Authors: Nathan Hawke
‘Your sword, Valaric!’ Gallow had one of them wrestled to the ground and was smashing it over and over but it still
thrashed and its mail turned his blade. ‘The red sword. End them! I’ll keep Medrin’s curs whimpering in their holes for you!’
Valaric ran out from the tower and across the ramp. He smashed the red sword into the head of the one wrestling with Gallow and then watched as the Foxbeard ran to take his place. The red sword hacked down another shadewalker. Now that he was outside he could see the forkbeards were bringing their ram up to the first gate and the Marroc on top were already scaling the rope ladder to the roof of the second, fleeing without putting up a fight. Valaric raised his fists at them all, screaming at the top of his lungs, ‘Cowards! You sheep! You’re everything they say of us! If this is the best we are then we deserve everything they do! Mewling hedge-born clay-hearts, all of you!’ Tears were running down his face. The Crackmarsh men he’d had with him, those surly old soldiers he’d quietly thought as good as any forkbeard, they were all gone, cowering along the zigzag road, past the next gate where they had stone and wood and iron to keep the shadewalkers at bay. Probably none of them could even hear him. No one except the Aulian wizard, who shouldn’t even be here, and Gallow, a forkbeard. It made him want to fall on his own sword.
The second tower was close. Soon it would reach the road and fall open and there’d be no stopping them. He let out a furious howl, grabbed one of the shadewalkers from behind, picked it up and and threw it over the wall onto the throng of forkbeards below. He turned back. ‘I have iron enough for these, Aulian!’ He swung the red sword and listened to the air moan as the steel split the wind. A shadewalker fell with its head torn from its shoulders, the next with its face split in two, a third with the point driven through the back of its skull. They tried to defend themselves, but against the red sword, out in the sun and doused by Oribas’s salt, they were as feeble as children.
Peacebringer. The red sword wanted them. One by one the shadewalkers crumbled to dust.
A
movement from inside the tower caught Valaric’s eye, another forkbeard shield creeping up. Gallow was there. He brought his axe down and the forkbeard beneath bellowed an oath. Valaric laughed. The last two shadewalkers were helpless quivering things, paralysed by Oribas’s salt, and they didn’t even try to stop him as he took their heads. He looked up the road to the third gate, praying to Modris that his Crackmarsh men had found their spines again, but no.
The second forkbeard tower reached the road and stopped, and even Valaric knew better than to stand alone against the dozen angry forkbeards who’d come howling out of it. He grabbed Oribas, turned and ran, shouting at Gallow as he did and didn’t look back until he reached the elbow where the road turned from the siege towers and second gate behind him and doubled back on itself up towards the third. Past the elbow there were Marroc on the walls over his head again, more men with stones and arrows and fire. Forkbeards were coming out of both of the siege towers now, scores of them, and Gallow still stood alone to face them. Valaric could have murdered him for that. A forkbeard facing dozens of his own kin when a hundred Marroc had been too afraid? And for a heartbeat Valaric thought about running back to Gallow’s side, facing them together, the two of them against the whole of Medrin’s army just like it had been in Andhun. Utter madness, but when he held the red sword he felt immortal.
The forkbeards were advancing slowly behind a wall of shields, taking their time, content to walk the Foxbeard slowly back. As Valaric watched, an arrow from up on the fourth tier took one of them in the legs. Gallow threw back his head and roared out his challenge once more: ‘Here I am, Medrin! Waiting for you!’ The first gate was being smashed in without a single Marroc holding his ground to defend it. The second gate had the forkbeards from their towers behind it already. They’d just walk up to it and open it.
Valaric walked through the third gate with the red sword over his shoulder. He growled and looked at the faces around him, the men who’d broken and run at the first drawn sword. But as he prepared to bellow out his furious contempt, Oribas touched his arm. The Aulian took his hand and raised it high, the red sword still firm in Valaric’s gasp. ‘Men of the Varyxhun valley! For years you’ve feared those creatures. Shadewalkers that many of you thought could not be killed. Today one man alone with this sword has destroyed them.’ He dropped Valaric’s arm and lifted one of his satchels of salt. ‘I have fought them too. You saw me. I didn’t kill any and I had no sword, but I didn’t run because I did not need a blade.’ He sprinkled a line of salt across the road. ‘Salt! Nothing more, yet it is like a wall of stone to them. They cannot pass. Throw it on their skin and it burns them like fire. Salt!’ He threw the satchel down and pulled Valaric up the road, muttering under his breath, ‘You’ll have to give salt to every man now. I have no idea how many shadewalkers are in this valley but it’s many more than you put to rest today. Tell them it works on the ironskins too. Men must know how to fight whatever enemy stands before them. You cannot blame them if they run when they do not.’
Valaric looked back through the open gate at Gallow, still alone, still facing the forkbeards. He didn’t understand why the forkbeards didn’t simply charge and overwhelm Gallow
with their numbers. He stopped at the edge of the road and looked down. The ram was still at the first gate but the forkbeards must have smashed through already because he could see them clearing rubble on the other side and trading insults with the Marroc atop the second. Now and then an arrow flew down. One good charge and he still might sweep the forkbeards off the road and smash their towers. One good charge, but that was what the gates were for. So that he didn’t have to. So that he didn’t have to lose so many men, not yet.
