by David Keck
In a moment of impossible horror, a hundred beating pinions lifted. The maimed soldier struggled, his limbs twitching in crooked angles, but the gallows-birds tore him from the street, swinging him beyond the roof peaks.
A sandal slapped from the rooftop into the lane.
Bercta stung her carthorse. “Run!”
THEY PELTED FOR the Gates of Sunset. Those who could walk, ran. Every able man had the poles of a litter. The cart carried a dozen men more, heads rolling between ankles.
Durand’s head was full of dark bargains and sorcerers. He had dragged Deorwen into the Hells.
Now, more than the dull roll of an army’s heels on pavement, they heard voices. As they rounded one corner, the street burst with clattering hooves: a green-cloaked outrider swung onto the scene. Berchard wrenched his crossbow from his shoulder—and snapped a bolt into the face of the man’s horse.
“Bloody eye!” Berchard snarled, disgusted at himself. They swarmed the downed rider before the horse could fall.
“He’ll be missed,” said Berchard, and so they rushed onward, taking the smallest lanes their company could manage—ducking upper rooms, throwing debris aside, both hubs grating over shop doors. Durand breathed through his teeth, jogging ahead—blade in hand—ready to launch himself at whatever he found around each corner. This was not what he meant when he thought of taking Deorwen away from the fighting.
But, finally, the Gates of Sunset stood before him. The mob heaved, knowing death was behind them. Still, someone saw the gray hospital tabards of the men from the Sleepers Mercy and people made way so that soon they were inside and the army had not caught them.
As Durand saw Deorwen walk into safety, he nearly fell to his knees.
THEY HAD HARDLY pitched through the gates when Lamoric rode into the square. Coensar, Kieren, and a conroi of knights followed, all armed. Badan hunkered over his saddlebow, cocking his eyebrow at Durand with Deorwen at his side.
Lamoric was the knight-commander. Without a glance, he called to the captain of the gate, ten fathoms above the crowd. “It is the order of the duke that the great gates of Acconel must stand open! All who wish to flee the traitor Radomor must have their chance as long as it is in our power to grant it. You, the garrison of His Grace’s Gates of Sunset, are commanded to hold the portal wide until Yrlac’s ladders touch the walls, or his host is massed in the streets before you.”
High under the clouded Heavens, the captain of the gates bowed low. “As His Grace commands, Lordship!”
A cheer arose among the mobs, and Lamoric saluted them all.
He had seen the hospital cart, and approached, still waving. “They wouldn’t cheer so loud if they knew how little time that’s bought them. The siege is on us. Radomor has outriders within bowshot. He’s seized the bridges on both sides of Acconel. But old Sir Kieren tells me these gates drop in a heartbeat.”
“More will get in if they don’t panic and crowd the way,” Deorwen said.
“It’s what Kieren said. You have been lending a hand?”
Deorwen looked up. “I could not stand by.”
“Good, good. I suppose with Durand watching over you, you’re safe enough.”
Durand set his teeth, he couldn’t meet the man’s eyes. When he glanced up, he met Badan’s stare.
“I never dreamed Radomor could bring so many, or so fast,” said Lamoric. “Our men have seen trebuchets. They’re throwing the things up in half a day. It’s taking us longer to hand the townsfolk weapons than he requires to ring the city. He’ll launch the first assault in—”
A great bell tolled.
Knights twisted, and a hundred other bells joined the first: a slow, heavy tolling that trembled in the air.
Lamoric pawed rain from his face. “That will be the high sanctuary. My father calls us.” For a moment, the others avoided his face. There was family to bury.
AN URGENT TAP summoned Durand into the darkness of Gunderic’s Tower. The bodies lay, shrouded, in the Painted Hall. Men and boys shuffled and stared. And a serving man led Durand to his place: he was to shoulder one of the long poles of Lady Adelind’s bier. He glanced over the woman’s draped profile, thinking of that dreaming moment above her bed when he had seen her wake—and seen her die.
Deorwen shot him a glance over Almora’s shoulder.
