by T. O. Munro
“I’m packing.”
“Why bother? No one can handle those swords.”
“There is one person out there that could, and she mustn’t get hold of them. With either of these in her hands she’ll make plate mail as useless for armour as a silk robe.”
“How are you going to pack them then?”
“Just keep watch, Lilith.” There were some secrets he would not share, even in the extremis of their present circumstance. Fear made her obedient. She turned her eye to the tiny crack in the door. The shouts were fainter now, the battle either lost or moving further away from them. Haselrig bustled about his awkward business and then the job was done and the long simple box fastened shut again.
“We can’t get out, Haselrig.” There was a growing edge of panic in Lilith’s commentary. “They’re killing wizards. Some little brat just cut Aleric’s hands off with an axe. Haselrig, we’re going to die!”
“Shut up Lilith and keep watching.”
He dragged the box towards the back of the hutch and kicked at the planking of the rear wall. It gave way easily, shoddy orcish workmanship. His workroom had been assembled in the shadow of the southern curtain wall. Through the opening his footwork had created, Haselrig looked out on the section of scaffolding supporting the unset wizard stone. All was relatively quiet in the ten foot gap between his shaky workroom and the wooden poles.
Haselrig reached for the lantern and turned up the wick. As the light flared brightly, he swung his arm and cast the object at the base of the nearest pole.
“What are you doing, you fool?” Lilith had abandoned her post by the door to see what Haselrig was up to.
The lantern shattered into a puddle of broken glass and spilt oil which licked at the foot of the timber structure. “I’m making us an escape route.”
“If that scaffolding goes, you’ll bring the whole wall down.”
Haselrig shook his head. After the unfortunate episode with the barrel of pitch at the gatehouse, Quintala had given strict orders on the separation of the sections of scaffolding so that a fire in one could not trigger a domino of disaster. “Not the whole wall, Lilith, just a section wide enough for us to slip through. Now, if you have any sorcery beneath those dirty fingernails of yours, this would be a good time to show it and kindle that sputtering flame into a proper conflagration.”
***
Johanssen’s men were skilful warriors, lightly armoured but working bows and swords with brisk efficiency. They converged on the inner gatehouse from both sides, grapnels and climbing ropes making short work of the height difference between the gate battlements and the walkway on the curtain wall. Kimbolt seized a grapnel from a soldier pinned down by an orcish arrow. Around him the men of Nordsalve returned fire on the few defenders. The seneschal was glad to have exchanged his princess minding duties for a more martial role. He hooked the grapnel on a merlon with his first throw and then launched himself from the uncertain solidity of the wizardstone walkway beneath his feet. The stuff looked like stone and felt like stone, but it flexed beneath running feet in a way that natural stone would not.
An orc appeared in the embrasure above him. The creature held a hand axe high for a killing throw which Kimbolt, two hands on the rope, was in no position to defend himself against. But then an arrow erupted from the orc’s eye and he tumbled forward, toppling past Kimbolt in a fall that was nearly as hazardous to the seneschal as the hurled hand axe would have been.
Kimbolt caught his breath and then resumed the climb. As he plunged onto the gatehouse roof, all was carnage. Orcs caught between Kimbolt and Johanssen’s sections were being forced back. One green hided monster, larger than the rest, lashed out with an axe catching his opponent on the knee. The orc gathered his weapon for a killing blow as the soldier collapsed to the floor, but Kimbolt’s sword through his side swiftly ended the threat.
Johanssen tumbled over the northern parapet, parrying one orcish axe before shoulder charging the creature against a merlon. Kimbolt moved to assist but other soldiers stepped in first and the last orc fell beneath a rain of blows.
The constable straightened and greeted Kimbolt with a curt nod. “You beat me to the prize, Seneschal.”
Kimbolt stared out over the captured fortress, the bailey strewn with fallen orcs, outlanders and a few moaning crippled wizards. “I think we have all won a prize tonight, Constable,” he said.