Stuck in his throat though. He yelled down the road at Gallow, ‘Foxbeard! Save it for the sixth gate, not the second.’ He sighed and shook his head because walking away wasn’t what forkbeards did when they could stand and fight instead, however stupid it might be. Yet after a moment Gallow backed away and the forkbeards didn’t follow. Valaric took a deep breath and let it out between his teeth. The second gate wouldn’t hold long, not with forkbeards on both sides. ‘Two gates lost in a single day.’
Oribas touched his arm. ‘They still have to open it. Then they have to clear the road and bring up their ram and you can drop rocks and arrows on them all the way. Your men have seen that shadewalkers can die now and the forkbeards cannot easily bring those towers any further; and if they do then I have an idea or two about how we might stop them.’ His eyes were gleaming. ‘Imagine many stones hitting the men behind that ramp as it opens. Hitting them very fast and hard.’
Valaric felt suddenly light-headed. ‘What I want, Aulian, is to imagine the dragon coming out of that cave behind the sixth gate and eating them all. That would do nicely.’
Gallow was walking through the third gate while the Marroc there all looked away, pretending he didn’t exist, closing the gate behind him. The Aulian was nodding to himself, lost in his own plans. ‘I’ll go back up to the castle
now. You’ve got enough carpenters there and rope and wood. I could have one made by sunset. And the dragon of your stories will drown them, not eat them.’
Valaric unexpectedly sat down, because it was suddenly that or fall over. He felt dizzy and had no idea what the Aulian was talking about. He looked at his feet in front of him. One of his boots was light and one of them was dark. Which was odd because they’d both been light at the start of the day.
It was blood. ‘Oh . . .’
Oribas was staring at him. The Aulian knelt down and pushed at the mail surcoat that Valaric wore down to his knees. He poked at something and a sharp pain shot right up Valaric’s spine. ‘One of the shadewalkers.’
‘I don’t even feel it.’ Did he want to look? That was a lot of blood, but he’d run all the way up the road so it couldn’t be too bad, could it? But Oribas wasn’t even looking at him. The Aulian was waving his hands at the nearest Marroc and yelling for a mule, and at Gallow, and calling for his satchel, and all with an urgent panic in his eyes. Valaric sat humming to himself. Some old tune his mother had used to sing when he was a boy, one he’d forgotten for years.
Reddic listened to the forkbeards yell at each other and then tuned his ears for the scrape of wood on stone that would be a ladder but it never came. After another hour, when there still hadn’t been any forkbeards climbing over the battlements, he needed a piss. Jonnic snarled at him. There were forkbeards all over the road below clearing stones so they could move their ram. They hardly weren’t going to notice if some Marroc stood up on the gates and relieved himself over them.
Reddic turned his head. There were more forkbeards further up the road. The second gatehouse was surrounded. But more to the point, the forkbeards on the second tier
could see him if they cared to look down. He couldn’t even sit up. Didn’t dare move at all. After another hour he just let it out. It was an odd feeling, lying down and pissing in his pants. Couldn’t say he could remember ever doing that before. And there they stayed, the two of them alone, lying still as statues because that’s what Jonnic said, while the forkbeards pushed their ram and then their army on up the road.
Oribas had barely got two Marroc to bring a mule when Valaric tipped over sideways, white as a sheet. Gallow caught him and eased him to the ground but the bleeding was worse than the Aulian had thought and so there wouldn’t be any taking him up to the castle to patch him together. He’d do it here. They needed him. Without Valaric, the Crackmarsh men would simply break.
Oribas waved back the Marroc with the mule and beckoned Gallow closer instead. ‘Hold him.’ He eased Valaric onto his back. Blood still ran freely out of his leg, though it should have clotted by now. ‘Pull back his mail.’ He rummaged in his satchel wondering why the wound wasn’t closing. If the shadewalker had hit an artery Valaric would have died back on the road so it wasn’t that, but it just kept bleeding. There were desert animals that used the same trick on their prey. Bit them and then left them to bleed until they were too weak to run. He’d never understood how they did that. Spirits. Bad spirits, his masters had said, which was another way of saying that they didn’t know either.
‘I never thought I’d come back,’ said Gallow out of nowhere. ‘It was right that I did. I’ve made myself whole again.’
Gallow had Valaric’s mail pulled back. ‘Now get his trousers down.’ Needle and thread and Firaxian powders to make the bleeding stop. Marroc clustered to see what he was doing. They stared at him and so Oribas stared back. ‘Do you want to be the ones fighting the shadewalkers? No?
Then give me space to work! Fetch some wine. Good strong dark wine. The best you can find.’ It might help Valaric or it might not but it would certainly help an Aulian scholar who’d never been so close to a battle in all his life until Gallow had brought him over the mountains. He set to work with Gallow crouched beside him with his weight on Valaric’s shoulders.
