Gallow (77 page)

He scooped up a burning branch from one of the fires and hurled it at three forkbeards standing together, then charged into them, battering one man down, veering away before the other two could stab him with their spears. He wheeled and ran straight into a forkbeard fighting toe to toe with one of his Marroc. Valaric rammed his spear into the back of the forkbeard’s thigh and ran on. A pair of Lhosir with axes were racing across the camp, coming his way. He dropped into the shadows of a tent, stuck out his foot and tripped one and then surged up and brought his spear down with all his strength, splitting the mail that protected the back of the forkbeard’s neck. He yanked his point free, blade dark with forkbeard blood. The second axeman skidded to a stop and spun to face him. Valaric bared his teeth.
Modris, but it feels good to be doing something at last!

Gallow stepped aside as the iron man hurled himself forward. He struck Beyard in the side with all the strength his arm could muster. Beyard turned and stood for a moment, lit by Tolvis’s pyre, armour gleaming, shoulders rising and falling with each heavy breath. He came more slowly now, with the patient purpose of a Fateguard, driving Gallow back towards the heat of the fire. The red sword arced and swung and the air moaned under its blade. Gallow raised his own sword to defend himself. Sparks flashed as steel touched steel. Beyard lunged, driving for Gallow’s heart. Gallow leaped sideways, almost falling into the pyre in his desperation. He hurled another swing at Beyard but the Edge of Sorrows caught it easily and almost wrenched his sword out of his hand. Beyard swung and lunged again. This time Gallow stepped inside the blow and barged Beyard with his shoulder, staggering him back. He lifted his sword to drive it between the bars of the iron man’s mask, but Beyard smashed the blade aside. The ring as the two swords struck sounded oddly dull. The red sword slashed at Gallow’s face. Gallow stumbled again, and this time when the red sword came down and he blocked it with his own, his blade shattered. Gallow rolled away, snatched a brand out of the pyre and jumped to his feet, waving it at Beyard’s face. The iron man caught it in his fist and held it. For an instant their eyes met, the fire burning between them, then Beyard punched Gallow with the hand that still held Solace. As he reeled, Beyard pushed him to the ground. A moment later the tip of the red sword rested on the back of Gallow’s neck.

‘Yield!’ rasped Beyard.

The Marroc raced out of the tower, howling and screaming, hacking at the ramp the forkbeards had built, drawing them from where they stood watch. They came slowly, distracted by the fight at the pyre, but they came, and Achista and the Marroc fought them as hard as they could. But there were dozens of them, soldiers born and bred, and slowly they drove the Marroc back into a tight circle of shields and spears just outside the gates, pressing in, killing them one by one with no way out.

Valaric took the forkbeard’s axe on his shield and rammed his spear point into the man’s belly – maybe not hard enough to pierce mail but hard enough to wind him. As the Lhosir doubled over, Valaric lifted his shield and smashed its rim into the back of the forkbeard’s head. He went down.

‘Next!’ In the darkness, amid the litter of campfires and the scurrying of men here and there, it was impossible to tell who was who and who was winning. It was everything Valaric had wanted though – a wild swirling melee with every man for himself. The forkbeards hadn’t formed their wall of shields because he hadn’t let them. He crouched down in the shadows. A Lhosir ran out in front of him. He sprang and brought him down, banging the forkbeard’s head into the frozen ground and holding it there until his struggles eased enough for Valaric to get out a knife and open his throat. Not ten feet away a Marroc was fighting another forkbeard, the two of them locked together, grunting and swearing, the forkbeard slowly bearing the Marroc down. The forkbeard wasn’t wearing his mail though, so Valaric ran to them and knifed him in the liver.

‘Look!’ The Marroc pointed up the slope towards the Reach. In the dim light around the gates Valaric saw fighting. ‘They’ve come out for us,’ said the Marroc.

‘Crazy fools.’ They were surrounded. He could see that even from here. He could see the pyre as well and two men fighting around it, and as he watched, one of the men fell. A savage growl prowled inside him, looking for an escape. ‘Round up some others,’ he snarled. ‘Not too many. But we came here for Witches’ Reach.’

‘Yield.’ Gallow was kneeling now. ‘Yield and I’ll give you a clean death.’

‘Let the Marroc go. Let Oribas go. Let all of them go. End it all, old friend.’