“Fire, sir!” a soldier called both their attentions to a blaze on the southern wall, fierce but localised, the crack of the spluttering scaffolding audible even at this distance.
“Crap,” Kimbolt muttered. “It’ll bring the whole lot down.”
“It’s not spreading,” Johanssen observed. The invaders still in the bailey were dousing the neighbouring sections with water, though the constable was right, there appeared to be no danger of the fire spreading.
“Maybe there’s enough strength for the wall to stand by itself now,” Kimbolt suggested, testing the strange texture of the unset wizard stone with his heel.
Just then the last of the blazing scaffolding fell, blazing poles tumbling on a low hut in the shadow of the wall, setting the roof on fire. But before the flames could fully take hold there was a thunder and a crash. The twenty foot long section of wall collapsed into a cloud of dust that bloomed and spread, hiding the fire and obscuring vision as it rolled away from the epicentre of destruction. Even at the distant gatehouse Kimbolt quickly found himself tasting the moisture sapping dust on his lips and tongue. For those in the bailey, the confusion must have been absolute.
“Johanssen,” he coughed. “Get some men, we must secure the breach.”
***
The dust was everywhere, it obscured vision and muffled sound. Haselrig could not see his own hand infront of his face and the spluttering calls that must have been Lilith were as indistinct as shouts heard underwater.
“Quick,” he coughed. “While no-one can see.”
He reached out and in the black mist of dust he found a bony hand and held it, pulled it down to the far handle on the wooden box which he knew was by his feet. “Hold this.” She must have understood for there was a tug of her being stirred to motion as he dragged the box behind him and headed for the breach.
There was heat about them, the embers of burnt timbers not entirely extinguished by the cloud of dust. There were other shouts, a commotion to left and right, clearer now with the dust beginning to part settle, part evaporate, once the magic that bound it had been destroyed.
“Quickly,” Haselrig re-iterated as they crossed the wreckage of burnt scaffolding. He stumbled into the remnants of the wall, the jagged three foot height of set stone and foundation blocks on which the rest of the curtain wall had been assembled. This material had won its rigid permanence at the last full moon; the thinning stone dust he was inhaling had missed its chance by nearly a full week.
He threw himself over the wall, knowing there was only a narrow ledge of rock before the steep sloping edge of the hill. He dragged the chest with his other hand. He felt it grate over the stone and heard a muffled cry as Lilith, presumably still attached at the other end, crashed into the parapet.
“Come on, you bitch,” he hissed. There were other sounds now, unseen people closing in. But the fading dust was allowing the fire to regain a hold. A glance behind showed a dull orange glow where the embers had ignited the roof of his workroom. He let out a soft curse at the materials that would be destroyed, then again, bit was etter that than they should fall into other hands. The chest held the only artefacts that fire would not destroy and the enemy must not have.
“It’s too steep,” Lilith said as she fell beside him on the outside of the curtain wall, separated by the length of the chest.
“It’s that or dying horribly. Nobody behind us wishes us well – right now I’d say gravity is our best and closest friend.”
“Oh crap!” she said.
“Just try to slide feet first, rather than roll,” he told her. “And watch out for gors
e bushes. Push off, now.”
They slid together, the chest between them providing some stability and braking as they careered down a slope that fell almost a yard for every yard it strayed sideways. It was not the steepest gradient on Colnhill, but also not the shallowest. Haselrig would certainly have chosen a different route for his precipitous escape from calamity, if he had the choice. But this was the best of a bad lot, sliding on his arse away from a woman who had every reason in the world to kill him and taking with him the very weapons which would make her just about unstoppable.
Somehow he kept a grip on the chest, though halfway down the box began to bang and trail behind him, suggesting that Lilith had parted company with the other end. There were shouts behind him, at the top of the hill, but no sounds of pursuit or calls for archers. It appeared that the invaders had thought the fire accidental rather than a cover for an escape and that the blazing workshop and the risk it posed were a more urgent distraction than looking down the hillside.