‘I made an oath on Shiefa’s night. It was three years to the day since I left Middislet with the Screambreaker. I made an oath in blood, Oribas, a promise to fight no wars once this one is done. And after that I dreamed of how it would be if Medrin Sixfingers simply ceased, if he changed his mind and went home, if there was more to our horizon than bloody war and starving siege and a slow and unwelcome death. Can you do that, Oribas, wizard of Aulia? Can you make Medrin simply disappear?’
‘No.’ Oribas snapped. His stitching was ragged and there was blood all over his hands and yes, he was staunching it at last, but far more slowly than he should have. He shouted at the Marroc, ‘Water! Bring water!’
Gallow stood up. ‘I’ll see we’re ready for Medrin when he comes. We’ve lost two gates already. Yes, I’ll be seeing to what needs seeing to, whether these Marroc like it or not.’
Oribas muttered and kept to his sewing, and of course Valaric woke up when he was only half done and almost jumped straight into the air even though he was lying down, and Oribas had to persuade him back and never mind how much it hurt. At least the wine helped with that, when it came.
The forkbeards were moving on now, swinging their ram around the elbow in the road. Past the second gate they were already clearing the stones the Marroc had left there to bar the way. A few Marroc still held the top of the second gatehouse, shooting the odd arrow to keep the forkbeards
on their toes. It was never going to amount to much, holding the roofs of the gates, but Angry Jonnic still just shook his head when Reddic said they should go and climb on up to the second tier before the forkbeards cut them off.
‘Sooner or later Sixfingers is going to come up that road. He’s going to think he’s safe, right until we put a pair of arrows into him.’ Jonnic grinned and drew a finger across his throat. The ram rounded the corner.
Valaric just about managed to wait for Oribas to finish before he jumped up again. ‘Gently on it!’ The Aulian snapped at him. ‘There must have been something on the shade-walker’s blade. A wound shouldn’t bleed like that. You should rest.’
But Valaric laughed and waved him away. ‘Rest? You still have eyes and ears to see and hear that army, right? Rest? Don’t you worry Aulian, there was nothing on the blade that cut me. I bleed. It’s just the way it is.’ Stupid thing for a man who’d made his life fighting, but then that wasn’t how he’d ever thought he’d spend his time. A farmer like his father, like his brothers, like his uncles, like everyone he knew, and that’s how it had been until the forkbeards had come and set to their rampaging. After that, knowing every wound would bleed had made sure he’d learned how to fight, how to take the other man down first, fast and hard.
He made himself forget the pain. Sixfingers was down there somewhere. He took a long look at the forkbeards and their ram and then moved among his men. He knew every one of them. Knew their names and who they were and what had dragged them from their homes and into the Crackmarsh to fight the forkbeards. Some had lost their families or their wives or their sons or their daughters. Others had stood up for themselves. A few had killed. And of course they had men come to the Crackmarsh to get away from Marroc justice too, but the marsh always heard
the truth of what a man was running from in the end and when it did, they made their own justice.
He moved among the men who hated the forkbeards most of all. The ones who’d lost everything. The ones who’d come here ready to die, wanting it even. Men like him. He knew who they were, for they were the ones who looked at Gallow with stony dead eyes. Whose lips stayed tightly shut while their knuckles clenched white as he passed them. They stood together and watched the forkbeards below, threw taunts at them while the Lhosir laughed back from behind their shields and shouted insults of their own. One of the forkbeards threw a spear. Valaric plucked it out of the air and threw it back and it hit a shield hard enough to sprawl the forkbeard beneath across the road. The man wrenched it free and shook his fist. The others around him laughed.
The ram moved up towards the second gate. Marroc archers still held the roof, sneering at the forkbeards on the road and loosing an arrow now and then. A few men dead but it didn’t amount to much, not unless you were the one with the arrow sticking out of you. Valaric waited until the ram was right up to the gate, until the forkbeards were getting ready to swing it, then he smiled and nodded. This time his stones were in the right place.
The first fell squarely on the nose of the ram, shattering its frame and smashing the front wheels. It slithered off the wood and into a half-dozen forkbeards and dropped them over the edge to the tier below. Valaric didn’t see them land but he heard the screams as they went. The next two stones landed short. Men were crushed flat and the ram smashed sideways, throwing another few forkbeards over the edge as it slewed. The last stone was perfect. It bounced off the cliff and landed on the front of the ram again, and this time the back end jerked into the air, scattering forkbeards, twisted and then rolled as it landed and slipped over the edge. In a great rumble of stone and cracking wood and howling men,
the ram tumbled off the road and smashed itself to pieces behind the first gate below, crushing a few forkbeards more as it did. Valaric picked up a bow and let fly a couple of arrows while the forkbeards were still reeling. After that he told his men to hold their fire and watched to see what the enemy would do. He looked at the siege towers, still where the forkbeards had left them. They’d be back with those, he thought, and that made him start looking for Oribas. Maybe the Aulian could think of a way to bounce a stone straight on top of them from right up in the castle. Save them the bother of all that walking back and forth.