Authors: Nathan Hawke
N
o one knew who started the rumour but it spread through the castle like a plague: Sixfingers was dead, that was why the forkbeards had pulled back. Not that it meant they’d leave, but for now the Marroc cheered and drank and sang songs and threw taunts down the mountainside to where the forkbeards were building wooden shields to protect the lower tiers from Marroc stones and arrows. Gallow watched. If Medrin was dead then the Lhosir would make the mother of all pyres for him. They might just burn the whole of Varyxhun. They’d speak him out for days too, one after the other, those who knew him telling of his deeds over and over as he walked the Herenian Marches to the Maker-Devourer’s cauldron. And maybe it was all true, and Gallow did see many pyres when he looked down from the castle to the city, but none near big enough for a king. Even so, the Marroc paraded Reddic around the castle walls: the hero who’d put an arrow into the forkbeard king – and maybe he had, and Medrin was just slow to die.
The Marroc had seen Gallow fight too. They’d seen him stand up to the shadewalkers and stand up to the forkbeards at Valaric’s side. Foxbeard they called him now, and quietly put aside what he was though he made no effort now to hide the fork growing in his beard. The ones who’d seen him hold the shield wall behind the fourth gate all remembered Andhun now as though they’d never forgotten how
he and the red sword had turned Medrin Twelvefingers into Medrin Six.
Oribas found him staring out over the valley as he always did at sunset. Everywhere else it seemed the Marroc were waiting for the Lhosir to give up and go home. But the Lhosir weren’t like that, although no one wanted to hear it and even Valaric called Gallow a sour old man who preferred fighting to being with his family.
‘I leave for Witches’ Reach tonight,’ said Oribas quietly. ‘The quicker it’s done, the sooner the ironskins will trouble you no more.’ He looked furtively around as though afraid they might be overheard. ‘I wish you would come with me. It’s not that I don’t trust this Vathan, but . . .’
Gallow slipped the belt from his waist, slid the scabbard from the loops that held it there and handed it to Oribas. ‘Take it. Let her keep it, Oribas, no matter what happens.’
‘Hunting a monster again. It’ll be strange not to have you at my side. I’ve searched the library but there’s nothing. Salt will bind it, I think, but to make an end . . .’ He nodded to the sword. ‘The Edge of Sorrows. If anything can.’
Gallow put a finger to his lips. ‘Do your best, Oribas. No one will fault you. Now take a moment to be quiet and watch the sun go down.’
Oribas sidled closer. ‘Sixfingers isn’t dead. I know this.’ Gallow turned sharply, but before he could speak Oribas leaned in and whispered in his ear, ‘There were always ways in and out of this castle, my friend. Aulian ways. Achista has been to the Lhosir camp. I will tell you where. Decide when it is right for others to know.’ He stepped back and shook his head. ‘There is still a secret to this place, old friend. Something I haven’t found. I feel it. Look for it if you can while I’m gone.’
‘You can’t wait to go. Why?’
Oribas shrugged. ‘Since I came here, I have watched men fight one another. I have led many to shameful deaths and I
am made small by what I have done. This creature, though? It gives me an honest purpose once more.’
For a while Gallow said nothing. They stood together and watched the sun set until the last brilliant crescent of orange slipped behind the mountains on the far side of the valley. As that last light died, Oribas nodded and turned to Gallow and clasped his arm. ‘And so now I go. Farewell, friend. We each have our monster to face.’
Gallow took his arm and held it fiercely. ‘And we’ll slay them, wizard, and I’ll see you again, if not here then in Middislet, a little past the Crackmarsh in Nadric’s forge. Look for me there.’ He smiled. ‘But if you want your welcome to be a warm one then come filled with stories and not more adventures! Fare well, Aulian.’
‘Fare well, Lhosir. I vow I will not die first.’
‘Aye and so do I, and that’s one of us an oath breaker right here.’ Gallow pushed him away and watched him go, then turned back to the darkening sky across the valley. After a little while he left that too to be with the people who mattered most of all.
A quiet fell over the castle after sunset. Men slept or kept watch. The forkbeards were skulking at the foot of the mountain and Addic was limping his way to the kitchens. He went there every night after dusk and struggled his way to the cool caves deep in the mountainside that passed for pantries and cellars. He leaned on a staff that had once been the shaft of his spear but now had a crook on the top from which he hung a lantern. Short of sitting on the battlements dropping rocks on forkbeards, there wasn’t much else he could do. So he came every night and counted the sacks of grain and the barrels of onions and beans and the hams to make sure all was as it should be. They had food for weeks and everyone had full bellies but he liked to be sure. And to be useful.
