“Estmor is under siege,” Nathaliey said. “The pasha’s army driven off or surrounded. If Estmor has fallen, what chance does this little rock have?”
The dark acolyte stopped. “Don’t listen to soldiers. They are gossiping fools, the lot of them.”
Her voice was loud enough that two nearby men paused from hammering at the wet hides they were attaching to wooden framework shielding the wall. They scowled, and Nathaliey enjoyed a small victory.
“So the castle is not under siege? And the pasha is not surrounded?” Nathaliey shook her head in mock sorrow when Jasmeen failed to answer. “Your master’s war has apparently collapsed.”
Jasmeen sneered. “The entire strength of the barbarian kingdoms amounts to a few thousand men. King Toth will muster fifty thousand, with tens of thousands more to support them. Entire cities will go hungry this winter to feed his army.”
“And yet the sorcerer is nowhere to be seen at the front lines,” Nathaliey answered. “His champions have withdrawn. Why? The east must still be troubling him. How is Toth going to subdue the whole of Eriscoba if he can’t manage a tiny little khalifate like Aristonia?”
“If you refer to your friends, they are already dead. Your wizard—what was his name? Memnet the so-called Great?—begged for mercy, and your fellow apprentices screamed as we stripped the skin from their bodies. We tore down your garden walls, burned your trees, and slaughtered them all. No two stones stand one on top of the other.”
Nathaliey was not so feeble that she couldn’t manage a laugh at the obvious lie. “Then it’s truly strange for the sorcerer to abandon these castles to the paladins and their armies. After all, if my order is dead, there’s no reason to withdraw.”
Jasmeen bared her teeth. “This fortress will never be taken. Let the barbarians lay siege. They have no wizardry, no war machines, no engineers or incendiaries. We can hold the castle for months if necessary. Longer. By then my master will have his armies.”
Nathaliey had no ready retort for this, as she’d already had this conversation in her head, and Jasmeen’s boast seemed all too true. All she could do was stare back at the woman and ignore the vision of wights floating through the air between them.
“You’ll never break my mind,” Nathaliey said. “Your poison will fail.”
Jasmeen stared for a long moment with her gaunt eyes boring into Nathaliey. She reached over the edge and gave the pole a shake, which made the gibbet sway where it hung above the gorge, then continued around to where a Veyrian continued whipping the prisoner. The screams had ceased, and the poor fellow could only moan pitifully.
The sound of marching feet and horses’ hooves soon rose like a dull thunder to the west. Jasmeen had disappeared around the wall walk behind the central keep, and didn’t reappear. She must be standing above the gates, waiting with the garrison commander.
Meanwhile, the sound grew until it echoed off the soaring peaks that rose above the Tothian Way. Soldiers stopped their work on the castle walls and turned to shuttling crossbow bolts, baskets of stones, and other missiles to the tower and battlements. Men lit fires on the wall walk, while others hauled up kettles, which they filled with oil and pitch.
Nathaliey waited in anticipation. She desperately wanted the Eriscobans to assault the castle and free her, but knew in her heart that any attempt would be futile. Hundreds of Wolfram’s men would die to little effect. Never mind the well-protected garrison; how would he even combat Jasmeen’s sorcery?
It took another hour before the advance units of the besieging army arrived. Much as she craned, Nathaliey couldn’t see them or any bit of the Tothian Way as it approached the small castle, but the army made plenty of noise, and it had to amount to several hundred men on foot and horse. Perhaps more. Someone outside the walls blew a trumpet, and a man hailed the garrison commander in a booming voice. This led to threats and demands shouted back and forth, followed by a volley of flaming arrows from the besieging army. They sailed over the walls and into the castle.
Unlike Estmor’s castle, this small fortress had never been a home or built with anything but defense in mind. There were few wood roofs inside, and these had been covered with wet hides. A handful of arrows struck, but the fire didn’t take hold.
The initial attack was followed almost immediately by return fire from crossbows and ballistae atop the castle walls. Jasmeen reappeared on the west side of the wall walk, where she paced among the defenders, casting enchantments into the bolts as they sped downward. The cries of wounded men rose from outside the walls, which brought jeers from the defenders. Two men trotted past Nathaliey’s cage, rolling barrels of oil, and their chatter was excited and confident.
