Next came the pain. With each breath his ribs burned. His left leg cramped as he bent it and he had to straighten it suddenly to prevent the muscles from binding up. He stretched his fingers and closed them into a fist. Were any bones broken? Beneath him, wood jabbed against his armor and a lump had swelled on the back of his head.
Spear oriented himself. He lay on his back in the stable and stared through a gaping hole in the roof. Black smoke swirled against the blue sky. The crows cried louder than before. Beyond them, men and women shouted.
He wanted to stay here in the shadows of the stable lying in the hay. He wanted to let the others take the keep. After all, he had opened the gates. He had earned his rest. He wanted nothing more than to close his eyes and return to sleep. Maybe when he woke everything would be better.
Except the moment he closed his eyes he saw Valda, a broken wreck in the stream. He felt her small body in his arms again, bones like those of a bird, shattered. He saw the pile of rocks marking her grave. He imagined the weight of the stones sinking and the bones cracking beneath. His lips trembled.
He brought a shaky and bloody hand to his purse, feeling the hard shape of the one remaining gem. He had made a promise. He had promised he would bring her five heads. Four he had delivered. One more to go. One more head before Spear could finally rest.
He gathered his breath and rolled to his side.
A boy squatted in front of him, his bare feet splayed in the thick hay, a heavy greasy knife held in both hands in front of his chest.
“Wasn’t sure you were alive,” said the boy. His hair was ragged and hung to his shoulders. Grime rimmed his fingernails and his knuckles. One pant leg of his gray trousers was torn open, held together by rough black stitching. Flies circled in the light above the boy’s head.
“Me neither,” said Spear. He stared through the hole in the ceiling towards the top of the tower. “Long way down.”
“Better than burning.”
“You’re right about that.” Behind the boy, others stood in the shadows, not willing to step fully into the light. The metal from crude weapons – pitchforks, spades, butcher’s blades – glinted. “I’m just going to get up.” He found his sword at his side and pulled it into his hand. “I’m going to get up and leave.”
“Others will follow you.”
“The men outside? Cruhund’s sell swords? They’ll fight with me?”
The boy shook his head. He rose from squatting, the knife hanging heavy in his hand. He swept his hand behind. “No. All of us. The slaves. They call us servants but we are slaves. Promise to set us free and we will follow you. We will bring knives.”
Spear stared at the line of figures behind the boy. He could see them as his eyes adjusted to the dark. A thick-set woman with a simple apron and a meat cleaver. A stooped man who held himself up with a pitch fork. Another woman, broken-nosed, one hand on a jutting hip and the other on a long-handled spade. There were others – maybe eight of them total.
Spear was not sure if they were enough to even match the mercenaries who remained in the keep. They would be outnumbered. Spear was used to that so it did not bother him. What brought a tightness to his throat, though, was knowing that most of these people would be cut down at the first clash. More innocent blood from those who followed him.
“Might be better to hide in here,” he said. “The men out there are killers.”
The boy laughed. “Think we don’t know that? Better to die free than to live as a slave.”
“You have no armor. No training. And your weapons…”
“We just want a chance.”
Spear looked past him to the others. “You all feel that way?”
They nodded and grunted. One even hurrahed.
“But if we win,” said the boy, “we win our freedom? No going back on your word.”
“I promise.”
He told them to follow him close, but not so close as to eat the backswing of his sword. He would be the first into whatever group they encountered. He would cut a path. They would follow and kill any that fell. They were to strike hard: neck, head, gut, groin. Make sure they were dead. Take their weapons and shields. Come back for their armor later.
“They’re half drunk,” said the boy. “The lot of them. We’ll make them bleed. Feed them to the pigs.”
Spear rummaged about the stable until he found the top of a barrel with a handle. It would only shield a blow or two before splintering under the onslaught, but he needed every advantage he could get.
“Let’s feed the pigs,” he said, and he crept towards the stable doors.