Now he caught the flash of a lantern ahead, quickly hidden, and stopped. That people might take to stealing food was why he came to do his counting; but that he might catch them at it was something he hadn’t imagined and now he wished he had – that, and that the shaft of his spear still had a point on the end instead of a lantern and that he could still walk without it.
He took another step. ‘Who’s there?’
The lantern ahead flared into life again and started bobbing towards him. The air was cool after the stuffy warmth of the evening outside, although night would swiftly bring its chill. ‘Addic?’
‘Achista?’ He stopped as she came into the circle of his light and he saw her. ‘What are you doing here?’ He smiled. ‘You’re not stealing food, are you?’
Achista came closer and stopped in front of him. ‘How’s the leg today?’
‘Like it’s on fire, just like it was when you asked this morning.’
‘Oribas says you should rest it. You should listen to him.’
‘Oribas says that to Valaric too. Do you see
him
listening?’
She smiled but he could see that something was wrong. ‘Pig-headedness a disease now, is it? Suppose it must be.’
There was a rustle and a scrape from the caves further on and then the glow of another lantern, and slowly two more figures emerged from the shadow – Oribas, who spent half his time in the castle library carved high into the mountainside with its balcony and its hundred long thin doors that let in a glory of light when they were opened. And then the Vathan woman. Last he’d heard she belonged in the dungeons. They both had sacks slung over their shoulders.
‘What are you all doing here?’
Oribas frowned at him. ‘I told you to rest that leg. Does no one in this castle listen? Do I speak the word badly? Rest? R-e-s-t. Is that not correct?’
The Vathan woman shook her head and tried to push on past but Addic hopped into her way. She glared at him. ‘Getting food for our journey, Marroc.’
Ah
. He looked at his sister Achista. ‘What journey’s that?’
Achista took the staff gently out of his hand and passed it to Oribas, then put his arm over her shoulder and led him back to the kitchens. ‘Oribas has something to show you.’ A spikiness crept into her voice and he knew that whatever it was, he wasn’t going to like it. ‘There’s a passage under the gates that runs beneath the Aulian Way right to the bank of the Isset. A way out. And Sixfingers isn’t dead.’
The Vathan woman growled. ‘I mean to change that.’
‘He keeps a monster in Witches’ Reach,’ said Oribas quietly. ‘The mother of the iron devils. We must kill it.’
Addic almost laughed. ‘I see. A wizard and a Vathan. And what, sister, will you do?’
‘Someone has to show them the secret ways.’
‘The Aulian knows them, or he knows enough.’ But he was wasting his breath and he knew it. She was going so that she could be with him, one way or the other. To keep him alive or die by his side, and he had the sudden sense that he was never going to see her again, a horrible sickening feeling in the pit of his stomach worse than the pain in his calf when the iron devil had cut him open. And now that it mattered the most, he couldn’t think of a thing to say, because nothing would change anything.
Achista led him down into the cisterns where fresh water from the tarn above the castle drained through a series of tunnels and channels. They hobbled together to the far side where the water lapped at a hole in the wall not much bigger than a man.
‘The water makes its way down to the Isset.’ Oribas sounded smug. ‘It took me a while to work it out, but if you squeeze through the tunnel quickly widens. There are steps. I think it goes down the mountain under the gates but I
suppose it hardly matters how it gets there – what matters is where it ends.’ He knelt down by the hole and squeezed into it, feet first, dragging his satchels behind him. ‘I told Gallow where it is before we left. Since I know you will now tell Valaric too, make sure he posts a guard here. The Lhosir may see us. It’s best to be sure, and though I have not yet found them, there may be others.’ He vanished into the gloom of the hole. The Vathan woman followed him. She had a sword now, Addic suddenly realised. Someone had given her a sword even though Valaric had forbidden her from carrying one. And then he looked again and saw what sword it was. He backed away and shook his head.
‘What are you doing, Achista? What are you doing?’
She took his hand in both of hers. ‘We go with Valaric’s blessing, brother.’
Words dried up and stuck to his tongue. ‘The Vathan. The sword. Does he know?’ He stared at her and saw it in her face. Yes, he did. And he hadn’t said a word.
