Authors: Nathan Hawke
S
tanding beside Valaric on the second of the six tiers of walls that rose up to the castle of Varyxhun, Gallow watched them come. The Lhosir marched up the road in the cool morning air singing an old song of the sea that Gallow knew well, a mournful lament for drowned men. A hundred feet short of the first gate they stopped. A few dozen pushed a ram towards the gate but they stopped short too. Gallow waited for the surge forward and for the fury of the battle to begin but it didn’t happen. The Lhosir stood below him, out of reach of the gatehouse but right below the feet of the men lining the second tier, shields locked together over their heads, looking up in anticipation. For a long minute an eerie quiet fell over the road. Then Valaric raised his hand and held it high for three long heartbeats and let it fall, and as he did, a storm of stones and arrows flew into the shields from right above them.
The Marroc yelled and howled and hooted. The Lhosir held firm and took their punishment. Arrows stuck out of their shields. Men screamed and howled curses as stones hit them. Here and there Gallow saw a Lhosir fall, crippled or dead, but there were few. The air had a touch of sweat to it now, forkbeard sweat, men already sweltering under their mail and helms though the road to the castle lay in the shade of the mountain. No burning skin yet though. Valaric was saving his fire for when he needed it. The Lhosir simply stood there. They didn’t even try to raise any ladders.
Gallow caught Valaric’s arm and shook his head. Arrows into a wall of shields was a waste, even if they did hit a Lhosir now and then. ‘They’re drawing you in, Valaric. They’re making you spend your arrows while their shields are strongest. Wait for them to make their move.’ He looked at the stones around him. The Marroc had already thrown most of what they’d brought and the battle had barely started. Three hundred archers with some dozen arrows each and the same again waiting in the castle thanks to Arda and Nadric. Enough to kill almost every Lhosir who’d ever crossed the sea, but only if they were used with care.
Valaric’s eyes blazed, itching for the fight. ‘Every arrow, you beef-witted clods! Every arrow has to count! Every arrow and every stone! Hold! Hold!’
The first of the siege towers was getting close. The Marroc bowmen fell silent, and now it was the turn of the Lhosir to hoot and taunt and howl, peering from behind their shields and sticking out their tongues. There was a rhythm to their shouting, as if they were at the oars of their ships. The towers weren’t for the gates, Gallow saw that now. Medrin meant to scale the walls directly from one tier of the castle road to the next, bypassing both the first gatehouse and the second. And Valaric, who had seen this too, meant to stop him. Marroc scurried to and fro, readying every stone and missile they could find. Valaric raised his hand again as the first tower came higher, as its top came close to the level of his feet. Every Marroc eye turned to follow him. The Lhosir watched too, hunched behind their shields. They understood what would come when that hand fell.
‘Now!’ Valaric’s hand dropped, and the Marroc along the walls cried out to Modris, to old King Tane, to Diaran, even to the Weeping God. Stones and rocks and boulders rained on the Lhosir once more, and now lighted pots of fish oil burst among their shields. The Lhosir wavered and Gallow felt a pang of sorrow for them, for deep down these were
his people. Nothing wrong with most of them, just men on the wrong side of a wall as stones smashed down shields and broke bones and snapped sinews. Arrows flew. Men wrapped in flames tumbled over the edge to the Aulian Way and the Isset below. Others slipped and fell, rolled on their backs; burning shields were hurled away. Medrin’s Lhosir had no answer, no arrows of their own, no javelins, no stone throwers. Yet the towers came on.
‘More! More!’
The Lhosir were packing themselves tight, pushing their shields closer. A jagged piece of stone as big as a man’s torso went over the edge and smashed into a dozen of them clustered together. Half were crushed where they stood, the others sent sprawling. Gallow saw one man stagger to his feet with two arrows in his chest and vanish back under the wall of shields. How deep they were through his mail was anyone’s guess. Smoke rose up the walls now, acrid, thick with the stench of burning men, of fish and hair and skin. Over the shouting he heard Valaric whoop as the Lhosir died.
Gallow closed his eyes. Medrin. Medrin had made this slaughter. Medrin and no one else and so Medrin would pay to make it right.