Every step brought piercing pain up through his right leg, and his left elbow throbbed from the fall and where the arrow had struck him. But he hid the pain, tamped it down. He did not want the others to know.
When he reached the doors, he pulled them open and crouched in the shadows.
Corpses filled the courtyard. To his right, the gate was open and the tower burned, black smoke piling into the sky, a dark cloud forming over the keep. To his left, the last of Cruhund’s mercenaries were pushing through the doors of the great hall, ducking behind shields as black arrows thudded against the wood and planted into ground at their feet. One arrow caught a mercenary in the neck and he spun as if dancing before falling at the retreating feet of his companions. They pulled the heavy doors of the great hall behind them so hard that Spear felt the vibration in his feet.
Back at the base of the unburnt gate tower, figures moved in the shadows. A handful of figures. His crew had come to his aid.
He gave a shout and then dashed along the stables to where his companions waited in the shadows.
“Ha,” said Bones, “look who came back from the dead. We saw you fall from the tower.”
“Who are these behind you?” asked Kiara looking at the slaves who had come out of the stable.
“Those ready to cut the throats of the men in the hall,” said Spear.
“That’s all I need to know,” said Bones.
Spear looked to Seana, trying to catch her eyes, but she turned from him, hiding behind her pale hair. He moved to her and touched her elbow. “Seana…”
She shook her head and stood off by Kiara. The others looked at him.
“We go then. We take the hall and then the keep. It will be ours. Ours to rule.”
They followed him, running at a crouch, jumping over the corpses. Biroc ran wide of the others to pluck arrows from the ground. The stable boy was close to Spear’s heels. His young breath was ragged and excited. Night and his cloak were nowhere to be seen. Spear wondered if he had gone ahead. He shuddered at the memory of the writhing worms inside of the cloak. Seana and Kiara ran close together, whispers slipping between the two of them. Bones trailed behind the old limping servants.
Spear was ready for the doors of the hall to fly open or the shuttered windows to crack wide. Instead, they met no resistance and made it safely to the doors of the great hall.
The doors were thick and ancient, made of wood, banded and studded in iron. Figures and scenes had been painted on those doors. Grubby fingers had long since stripped the gilt away, and what paint remained had faded to the point that the figures were ghosts. He could make out some of the figures but none he recognized from old stories. Still, they were familiar. A giant one-eyed axe man. A woman stealthily approaching a cave with sword and shield. A hunter standing over a white stag.
Spear signaled to the others to be ready, especially Biroc with his bow. He seized one great iron ring, cold and worn shiny, and pulled. The door did not budge. One of the slaves joined him, using both hands and leaning back with all his weight.
“They’ve locked it from the inside,” said Bones. He ran his hands on the stone walls. “Won’t be able to burn them out.” The shuttered windows were high and beyond reach. “We can’t get through these doors.”
“There are other ways,” said the boy. He pointed towards the left side of the hall. “There is a narrow passage cut into the wall. I found
it months ago. We’d have to crawl through. On the other end, the door is covered by a tapestry.”
The boy led them to the side of the hall. Spear helped move the barrels and boards that concealed the entrance. It was a small door, two feet square, of weathered gray wood.
“They don’t know about this door?” asked Spear.
“Not that I know of.”
“If anyone knows about it, Griope would.”
“I’ll go first,” said Spear. He pointed to the servant with the axe. “Go back to the front door and start at it with your axe. Relentlessly. Yell in different voices. Make them think we are coming at them head on.”
Before he bent to the small door, Spear paused to strip off his vambraces and greaves. He needed the stealth of little armor.
He wondered how many of them would survive the attack. If the mercenaries knew of the passage, they would cut him down the moment he poked his head out. He wanted to look one last time at the balcony far above, at the fluttering white curtains. He wondered if Cruhund, bloody teeth and all, waited for him as much as he longed for him.