Achista turned away. She’d never been able to lie to him. Then she turned back and embraced him. ‘Goodbye, brother. And good luck. Modris watch over you.’
‘Over you too, little sister.’
She let him go, handed back his staff and his lantern and slipped quietly into the hole without another word. Addic stayed where he was, watching long after she was gone. There were tears in his eyes.
Eventually he turned his back and hobbled up through the castle to the room that Valaric the Wolf had taken for his own.
V
alaric stormed around the castle. Gallow watched him hobble in a fury from one battlement to the next, taking it out on anyone who happened to be near and swearing at Gallow now and then. For his own part, Gallow shrugged it away. So the Aulian had given them a way out, so what? It was all the better, wasn’t it? When Medrin broke through the last gate, maybe they could slip away.
‘A fine gift,’ Gallow said, which only made Valaric storm even louder, but by the evening he’d limped down to see the tunnel for himself, cursing and snapping and snarling at his injured leg.
‘And what does one do with this gift, Gallow Foxbeard?’ he snapped when he’d seen it. ‘If I had a new leg I’d be out there in the middle of them in the small hours of the night, wreaking havoc.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘
You
know forkbeards better than any of us.’
There were plenty of Marroc who could have gone instead of Valaric, but with Addic crippled, Achista gone and Angry Jonnic dead, Valaric was in a mood for arguing. Maybe it was his way of getting his own back for Gallow refusing to go to Witches’ Reach, and maybe even Arda felt a twinge of guilt for that because when Valaric told her what he wanted, she only closed her eyes and nodded. By the middle of the next night, Gallow was at the bottom of the shaft with the last of Achista’s Hundred Heroes behind him, a handful of the Marroc who’d seen him fight at Witches’ Reach and a few
Crackmarsh men who’d heard of the Foxbeard of Andhun and believed in him enough to follow him into a fight. There should have been more, and if it had been Valaric with the red sword leading the way then every Marroc in the castle would have come. But it wasn’t, and despite what he’d done in front of them all, there weren’t so many Marroc ready to fight beside a forkbeard, not here in Varyxhun.
Oribas’s tunnel rose higher into the mountain but it was the going down that interested Gallow. They crept through the trickle of icy water, ever lower until the tunnel ended in a hole and the trickle splashed through it into some reservoir below. There were no steps, no ladder, only a gap the height of a standing man and then ice-cold water and a darkness that seemed to eat the light of their candles. Gallow peered and lowered a lamp and looked about and then handed the lamp to a Marroc, closed his eyes and dropped. The cold was shocking. His mail and his weapons dragged him straight down, but when he found his feet and stood on the bottom, the water only reached his chest. He looked back up. The lamplight from the shaft lit up a cavern shaped like a tadpole, the tail rising up out of the water into the heart of the mountain. Where that passage went not even Oribas knew.
He waded forward. It was slow and difficult and he kept losing his footing, and the cold was like a vice gripping him ever tighter. Ahead of him the roof of the cavern dropped to the water, pushing down on him, making him duck. Oribas had said there were Aulian pictograms etched into the stone where the water would lead him out but it was too dark to see them. He ran his fingers over the rock instead, feeling until he found their notches and ridges and then took a deep breath and then another, filling his lungs one last time before he dipped his head into the freezing water. Snowmelt, he remembered, that’s what Oribas had said. Water that had made its way down from the tarn above
the castle. He could feel himself freezing, his arms and legs already sluggish. He reached up, hands to the stone ceiling above him and walked and fell and floundered and stood up again, pushing himself forward as quickly as he dared. His head broke the surface in a second cavern, utterly pitch black. The floor rose and the water fell away until he was out, shaking himself and his furs, jumping up and down, making his heart pump faster again. Made him wonder how people as small as Achista and Oribas had come through without freezing to death, but maybe Oribas had some potion or powder for that.
Straight ahead
, the Aulian had said.
Straight ahead until you crack your head on the wall and then veer to the right and you’ll see some moonlight
. So he walked with one hand reaching ahead of him and when he felt stone he veered to the right, and half a minute later he saw moonlight reflected in the dampness of the walls. He thanked the Maker-Devourer, not that the Maker-Devourer either listened or cared, and turned back to call the rest.
Reddic dropped into the freezing water, the last Marroc to go. He squealed as the cold shocked the air out of his lungs. The Marroc ahead of him turned and glared. ‘Quiet, boy.’ He followed the man in the darkness through water that reached almost to his neck.