‘Look around you. It’s ended already.’

‘Yet still I will not yield.’ Gallow started to rise.

The tip of the red sword pressed into his neck. ‘Your Marroc are beaten, old friend.’

Gallow kept rising though the sword’s edge cut into his skin. He could feel the blood trickling down his back. Beyard could kill him with a flick of his wrist yet he didn’t. ‘No, Beyard. Lost is not beaten. You’re Lhosir. You of all of us understand the difference.’ He walked away and picked up the jagged stump of his broken sword. ‘I’ll fight you until you kill me, old friend.’

Beyard kept the red sword held out before him. Gallow walked calmly towards it. He swatted the Edge of Sorrows aside with his half-sword. Beyard stepped away. ‘Stop,’ he hissed. He sounded hoarse. ‘Just go, Gallow.’

‘I will not.’

‘I don’t want to kill you, old friend.’

Gallow flicked the red sword aside again. ‘Then take your Lhosir and walk away.’

‘I cannot.’

‘Then I have no other choice to give you.’ Gallow lunged and Beyard only moved at the very last moment. The jagged edge of Gallow’s steel slid off the side of the Fateguard mask. The iron man stayed where he was. He didn’t raise the red sword. Instead he lifted the mask and crown off his face and looked Gallow in the eye.

‘There would be tears in my eyes if I could still weep.’

‘Yield, old friend.’

‘I cannot. No more than you.’

They looked at one another a moment longer. Beneath the pale scarred skin and the hollow cheeks and the red-rimmed eyes, Gallow saw the Beyard who’d stood beside him in the Temple of the Fates, holding closed a door, young and strong and fierce, the best of the three of them by far.

‘Don’t let him lessen us,’ Beyard whispered and put back his mask and crown, and Gallow knew he meant Medrin. Medrin, who’d been with them that day and had run away.

The iron man lowered the Edge of Sorrows and was still. Gallow drove the spike of his broken sword through the bars of the iron mask. Beyard spasmed. The red sword fell from his hand. His weight sagged forward and Gallow eased him to his knees. ‘Farewell, old friend.’

Beyard still had some strange strength to him. He knelt, head bowed, a spike of iron through his skull, and yet for a moment he didn’t die. He gripped Gallow’s leg.

‘Peace.’ Gallow pulled away. He picked the red sword out of the snow and brought it down with all his strength on the back of Beyard’s neck. Solace. The Comforter. The Peacebringer.

Achista knew she’d die. The last dozen of the Marroc from the tower were pressed together. She’d never even fought a man with a sword and half the other Marroc were the same – pathetic, desperate – while the forkbeards were forkbeards. Even as she dodged and ducked and lunged, inside she cringed, waiting for the end. And then suddenly the forkbeards were drawing back. A score of them and they were pulling away, all of them staring down the trail from the gates of Witches’ Reach to the pyre where one man stood holding the sword of the Weeping God. Gallow.

Slowly, with their shields still high and their spears still raised, the forkbeards drew away and melted into the night. They were Lhosir, after all, men of fate, and fate had spoken. Achista stared long after they’d vanished into the darkness. Stared as a horn sounded in the distance, deep and mournful. Stared at Gallow as he stood there doing nothing but looking down at the fallen iron devil. Then figures appeared out of the shadows heading up from the forkbeard camp – Marroc, led by a man with wild mad eyes, scarred and spattered with blood. He looked at her and at the others and then back again and held out his arm. ‘Valaric,’ he said. ‘They call me Mournful.’

It was a miracle. She clasped his arm. ‘Achista. They call me the Huntress.’

‘Why did the forkbeards run? They never run.’

She pointed at Gallow. There was the answer, somehow. “But they didn’t
run.
They just . . . left.’

Valaric nodded. ‘Well get your men together, Achista whom they call the Huntress. We’ve work to do. There’s plenty more forkbeards left where they came from.’

He ran back yelling orders and Achista watched him, too dazed by fate’s sudden turn to take it in. The forkbeards would come again. Another army, bigger. But this time there would be enough Marroc to hold the walls for months.

She left the gate and walked to the pyre. Gallow was dragging the body of the iron devil towards the flames but it was too heavy and awkward for one man to lift alone. She took the iron devil’s feet. Burning it felt right. Burning it into ash. Together they heaved it into the flames. ‘You won,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how, but you won.’

