Heir of Stone (The Cloudmages #3) (72 page)

Kurhv Kralj had his litter sent to the rear. He took a step out from the gathered troops. The war drums had already begun their insistent unison rhythm. Ennis could feel the battle lust throbbing in the Arruk as they waited, pressed together, their jaka held high, the Svarti chanting their opening spells, the foot soldiers slapping spear shafts to chests in time to the throbbing, slow rhythm of the drums. The pulse made Ennis’ heartbeat sound fast and frightened. Ennis was once again on Cima’s shoulders lest he be lost and crushed in the press of Arruk, his spell-stick clutched firmly in his left hand (and lashed there by Cima with a strip of leather), his right hand still bound to his chest, but with Treoraí’s Heart out from under his léine and firmly clutched in his hand.

Kurhv Kralj lifted his hands and the drums stopped. In the eerie, stunned silence of the landscape, the Kralj opened his mouth and roared a challenge to the wall and its defenders. He gestured. “Hajde! Idemo!” he cried:
Come on! Forward!

With that, a roar erupted from the thousands of Arruk throats, the drums began a quick, urgent cadence, and the army surged forward, a savage wave across the land that trampled heather and grass underfoot. Ennis and Cima ran with them: they had no choice.

As they advanced, the Daoine on the walls loosed flight after flight of arrows, some of them breaking harmlessly against the thick Arruk scales, others finding the softer flesh between the scales. With a shriek and a howl, the Arruk on either side of Cima and Ennis went down, but more rushed in to fill the gap. Then they were no longer running but were rushing between the legs of Cudak and pressing around the base of the wall. Close up, Ennis could see the eroded, carved faces with their coats of fresh paint, now scarred by Arruk claws.

The scaling ladders were raised, with Arruk standing on them to strike as soon as the ladder reached the summit of the wall. Most were immediately cut down by the Daoine and the ladders pushed back into the crush of Arruk. There were a few skirmishes along the wall but none of the Arruk managed to secure a breach along the wall where others could surge up the ladders to gain a hold. The Arruk army milled at the base of wall, stymied for the moment.

Arrows hissed down on them. Lightnings flashed from spell-sticks as the Svarti unleashed their spells on the wall and the gate. Though the stones chipped and shattered, the thick wall held fast, and the carved creatures sparked and glowed when the lightnings struck them, the very stones seeming to rebuff them as if the warding spells the ancient Bunús had cast on them still retained some vestige of their power. The battle was loud with the shrieking of the Arruk, the chanting of the Svarti, and the shouting of the Daoine above. Ennis could see their faces now, and aye, some
were
clad in Dún Laoghaire gray. Some of them saw him as well, for he heard one shout: “A boy! They have a Daoine boy with them!” Heads peered down at him, then vanished, but Ennis had little time to wonder about them.

He was locked together with the blue ghost and it took all his concentration to remain with it, buffeted by so many possibilities. He saw an image of himself, an arrow through his throat, falling from Cima’s shoulders. He saw himself torn apart by the Arruk. He saw the Arruk pouring through a gap in the wall, but leaving his broken body behind.

Keep your mind on the pattern,
Isibéal’s voice whispered, or was it Gyl Svarti, or perhaps his mam? He could no longer tell. Perhaps it was none of them at all. The arrows were a sharp and deadly rain all around him and the wall seemed to actively defy them. The Arruk clawed at the wall, trying to clamber up and over it without the help of the ladders, but they were cut down before they could reach the summit. They pushed and scrabbled and tore at the wooden doors of Cudak’s Gate, but though the wood shivered and trembled, it did not give.

He knew what he had to do. He knew what he must do. The blue ghost told him.

“To the gate, Cima,” he shouted down to his bearer, and Cima obediently began pushing toward the gigantic image of Cudak, pushing aside the Arruk in front of him, his jaka swinging. Seeing Ennis, the Arruk gave way willingly, and he heard the shouts in guttural Arruk:
“Ennis Svarti goes to the gate! Make way!”