With a rattle of censers and relics, the crowd in the Painted Hall drew itself into a solemn file. Priests walked before the draped bodies, chanting under golden standards. The family followed behind.
Durand’s hands trembled. He’d had little sleep.
In the castle courtyards, mobs of knights huddled in the rain waiting to join the march and play honor guard. On every side were unshaven men who’d been dragged from the walls—all in armor, all searching for glimpses of their posts. They’d emptied the battlements with Radomor in the streets.
The solemn procession unwound from the castle yards.
They passed files of townsmen in the market beyond the gate—bakers, weavers, stable hands—lined up in the drizzle to get what blades and bows the armory could give them. Most of these men smeared their hats from their heads as the cortege passed. Many fell to their knees. All wore the same look of horror: who was left on the walls? Radomor had five thousand swords.
In a single glance back, Durand saw Abravanal’s numb eyes. Tiny Almora seeing her mother. Lamoric gaping at the size of the honor guard. In the rear of the train, pages and shield-bearers carried the warlike relics of House Gunderic: shields plundered by crusading dukes, banners of forgotten houses, the alien charges of lake and mountain peoples lost to time. Some had hung in the Painted Hall two thousand winters; now solemn boys carried these things in the rain.
Soon, the pinnacles of Acconel’s high sanctuary appeared over the rooftops. In the streets, people hung from their windows to watch them pass. Even as serving men scattered alms among the silent onlookers, the people counted the knights in the procession.
Finally, the cortege drew up before the great doors of the sanctuary, ranks of haloed icons waiting above gilded priests below. Oredgar the Patriarch spread his arms at the threshold. But before the fearsome old man could offer his greetings, the Heavens opened.
The weight of rain drove man, woman, and priest through the sanctuary doors.
AS THE RUPTURED procession splashed into candle smoke and incense, Durand peered around Adelind’s pall. He had pictured an empty sanctuary. But now, hundreds—thousands—of hollow-eyed faces looked on from among the sinuous pillars of the ancient place: refugees driven by the storm.
Priests summoned order and the throng parted, leaving an avenue of wet stone to the high altar. Durand swung into step.
Beyond the staring crowd, priests prayed, nose to the wall, punctuating their whispers with rapid nods and genuflections. At the ground and high in the clerestory, their mutterings puffed clouds of steam up the polished stone.
“Let the fallen be laid at the heart of the sanctuary,” said the Patriarch.
Durand and the other pallbearers set their burdens before the altar, then joined grieving family, honor guard, and brandished heirlooms as they followed the course of Heaven’s Eye, walking solemn rings around the dead, one ring within the other, turning like the chambers of a lock.
As Durand’s empty hands dropped, he felt the sanctuary come to life. The great mass of priests and townspeople beyond the funeral party took up the march, and so many moved that the great sanctuary seemed to come unmoored above them all: a polished Heaven turning over the chanting sea of the masses. So many stricken people, so many afraid—they grieved with their duke, whom they could hardly know. They grieved for the lives that had been torn from them. They sang for the losses they knew must come. Thousands marched. Thousands sang.
In the midst of it all, the Patriarch stood, bright as a flame in his shining robe. With a solemn nod, he summoned the family from the churning multitude.
Lamoric, still in stained and soaking war gear, looked to his father, his wife, his
sister. He stepped into that dizzy heart of stillness and, after a moment’s blinking hesitation, set his hand on his brother’s shoulder.
In that heartbeat, Almora slipped her minders and darted between the long shapes, joining her brother. Someone had found her a bunch of daffodils and she stood with them, frozen like an animal. Lamoric touched her shoulder while Deorwen crouched at the little girl’s side. With profound self-possession, the tiny thing got on tiptoe to peck her brother and her surrogate mother on the cheek. Daffodils shivered as she reached high to set a flower by each. Lamoric lifted her from the scene, clutching her to his chest.
Next, Abravanal stepped between the two bodies, hands clasped. He looked to Almora, as if astonished that he hadn’t helped her. “My son . . . His wife . . .” The words creaked from his heart audible only to the very nearest ears. “He was the support of my old age. I had seen the future in them. It still hangs before my mind’s eye.”