The first tower began to slide slowly back. For a moment Gallow’s heart was in his mouth, begging and praying and willing for it to slip and roll and topple and fall and crush the others. The Lhosir were yelling to hold it steady. Yet now, when it mattered most, the stones and the arrows gradually wilted. The boulders became pebbles. The road fell quiet again as though both sides were holding their breath, waiting to see, all except Valaric who was screaming at his men for more. But when Gallow looked, he saw why Valaric’s Marroc didn’t respond. There was no more. They’d thrown everything they had.
The Lhosir shouts found a rhythm again. The tower
stopped then ground back up the road once more until it slid to a halt in front of Gallow, right in front of him because he’d been watching it and was waiting for it. A ladder on wheels, that’s all it was, draped with heavy furs to protect the men climbing inside. At the very top the forkbeards had built a ramp like a drawbridge to cover the gap between the tower and the wall. Gallow readied his spear and waited for it to fall.
Now the tower was actually here, Valaric wished he’d saved some of the oil or the boulders. There was a runner on the way to the third gate calling for both but they wouldn’t come in time. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. The forkbeards were supposed to die battering their way through the gates. Now his men were in the wrong place. He needed his soldiers here, all of them, and he sent a second runner for reinforcements, but it was all too late to make a difference. Cursed Sixfingers had out-thought him, that was the truth of it, not that any man around him would ever say so.
A dozen archers stood ready for the ramp to come down. Valaric stood in the middle of a semicircle of twenty men with spears and shields, the best of his Crackmarsh men with Gallow in the middle beside him. In his hand he held Solace, the Comforter, the red sword of the Vathen. In Andhun he’d told Gallow that the sword was cursed and he’d believed it too, but now he had no choice. ‘When that ramp comes down, sod the arrows.’ The forkbeards would be ready for that. They’d have their shields up, but maybe that meant for a moment they wouldn’t see what was coming. ‘When it comes down, we charge them. We hit them like bulls and we take their tower and throw it down on their heads!’
The forkbeards below fell quiet. Valaric and his men gripped their spears, waiting for the ramp to fall.
‘Are you ready for us, Valaric of Witterslet, Valaric of the
Marroc, Valaric of the Swamp? Are you ready to die now?’ Sixfingers was somewhere below and not far from the foot of the tower but Valaric couldn’t see where.
Beside him, Gallow let out such a howl of hate that Valaric winced. ‘Medrin!’
There was a long pause and then Sixfingers seemed to be closer. ‘Is that you, Foxbeard?’
‘My sword hungers for you!’
‘They say you killed Beyard outside Witches’ Reach. I hear he had the better of you and let you win.’
Valaric threw Gallow a glance then nudged him. ‘Answer! You have to answer!’
‘I’ll not be as accommodating, Foxbeard.’ Sixfingers was taunting them now. ‘I’ll be with you as soon as I can. While you wait, perhaps you might discuss with your Marroc friend which one of you I should kill first.’
Valaric shoved Gallow again. Idiot. ‘Bring your worst, king of dogs,’ he bellowed. ‘My wolves hunger for you!’
‘Then enjoy your feast!’ There was a venomous glee to Sixfingers’ voice but Valaric didn’t have time to wonder about that because the tower shuddered and the ramp crashed down, and he was already moving and so were his Crackmarsh men because if there was one thing that got you killed in a battle more surely than a spear or an axe then it was doubt.
But the men waiting for them when the ramp came down were no forkbeards. They wore closed helms and ragged mail. They carried long Aulian swords and small round shields and their skin, where it showed, was chalky white. Shadewalkers. Sixfingers, somehow, had sent shadewalkers, and for a moment Valaric felt every part of him turn numb. The Marroc beside him thrust a spear through one porcelain throat. The shadewalker staggered but it didn’t bleed and it didn’t fall. Valaric heard a wail of fear and a cry of despair. He felt the air turn cold and sour and his men falter.
Gallow smashed a shadewalker with his shield. Another lost its hand, cut off at the wrist. It dropped its shield and grabbed a Marroc by the throat and throttled him while the Marroc stabbed it over and over, but Valaric had his own dead man to deal with, slamming its sword into him, battering him back with a strength that wasn’t human. ‘Stand!’ he bellowed. ‘Stand and hold them! Get the Aulian!’ Salt, that was the trick wasn’t it? But none of them had thought the forkbeards would send shadewalkers to do their fighting – who would have thought they could? And, besides, shadewalkers only came out at night, didn’t they? How had Sixfingers done this?
