Gallow (78 page)

‘They’re going to hang him. He was my friend. I have to go.’

Her lips were dry. ‘I know. And so do I.’

‘If you ask me to I’ll stay.’

She didn’t doubt he meant it but it was such a stupid thing to say. She pushed him on and then stepped back. ‘You stole my heart with all your forkbeard pride and your courage and your strength. I love you for what you are, Gallow, but what I need is a man who’ll feed my children and protect them. Someone who’s there. War clouds are coming. I need a man who’ll stay at home and that’s not you. So yes, Gallow Truesword, Gallow the Foxbeard, I want you to stay, I want that more than anything, but I’ll not ask it. Only you can say which matters to you more. And if you ask me to wait, I won’t. Not again.’ She stepped back into the shadows of Witches’ Reach.

‘There’s no peace for us, Arda.’ Gallow shook his head. ‘No peace. Not while Medrin lives.’

Arda nodded and turned her back and walked away because hell would freeze over before she’d let a forkbeard see her cry. Gallow called after her one last time but she didn’t dare look back, and then he was gone. She climbed to the top of the tower and looked out over the dawn and saw him again, standing by the pyre of Tolvis Loudmouth, and she watched him pull a sword out of the ground where he’d left it the night before and turn and go. Watched until she couldn’t see him any more, until she saw that he didn’t look back, not once.

When he was gone, she dried her eyes and went looking for Valaric the Mournful, the Marroc whose men had her children back in his hideout. There were things to be said about that and in no uncertain manner.

More Lhosir came later that day, the half-an-army that had been waiting by the Aulian Bridge to fall on Valaric’s Crackmarsh men. They were righteously furious, and from all the stories told afterwards it was a vicious and bloody little siege until the forkbeards finally took the walls and built the iron devil’s ram again and smashed down the gates and stormed inside. But at the end, the stories said, all they found was an empty tower. And Arda heard those stories too, but she couldn’t have said if they were true because before the first of the forkbeards came up from the bridge, she was already gone.

No one had taken the red sword. A hundred upon a hundred Marroc plundering and looting the dead, and not one of them had touched it. Gallow pulled it free and sheathed it at his side. The cursed blade. His and his alone, stained by the blood of his oldest friend. He turned to face south, the road to Varyxhun, and when the Lhosir came later that day he was long gone too.

T
here were riots in the city. Oribas couldn’t see but he could hear them and he could smell the smoke. The Marroc had been restless for days. Something had happened but no one would tell him what. Down in his cell he picked up rumours now and then and saw the odd Marroc being dragged off to the torturer and then later he heard their screams and sobs. He heard everything they cried, not that it added up to much, but there were more every day.

His cell was underground, but on the day they hanged him they hauled him up to the castle yard and he could hear and smell the turmoil clearly at last. He could see it too, written on the Lhosir around the castle, on their faces and in the way they held themselves. He looked up at the gallows and he could see it even there. They were going to hang him but he wouldn’t be the only one. There were some Marroc to die too. Out here in the yard, pressed together with the other prisoners, he’d heard what it was that had the streets of Varyxhun filled with revolt. The forkbeards were beaten. The iron devil was dead and Witches’ Reach still held.

Witches’ Reach still held.

He stared up at the waiting gallows and knew that Achista was still alive. He would hang a happy man.

THE END OF FARRI MOONTONGUE PART 2

NATHAN HAWKE

‘
But by the end of my looking it was the Moontongue I came to understand. They say the Moontongue stole the Crimson Shield as a gift to Neveric the Black of the Marroc, that he meant to betray his brother and his king and that Neveric betrayed him in turn, but Moontongue had a sea more ambition to him than that. When I understood, Aulian, for a moment I was in such awe of him that I forgot to breathe. The Moontongue stole the Crimson Shield for himself, not for some Marroc. He believed he would see the future, know all things before they came to pass, and with that knowledge he would crush Yurlak and grind his brother to dust and lead a conquest the like of which the world hasn’t seen since the glorious days of Aulia. He wasn’t killed by some renegade Marroc.
’

The Marroc ship of Neveric the Black trailed in the wake of the Lhosir for two days before Farri Moontongue changed his course to meet them. There was a storm coming and he thought it best to get this over with before it arrived. The two ships eased up close to one another and the crew threw ropes and hauled on them until they were lashed tight together. The Moontongue kept his warriors away from their axes and their shields, not wanting to give away his intent. There was a wariness to the Marroc crew too, an uneasiness that said they weren’t here for the peaceful bargain they claimed. When they were done tying fast the ships, the Moontongue stood on the middle of his deck, waiting for the shout that would kick off the fight, but it didn’t come. Instead Neveric the Black came out and stood by his mast as the Moontongue stood by his own. The Marroc looked this way and that, almost anywhere but at the Moontongue and his men, as though he really didn’t want to be here. As though he’d already lost.

‘Well then Neveric, what is it?’ shouted the Moontongue.

