Heir of Stone (The Cloudmages #3) (76 page)

“I agree, we can’t hold it, but we
can
delay them here. We can make them pay with time. We can leave ourselves an exit to the high plain and take it when there’s no more hope. We could cost the Arruk a half day’s march, maybe more.”

“How many lives will that cost us, and to what end? Then the Arruk only stay longer in the Finger.”

“Aye, but we give the Bán Cailleach, Tiarna Kayne, and Bantiarna Séarlait time to gather their forces. I’ve sent message birds to them . . .”

“And if they didn’t get them? Or if the Riocha don’t care to help?” O’Blathmhaic scowled. “Fingerlanders don’t count on the Riocha coming to our aid. They come here for the same reason as these damned Arruk: to steal from or kill us.”

“Not this time,” Garvan insisted. “Not with Tiarna Kayne and your great-daughter. But we need to give them more time. They’ll be thinking of stopping the Arruk at the Narrows—just as we stopped Rí Mac Baoill’s army there. But we have to give them the days they need to gather and ride there.”

“Why?” O’Blathmhaic answered. “The sooner the Arruk pass through the Finger, the less damage they’ll do and the fewer of our people they’ll kill. Who knows, maybe the Finger itself may even turn them back. If not, then let the Tuatha deal with them. Let them bloody their own damned lands.”

Garvan was shaking his head. “The mountains of the Finger won’t stop the Arruk, Laird. I know them; I’ve fought them in Céile Mhór, and the whole breadth of that land didn’t turn them back. And if you let them into the Tuatha, there may be no stopping them at all. They don’t leave our kind alive in their territory. Eventually, they’ll finish what they’ve started, and then there will be no one to help the Fingerlanders at all.”

Laird O’Blathmhaic tightened the straps on his horse without answering. Grunting with effort, he mounted. “So you think Fingerlanders should die to let the Riocha live? ’Tis not a proposal that any of the clan-lairds will like.” He jerked the reins of his horse and rode off.

Garvan stayed on the mountain for another stripe of the clock-candle, cradling his arm and watching the Arruk approach through the mist and rain.

The town, set at the mouth of a pass in the mountains with a high valley spreading out behind it, seemed deserted. There were no soldiers waiting before its flimsy wooden walls, no rows of sentries along the ramparts, no sounds of occupation at all. For the last few stripes, the Arruk army had marched along the High Road without contact from the Fingerlanders. The ambushes, the sudden storms of arrows that would arc down from high above on the ledges where the Arruk couldn’t reach, had stopped. The army marched on, a plague on the land, following the curving and twisting High Road.

Ennis, riding with Cima in his litter, looked out from the curtains at the town and felt a touch of homesickness. Ceangail reminded him of villages in the hills south of Dún Laoghaire, and the thatched roofs that peaked above the walls were shaped like the houses of home, not the rounded and low buildings of Céile Mhór.

For a moment, he regretted what would happen here, but then he remembered what had happened to his mam and he heard Isibéal’s voice in his head.
“They wanted me to kill you. Now you’ll give them your revenge, for what they did to your family . . .”
“I know,” he answered. Cima stirred on his pillows.

“What?” he asked.

“Nothing,” Ennis told him. “We’ve come to a town.” The litter was already being set down, and he could hear Kurhv Kralj shouting orders to the Mairki. Ennis stepped out from his litter; immediately a space cleared around him, and the Arruk nearest him looked carefully away, their snouts conspicuously raised. The knitting wounds on Ennis’ body pulled and ached as he moved, and Cima hurried forward with his spell-stick, with the knob at the top now nearly gone. Still, it had held the spells that Ennis, with Cima’s aid, had carefully placed back within it. Ennis leaned on the stick, hobbling forward to stand at Kurhv Kralj’s side.

There were blue ghosts everywhere, and in all of the images, he saw fighting here. He wondered how that was possible in an empty town. Ennis wanted to move closer to the walls to look at it, but the blue ghost to which he had attached himself did not move, so he stayed where he was.

“They think walls made of sticks will stop us,” Kurhv Kralj said to Ennis, as Cima translated. “We’ll leave them burning under our feet. Look, the cowardly Perakli have already abandoned their town to us, too afraid to even stay here.” He roared toward the barren walls and the shut gates. “As they should be,” he shouted. “The Arruk come, and the Perakli tremble.” He gestured to the Mairki and their Svarti. “This travesty blocks our path. Take it out.”

The four Mairki roared and went scurrying to their respective positions. The Mairki bellowed their orders and the Arruk army surged forward, the front ranks carrying a massive tree trunk as a battering ram as they trotted up the road toward the gates to the beat of the war drums. The rush of battle fury caught all of them, and Ennis wanted to charge with them, but again the blue ghost would not move. He clenched the spell-stick in his hand and watched the other Svarti move toward the town with the Arruk soldiers.

They were a hundred paces from the walls when heads appeared at the ramparts, and the Daoine bows sent a shattering wave of death toward the Arruk. The front ranks crumpled and the ram bearers stumbled, the trunk falling to the ground and rolling as those crushed beneath it screamed. The barrage stopped a bare few strides from where Ennis stood. He saw an arrow lodge itself in the mud just ahead of him—where he might have been had he followed his inclinations. Another flurry of arrows came as Kurhv Kralj, standing with Ennis, screamed a challenge at the town’s defenders. “Come and fight!” he shouted. “Quit cowering behind the walls and meet your fate as warriors!” He looked at Ennis, flecks of foamy spittle at the corners of his mouth. “Your people are fearful mice and filthy grubs,” he said. “They hide, and throw their sticks at us from the shadows.”

