by A. J. Smith
‘I have no idea why you are here, but it’s a nice surprise. Did you bring an army with you?’ Magnus asked.
‘Not exactly.’ Rham Jas pointed to something behind the priest.
Magnus turned quickly and saw Castus, the gaoler, standing wide-eyed in the dungeon passageway. He wasn’t moving and his mouth was open, with a slight drizzle of blood on his lips. Then he crumpled limply to the ground and behind him appeared the figure of Lord Bromvy of Canarn, holding a bloodied longsword.
‘Brom!’ exclaimed Magnus, louder than he had intended.
‘Stealth was never one of your gifts.’ Brom smiled. ‘Don’t worry too much, though, the bound men that were with this pig are both dead.’ He kicked the lifeless body of Castus to emphasize that he’d taken care of the other guards. ‘Rham Jas, get to it,’ he said to the Kirin through the cell window.
Rham Jas took a quick scan behind him to make sure the way was clear, then darted back out of the feeding trough and into the city.
‘How did you get in here?’ Magnus asked Brom, unsure what his two friends intended.
‘Let me get you out of there first,’ he said, retrieving the cell key from the gaoler. ‘Where’s Skeld?’
Magnus scowled. ‘Pevain was given him as a trophy.’ The fact that the dishonourable mercenary knight had his war-hammer still bothered Magnus greatly.
‘Well, I hope you’ve been practising with a longsword,’ Brom said with a smile, kicking the gaoler’s sword towards the cell.
The young lord of Canarn was wearing tough-looking leather armour and carried a heavy-looking leaf-shaped blade in his belt.
Brom unlocked the door and the grating sound was like a strange kind of music to Magnus’s ears as, for the first time in a month, he set foot out of his cell without a guard of Red knights for company.
‘You’re a wanted man, Brom. Coming here was not wise.’ Magnus was deeply grateful to be rescued, but the last thing he wanted was to see either of Duke Hector’s children captured and branded a Black Guard.
Brom shot him a serious look as the Ranen priest picked up the Ro longsword. ‘You doubted I’d come back? The Red bastards killed my father, Magnus… they beheaded him as a traitor.’ Brom’s face had always looked fierce, but Magnus thought he’d gained an extra edge of darkness since they’d last met.
‘They made me watch as they killed him… I mourn him too.’ He directed a grim look at his friend.
‘I know you’d have stopped them if you could.’ Brom began to wipe the gaoler’s blood from his sword and turned to look down the narrow stone passageway. ‘Why are there so few knights here?’ he asked, changing the subject. ‘Lanry saw a massive army pass through, but he didn’t know what was going on.’
‘Rillion was left with only a token force to hold the city while the king went north,’ Magnus replied.
Brom looked genuinely surprised by this news. ‘The king? As in the king of Tor Funweir? As in King Sebastian Tiris?’
‘I think that’s what your people call him, yes,’ replied Magnus. ‘There’s much you don’t know, my friend.’
‘That goes for you as well,’ Brom said, still processing the news that the king had passed through the city. ‘We ran into Kohli and Jenner, so we know Hasim was here and took my sister north. Please tell me you know what happened to her?’ They began to walk back along the dungeon passageway. ‘Please tell me she’s still alive.’
‘I wish I could answer you, my friend, but I haven’t seen her since Hasim smuggled her out of the city.’
‘Will she be safe in Ro Hail?’
Magnus frowned. ‘Hard to say. If they got out before the king arrived…’ He paused. ‘It takes time for the Free Companies to muster.’
Brom resumed walking towards the guard station at the end of the passageway and Magnus could see two more dead knights, propped up against the wall with their throats slit. The young lord of Canarn was just as cold and dangerous as Magnus remembered, and the priest was impressed at the way he’d entered the dungeon and killed the three bound men without making a sound.
‘Let’s keep things simple for now,’ Brom said, as he stepped over the dead knights. ‘How many fighting men are left in the keep?’
‘Fifty Red knights and a hundred bound men. I think Pevain has a couple of hundred mercenaries in the city… more than we can handle.’
