Gallow (73 page)

The Aulian bowed his head. ‘You must give me a day, shadewalker. That is the Aulian way of these things. One day, and then we will imagine that your torturers have plied their trade and done terrible things and that I screamed and bled and begged for it all to end, and at the end of that one day I was broken. We shall both imagine this thing and then I shall tell you without the pain, and you will hear it without the unpleasantness and the expense. That is the Aulian way.’

Oribas was quaking where he sat but his voice was strong and resolved. Beyard lifted his mask back over his head. ‘But we are not in Aulia and that is not the Lhosir way, and there is no expense, nor is there unpleasantness.’ He sighed. ‘I would like to send you back to Varyxhun to hang. But I can hand you over to the Lhosir here to take their time over you if you like. You’re a foreigner, as good as a
nioingr
, so there’s nothing they won’t do if it amuses them. We are not a civilised people. Not in your way. So tell me about the other way into Witches’ Reach you claim to know, or all those things you wish only to imagine will be visited upon you, one after the other. Or . . .’ he paused and leaned in closer ‘. . . worse.’

‘Bird, fish, bear, dragon,’ said the Aulian. ‘There. I’ve told you the piece that matters. The thing you want to know. But they will be watching. The shaft is death to you now.’

Beyard lifted the red sword and grated the edge of it against his iron-gloved hand. The Aulian whimpered. His words tripped over one another in their eagerness. The cave in the mountainside, the passageway, the shaft and the old Aulian tomb. The sealed door – bird, fish, bear, dragon – and how it led into the cellars of Witches’ Reach. How Oribas had opened it for the Marroc and how he’d lured fifty or more Lhosir into that same shaft and then burned them alive. The Aulian almost wept when he spoke of it, and there was more to his tears than fear: he was ashamed. Beyard understood. He almost reached out a hand, but they were cased in iron and were hardly things of comfort. So he let the Aulian speak on until he was done, and when at last Oribas fell to silence, Beyard let it hang between them for a long time.

‘I know what it is to have shamed yourself,’ he said at last. When the Aulian didn’t reply he got up and looked outside the tent. The day was fading, the sun already low over the mountains.

‘I was taught to battle monsters,’ whispered Oribas. ‘Not men.’

Beyard kept staring out at the orange sun hanging in a deep blue sky. The mountains before it were in shadow, a deep purple, almost black. He felt a terrible truth coalescing inside him, as yet unheard but demanding at last to be told. ‘Why did you call me shadewalker.’

The Aulian didn’t answer.

‘What did you throw in my face, Oribas of Aulia?’

‘Salt.’ The word was a whisper, so quiet that Beyard barely heard.

‘Salt. Again?’

‘Yes.’

‘
Just
salt?’

‘Yes.’

Beyard let that linger a while. ‘Why, Aulian? Why would you throw salt in a man’s face? Why did your salt burn so?’

The Aulian didn’t answer but by then he didn’t need to. The iron skin, the ever-present sense of cold, the ambivalence to food and even water, the sleepless nights and salt that burned. He’d been what he was for seventeen years and had never understood, and yet this Aulian had seen through it in days. If he’d still been able to cry, Beyard might have shed a tear for himself.

‘No need, Aulian. No need.’ His voice was like the grinding of stones. ‘I am like them, am I?’

Yes.’

‘I am no longer alive.’

‘No.’

The Eyes of Time had done this to him. He’d stolen into the Temple of Fates, for which the price was always death, and thought he’d escaped his punishment, but he hadn’t escaped at all.

He slipped the crown and mask over his face once more. ‘They will hang you in Varyxhun. It will be clean.’ He strode out into the sunset, leaving the Aulian behind.

T
he Lhosir took their time. They stayed in their camp on the first day of the siege and Achista stood on the walls watching, wondering whether Oribas was a prisoner among them or whether he’d found his own path to slip away. She couldn’t bring herself to think of him held by the forkbeards, but nor could she bring herself to think of him simply walking away.

‘We have to suppose the forkbeards have him,’ whispered Addic. He stood beside her, looking down the slope of the mountain saddle to the Lhosir camp. ‘We have to suppose they know about the tomb.’

‘He wouldn’t tell them!’

‘But perhaps they knew already. Is it sealed?’

‘If you sealed it when you left.’ Achista couldn’t remember what they’d agreed. Whether they’d even spoken of it. ‘How many forkbeards this time?’

‘More than enough.’ Addic put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed.

‘The Wolf will come out of the Crackmarsh.’ She tried to sound as though she believed it. Not a word had come back, not one of the messengers they’d sent. She didn’t know if any of them had even reached Valaric. The Crackmarsh was a hostile place, filled with monsters that only he and his men had learned to master.