At last the slope began to flatten and, at the end of his tumbling ride, Haselrig was pleased to find that his limbs all still answered to his commands albeit with the painful protest at the bruised battering they had received. Nothing broken he limped towards a groaning lump a few yards away.
“Can you walk?”
“Fuck you Haselrig!”
“That’s not the answer I was looking for.”
“You’ve just pulled me down a bloody mountain.”
“It’s a hill, you silly bitch. And if you can’t walk I’m going to have to kill you to make sure you don’t get captured and tell any of the bastards up there things they just don’t need to know.” He paused for breath, his winded lungs not up to long pronouncements. “So, can you walk?”
“I can walk,” she admitted sourly.
“Good, well grab one end of this and get walking.” He pointed to the chest behind him. “I don’t think we’re going to find many friendly faces around here tonight and I need to get somewhere where I can let Quintala know what a complete entrail strewn disaster tonight has been.”
He reached inside his shirt for the black medallion on its chain. Communication outside the appointed hours was only to be undertaken in the direst emergencies, on pain of severe and extreme pain, but he was confident this eventuality would qualify.
Lilith trudged at the other end of the chest. “Will you tell Rondol that I’m alright.” There was an uncharacteristic coyness to the sorceress’s request. “He worries,” she added.
Haselrig gave no more reply than a scowl. As things now stood they all had a lot more to worry about than the state of the red wizard’s love life.
***
Dawn was spreading its grey fingers across the victory Hepdida had been denied any part in. The crown princess kicked through the ashes of the hut by the breach in the wall. Niarmit had insisted she stay behind with four soldiers as a personal body guard; they had not brought her up until right at the end of the battle for the fortress. Although the fire had caught a ferocious hold of the little hut, there had been a hope of damping it out. Hope, that is, until an explosion of some store of chemicals had warned the men in the bucket chain off. Then, since it posed no threat to the integrity of the rest of the scaffolding, they had retreated content to watch as the flames burned themselves into extinction.
The ash was a fine grey dust, lying over and under a few blackened boards. Hepdida flipped one over with her toe and saw a charred book beneath. She knelt to retrieve it. Most of the pages had been burned away, the few that were left were black and dry, flaking into nothingness at the merest breath of her fingers. All that was left was the cover which had been face down in the dirt. She turned it over. Here, the thickness of the binding and the way the book had fallen had been protection enough against the heat. Wherever the pages had gone, the cover should have given some hint of what content they had lost.
Books had not been part of Hepdida the servant girl’s upbringing, but Niarmit had insisted that Hepdida the crown princess should broaden her mind with literature. This fire abridged volume was of a length more to her tastes than the classic works Niarmit had found for her in Lady Isobel’s library.
She brushed off a light coating of grey dust and frowned at the object. The book had been about six inches tall by four inches wide, though there now remained no trace of how many pages it had contained. The cover had one picture and one word. A blue oval in which patterns of different blues swirled and mixed like eddies in an ink bottle. The word inscribed above the picture was ‘Fate.’ She turned it back and forth, in hope that some more coherent meaning might reveal itself.
She glanced over at Kimbolt a few yards away, supervising the creation of a temporary patch of wood and rubble to seal the breach in the curtain wall. She was half minded to call him over and pose the mystery to him, but then she rejected the idea. She could have secrets too, secrets to be shared when she had answers to give, rather than questions to ask. She slipped the burnt remnant into a pocket within her cloak and watched the seneschal at work, muscles straining as he leant his own effort to support the soldiers and townsmen levering an obstinate boulder into position.
The rock slid into place at last and he stepped back, wiping grimy palms on his breeches. She watched him still, the line of his jaw, the shock of hair, and wondered where the particular fascination he had once held for her had gone. He turned then catching her unawares in the guilty thought. The confusion must have been written on her face for he greeted her with a grin, “what have you been up to, Hepdida?”
“Nothing,” she insisted. “And shouldn’t the seneschal address the crown princess as ‘your Highness’.”