‘I know about Pevain and his bastards – Lanry has a surprise for them,’ Brom stated.
‘A few common men don’t add much to our fighting strength,’ Magnus said, beginning to wonder if Brom intended some kind of glorious last stand.
Brom turned off the passageway, before the stairs that led up to the keep, and stepped into a dusty antechamber that contained a disused slit trench.
‘We have a few friends here as well. They’re waiting for the signal to join us in the keep. We’ve got a chance, that’s all.’
He had a vicious look on his face and Magnus thought Brom was very much on edge, wanting to get bloody as soon as possible. In fact, his friend was shaking with anticipation.
Magnus noticed that the iron grating above the disused toilet trench had been opened from within and realized how Brom had sneaked in without having to pass the knights in the courtyard above.
The Ranen priest paused as he watched Brom quickly move to the open grating. ‘Brom,’ he said quietly, making his friend turn back to him. ‘You need to settle down. Your hand is shaking.’
Brom looked at his sword hand and smiled. ‘I feel like I’m going to war for the first time.’
‘Rillion and his knights are true fighting men. They’ll kill you if you’re not focused. You and I are not burdened with Rham Jas’s gifts, Brom… simple men like us need to rely on skill, steel and luck. Take a moment to focus, my friend.’
The young lord had to wrestle with his impatience before he sat down heavily on the grating. He was breathing deeply and Magnus realized he had been functioning largely on adrenalin up to this point.
‘Rham Jas is waiting upstairs, we can’t take too long,’ he said, glancing up at the huge Ranen priest. ‘Apparently he’s got a plan.’
‘He’s patient. The longer we give him, the more time he’ll have to rub his hands together and be impressed at his own cleverness.’
The disused slit trench led out from the inner keep and it looked as if Brom had bypassed the courtyard entirely when he came to rescue Magnus.
‘Does his plan involve getting out alive?’ Magnus asked.
The lord of Ro glanced up and smiled thinly. ‘If the plan works, we should be alive and able to stay in the city.’
‘Sounds like a good plan, then,’ Magnus said. ‘If it works.’
‘Well, you don’t just have me and the Kirin to rely on… don’t worry.’ Brom puffed out his cheeks and stood up slowly. ‘We’ve found some unlikely allies… and we gave Lanry something that should deal with Pevain.’
Magnus was curious but also eager to experience freedom. If they had allies and a plan, that could only be a good thing.
‘We need to move,’ said Brom, as he slid the steel grating aside.
‘Are you calm?’ asked Magnus.
‘No, not at all… but we still need to move.’
Magnus wasn’t going to patronize the young lord. He had got himself to Ro Canarn and sneaked into the city with only a Kirin scumbag for company. If he could do that, thought Magnus, maybe he wasn’t just a Ro lord playing at being a brigand.
‘Okay, so let’s move,’ he said, as Brom began to climb into the slit trench. ‘And your allies had better be something special.’
They climbed down into a narrow stone tunnel just large enough to accommodate Magnus’s huge shoulders. It was almost pitch-black, with only infrequent shards of moonlight penetrating from above, and Magnus was glad his friend knew the passages around his father’s keep. The trench had numerous side tunnels which snaked round the castle, but they were heading now down a shallow incline that, long ago, had been part of the sewer system of
Canarn. Duke Hector had not used the dungeon for many years and the trenches were rotten and grown over with moss.
Brom stopped after a few minutes of uncomfortable crawling and poked his head up out of the trench. Then he ducked back down and waved Magnus forward to join him. As the Ranen priest moved a part of the steel grating out of the way, he straightened and joined Brom in looking out on to Ro Canarn. There was a rope secured to the grating where Brom had climbed up from below, and the town square could be seen between buildings. Magnus quickly gained his bearings and saw the drawbridge to his right and the keep beyond. They had come out on the same level as the courtyard, and low cooking fires were just visible through another stone tunnel.
Brom tugged on the rope and signalled to someone below. Magnus couldn’t see the face of the man standing at the base of the wall, but he was tall and cloaked.
‘Who’s your friend?’ he asked Brom in a whisper.