The defenders must like their chances. An army amassed at the gates, with no way to storm the castle. The attackers could only suffer heavy losses, while the defenders would emerge from the battle unscathed.
So what the devil was Wolfram doing? It certainly sounded like a siege: pounding hammers, creaking cart wheels, men shouting about the assembly of siege engines. The Eriscobans seemed to be making camp on the highway and preparing for a protracted battle. They couldn’t see the hot oil waiting above, nor understand that Jasmeen could set it all afire as easily as she could snap her fingers.
Or maybe Wolfram wasn’t in command. He’d proven himself capable of spurring his forces to quick action, but only when he spied an opening. Otherwise, he was cautious, slow to commit the men and women under his banner. In other words, a good commander, not one likely to throw away lives.
There must be someone else leading the Eriscoban army, Nathaliey decided, a baron or earl mounting the attack while Captain Wolfram remained in command of the Blackshields, but otherwise remained apart from battle preparations. This attack was too hasty, too unlikely to succeed for Wolfram.
The Eriscobans continued on the move throughout the late morning and into early afternoon. Unable to see the action, and with no strength left to pull up a seeker, Nathaliey could only follow by ear. It sounded like half the foot soldiers and cavalry were piling up outside the castle gates, while the other half marched east, deeper into the mountains.
That gave Nathaliey some hope. Maybe they wouldn’t mount an all-out assault after all. Maybe their strategy was to lay siege to all the castles in the mountain passes, testing the defenses, bottling up defenders, but no more. Time would prove that the Veyrians were well stocked and invulnerable in their mountain redoubts, but at least the Eriscobans wouldn’t sacrifice their forces. When King Toth finally made his move, it would allow an orderly retreat to Estmor.
It was about two hours after noon when the sun dipped behind a crag in the mountains and an Eriscoban trumpet sounded from the highway. A voice shouted a command, and a great cry rose from the barbarian army. Feet stomped and spears banged against shields. The Veyrians stiffened on the wall, crossbows in hand, hot oil at the ready, while they waited for the attackers to make their move.
Another trumpet from the highway, this one high and clear—a single long note. Nathaliey watched, tense. Enough with the horns. The Eriscobans could blare and stomp and cheer, and it wouldn’t get them through the castle gate.
Arrows soared up to the walls, and this time it was a full volley, hundreds of them. The defenders ducked behind the battlements to wait it out, but it seemed that the attackers were prepared to keep shooting and shooting to no apparent purpose.
The sun, still moving across the sky, emerged from the other side of the crag and bathed the castle in clear brilliant light. Nathaliey squinted, unable to see. At that moment, there came a clanking sound and she squinted, disbelieving, as hooks flew up and snared the crenelations atop the battlements. Somehow, the attackers had timed their volleys to launch claw hooks disguised among the arrows just as the sunlight moved from behind a mountain peak and temporarily blinded the defenders.
And yet, what possible good could it do? The attackers weren’t spiders; they couldn’t scramble up the ropes fast enough to reach the top, not carrying armo
r and weapons. Indeed, Jasmeen had already spotted the attempt to scale the walls, and was shouting for hot oil and crossbows to repel it. One of the more alert Veyrians drew a dagger and severed the rope holding one of the hooks in place.
Nathaliey was starved, poisoned, and demoralized, and yet the wheels were turning, clanking away as they raised some internal portcullis in her mind. In one brilliant moment of clarity, she understood, she knew what Wolfram’s forces meant to do. She shielded her eyes and looked skyward.
There, from behind the mountain peak and with the sun at their back, was a great cloud silhouetted against the sky. It dropped silently and swiftly, then broke into a hundred individual components. Not a sound, not a whisper as they approached.
At the last moment, a Veyrian soldier cried a warning, and suddenly the entire flock of griffins let out an ear-shattering scream, dozens of animals all at once, joined by a full-throated roar from their riders.