‘We had a bargain,’ called the Marroc, looking back at the Moontongue and meeting his eye at last. ‘I promised you King Tane’s gold for the shield. I’ll honour that promise if you will honour yours.’

The Moontongue laughed back at him. ‘I made no such promise. Two days on our tail, though. Persistent, I’ll give you that.’

The Marroc looked away and then looked back. ‘It’ll go easier on you, forkbeard. I’ve not come for a fight but I’ll give you one if I must.’

The Moontongue still laughed. ‘Will you now? So here’s what I think: since you’re trying so very very hard to give it to me, I’ll have your gold then, but I’ll be keeping your precious shield.’ His hand fell to the axe on his belt and everywhere on both ships men saw and tensed and reached for their own; but before he could draw it, more figures came out onto the decks of the Marroc ship – but these were no Marroc. The dark iron of their armour was almost black under the grey skies. Their iron boots clanked against the hard wooden deck and the Marroc kept well away from them, nervous and fearful. The grin stayed fixed on the Moontongue’s face but the laughter died. Fateguard. Twelve iron devils to go with the the thirty Marroc fighters. Changed things a bit, that did.

The iron devil who took the lead was missing a hand. The iron mask he wore was bent and misshapen and split along one side, exactly as though someone had buried an axe its side. So there couldn’t be any doubt, the ironskin took something from his belt and threw it from one ship to the other so it landed at the Moontongue’s feet. His axe. The one he’d left in the Hall of Fates.

‘Yours, Moontongue,’ grated a voice from whatever mouth lay hidden behind the mask. ‘Now return what you took.’

The Moontongue picked up the axe and looked at it and yes, three nights earlier he’d left it buried in the side of this iron devil’s head. He stared at it a little more and then nodded and picked up the Crimson Shield of Modris from where it sat propped against the mast. He strapped it onto his arm. ‘This?’ He held it up so everyone would see. ‘You want this? Then you’ll have to come and take it.’ He walked steadily to the where the two ships ground against one another and raised his axe and brought it down on the nearest of the ropes that held them together. ‘Cut the ropes!’ he cried.

Both ships erupted into sound and movement. The Lhosir warriors around him snatched up their shields and drew out their axes and ran for the ropes. The iron devils launched themselves at the rails, leaping across the narrow gap of sea between the two ships as thought they were acrobats, not men carrying their own weight in metal. They crashed among the Lhosir, swinging their swords left and right. The Lhosir met the blows with their shields and their axes.

Baldi Heronhand slipped away as soon as the fighting started. He stood in the Moontongue’s cabin, looking at the iron-bound chest that Svarn Bloodaxe had taken from the Temple of Fates. None of them had seen how to open it and the Moontongue hadn’t allowed Svarn to take his axe to it, but now it seemed to Baldi that the Moontongue’s orders were less important than they’d been a few hours ago. So he took his axe to the hinges and shattered the first in two blows and the second in one. The box fell off the Moontongue’s table and landed on the floor. The lid came half off and a pale brown grainy sand spilled out – no, not sand, salt. He picked up the box and put it back on the table and finished ripping the lid away. Salt? Was that all? But then he saw the glint of something golden.

The Moontongue caught the blows from the Fateguard easily. The Crimson Shield moved with a will of its own, anticipating each strike before it came. He faced the one-handed iron devil and parried blow after blow, turning each one and every time his own axe bit back at the iron armour. He struck the devil in the thigh and the hip and the arm, each time scoring a deep mark in the Fateguard’s iron skin, but nothing seemed to slow it. Around him his men were falling, one by one, and though the Fateguard lost a hand here and there and maybe a foot and Moontongue saw one with his iron masked caved in and one missing half his arm, still they kept coming. The Marroc, he saw, had stayed on their ship and they were cutting the ropes as fast as they could. They just wanted to get away.

Heronhand pulled out the golden thing from within the box. It was a tube, an exquisite map tube, but small – hardly even the length of his forearm. Each end was stoppered with an ornate golden cap that slid reluctantly off when he tugged. The fitting was perfect. He took it in his shield hand, picked up his axe and ran back to the fight. One of the iron devils had its back to him. He took out is knee with one massive swing and dodged past as it buckled and toppled backwards. He looked over to the Marroc ship, already starting to move away, and at the Lhosir he’d known and fought with for a dozen years who now lay dead scattered around the fury of the Moontongue. Two of the iron devils were too crippled to stand but even those were still moving. The rest fought on, relentless. He saw one Lhosir warrior drop his shield and pick up a massive axe as long as his leg and use it to cut one of the iron devil’s arms clean off and probably shatter half his ribs too, and the devil kept on. The last of the Lhosir were mostly in a circle now, shields locked together, fighting as best they could against an enemy that refused to die. At the far end of the ship, one man cut off from the others ran and leaped over the side, launching himself at the Marroc ship. He fell short and landed in the sea and vanished at once, sucked down by waves and the weight of his mail.