‘His name’s Tyr Nanon. I’ll introduce you to him if we don’t get killed,’ the Ro lord replied, with gallows humour.
‘What’s the Kirin’s plan?’ Magnus was still whispering and he could see no army to come to their aid.
‘It involves explosions and surprise.’ Brom turned to look at Magnus. ‘Who do we need to worry about?’
‘Rillion and Nathan are the senior knights and Pevain’s in the town somewhere,’ Magnus responded, secretly longing for a chance to kill the mercenary knight.
‘Okay, let’s get into position.’ Brom had a look of extreme concentration on his face and Magnus realized his friend had been waiting for this opportunity for a while.
They climbed out of the slit trench and entered the semicircular drainage tunnel that led to the inner keep and past the drawbridge. On the other side, Magnus gasped as he saw dark shapes moving like shadows through the streets of Ro Canarn. All the figures were tall and they moved with an inhuman grace as they made their way towards the drawbridge. Magnus saw three mercenaries hanging around by the entrance to the keep and all three died silently, pulled into the darkness and despatched by the rapidly moving figures below. Some of Brom’s mysterious allies were carrying sacks slung across their backs, and all wielded large, leaf-shaped blades.
‘Brom, did you enlist a company of ghosts to help you?’ he asked, as he crawled after the young lord towards the cooking fires in the courtyard.
‘They’re friends of Rham Jas… and me as well, I suppose. Risen men, Dokkalfar, forest-dwellers – I’ve heard a few names for them over the last couple of days.’
Magnus was struck by this strange news, but asked pragmatically, ‘Are they trustworthy and honourable?’
‘I believe so. They’ve been fairly straight with us so far,’ answered Brom over his shoulder. ‘And Rham Jas trusts them.’
‘Ha, the trust of a filthy Kirin, I bet that is hard-won,’ Magnus said with as much humour as he could in the circumstances.
Rham Jas was his friend, but their relationship had been based on mutual teasing and the occasional fist fight. Brom knew this and snorted quietly with amusement as he reached the end of the tunnel.
In silence, the two of them crawled out of the semicircular drainage tunnel and crouched in darkness in the courtyard. Opposite, Magnus could see the tower that led to the great hall and the wooden stairs that snaked their way upwards from the dusty inner keep. Around the edges of the courtyard sat groups of bound soldiers – not true fighting men, but knights of the Red nonetheless, each carrying a longsword and wearing a steel breastplate. Magnus counted some fifty men and wondered how many of the strange forest-dwellers had come to help. The drawbridge was close by, maybe ten paces from their position, and he could just about make out dark figures forming at the top on the wooden ramp.
Brom gave a signal that the nearest figure registered, before moving silently to the winch that controlled the drawbridge. The plan was clearly to cut off reinforcements to the keep while they dealt with the smaller group of knights within, without interference from Pevain’s bastards.
The risen man didn’t raise the wooden ramp right away, but appeared to be waiting for something. Magnus thought that something must be the small figure moving across the battlements high above – whom the longbow in his hands identified as Rham Jas.
‘Stay against the wall and be ready to duck back into the tunnel,’ Brom said in a whisper.
Some of the shadowy figures massing just inside the keep moved slowly forward, taking care to stay out of the light and remain hidden. They held small sacks and, once they had come as close as they dared, they threw them towards the campfires.
Before the sacks landed the risen men had darted swiftly back and Magnus saw confusion on the faces of the Red knights as the parcels flew sedately past them and exploded when they touched the flames. Magnus had seen pitch and Karesian fire used in a similar way before, but never with such explosive results.
Sound, fire and light erupted in the dark courtyard as one after another the campfires exploded and men were torn to pieces. The knights reacted with nothing but panic and half of them had died within moments. In less than a second, the dark, silent keep had exploded into flames. Brom drew his sword as the signal to raise the drawbridge. As it creaked into life, a second, louder explosion could be heard from the town. Magnus glanced back out of the keep and could just see the edges of the marshal’s office burning violently by the docks. Lanry and the people of Canarn had evidently decided that they didn’t want Pevain around any more.