He bent to the passage and opened the door. It was impossibly dark and the cold touched his cheek like a wet caress. He could not prevent the sudden trembling that ran up his spine. He lay on his belly, sword in his right fist, dagger in his left, and entered the passage.
It was almost too narrow for him, his elbows knocking against the sides. The moment he entered the passage he felt as if the air had been drawn out of the confined space. Absolute blackness lay in front of him. He could not see where the passage ended. But it did, almost abruptly, with the tip of his sword suddenly touching wood. He inched forward until his hands found the small door.
The boy had promised that nothing obstructed it on the other side. Spear worried the door would creak on its hinges or one of the men inside would notice the sudden bulge in the tapestry.
The axe at the front door thudded.
The small door swung open easily. Spear opened it only part way, enough so that he could extend a hand and lift the bottom of the tapestry. The mercenaries had all gathered at the front of the hall, their backs to him. They had stacked barrels on top of tables to create a makeshift barricade, and with bows in hand, a few of them stood at the high windows, shutters pulled open.
“Let’s go,” Spear whispered behind to the others in the tunnel.
He squeezed out of the passage and without waiting sprinted at the dozen gathered men.
He wanted to find Cruhund first. He wanted to cut his head from his shoulders. Maybe that would be enough to break the others. But where was the giant Northman? With all their backs turned towards him, Spear could not find him.
One of the bow men from the window called down. “It’s only one of the slaves. No one else there.”
Spear hit the first of the mercenaries at that moment, his blade slicing into the man’s neck from behind. Spear caught another man with his backswing before the others turned.
Everything vanished but Spear and his sword and dagger and whoever stood before him.
He dodged left, bringing his sword up to breech a guard and stabbing with his dagger. A face contorted. But the dagger was lost, wedged deep in the man’s chest and torn from Spear’s hand as the man twisted. Feet scuffled. An arrow splintered on the stone floor near his feet, the fragments of wood dancing around his shins.
Too many bodies. He ran, slid across a table and kicked a bench at the coming men. A hand axe bounced off his shoulder.
Another man with a baby face – clean-shaven, plump cheeks with wide bulging eyes – roared from across the table. Spear missed wildly with his sword. The man bolted at him, hard, dropping crushing blows that sent waves of pain into Spear’s hand. The sword was almost torn out of his grip. He backpedaled fast and then to the right. Better to avoid Baby-face’s sword. His free hand found something on the table and hurled it. A half-eaten plate of food. Enough to allow him to roll under another table and run.
Others were charging. One leapt on the table only to have the stable boy’s cleaver cut deep into the his calf. Spear saw another mercenary spitted on a pitchfork.
Wood and barrels exploded from the far side of the hall as Bones and Biroc knocked down the structure on which the archers had climbed. The old man was in among the bodies in wreckage with his knife before the dust settled.
Spear wheeled about just in time to block another swing from Baby-face. Spear’s sword flew from his hand. There was no time to lose.
Spear drove his elbow into Baby-face’s chest and wrapped the other man’s sword arm in his, locking his elbow against his ribs so his attacker could not free his sword. Spear pistoned his legs until the Baby-face tripped onto his back. Spear smashed his forehead into the man’s face, breaking his nose and splitting his lip.
Suddenly, something crashed into Spear from the side and sent him sprawling. He scrambled backwards on hands and feet but then saw what had hit him: a mercenary desperately try to hold his guts in his riven belly.
Then, the chaos stopped swirling.
A wood cup tottered on the floor. Bones stood heavy armed, the short blade of his sword glistening with blood. Kiara was on her knees, vomiting. Biroc, Seana and the two or three slaves that had survived stalked toward a door through which the last of the mercenaries fled. One was left behind dragging his leg, leaving a swath of blood. The stable boy pulled him back by his ankle and the slave with the hoe chopped that blunt iron edge into the mercenary’s neck.
Most of the mercenaries lay dead on the floor, and most of the slaves, too. “Free in the end,” Spear said to Bones.