Her brother stroked her hair. ‘Cithjan sent as many men again to the bridge to guard against that. If Valaric comes, he’ll have a hard fight to even get here.’

‘Then there’s no rescue and no escape.’

‘Win or lose this day, sister, we’ve already won this war before a sword was drawn. I’ve ridden across the valley, back and forth. Men will see what we’ve done. They’ll rise as we did, not a few score as we are but in their hundreds and their thousands, from here to Andhun, in Sithhun itself. I’ve seen it with my own eyes and heard it with my own ears. The Marroc of Varyxhun are ready for you, Achista.’

‘If they’re ready then let them come.’ She turned away.

Gallow and Arda spent the rest of that night together. Neither said much. ‘I don’t want to hear,’ Arda told him when he started to speak. ‘I don’t want a word. You can tell me why it took three years to walk from Andhun to home when there’s no forkbeards out there and I can get properly angry with you again. I don’t want to be angry with you now.’ And there were tears in her eyes, and Gallow didn’t understand but he held her in silence as she’d asked, and it was beautiful because it was a closeness that had always been unacknowledged. Eventually they fell asleep holding one another, and in the morning light the Marroc looked at him askance, trying to work him out, this man who looked like a forkbeard but wasn’t.

Some time later Gallow sat with Tolvis. Loudmouth’s pain ran deeper than the Marroc arrow in his side and for once there was nothing Gallow could do. Late in the afternoon as he crossed the yard with a bucket of water, he found Addic coming the other way. They glanced uncertainly at each other. Each had been in the Lhosir camp that night for something different. Both had got what they went for and both now had a hole in them where Oribas used to be.

‘I thought you were him,’ said Gallow. All the way from the Lhosir camp to the walls of Witches’ Reach he’d thought they were following Oribas. He’d never seen the skinny little Aulian run so fast, but then he’d never had a dozen Lhosir chasing him. In the dark he simply hadn’t noticed. And Addic had thought that the Aulian was Arda.

Addic looked at his feet, at the ground, all around, anywhere but at Gallow’s face. ‘Oribas married my sister.’

‘Oribas?’ Gallow struggled to imagine Oribas even interested in a woman. Before they’d crossed the mountains every drop of his life and passion had gone on hunting the Rakshasa. After they’d defeated it he’d just seemed empty. Then Gallow started to laugh. Oribas, looking for something to fill the place where the Rakshasa had been, had found a fiery Marroc woman had he? Achista. The Marroc called her Huntress now. She was their voice and their fire, and who was he, Gallow, to say anything to that but
Well done
?

‘Why are you laughing?’ Addic looked stricken. ‘I thought he was your friend.’

‘The only one I had for a long time.’

‘And now he’s gone and you’re laughing?’

‘Because he came from another land and fell in love with a Marroc, just as I did.’

Then Addic smiled too as he understood. ‘We make good women. Will you talk to her? Tell her something about him? They had so little time.’

‘He might not even be taken, Addic, and taken is not the same as dead.’

‘Cithjan sent Oribas to the Devil’s Caves simply for knowing you.’

‘But Cithjan is dead. You killed him. If the Lhosir have him then Beyard will decide his fate, and Beyard isn’t Cithjan.’ Perhaps they should leave the Fateguard as master of Varyxhun castle. Beneath the iron he was still the man he used to be, and that was why Medrin Sixfingers would never have it. Gallow passed the bucket to Addic. ‘Here. Take this to Tolvis. Arda will be there. Perhaps she should talk to your sister. I was lost to her for years so I suppose she has some wisdom when it comes to waiting.’

Addic chuckled. He took the water. ‘Don’t say that to Achista.’

Gallow climbed the steps to the wall. He passed along the walkway over the gates where the mound of ice still lay pressed up against them. If the Lhosir brought up a ram and it was anything short of a whole tree, they’d be wasting their time. But if they knew how many Marroc were inside, they’d bring ladders. One between three. One man to climb, one man to hold the ladder steady and one to hold a shield and throw the occasional spear.

He stopped beside Achista. She seemed too small and young to lead these Marroc, and yet she did. He told her about the ladders, how the Lhosir would overwhelm the wall with sheer numbers by coming at it from everywhere at once. ‘You can’t hold it,’ he said. ‘You don’t have enough men.’

She replied to the wind in a whisper barely heard. ‘Oribas would have found a way.’

‘No. Not even Oribas.’

‘He was a wizard.’

‘He still is.’