Noise and fire had burst upon the quiet of the evening, and Brom was framed in light as he shouted a defiant challenge at the panicked knights in the courtyard. The risen men were a step behind him and Magnus grinned broadly as he joined them.
The sacks had exploded violently but the fires had quickly burned down. Brom was shouting as he hacked two knights to death with swipes of his longsword. Magnus disliked using a sword, but he was still more than the bound men could handle as he cleaved his way through their ranks, barely taking time to parry as their wild attacks were blunted by a swift death.
It was a bizarre sensation to be free and fighting after so many days of captivity and the Ranen priest was enjoying the feeling of men falling under his immense strength. The bound knights were poor enough opponents and Magnus could allow himself a glance across the courtyard to see the risen men dealing out death from the shadows. There looked to be around twenty of them and they whirled their leaf-blades with grace as they killed the startled men of Ro. The Ranen priest was taken aback by the creatures’ otherworldly might and momentarily wondered why such people would ally themselves with an idiot like Rham Jas.
Magnus deflected a clumsy blow from a badly burned knight and decapitated him with a powerful backward swing of his sword. Nearby, Brom was holding a leaf-blade in his hand as he furiously killed any bound men who came across his path.
‘Is this the best they’ve got?’ he shouted across the melee.
As if in answer to the question, Magnus heard a shout from the wooden stairs that led to the keep and, looking up, saw more knights of the Red emerging from the great hall of Canarn. The churchmen that appeared were not bound men but true knights of the Red and dangerous foes. Magnus recognized them as some of Sir Nathan’s company and guessed that Rillion’s adjutant would be close behind his men.
High above, Magnus saw Rham Jas draw a flaming arrow and shoot across the keep towards the stairs. The arrow had something attached to it which exploded on impact, blowing several of the knights backwards, their broken bodies in flames. Several more fled back inside and Magnus experienced a moment of respect for the Kirin and his planning abilities. Raising the drawbridge had cut off the mercenaries and a well-aimed explosive arrow or two would cut off the true fighting men, leaving Brom and Magnus to finish off those in the courtyard. The old Brown cleric in the town must have killed a huge number of the mercenaries when he detonated the marshal’s office.
As men died around them, it occurred to Magnus that if they were to kill the senior k
nights and retake Canarn, someone would have to fight Rillion – and he was not keen to see Brom take a foolish step towards his own death by challenging the knight commander. Hacking apart bound men was one thing, defeating a company of true fighting men was something else. Rham Jas was a killer without equal, Brom was a skilled swordsman and, from what he’d seen, the forest-dwellers were formidable, but Magnus doubted they had the strength to win against overwhelming odds. Also, it would be only a matter of time before Pevain found a way of lowering the drawbridge, or a path through the secret tunnels, and joined them in the courtyard with his men – although judging by the explosions still sounding in the town below, Brother Lanry was proving more than a minor inconvenience to the mercenaries.
He looked up and wiped blood from his face. Around him were slaughtered bound men and, at a quick glance, he could see none dead on his own side. Brom was conserving his energy and expending minimum effort in despatching the frantic knights, while high above Rham Jas was fighting several men who had emerged from the guard towers. The Kirin was every bit as dangerous as Magnus remembered, and his katana dealt out death with chilling precision, quickly clearing the battlements of bound men.
Magnus paused. The number of knights remaining was negligible and they were cowering and dropping to their knees in surrender.
‘Kill them all,’ shouted Brom coldly, and Magnus turned sharply to face his friend.
‘No,’ he responded, more loudly than the young lord. ‘They’ve surrendered.’
Brom was doubled over and sweat was streaming down his face. He kicked a pleading knight out of the way and quickly sheathed his sword, before straightening up and breathing deeply.
‘Your priest is wise, Bromvy,’ said one of the risen men, a being shorter than his fellows but still tall and dangerous-looking. The risen men assembled the remaining knights into a group and Magnus could see that no more than six had survived the initial assault.
‘Yes,’ was all Magnus said in response before he turned back to the young lord of Canarn. ‘Brom, you need to calm down. The plan is working thus far. What’s next?’