Heir of Stone (The Cloudmages #3) (81 page)

Padraic turned away, snapping his mouth shut. She saw Kayne watching him, his battered and bruised face cocked to one side. “There’s no chance of victory here, Aunt Edana,” he said to her. “You need to understand that. We don’t fight here to win ourselves. We fight so there’s the chance of making victory possible for someone else.”

“Then that will have to do,” she told him.

He nodded. “Then my first order is that you leave, Aunt Edana. Go back to Dún Laoghaire. You can speak to the Ríthe. You can begin to gather the armies of the Tuatha together, all of them, to be ready when the rest of the Arruk come spilling down from the mountains. Padraic can go with you or he can stay here, but if he stays . . .”

He didn’t need to finish the statement. She knew. “We stay,” she said. “Both of us.”

“Didn’t you hear me?” Kayne asked. He pointed down into the valley. “Didn’t you look down there? I
know
these Arruk, Aunt. They’ll keep crawling toward you with hatred in their eyes even when their entrails are dragging behind on the ground. They’ll strike at you with their last breath. They have Svarti, spell-casters whose skill with the slow magics is as good as any cloudmage from either Inishfeirm or Gabair. No, they don’t have the power of the clochs, but their spells are all ones of destruction. Their war drums will deafen you and send their blood to boiling and they’ll come at you in their thousands. They kill those who fall—their own or ours. They won’t take prisoners.” He stopped, his chest heaving, and Edana wondered if he were remembering the battles he’d been in with his da. “And there’s worse,” he said.

“I know,” Edana told him. “Ennis is with them, holding Treoraí’s Heart. Sevei told us. We know what he did at Bunús Gate, and at Ceangail and the other towns.”

Kayne nodded once, miserably. He was glaring down at the Arruk as if he could crush them with his gaze.

“We can turn Ennis, Kayne,” Edana told him, soothingly. “He doesn’t know what he’s doing, or he’s confused. He couldn’t strike at his own brother and sister. By the Mother, Ennis is still just a child . . .”

“I hope you’re right.” He looked over his shoulder at them. “Stay, or not. I won’t blame you, either way.”

“Dying doesn’t frighten you?” she asked, and Kayne shook his head, finally turning his back to the Arruk.

“No longer. The one I most want to be with has already gone to the Mother. Why should I fear going to her again?” The side of his mouth lifted in what might have been a smile.

“I understand,” she told him gently. “And we’ll stay.” She glanced back at Padraic. He stared at her but said nothing. “Tell us what we need to do, Rí Ard Geraghty.”

Ennis felt panic. Blue ghosts swirled around him, thick and dark, and he hoped that he’d aligned himself with the one whose future held the throne. He was no longer certain. The air was thick with patterns and possibilities, and he was confused by them.

The Arruk army was still advancing, but more slowly now, and Kurhv Kralj—after Ennis’ warning of an impending battle—had sent scouts out well in advance of the main force. As the road lifted higher, cliffs rose on either side of them: steep, broken crags with brush and wind-stunted trees clinging precariously to the fissures. They were hungry, the Arruk—for two days now, there had been no herds of sheep or pigs to slaughter, no towns or farm, only the unrelenting path upward. The Arruk clogged the road as the space between the cliffs narrowed, stretching out the Arruk line.

The blue ghosts were agitated, all of them. They flitted around him, shapes of himself and Cima and Kurhv Kralj, and among them Daoine Riocha in clóca and léine, with Clochs Mór on their chests and riding battle steeds, and gardai with bright swords and spears. They all crowded around Ennis on all sides, howling and screaming and overlaying his own sight so that he blinked into the wind as if to clear his eyes.

“Soon,”
Isibéal crooned in his head as he stroked Treoraí’s Heart nervously.
“Soon,”
all the other voices in his head whispered also.

“Soon,” Ennis echoed, and Cima grunted near him, peering out the litter’s sides, the curtains now tied back all around.

“The battle comes,” Cima agreed. “Even I can feel it now. Here, Ennis Svarti. You’ll be wanting this.” He slid Ennis’ spell-stick along the cushions with the fang-laden grimace that was an Arruk smile. “And I’ll stay with you, as I promised,” he added. “You shouldn’t worry. I’ll bear you into battle as I did before. I’ll be your legs and your jaka and your voice for as long as you need me.”

The blue ghost to which he was locked nodded, forcing Ennis’ head up and down. “Soon,” he repeated. It seemed to be the only word he had left. “Soon.” A single syllable, sounding like the drumbeats that pounded outside the litter as the Arruk marched.

A horn blew, calling the advance scouts back to the Kralj for a report. The Kralj’s litter, with Ennis’ following, was still moving forward though more slowly now as the pass narrowed. Long breaths passed as they were jostled and rocked forward, the call horns sounding between every drumbeat, their brassy shriek ringing from the rock walls. The scouts could not have failed to hear them, yet none of them returned. Ennis saw Kurhv Kralj turn in his litter, looking back at them. He seemed eager and happy, already grasping his weapon in his hand.

“They’re up there, the bluntclaws,” he said. “As you said. They’ve slain our scouts and now they wait for us.” He gestured to the bearers and they set the litter down, Ennis’ bearers doing the same. The Mairki and their Svarti came scurrying over. Kurhv Kralj pounded the pole end of his jaka into the ground. “Good,” he grunted. “It’s about time the Perakli showed some courage. Let them come. Forward!” he shouted to the Mairki, and they went running back to their charges.