The old man laughed, spittle stretched between his lips. “Never free. Haven’t you figured that out yet?”
One of the dying mercenaries reached a trembling hand for Spear, who turned his back on the man with a short laugh.
He picked up his sword from the floor and went to the others who waited at the end of the door. It opened to a narrow hall, down which the surviving mercenaries had fled.
“We routed them!” cheered the stable boy.
“Not done yet,” said Spear. He pulled bloody fingers away from his ear. His hand was numb so he could not quite tell but he thought that he had lost a good part of the ear. “Where’s this go?”
“The stairs. Up. To the apartments. Where Cruhund lives. There and the tunnels.”
“The tunnels?”
“We don’t go there.”
“He forbids it?”
“Yes, but we don’t go there. Whoever built this place built tunnels deep into the earth. The ghost of the scorched witch, demons, worse. We don’t go there.”
“We won’t need to,” said Spear. “I only want Cruhund.”
He nodded to the others and as he ducked into the passage, he suddenly became aware of a sound, and at first he thought it was the mad beating of his own heart, but then realized that it was the lone axe man pounding on the still bolted door. Too late to turn back for him now.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
SPEAR FOLLOWED THE blood. It glistened from the light of wall sconces. It spread in scattered drops on the stone floor. It smeared along the walls. He would need to pass through the blood to find Cruhund.
Ahead, out of sight, feet scraped, gear jingled and the retreating mercenaries cursed.
He followed the blood up the stairs. The others pressed at his heels. The razor-sharp edges of their swords swelled behind him.
When he reached the first landing of the keep, cold air pressed against the back of his wrists and neck. A long passage stretched into darkness. A low moan escaped from the passage as if from a persistent, barely viable wind.
“The tunnels,” the stable boy said looking in the direction of the wind.
While the trail of blood led up another flight of stairs, feet had recently disturbed the dust leading into the tunnels. Someone had gone into that dark passage.
“They say that’s where Cruhund hoards most of the coin.”
“First things f
irst,” said Spear. Heavy objects scraped against stone above.
They climbed the next flight of stairs. The blood led down a hallway towards where another makeshift barricade – more barrels and an overturned table – had been set up. Helmeted heads peered over the table.
Spear and the others retreated to the intersection of the hall and hid behind the corner.
“We want to parlay,” said a voice from behind the table.
“That’s Griope,” said the boy. “He’s a slave too. Just acts like he’s not. I’ll teach him.”
“I can put an arrow through his eye,” said Biroc.
Bones tittered.
“Talk then,” said Spear.
“We are willing to negotiate. All twenty of us.”
Spear laughed. “All five of you. Outnumbered. Crow food.”
“What do you want?” asked Griope.
“We should just kill them,” the boy whispered. “Can’t trust them.”
Spear ignored the boy.
“I want a head. One more bloody head. The head of Cruhund. I made a promise and I mean to keep it.”
“That’s it? You only want him?”
“And the keep. I want this fortress. All the coin.”
Griope snorted. “Not much of a deal for us. You get everything and we get nothing.”
“You get your lives.”
“We are as many as you are.”
“But we’ll kill you all.”
The men behind the overturned table and barrels argued in whispers.
“What of us?” asked Griope.
“You can leave,” said Spear. “Or you can swing your sword under me. Get your fair share of coin. Live as free men.”
More whispers and then an answer. “Hated Cruhund any way. Bastard. We’ll lend our swords to you, but if we ever want to leave, you’ll let us go freely.”
“Agreed. Come on out.”
They were less than Spear had imagined: Griope with his twisted limbs; a grotesquely fat man who waddled; two men covered in their own blood, and a fierce-looking clansman whose clenched fists shook uncontrollably. They would not have even been able to hold that simple barricade for more than a few breaths. Now they served under Spear. He suppressed a sneer. Was this the beginning of his army of mercenaries or a troop of misfits?
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