“Yes, your Highness,” he said with unbroken cheerfulness. “That is quite right, your Highness. And what has your Highness been up to this morning, to celebrate the fine victory that your Highness’s cousin has earned.”
“Stop it,” she said. “You’re just making fun of me now.”
He shrugged. “None of us should take ourselves too seriously, Hepdida. Life is too short and fragile for that.” He looked past her in the direction of the gate, where another cartload of orcish bodies was being drawn past a row of human corpses. “It’s going to be a big funeral pyre sees them off. I think your cousin is going to bury the men and women though; mass cremation is not the way of the Goddess.”
“Outlander scum are beyond the grace of the Goddess.”
“You may be right, for myself I’d just sooner spare the labour of scratching graves out of the frozen earth, or piling stones over them. We’ve got to be ready for when Quintala comes back.”
“We have days yet,” Hepdida murmured, her attention drawn by the sight of her cousin walking along the line of human bodies. The queen was in company with two robed prisoners who stumbled between the grey bearded Johanssen and the big resistance leader they called Father Simeon. At the priest’s side, the slight dark haired figure of Jay, ducked his head deferentially.
***
The two prisoners were pretty useless. The one blind, the other with his wrists just bloodied stumps. Ragged bandages had covered both their wounds while tight straps above the wrists had stemmed the bleeding of the handless one. However, those measures would soon appear distinctly short term unless some fuller healing work was invoked to stave off putrefaction in the blood starved stumps. It was a matter to be attended to as soon as they had surrendered what knowledge they had.
“There are forty-eight human bodies here,” Johanssen stated for the benefit of the blinded one. “Forty-three men and five women, I make it. Is that all the outlander wizards accounted for?”
“I don’t know,” the blind man wailed. “I never counted the company.”
“If you know nothing, then there’s not much point keeping you alive after all.” Simeon made a sudden move, a noisy shuffle to the prisoner’s left, which had the blind man shrieking and backing away in alarm.
“Please,” he said, but whatever he was pleading for was lost as Johanss
en continued his interrogation.
“The outlander soldiers are all accounted for, the orcs too. We just need to know if all of your filthy magic wielding brethren are properly listed.”
“What? and then when you’re sure about that you’ll finish us off too.” The handless one spoke up, his face pale and drawn with pain, but with a defiant tilt to his chin.
“I don’t kill prisoners,” Niarmit said.
“But I do,” Father Simeon interrupted. “Leastways I do once the boy has finished playing with them.”
Niarmit’s eyes widened as the big priest gave Jay a pat on the shoulder. “You did good, lad, real good. Your dad would have been proud,” Simeon was saying. “Not ‘Just Jay’ anymore eh?”
Niarmit was not above gruesome threats; the Goddess knew how she and Tordil had sought to rattle Thom the day they first caught him chasing wayward zombies. However, those threats had been hollow ones played with as much conviction as they could muster. There was a grim sincerity to Simeon’s promise and a gleeful grin on Jay’s face, which hinted at torture not just willingly undertaken but actively savoured. She suppressed a frown. For the time being the priest’s unholy sadism would serve her purpose.
“Speak quickly,” she said. “Or I will leave you in the boy’s hands.”
“My name’s Aleric,” the handless one insisted. “And you’ll get nothing more than that from me.”
“Fifty,” the blinded one cried out. “There should be Fifty, six of them women.”
“Shut up, Crespin,” Aleric shouted, raising his stumps in anger and then shrieking with the agony the movement caused him.
“Lilith was in the hut, the workshop.”
“Be quiet! The master will find out, or the witch. Better dead than a traitor.”
“Lilith is a thin scrawny one, shaven headed.” Crespin could not hold his tongue and Aleric was powerless to stop the flood of information. “She should be with the rest.” Niarmit scanned the row of robed bodies. Drained of magical power by the task of building, they had been quiet unable to defend themselves against the rampaging farmers of Simeon’s makeshift army. However, none of the corpses answered Crespin’s description of the one named Lilith.