The Arruk, with Kurhv Kralj urging them on, were shoving at the barred doors without success. Ennis wanted to tell them to move aside, but the blue ghost was silent and Kurhv Kralj was far enough back from the gate that he seemed to be safe, and Ennis was afraid that the pattern was so faint that he might lose it entirely if he broke away from it. So he also remained silent, standing close to the Kralj several strides back from the gate and lifting his spell-stick. Arrows fell all around Ennis, but none touched him—the archers on the wall seemed to be deliberately aiming away from him; afraid, perhaps, that he was an unwilling captive of the Arruk, a hostage. As he lifted the spell-stick, Ennis also opened Treoraí’s Heart and once more let the power within it flow out into the staff. He groaned as the energy rushed outward from him, his wounded arm aching as if the healing skin were being ripped apart once more. But the blue ghost didn’t cry, and so Ennis couldn’t either. Instead he brought the staff up and spoke the release words for the spell, adding the energy within Treoraí’s Heart to the magic.

With the last word, the spell-stick shivered in his hand, a fierce, unrelenting white light gathering at the knobbed top of the staff. The radiance washed out the cloud-filtered sun, sent sharp black shadows racing across the battlefield and over the wall, caused the Daoine staring out from the wall to cover their eyes.

“Go!” the blue ghost and Ennis shouted as one, unable to hold back the gathered fury. The knob of the spell-stick shattered in Ennis’ hand, but as the splinters raked across his face like tiny knives, a pair of thick, fuming lightnings arced from him to the gate. The first struck the image of Cudak and the winged beast
moved,
the Daoine-like eyes gleaming green, the legs stirring, the wings beating and sending stone falling. Cudak stirred and yawned, and the gate fell open in its mouth as the second lightning smashed into it, shattering stone and beast and wood, Arruk and Daoine. The arch of Cudak’s mouth above the gate crashed down on the ruins and part of the wall itself tumbled inward with the sound of a falling mountain, the tumult drowning out the screams and howls of the dying and wounded. Kurhv Kralj gave a startled glance back at Ennis, but then turned quickly to the smoking gap in the wall. He pointed his weapon to the smoking ruins of the gate. “Hajde!” he cried again, and the Arruk all around them took up the chant, rushing forward in an unstoppable, remorseless mass.

Ennis was borne along with them.

“There’s a boy with them!” the gardai said to Garvan, cupping his mouth and shouting to be heard over the noise of the battle. “Look!” He pointed over the wall to the seething horde of Arruk below. Garvan could see the strange sight: a Daoine child in a tattered, bloody, and filthy léine, being held on the shoulders of one of the horrible creatures and holding what looked to be one of the Arruck spell-sticks in his hand. Directly below, the child raised his face to look up at them, close enough that Garvan could see his features, and Garvan reeled backward in shock and with an oath. “It can’t be! That’s Ennis Geraghty, the Healer Ard’s son.”

“That’s not possible, Garvan. You’re mistaken.” The gardai looked down again, shaking his head.

“I know the face, man. Tiarna Owaine introduced me to his son back in Dún Laoghaire. ‘My youngest,’ he told me. ‘One day he’ll ride with us . . .’ ” Garvan felt cold fingers stroke his spine. “I know it’s him. But how . . .”

“He’s moving, sir,” the gardai told him, “toward the gate . . .”

Garvan leaned over the wall. Aye, the Arruk was bearing Ennis away to the north, moving rapidly. Garvan followed along the ramparts of the wall, running past the beleaguered archers and the gardai struggling with the siege ladders and storming Arruk, around the bodies of Daoine and Arruk both.

He was still strides away from the gate when he saw Ennis lift the spell-stick he grasped, when he saw the impossible and for a moment glimpsed the stone-wrought creature writhing as if it were alive; when the horrible, glaring mage-dawn came; when the gate exploded inward and the Bunús Wall itself shuddered along its entire length; when Garvan was thrown off his feet and battered with flying rocks and boulders. The deadly rain continued for three breaths or more, and he finally forced himself to rise, clutching a forearm through which a shattered bone gleamed white. He had to blink away blood from his eyes, and he couldn’t bend his right knee. Garvan could see the Arruk beginning to rush through the opening. “To the gate!” he screamed to the gardai, to the Fingerlanders. “Everyone to the gate!”