The blue ghost said nothing. Ennis bit his lip to remain silent himself. He stared at the town, he clenched his spell stick, and his fingers prowled the facets of Treoraí’s Heart.

“Use the stone. Show them again the fate that awaits them. The Arruk are like dogs: they respect strength and will show their necks to someone who can dominate them. You can rule the Arruk; you can’t rule the Daoine—they won’t submit. Use the stone . . .”
It was Gyl Svarti’s voice.

It was Isibéal who answered. “
My voice will be stronger than theirs, Ennis.
You
will be stronger. Use the stone . . .”

“Let Mam talk. Let me hear
her
.”

The other voices, the voices of those he’d killed, whimpered and wailed in the background, but if Mam spoke, she was drowned out by them. Now the blue ghost moved, and Ennis laced his finger around the Heart. As he opened the cloch, he felt the enchantments he’d woven into the spell stick, felt them swell and wriggle as the power touched them, as if they were live things aching to be released from the cage of their wood.

“You don’t have to do this, Ennis Svarti.” That was Cima’s voice, whispering so that only Ennis could hear, and he felt his Arruk companion’s hand on his arm. “The town will fall without your help. They can’t hold.”

Ennis looked down at Cima’s hand, and he felt the blue ghost narrow his eyes into an angry glare. Cima shivered and let his hand drop away. “Tell the Mairki to fall back from the gates,” Ennis said to Cima and Kurhv Kralj. Kurhv Kralj’s eyes sparkled at that, and his lips moved back from the long rows of his teeth. He waved to his drummers and they lifted their beaters, hammering out on the tanned skins of the Arruk dead a new pattern:
doom, doom, datta-doom, datta-datta-doom.
The Mairki howled at their soldiers, the Svarti stopped their chants. All the Arruk, silent now, moved back from their assault on the walls and gates of Ceangail. Though the arrows continued to hiss down from the skies, they looked back to Kurhv Kralj, and he gestured. The Arruk moved aside from the roadway, leaving it vacant and empty from the gates to the Kralj’s litter and Ennis.

Ennis raised his staff, and they answered with an approving, mass howl.

Garvan could see the panic in their faces. “Hold!” he screamed to them: Tuathaian and Fingerlander alike. “Hold them as long as you can!”

He didn’t know if any of those arrayed along the walls of Ceangail heard him. The noise was tremendous: the shivering howls of the Arruk, the crash and boom as their ram battered at the main gates, the screams and shouts of their own men, the insistent beat of the war drums. Laird O’Blathmhaic was at the gates, rallying the Fingerlanders. Garvan ran along the walls until he stood above the gates. The Arruk were thick here, a surging mass of them, the scales colorful below him, the arrows of archers ricochet ing from them as often as they stuck. The Arruk didn’t seem to care: they trampled the fallen below their feet and more came to replace them. Garvan looked up the road to where the Kralj’s litter stood. He could see the Kralj; he could also see the small Daoine youth who stood beside him.

They would need the tunnels they burrowed under the walls, Garvan knew; the tunnels that led out far from the city and the road.

He shivered.

“Laird!” he called down. “How long?”

“The supports are already broken,” O’Blathmhaic shouted up to him. “We’re bracing as best we can. A few more well-placed strikes, though, and they’ll be through.”

“Then let’s get our people to the tunnels . . .” Garvan stopped: the Arruk war drums had changed their beating, a cadence that he had heard only once before, when Tiarna Geraghty and his cloch had swept the Arruk’s Svarti from the field and they’d broken through the Arruk ranks threatening to reach the Kralj.
Fall back . . .
the drums said. For a moment, Garvan’s heart lifted. He wondered if they’d somehow managed to break the spirit of the Arruk or if some army had impossibly come to their rescue . . .

But no . . . The Arruk went silent, dropping their ram in the middle of the road and melting back from the walls. The archers continued to fire down on them, but now the road was barren of everyone but the dead and wounded. Garvan followed the line of the open road up the slope. He saw Ennis—it had to be Ennis—lift the spell-stick he carried, and he also saw the glint of the cloch in his other hand.

He would not make the mistake of Bunús Wall and order his people to the gate. He already knew it was hopeless. The battle would end now. “Laird!” Garvan shouted, “Get everyone back!”

But it was already too late. Garvan was blinded by the light that arced out from Ennis, a jagged brilliance that traveled impossibly along the ground like slow, crawling lightning. The fury struck the gates of Ceangail; the thick oaken planks shattered into splinters. The walls on either side of the gate trembled and fell, and Garvan fell with them.

He found himself on the ground in a jumble of broken lumber. A jagged spear splinter of oak had impaled his once-broken arm, now broken again and worse. The rain dappled the blood as he grimaced and pulled his arm free of the wood. He knew he’d also cracked ribs on that side, that his skin would already be blackened with bruises. His knee screamed at the abuse, but he found that he could stand. “Retreat!” he screamed to anyone who could hear. “To the tunnels! Ceangail has fallen! Retreat!”

He pushed at those around him with his good hand—as he heard the howls of the Arruk, as the afterimages of the mage-light purpled his vision. “Laird! Laird O’Blath mhaic!” he shouted, looking for the man.

He saw him. O’Blathmhaic was sprawled on the ground near the gate. His open eyes stared upward at the sky, and the rain fell on him and he did not blink. Garvan’s heart sank, and he turned his back to the gate.

“Retreat!” he shouted. “Ceangail is lost! Retreat!”

Too few of the defenders moved to follow his orders.