The soldiers held hands, each whispering to the man behind what was coming, pulling each other onward. Reddic ducked his head beneath the water along with the rest of them and prayed to Modris, but when he felt the stone close over his head he still knew he was going to drown; and when his head found the air again and he breathed a deep chestful of ice-cold air, he felt a relief like the moment the sun had risen after his night with Jelira and the ghuldogs. He hurried after the rest, all of them picking up speed now, keen to keep moving, shaking off the water and the cold and eager for the fight. Out of the cave they scrambled up a vicious
path that twisted from the bank of the Isset up to the Aulian Way as it wound along the valley beneath Varyxhun castle. He followed the others and they crouched in the shadows of an overhang.
Reddic found he could barely meet the Foxbeard’s eye. There he was, hunched over two bodies. Dead forkbeards, and somehow knowing that the Foxbeard had killed two of his own only made him even more terrible and Reddic was suddenly very aware that he’d lain with the Foxbeard’s wife in the caves of the Crackmarsh and then spent the night of Shieftane staring at the moon with his daughter, or someone he thought of as his daughter. He hung back. Sarvic, Valaric’s right hand now, squatted beside Gallow. Rumour had it they’d once fought together against the Vathen at Lostring Hill and that the forkbeard had saved Sarvic’s life. Hard to imagine when you looked at Sarvic now.
Gallow’s eyes raked them. ‘Medrin and the Fateguard will be in the heart of the camp. Fateguard don’t sleep. Keep away from them.’
Sarvic glanced at Reddic and Gallow’s eyes followed. ‘The Aulian wizard says the iron devils can’t cross a line of salt. Any of you bring salt with you? Any of you keep it dry through that sump?’ He bared his teeth and drew his sword and pointed it at Reddic. ‘On the left, you’re with the Foxbeard. You wait out of sight for a hand of the moon and come at the camp from the castle road.’ Where the forkbeards’ watch was sharpest and they all knew it, but Sarvic left that out. ‘On the right, you follow me. We go around the other side. There are Marroc in Sixfingers’ army, our own kin. We need their arrows. You see a bow, you take it. A bowstring, you cut it. Kill and fight as much as you like but remember it’s the arrows that the Wolf wants from us. Watch the road and remember your path. Every man makes his own way back. We’ll not wait past dawn.’
None of the Marroc spoke. Gallow rose and began to lead
his men away. Reddic decided the sword must have been pointing to his right and followed Sarvic instead.
There were men here he knew, Gallow had no doubt of that. Most of Medrin’s army would be younger Lhosir, men like the ones he’d seen when he’d sailed with Jyrdas One-Eye to take the Crimson Shield. But there’d be some older men too, men like him who’d fought in the Screambreaker’s war and found a taste for it in their blood and never given it up. For almost twelve years he thought he’d been free of that hunger but Mirrahj had taught him he was wrong. He knew better now. He’d never be free of it. He could put it aside – for Arda he could do that much – but be free of it? No.
He took his time. When he reached the edge of the Lhosir camp he kept the Marroc down and out of sight. He watched the waning half-moon creep up through the sky, wondering how long Sarvic would need before he found where Sixfingers’ archers kept their arrows. Wondering how far he, Gallow, might get among them before someone realised who he was. If he could get to Medrin himself, and if he did whether that would be enough to make them go away. But that wasn’t how it worked among the brothers of the sea, and besides Sixfingers still had his ironskins. They’d spot him long before he could run a spear through Medrin’s heart.
The moon crept over the top of his hand. Time enough. With a sigh and a snarl, half-regret and half-hunger, he stepped out of the shadows to where the nearest Lhosir sentry must be. ‘Hoy! Filthy
nioingr
!’ He couldn’t see the man but he was there, and sure enough a furious Lhosir came striding out from a cluster of stones long fallen from the mountaintop.
‘What flap-eared piece of—’ Gallow rammed into him shield first, battering him back. The force knocked the sentry off balance, and he stumbled and fell. Gallow drove his spear through the Lhosir’s neck before he could say another word.
‘Gallow Foxbeard,’ he hissed, ‘that’s who.’ He stepped over the body and quickly on.