A griffin blasted past Nathaliey’s gibbet in a rush of air that shook the iron cage. It seized a soldier on the wall, who only had time to stare in dawning horror as the talons closed around him and hurled him over the edge. He went flailing past her cage, making a final, desperate, and unsuccessful lunge for her metal bars before he fell screaming into the gorge. The rider angled her griffin along the wall and hurled her spear at a man with a crossbow. It hit the man in the chest. Another Veyrian down.
There were forty or fifty griffins in the first wave, and they had nearly swept the defenders from the wall by the time the second wave barreled in. Each of these griffins carried two people, one rider and one passenger. They landed just long enough to discharge the second person to the walls, and Nathaliey managed a rusty cheer when she saw they were paladins.
Wolfram was among them, and he spotted her in the cage. “Hold on! We’ll get you out.”
But first there was fighting to do, as Veyrians rushed up from below while crossbows and ballistae chased off griffins, and some of the newly arrived paladins were trying to fight their way to the castle gate to open it for the Eriscobans to pour in, while others hauled at ropes to hoist their comrades in arms up to the wall. Nathaliey could only watch, frustrated, as the battle raged without her participation.
Jasmeen came slithering around the edge of the wall walk. Paladins and Veyrians did battle all around her, but none seemed to notice her, and they even bent their movements in combat to allow her through. Sorcery swirled about her robes, and she seemed to be dragging multiple shadows. One moment her face looked dead, a rotting corpse, the next a blue wight, and the next, it was her own face, gaunt and starved. She came to the edge of the wall and stared out at the gibbet on its pole.
“I see you,” Nathaliey said. “You can’t hide from me.”
“That is because you are half-turned. My sorcery is your sorcery. And because we are the same, it reveals me, it doesn’t hide me.”
“Your elixir failed.” Nathaliey’s words came out cracked and hoarse, but defiant. “The castle is taken, and I’ll be freed.”
“Which is why you must die,” Jasmeen said.
The dark acolyte put her hand on the wooden pole, closed her eyes, and squeezed. The pole groaned. There was a crack, and a fissure opened down the wood. The cage sagged as the pole holding it up buckled, and Nathaliey grabbed the bars in sudden fear. The pole held one second longer, dangling, then cracked in two and broke free. Nathaliey’s stomach lurched as she fell. The cage dropped away, with the castle rapidly receding above her.
Something jerked her upward. A griffin’s talons held the gibbet and lifted her higher. The rider leaned over her mount and looked at Nathaliey through narrowed eyes. It was the woman with the emerald-green stone at her brow. Laboring against the weight, the griffin hauled up the iron cage and dropped it with a clank on the wall walk.
Nathaliey was face down in the gibbet and couldn’t see anything. But her ears worked. The castle gates clanked open, and attackers poured into the bailey. The walls seemed to be taken, and the remaining battle concentrated around the keep. Griffins swooped overhead with eagle-like cries and blasts of air from their beating wings, and more than one defender who’d survived the initial assault fell screaming to his death.
A few minutes later, the battle came to an end as the remaining Veyrians cried their surrender. Strong arms turned the gibbet over, and paladins set to work breaking her out. When she was hauled to her feet, trembling and weak and unable to hold herself upright, she found herself staring at Captain Wolfram’s confident face. He smiled and rested his hand briefly on her shoulder before setting off to finish securing the castle.
Griffins still swooped overhead. One landed long enough to retrieve a fallen rider, and two more emerged from the gorge hauling the struggling body of an injured griffin between them, which they carried up toward the peaks. A griffin landed atop the keep, its wings spread and its giant, eagle-like head cocked and fixing the Eriscobans below with a penetrating gaze.
The woman who had rescued Nathaliey sat on the griffin’s back. She held her long graceful sword in hand and stared down at Nathaliey from above, her gaze every bit as sharp as that of her mount.
“A debt acknowledged,” the woman called down in a high clear voice. She sheathed her sword. “Ska!”
Her griffin lifted skyward with a shrill cry. Other griffins swooped in after her, and together they flew in a massive flock down the canyon, away from the castle. Moments later, the griffins and riders were all gone.