Gallow picked up the iron devil’s head, still with the spike of his broken sword driven through its mask. He threw it into the flames and whispered words amid the crackling heat. Achista stared into the pyre, lost. It was like watching all the forkbeards she’d ever known burn, all the things they’d done and all the bitterness they’d wrought.

When she turned back to Gallow to ask him what he would do, he was gone.

G
allow stared at Beyard, wreathed in fire, his head still mercifully cased in iron, the crown and mask of the Fateguard pinned in place by the spike of his broken sword. He’d been a man once. Even at the end neither of them had forgotten. The right thing now was to speak out his deeds, shout them to the sky loud and clear so the wind would carry his words across the world and through the Herenian Marches to the Maker-Devourer and his cauldron, but what was there to say? ‘Beyard. A Lhosir of the old way. The best of us all. Maker-Devourer, take him to your cauldron. A friend once.’ That was what mattered the most.

Achista was staring, mesmerised by the flames and their ever-fickle meanings. Her eyes were black and wide. Words grew in his throat and then died on his lips. He almost reached out to touch her, to bring her back from wherever she was, and then stopped. He was a forkbeard and she was a Marroc, and that would never change. Only Arda ever saw past to the man inside. Arda, who’d kept his heart alive for three long years, and now he had to leave her again.

The heat of the pyre burned his face. He stepped back, and then turned away and slammed the Edge of Sorrows down. Its point bit deep into the frozen earth, ever hungry for the piercing of things. He left it there and walked through snow pounded flat by a thousand fleeing footfalls. The Marroc from the keep were out by the gates now, the few that were left, dancing and singing and whooping. Addic was there and somehow Valaric too, Addic drunk with delight that he was still alive, Valaric yelling orders at his men who’d come from Maker-Devourer-knew-where on this night to save them. A miracle? A sign from the gods? Luck? Fate? Gallow passed them by and felt none of it, no joy, no pride, no glory, just the weight of a lot of dead men whose blood had spilled for no great cause one way or the other. He walked up the steps to the keep, and there she was in the shadows beyond the doorway, looking out. Watching. Arda. He opened his arms to her and she walked to him and let him hold her tight. In his mail and his furs he felt like a bear and she so fragile.

‘Arda.’ He nuzzled her hair and held her, and for a long time that was enough.

‘I know that look.’

‘I killed a friend tonight.’

She didn’t say a word.

‘You are . . .’ He shook his head. Oribas would have found words of magic power, drawn patterns in the air with them, made them dance and sing to the tune of his heart, but that was Oribas, whose art was knowledge. Gallow had no idea how to tell Arda what was in his heart. Neither of them had ever been good at that.

Oribas, whom Beyard had sent away to be hanged, whom Gallow had walked away from once back in Varyxhun.

‘Clod-head. I know. Come.’

She led him away to the cellars, to a quiet place where the Marroc left them alone and kept him there until the creeping grey of dawn spread across the mountain sky to the east. And when he thought she was sleeping and turned back the furs to slip silently away, she looked him right in the eye. She’d known all along that it would come to this.

‘You’re going to go again, aren’t you?’ She tried to sound like it didn’t matter but she couldn’t. Her voice was flat and dead.

‘Yes.’

The Arda he’d left behind three years ago would have sworn and shouted and thrown things, screaming about family and loyalty, but now she only looked at him. ‘Why, Gallow? Why?’

‘Oribas.’ And that was all. As if that should be enough. She stiffened, the old anger and resentment and all those other things still burning away inside her, hard to push away.

‘Pursic doesn’t even remember you.’ She knew he’d seen back in Middislet: Pursic at the top of the cellar stairs staring at Tolvis.
Dada!

Gallow closed his eyes. His voice broke to a whisper. ‘I know.’

She snorted, and for a moment she was herself again, the old Arda who was used to being around mud-brained forkbeards. ‘Well, if you’re going then you’ll be not much use if you freeze to death.’ She picked up a handful of furs and threw them at him. ‘At least keep yourself warm.’ She waited while he put on his mail and buckled his belt and arranged his furs, and then when he was dressed she led him by the hand to the gates of Witches’ Reach and handed him his spear. ‘I won’t be here when you come back. Three years was enough. I’ll not do that again.’