Sarvic dropped to the banks of the Isset and crept through the shadows, hidden from the moon. Reddic followed. They slipped into the fringes of Varyxhun where the river touched up against it. The Isset was flowing fast and high, still rising every day as the late spring warmth reached the deep valley snows. There were no walls here and it was easy enough to creep into the deserted streets. The emptiness put Reddic on edge. He was used to the quiet of the Crackmarsh but he’d been to towns often enough on the back of his father’s cart to know they were bustling places, full of life. Varyxhun was dead, abandoned. As they crept deeper in, they began to pass the gibbets where Sixfingers had hung the Marroc who hadn’t run. From the castle they hadn’t seemed so many, but now Reddic saw them all. A hundred of them and more.
‘Sixfingers wants his kin-traitors to remember what they’re fighting for,’ hissed Sarvic, and Reddic winced at the savagery in his voice. Kin-traitors. That’s what the Crackmarsh men called the Marroc who fought for the forkbeards, but the forkbeards had their own word for it.
Nioingrs
.
Sarvic stopped. He waved the other Marroc into the shadows and crouched down and put a finger to his lips. Reddic strained his ears. He heard voices. Marroc voices.
Three Lhosir sat beside their fire at the edge of Varyxhun, picking dirt out of their fingernails and trading battle stories. They’d been fighting the Vathen in Andhun, and not long ago at all by the sounds of it. They heard him coming and were already up and on edge as Gallow strode towards them out of the dark. As he stepped into their circle of firelight and they saw his face, they scrambled to their feet. None of them wore mail.
‘I’d be very pleased to hear more.’ Blood still dripped from
the tip of his spear as his arm whipped back and he threw it. It struck the middle Lhosir in the chest just beneath the breastbone. He flew back and fell, twitching, trying to raise his arm as blood poured from his mouth. Gallow hefted his axe. The other two were quick, he’d give them that, with their shields propped up by their sides and their spears leaned against their shoulders. But not quick enough. He was up close before they could bring their spears to bear and between them before they could overlap their shields; and while he barged one back, he dipped almost to his knees and swung his axe across the earth – low enough to snip the stems of spring flowers and also to snap an ankle or two. A Lhosir screamed. The last one dropped his spear and went for his sword but he was too hesitant. Gallow stood and his axe rose high and came down, over and inside the guard of the other man’s shield and into the Lhosir’s collarbone. It bit deep. The Lhosir clutched at Gallow. His eyes rolled like a madman. He sputtered and coughed, blood welling up in gouts in time to the last few beats of his heart and then his arms went limp. Gallow pulled his axe out of him and turned on the other. The crippled Lhosir was gasping for breath. Hopping back. He was desperately young, young like Gallow had been once when he’d first crossed the sea.
‘Medrin took an arrow through his chest from a crazy Marroc when he was your age. Didn’t stop him from being king.’ Gallow scratched at his mangled nose, his own reminder of a first year of war. ‘You know who I am?’
The Lhosir didn’t answer. He had his back to the mountain now, and so to the dozen Marroc creeping up behind him out of the darkness.
‘I’m the Foxbeard. I’m here for Sixfingers. Built a new ram yet?’
He caught a flash of a glance away and then perhaps the Lhosir heard a noise: he turned sharply in time to see three Marroc come out of the night to pull him down. They
dragged him to the fire and pushed his face into it until he stopped screaming. Good enough a way as any to get some attention, Gallow supposed.
Sarvic waved them forward. They kept low, creeping through the fringes of the Marroc camp. A few Marroc soldiers stood around a fire in the middle, looking off to the commotion on the other side of the town. In a ring around the fire were a dozen hunting shelters, branches lashed together and draped in hides. They’d each have ten or maybe twelve Marroc inside. The arrows would be at the end near the fire in leather quivers. In the Crackmarsh they did the same.
Sarvic nodded. He pointed to three of the Crackmarsh men and then to the guards and drew a finger across his throat. They moved silently forward and then struck all at once, one hand over the mouth, pulling back the chin, the other with a knife to open the throat, the way every Crackmarsh man learned for when they met a forkbeard one day. Some guards, Reddic knew, wore mail across their throats, and this was exactly why, but Sarvic had known without looking that these Marroc wouldn’t have such a thing. They were Marroc and so they only got what the forkbeards threw away.
They lowered the dead guards to the ground around the fire and Sarvic beckoned the others forward. He pointed at them and then to the shelters, made a creeping silently gesture and then another throat-cutting motion. And it took a moment before Reddic realised that he really did mean them to creep inside and kill every single Marroc here.