Chapter Eighteen
Nathaliey was in bed in the keep, her head aching, her stomach churning from the bit of ale and bread she’d taken, when Wolfram knocked on the door and entered. He’d changed out of his tunic and breastplate and wore a simple linen shirt, with a bandage visible at the right shoulder blade. There was another cut on his hand, but he otherwise seemed healthy and strong. He looked around, taking in the bed, the single trunk, and the lantern on a roughly hewn table.
“These were the castle commander’s own quarters. Rather spartan, wouldn’t you say?”
Nathaliey fought off a violent shiver. “Whatever else this place is, it’s not built for comfort.”
Wolfram was partially blocking the light from the small window and moved into a different position to study her. “Your eyes are yellow.”
“That’s the least of my troubles.”
“Your strength will return with time. Food, clean water, and rest.”
“My body should heal quickly enough. I’m a wizard—we can live without food longer than you might expect.”
“They gave you nothing?”
“No food. A little water. And a poison—an elixir of thrall. I see wights. They’re standing over your shoulder right now.”
Wolfram cast a quick glance behind him. “Where?”
“I don’t know if they’re really here. I think not. It’s a vision, nothing more. I need time. And another wizard to heal me, time to eat and rest in the gardens.”
“I can’t give you that, I’m afraid. We’re rather short on wizards around here, and Yuli won’t leave the mountains to carry you down. I already asked.”
“Yuli?”
“Yuli is the flockheart, the queen of the griffin riders. I asked her to carry you home, but she refused. Said she already carried Markal to the lowlands and seemed shaken by the trip. Too many people, too hot. Thick, poisonous air. Her words, not mine.”
Nathaliey pushed herself into a sitting position with her back against the cold stone wall. “She knows Markal? When did this happen?”
“Sometime after he left us, but I don’t know anything more than that. The griffin riders don’t much care for us, and the feeling is mutual. When Yuli first approached, offering to help us drive Toth’s army from the mountains, my men almost caused a small war by trying to shoot their lead griffins out of the sky. We’re fortunate they missed.”
“What about Jasmeen? The acolyte, I mean. Did you capture her?”
Wolfram’s expression turned grim. “No, she escaped. As
did Hamid and his marauders. We almost took him that night you sent a warning with your magical eye. I fought the brute myself, came face-to-face with Soultrup.”
“You bested him, though. You drove him back to the castle. I heard him return, and he’d lost men.”
“Aye, that we did. Hamid could have taken my life, though. He was defeating me at the time. He could have cut me down, but stopped, waited for someone else to do the killing.”
Nathaliey studied Wolfram’s face. “Because of the red sword?”
“Hamid was already struggling with the blade. Once, it tried to hurl itself from his hands before . . . well, whatever evil forces resumed control. Perhaps he was afraid that if he killed me, I would fight from within to take it from him.”
That sounded plausible. Nathaliey wanted to question Wolfram more, to hear the man’s strategy, to know if he meant to march all the way to the khalifates. And what about the griffin riders? They’d fought one battle, but would they be back to help overthrow the other fortifications?
But she was so tired, and her head was aching. She was thirstier than ever, and the wights were beginning to whisper. She found herself thinking about Jasmeen, wondering where the dark acolyte had gone once she escaped from the castle, and if she could follow. That was the nourishment she craved. The elixir . . . if she could—
Nathaliey clenched her eyes shut and sank back into the bed with a groan. If she didn’t regain her strength, she was afraid that she’d find a way out of the castle and track down Jasmeen. Not to defeat her, but to swear fealty to the dark wizard.
“I’ll let you rest,” Wolfram said, “and we can talk later. But if you wake up feeling weak, and need something to fortify your strength, try this.”
He set a bottle on the table next to a stack of enemy maps and dispatches that nobody had yet examined. Nathaliey peered at it through one half-opened eye.
“Wine? I thought you barbarians preferred beer and ale.”
“Captured from a wagonload of enemy supplies. There were rare spices, silks, wines, and brandies. Intended for Pasha Kerem, most likely, given the excess of luxury. This bottle isn’t just any wine, it appears to be from your gardens, by the wax seal on the cork.”
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