw Arithon’s face, after bearing your word that Feylind’s brig was pinned down with all hands aboard.’ The truth written there had surpassed all deceit: that Rathain’s prince had no shield against honest tears for the unalloyed sorrow of casualties. Fionn Areth stepped forward, sword sheathed at his side, and offered his steadfast apology. ‘I’ve got tinder, if you need my help with the oil. Then count on my stand in the passage.’

  Paired as they had been through much of their professional lives, Vhandon and Talvish matched desperate strides through the tangled streets of the dock quarter. They had outdistanced the cohort of garrison men, stripped by necessity from the melee on the walls: a fighting force that could ill be spared, called away to thwart the imminent threat to the shipworks’ broken rear postern. Pounding at a sprint, strained lungs burning in the frigid air and feet skidding on icy cobbles, the two captains shared the grim certainty that the Koriathain’s made decoy of Arithon would be found embroiled at the site of disaster.

  ‘I’ll kill him,’ gasped Vhandon, ripped raw with remorse.

  Talvish just ran, having nothing to say. Both men had given their friendship to the surly Araethurian. They had done their utmost to mentor his conflicted character, beyond any other green recruit because, like Arithon, they had believed in his salvage. The trauma that had mauled his innate identity and twisted his idealism into contentiousness had been a flaw born from cruel exploitation.

  To the end, all had striven to keep an unbroken integrity with the victim, that he might build his own footing for trust.

  Now that kind-hearted mistake came to roost. The reckoning impelled the most harsh acknowledgement: that, all along, the grass-lander was the made instrument of the Prime Matriarch’s fashioning. In life, his sole purpose had been viciously crafted to snare the Prince of Rathain. Excuses were forfeit, before the staring fact: danger stalked Arithon without remission in the long shadow cast by his enemies. The anguished captains spurred their brutal pace. However the weir at the cut had been breached, that event posed the crippling blow to drive Alestron to final defeat.

  Once invaded, the cavern defences could not be recouped. The dry dock gave the enemy a defensible access, with the warren of sewers too extensive to flush without crippling losses. A mass influx of sappers would mine under the cliffs. Before the walls crumpled, no more could be done but hamper the final incursion. Allow Sevrand’s forces enough borrowed time to stage a doomed retreat to the upper citadel. The crushing impact of impending conquest could scarcely be mourned, far less measured.

  The heroic effort of two driven men could not cross the sea quarter any faster. Past the wharf-side’s dark shop-fronts, through the cramped gutters betw
een masonry warehouses, and under the railed balconies of the back-alley brothels that no longer roared with the lusty abandon of deck-hands on leave, Vhandon and Talvish rushed ahead with a will fit to burst mind and sinew. The awareness, that all they had done was for naught, added torment to searing exhaustion.

  ‘Think of your brave daughter!’ gasped Talvish, not able to bear the mute agony on Vhandon’s face. ‘She is far from this place, and quite free. She chose life! Arithon’s summoning granted that grace. Remember her, above failure!’

  Alestron might fall. But the Light’s hollow cause could never obliterate the record of Bransian’s unbroken defiance. Because Arithon had come, Vhandon had a legacy: grandchildren who would grow up in peace, informed of the citadel’s resistance. Unlike his lost eldest, a son who had farmed and been killed by the blast of Lysaer’s suborned power; or his tempestuous youngest, who served yet under arms with the duke’s elite guard.

  ‘For Fionn Areth?’ snapped Vhandon, not one whit consoled. ‘The Teir’s’Ffalenn shall not be told! Let his Grace never know whose black-handed ingratitude caused our undoing.’

  Around the next corner, both veterans coughed, eyes streaming under the roil of smoke choking an avenue well-known since their boyhood. Guided by instinct, lashed by cruel grief, they pressed forward on guts and necessity.

  Their fight must deny the Prime Matriarch’s prize. Accord between them required no words: Desh-thiere’s curse, and the meddling of Koriani politics drove Alestron towards hostile conquest. Citizens would be on fire to lay blame. As their anguish turned in reproach on the Masterbard, they would accuse Arithon for the suffering heaped on the undermanned garrison.

  ‘Can’t spare his Grace from public censure unless we take the grass-lander first,’ Talvish said in grim assessment.