She shook her head and started telling Gallow of all the things Oribas had done, of all the miracles he’d worked. Laying a shadewalker to rest, the avalanche outside the Devil’s Caves and the victory at Jodderslet even though Gallow had seen both for himself; then in the woods below Witches’ Reach and opening the Aulian seal, luring Skilljan Spearhoof’s Lhosir into the shaft and burning them there. Gallow understood. She didn’t know it, but she was speaking him out, letting him go in the Lhosir way and reminding the gods of his deeds. When she paused, Gallow took over. He told her of the scared twitchy desperate man who’d found him washed up on a sandy beach a thousand miles to the south of the Aulian mountains. Of the determination that had kept him going after the monstrous Rakshasa, relentless and remorseless and unstoppable as the old Screambreaker himself. How he’d hunted the Rakshasa for year after year and never stopped until even the gods themselves had seen the strength of his heart and answered his prayers. ‘He wasn’t the one who laid it to rest, not at the end,’ he told her, ‘but Oribas was the one who laid the traps, who followed its trail, who saw through its tricks and disguises and in the end fooled it into its doom. I’ve never met a man who was so driven to his end, and the end he’s chosen now is you. He will find a way, Achista of the Marroc. There’s no man in the world who’ll try harder and few better equipped to succeed.’ He could feel the lightening around her, the shedding of her burden. She would still grieve, but it wouldn’t crush her now.

‘It was even his idea to mound up the snow behind the gates.’

‘If he was here now, what he’d tell you to do was take as much snow as you can up to the roof of the tower and as many stones as you can carry.’

‘Why?’

‘Beyard will take the walls tomorrow, and quickly. Ladders won’t help him get into the tower, though. He’ll need to force the door. He’ll have a ram but since the doors are a full man’s height above the ground with steps that come at them from sideways, he’ll have to build a ramp to use it. In time he will, and he’ll get in – don’t be mistaken about that. But the Lhosir with him, they’ll be impatient and looking for a quicker way. They’ll go at the tower door with axes and fire. The snow is for the fires, the stones for the Lhosir who try to light them or bring their axes.’

‘Once they have us penned in the tower, we’ll all die.’

‘You set that to be your fate long before today, Marroc. Oribas may yet outlive us all.’

She laughed, a harsh broken sound. ‘Oribas will arrive on the back of a dragon that he’s awoken with some ancient Aulian spell to burn the forkbeards? Perhaps the dragon buried under Varyxhun!’ She shook her head. ‘No. It’s done. We’ll fight and shed our blood and die, all of us, and it will be the telling of our courage that will live on. We won’t win, but our story will eat you forkbeards one by one, until none of you are left.’ She twisted suddenly to meet his gaze. ‘Why are
you
here, forkbeard? How is this your fight?’

Gallow stared down at her. So fierce. ‘I had a dozen angry brothers of the sea chasing me and you lowered a ladder for me to climb and so here I am. When they come, I’ll hold your wall for you as best I can. If the chance comes, I’ll seek out Beyard and we’ll finish what we started. I don’t expect to live either, but perhaps he’ll spare my Arda. Would you believe me if I told you he’s a good man? Brave and honourable.’

Achista laughed and turned away. ‘The iron devil of Varyxhun? He’s a monster.’

‘Can he not be both? He’ll be fair, Achista. If he offers you mercy, at least listen. He’ll be good to his word. Better than most.’

‘There’ll be no mercy.’ Her eyes settled back on the Lhosir camp. They’d been busy with their axes today. They’d built a pyre for Cithjan and burned him, but Gallow was sure they’d built other things too. She was probably right. Beyard might give them quick clean deaths to honour their courage, but not mercy. That wasn’t what the Fateguard were for.

‘Tomorrow you’ll need small groups of men around you, Addic, Tolvis and me. Four to each of us, the best swordsmen or axemen you have. Station the rest of your men evenly around the walls. We’ll go to wherever the fighting is most fierce, wherever the Lhosir get a foothold on the battlements. It will come to us to try and drive them back. Someone must take charge of calling a retreat to the tower. These same four groups of men will keep the Lhosir at bay. Tell your Marroc that when the call comes to abandon the walls they must do it at once. They must turn and run as fast as they can with their bows to the tower and then stand at the doors. The Lhosir will take the walls faster than you can imagine. Those with swords will keep them back long enough for the men with bows to get to the tower but they’ll not hold for long. Then the bowmen must hold the Lhosir in turn while the men with swords withdraw. Many will die when the walls fall, but if your Marroc don’t understand that they must run like the wind when the signal is given, the Lhosir will take the tower too and it will all be done and gone in a day. You need to last. To be seen.’