He glanced at Almora. At Lamoric. “I do not know what doom will—”
The stones rocked. The air shuddered. A thousand candles swayed. Every foot stopped.
North. “The Fey Gates,” Lamoric said. The crowd was looking now.
There was another great boom: south. “Harper’s.” Lamoric passed his sister into Deorwen’s hands. “That was the Harper’s Gate coming down.” A final boom slammed: west toward Yrlac and Ferangore. “And Sunset. The Gates of Sunset are down. Any who come for shelter now come too late. Radomor is at the walls.”
Carrion birds stormed past the tall windows over their heads.
19. The Night’s Messengers
With Lamoric and the duke’s guard, Durand sprinted up the lofty Gates of Sunset. The gatehouse parapet hung like the prow of a vast warship above deep ranks of Yrlaci soldiers. They filled the streets, brimming in each channel like the city was in flood.
Kieren shook his head, muttering, “They’ve used all the green dye between here and the Dreaming Land.” The old duke blinked, a robe like a great rug around his shoulders.
In the vanguard of Yrlac’s battalions stood a tight squadron of knights. They rode under a new banner: Yrlac’s red leopard under a jagged crown. In their midst, Durand saw the hulking Champion, the two grinning Rooks, and—most monstrous of all—Radomor, bald and bearded in his green war gear. All the carrion crows for a hundred leagues were heaped upon the rooftops, greedy for the coming battle.
As Abravanal set his hands on the battlements, Radomor rode out, clattering into bowshot. His charger was nearly wild under the wings of his mantle.
“Duke of Gireth! Your time has come. Submit to the rightful king, or perish a traitor and a fool.”
“You are the fool, Radomor!” Abravanal shouted. He stuttered. “What do you gain with this madness?”
“I gain the realm in strength. The people in safety. The crown must be wrested from this, the most stunted branch of an ancient lineage.”
“You are mad! Gireth has allies. The king will ride with his host. He will teach you your folly.”
“My poor cousin has much to teach of folly, but you will not soon see him here. Not for you who denied him his hostage. And your allies? I grant you Garelyn, but Ragnal keeps him penned in the Mount of Eagles. The rest will watch us play our game. They will watch, but you are alone.”
Abravanal’s fingers clamped the stone. “I will not bow!” Crows shifted their wings.
“Squander time and blood in defiance of your rightful king and I will put the city of your ancestors to the torch!”
The sinews of Abravanal’s neck stood like a web of bow cords. “I will not bow! Not to you. Not to your minion fiends! You will not have Gireth from me!” Kieren caught the old man’s shoulders before he could fling himself from the gates.
Radomor drew a great blade from his scabbard. To Durand’s eye, wings of shadow pressed about the man; almost, he could make out shapes shuddering close as the blade flashed cold above. Durand wondered if anyone else could see it.
“On your head, Gireth,” rumbled Radomor. “The blood of Gunderic is at its end. His house is fallen. How many will pay for this last folly of a dead line?”
A final sweep of his blade sent an infinity of black wings to choke the Heavens, and the men of Gireth dragged their lord from his battlements.
BEYOND THE GATES of Sunset, Radomor drew his battalions behind the screen of buildings. Durand thought of a cocked fist or crossbow. Dark eyes glittered from tenement windows of the lower city. Engines moved in the narrow places. Rain fell, and still Durand watched.
He watched as the light bled from the clouds, and dusk settled obscurely. Peering from the battlements, he thought of Sir Agryn and his sundial. The man’s prayers were often thwarted by a clouded Heaven.
With a grunted greeting, Berchard joined Durand atop the gatehouse, spying through an embrasure into the lower city. “Host of Heaven, I hate waiting. What is he—Hells.” He ducked back as soon as his eyes could focus. Monstrous espringal-crossbows sat like adders in the streets, trained on the battlements, their crews watching for the glint of helmets. “They picked anyone off yet?”
“Not that I’ve heard. They haven’t loosed a bolt. Radomor’s poised out there like a headsman.”