His men were already breaking and running around him, the shadewalkers stumbling after them and then stopping, staggering in the daylight. Valaric screamed a roar of rage and frustration and hewed at the dead thing in front of him. He slammed two blows into its shield, and then it blocked a third with its long sword but the iron blade snapped. Solace carved a line across the shadewalker’s face. The creature howled, its skin fell in on itself, and before Valaric’s eyes it crumbled into dust and bones and a dizzying stench of death. Valaric reeled and swung at the shadewalker strangling one of his Marroc and half severed its head. It too crumbled before him.
‘See! They die!’ But he was too late. His men had left him, even Gallow. Fled, and now there were shadewalkers all around and he could feel the tower shake as the forkbeards climbed through its guts, and then suddenly there was one looking right at him with his shield over his shoulder as he climbed. Forkbeards he understood, and this one couldn’t do a thing about it when Valaric lunged. The point of the red sword split the forkbeard’s mail as though it was cloth and bit straight through to his heart. The forkbeard’s eyes rolled back in surprise. He fell limp and dropped among the others behind him. Valaric bared his teeth and grinned:
this,
this
was what he wanted! He was standing at the top of the ladder and the forkbeards had to get past him. He’d kill them all, every single one of them. Alone if he had to.
‘Valaric!’
And he
wasn’t
alone. On the road behind him the shade-walkers staggered and lurched. Not a single Marroc had stayed, but two men stood firm nevertheless. The Aulian wizard with his satchels of salt and Gallow, battering the shadewalkers away from him.
From atop the first gate Reddic saw the Marroc surge into the forkbeard tower and then fall back and scatter and break, screaming as though they’d walked into the gaping maw of the Maker-Devourer himself. They ran like they had the devil at their backs and Reddic could see at once that the creatures who stepped onto the road were no forkbeards. They stood in a daze as though they’d never seen the sun. He gasped. ‘Shadewalkers!’
‘Look sharp!’ Angry Jonnic didn’t want to know. On the road beneath them the forkbeards were coming, a hundred or more with the ram they’d left short of the gates. A second tower was coming up the road and the next two weren’t far behind. Reddic squinted at where the forkbeards had driven his Crackmarsh brothers away. The walls of the second tier overlooking the ram were already all but abandoned: where there should have been a hundred men with arrows and stones, now there were none. At the start of the day he’d been scared but there’d been a part of him that had thought they might win. Not any more.
‘Ladders!’
The stone quivered under Reddic’s feet as the ram hit the gates. He looked for something to throw but Jonnic caught his arm and shook his head. ‘Wait.’ He pulled Reddic away from the edge and pushed him down behind a merlon then shouted at the others to abandon the gate and go up to the
next and pull the ladder up behind them. When Reddic made to get up to join them, Jonnic pushed him down again. ‘I said wait!’ He grinned and his eyes were wild and mad. ‘The six of us up here won’t stop them breaking through. Let them think they’ve got an easy ride of it. Let them think we’ve all run away like the rest. Keep nice and quiet and still. Then we can rain rocks and oil on them when they’re not expecting it. Hurt them where it counts.’
‘And then?’
Jonnic patted Reddic on the shoulder. They both knew what
and then
looked like. Reddic closed his eyes and shook his head. ‘Scared?’ Jonnic chuckled. ‘There’s no shame in that.’
But Reddic found he wasn’t really, not any more. He’d gone long past scared and it was something else. ‘There’s a girl up in the castle. We spent Shieftane watching the moon together. I wanted to tell her something but I never did.’ He shrugged and whispered a prayer to Modris the Protector. Beside him Jonnic did the same.
Valaric killed the next forkbeard to show his head at the top of the ladder. Oribas was scattering lines of salt on the road and Gallow was smashing the shadewalkers away, keeping the Aulian free to do his work. One by one he penned them in, and it seemed to Valaric that these shadewalkers were slow and clumsy and not so frightening after all. Yet there were no other Marroc here now. Just him and Oribas and Gallow against Sixfingers and all his army.
‘Come on up, Sixfingers!’ he bellowed. ‘We’re both here. The Foxbeard says I get to have at you first!’
‘The sun, Valaric,’ Oribas shouted. ‘The sun steals their strength. But I have no fire to burn them, nor iron to kill them.’