Even as he shouted, even as he limped and crawled and stumbled from the wall—trying not to scream with the pain of the broken, useless arm or his damaged knee, even as he tried to direct the defense—he knew it was hopeless. There were too many of them, and the breach in the wall was too large.

With his good arm, he grabbed the arm of one of the younger gardai rushing to the gate. “Hold!” he told the wide-eyed young man, with the barest hint of beard on his chin. “Find me the scribe and our message birds,” he ordered the youth. “I have to get word back to the Tuatha. It’s vital—Go! Hurry!”

The garda nodded and ran off. Garvan could hear the clashing of swords and the din of the skirmish at the broken gate, but it was all he could do to stagger backward. Blood poured down the fingers of his hand, and the world was turning dark around him.

He hoped the darkness would not last forever.

HARIK CAME RIDING back to Séarlait and Kayne as they approached the village of Cloughford. Just ahead of them, they could see Rí Parin Mac Baoill and his retinue waiting at a crossroads in front of a few tumbledown cottages on the shore of the lough. The gardai on foot were plodding up to the crossroads and sitting down gratefully in the grass there as the supply train came straggling and clanking up the road behind. The sky was gray and forbidding, occasionally spitting rain at the clócas draped around their shoulders.

“One-Eyed Parin said to tell you that we’ll stop here for a bit,” Harik told them.

Kayne lifted his eyebrows, his nose crinkling. “Here? We’d be better going on past to get through the stench.”

“I’d agree, Tiarna,” Harik answered. His horse was next to Séarlait’s and slightly behind. “But the Rí . . .” Harik stopped, and Kayne saw the Hand’s gaze flick nervously to their right. He followed the direction of Harik’s glance; there were men emerging from between the houses of the village, from the cover of trees across the road: men dressed in fine clócas, men with Clochs Mór around their necks. Riocha. Mac Baoill, at the crossroads, sat easily on his horse, smiling.

Kayne felt the breath leave him as if he’d been kicked in his stomach. He reached for Blaze, ready to rip the cloch open and attack, knowing that they’d been betrayed and lied to and that their hope was faint. That he, Séarlait, and Harik were three against more . . .

“Don’t do it, Tiarna,” Harik said warningly, and as Kayne looked to Harik, his hand dropped away from the stone. Harik had reached over to Séarlait. One hand clutched the dark fall of her hair, pulling her head back harshly, and his other hand held a glittering knife edge to the side of her neck. Séarlait’s eyes were wide with mingled fright and fury, and her throat pulsed with the effort of breathing. Winter gleamed on her chest, but even as she started to reach for it, Harik pressed his knife against her neck, hard enough that blood drooled from under the blade. “If either of you touch your cloch, she dies.”

“Harik—” The full realization and scope of the betrayal hit Kayne then. “All those years Da trusted you . . .”

“He trusted me, aye, as well he should have. Tiarna Geraghty would never have made the choices you’ve made, Kayne Traitor,” Harik answered. “He would never have cast his lot with the filthy Fingerlanders against his own people.”

“Then for all your time with him, you never knew him at all,” Kayne spat back. He kept his hands at his sides. He glanced at the others, recognizing faces: Rí Mallaghan; Shay O Blaca; his cousin and childhood friend Padraic Mac Ard, looking uncomfortable and uncertain as he stared at Kayne; and . . . “Uncle Doyle,” he grunted. “I should have known. What’s the matter, Uncle? Wasn’t it enough that you killed Mam and Gram?”

Kayne felt small satisfaction in seeing Doyle’s face color with the accusation, as if Kayne had slapped him across the cheek. The man didn’t answer; instead, he glanced at Rí Mallaghan. Kayne chuckled grimly. “Ah, so Uncle Doyle’s just a lackey here, and you’re the one in charge, Rí. My sister’s going to be terribly disappointed in all of you.” He looked at each of them. “So many clochs in one place . . . Certainly far more than you need for the two of us. Do you think it will be enough to hold
her
? Do you think you’ll manage to stay alive when the Bán Cailleach comes looking for you? You won’t.”