“Waiting for the rain to break. I saw a crew shoot an espringal once that had got itself soaked. It leapt up like a scorpion. Whipped ten men blind. Took a dozen arms.” He laughed. “Tacked a friendly sergeant to the neck of his horse.”
Durand tried a smile, but he could see Radomor’s men moving, squads jockeying through the rain.
Berchard shrugged. “Radomor’s had a good look at this place; there’s a reason no one’s taken it. It’s still a stout old fortress. Nobody’s daft enough to try.”
“Except without warning.”
Berchard dug a knuckle under his eye patch. “Or with engines of war.”
Now Durand laughed. “I watched them drag one up this way.” He pointed into a long street where a machine stood like a fiend’s windmill. Its throwing arm was a cedar as tall as the citadel. “It was a near thing.” The streets were narrow and twisting.
Berchard pulled his sodden cloak around him. “Trebuchet. I’ve seen one of the buggers throw stones it took an ox team to haul.”
“Radomor’s got more than the one.” Rough wooden towers poked through the lines of rooftops. “I’ve lost count.”
Berchard shook his head, blowing out his cheeks. The sight made the old campaigner pale. “Hells. Let’s hope he doesn’t choose this spot to start.”
But several of the big engines were aimed their way, and Durand had watched battalions jockeying through the alleys, massing out of sight. The siege engines would pound the Gates of Sunset and the army would bolt over the rubble. This was where the blow would fall, and this was where they must throw Radomor back.
“What is it?” said Berchard. “Durand . . . ? What are you—”
Some dark humor tweaked Durand’s lip, and Berchard clapped both hands over his face.
“And this is where you chose to stand?” The grizzled knight shook his head and shot a glance back through the embrasure. A group of Radomor’s men scurried. “Hells, you are green.”
“A man has to stand somewhere,” said Durand.
Berchard grunted at this. “Green as grass. I wonder if there’s time to get an extra mail coat. Maybe another helmet or two. I’ll need to be wrapped up like a turtle just to stand near you.” He shook his head. “I had a message for you—seems a waste of time now. Coen says we’re to get rest while we can. I’m not sure how much sleep a man would need to start catching the stones from trebuchets, but it’s your turn. With this sky, the buggers will likely hold out until dawn.”
Durand made to protest.
“When Radomor comes knocking, I think you’ll know,” Berchard said. “Don’t worry. You can come fight him then.”
Durand looked at Berchard awhile, then nodded. He went to find a dry spot under the walls.
IN A TOWER storeroom nearby, sleep came s
uddenly.
Durand sank deep—into that place between and below men where the deepest dreams sometimes take them. He sank—with hardly a tremor of recognition—into a midnight sea that stank of clay.
Strange words moved in the dark. The cut and pull of the strange syllables stirred the leviathans of those frigid depths. Not one. Not two. Vast shapes churned toward a gray surface.
And Durand followed in their wake, remembering only a dread of what might follow. He rose from that well through a complicated darkness of roots and soil to emerge suspended above a strange clearing. Some distance away, the watch fires of a citadel rose from ramshackle tenements. This was some grassy wasteland between a river and the outermost streets. Here and there were broken bits of wood, stones, and smashed crockery: middens. The grass stood in tussocks. As he looked over these, his gaze fell on the black sockets of new graves. Heaps of fresh earth were mounded nearby.
More unnerving than these open graves, twitching shadows swung above this wasteland graveyard. Dozens of shapes circled a steaming fire, stirred by strange words.
As he looked on, Durand felt as though he were truly hanged. He could neither breathe nor move and could almost feel the hangman’s knot pounding at his throat.
Through this dream of shadows, living beings moved. A huddled pair squatted among the graves, bent over close dirty work. Durand thought of tubers and paring knives. Firelight gleamed on bare scalps and blotted hands. They wore black robes—pendulous sleeves.
A dozen paces away, two figures watched: a mighty warrior, twisted and glowering in cloaks and mail. A step behind him, a giant in a battle helm, the gray-silk threads of his beard flowing in the same current that stirred the shadows.
Durand struggled to draw a breath.
“This is a terrible thing,” growled the warrior.