The drums began pounding out an urgent, insistent cadence, and the Arruk army began moving forward again, more quickly this time. The blue ghosts all shivered in response to the beating of the drums, their forms shattering and reforming again and again. Ennis could barely see for the chaos as he climbed on Cima’s shoulder and followed at Kurhv Kralj’s left shoulder. Ahead, the walls of the canyon came within a double-hand of strides, the narrow gap made even smaller by piles of boulders and huge rocks. Beyond the opening, the pass opened up into a grassy verge and the ground leveled out before resuming the climb to the top of the Narrows Pass, still well up ahead. The Arruk surged through the gap like water foaming and roaring through a steep rapids. The drums pushed them; those behind pushed them; the thought of the battle ahead pushed them. Ennis clung to Cima and to the blue ghost of his throne vision, equally.

The Kurhv Kralj and Ennis were still well back from the mouth of the gap when the attack finally came.

There was the shower of sudden arrows, like a deadly cloudburst above them, the feathered shafts descending in arcing flocks—the type of ambush they’d dealt with all through the Finger. This attack was directed toward the Arruk at the opening of the gap, evidently intended to block the road with the Arruk’s own dead. Several of the minor Svarti had placed warding spells in their spell-sticks—Ennis heard them shouting the release words and at least half of the arrows erupted into flame, the wooden shafts going to quick ash and the arrowheads pattering among them like hard rain. Those Arruk who were unlucky enough to go down were quickly trampled underneath. Ennis felt Cima rise slightly as one foot stepped on a fallen soldier. Kurhv Kralj, the Mairki and their Ruka, the Ured and Nista all screamed challenge at the canyon walls around them. “Come and fight!” they bellowed, clashing jaka shafts on chest scales. “Come meet our blades.”

All through the Finger, their constant challenges to their hidden assailants had met with no response. But this time there came an answer.

A trumpet blast sounded far up the pass, and above the heads of the Arruk and through the opening, Ennis could see a line of horse-mounted gardai in leather and rings under their clóca—clóca, he saw, that were primarily the gray of Dún Laoghaire. Memories flooded him with the sight—
Da and Kayne clad in the same color, the gardai with them a sea of gray as they rode out to Céile Mhór to fight the very creatures that Ennis now marched with; Mam wrapped in a soft clóca of the same color with the torc of Dún Laoghaire around her neck, and enfolding him in the fabric as she hugged him . . .
Ennis cried out even though the blue ghost sat silent on Cima’s shoulder. “Are you hurt, Ennis Svarti?” he heard Cima call out below him.

The blue ghost was silent, as if it hadn’t heard, but Ennis forced himself out of the pattern to answer. “I’m fine, Cima,” Ennis said. “I see . . . I see the bluntclaw horsemen coming.”

Cima growled, and Ennis could feel the rumble through his legs.

No more than a few hundred of the Arruk had spilled through the gap into the high meadow. Ennis saw the Daoine gardai wheel their horses and strike the Arruk in a long crescent. Kurhv Kralj, along with Cima and Ennis, were jostled in the crush as Arruk pushed from behind while the Daoine attack halted the Arruk advance. Kurhv Kralj howled orders to the war drummers. The beat changed, becoming insistent and driving, but the Mairki couldn’t respond. There was no way through the gap, and now Ennis saw a new barrage of arrows coming down on the Arruk pressed together helplessly at the opening. He could no longer see the battle in the meadow ahead of him, only hear the screams of Arruk, Daoine, and warhorses alike. Ennis grasped at Treoraí’s Heart; through it, he could feel Clochs Mór—at least two of them—open in the meadow, and the sound of false thunder came to his ears. The sound of the Arruk shouting changed: there was desperation now in the cries that came from the battle beyond the gap. Kurhv Kralj continued to scream orders; the arrows from the hidden archers poured down on them, many still consumed by spell-fire as the Svarti countered, but too many now striking their targets. An Arruk next to Cima and Ennis grunted as an arrow found skin between the bright orange scales of his chest. Blood spurted from a torn artery, but the Arruk couldn’t even fall, pressed too tightly against Cima and others of his kind. The pressure was intense; Ennis’ legs were trapped, and he could feel the push not only from the back, but from the front as the Arruk were forced back through the gap by the Daoine charge.

The battlefield was also crowded with blue ghosts. Ennis was no longer sure which was his, but he clung to the one he’d chosen as tightly as he clung to Cima.

“Ennis Svarti!” Ennis and the blue ghost turned their heads at the same time. Kurhv Kralj pointed ahead to the gap. He continued to shout instructions in the Arruk tongue, none of which Ennis understood, but his intention was clear. The blue ghost certainly understood, for it grasped his spell-stick and Treoraí’s Heart at the same time, and Ennis did the same. The power came rushing out from the Heart, making Ennis gasp with its cold heat. He pointed the spell-stick at the boulders and rocks at one end of the opening to the meadow, letting the mage-power gather in his mind. In a burst, he released it through the spell-stick, releasing several of the spells he’d stored there.

The eruption of light sent afterimages dancing in everyone’s vision. Rocks and dust and broken Arruk bodies cascaded forward a hundred strides into the meadow beyond. For a moment, the world halted, the noise of the battle beyond made insignificant as everyone’s attention went to the pall of dust rising from the northern side of the canyon. The blue ghost laughed, and Ennis laughed with it—he didn’t know how many of his own army he’d just killed, but it didn’t matter; they were only soldiers, after all, and death was their eventual fate anyway.

The blue ghost continued to chortle, and Ennis pointed with it to the newly-widened opening. “There, my Kralj!” he cried, and Cima called out the translation. “Forward!”

Ennis prodded Cima as if he were a mount, and Cima pushed forward with Kurhv Kralj, and the Arruk poured through the rent toward the battle line beyond.

“Hold!” Kayne shouted to the mounted gardai. They could see the Arruk beginning to push through the gap into the high meadow that marked the start of the final climb to the Narrows. They’d spent the day and much mage-energy making the gap as small as possible. Rodhlann had placed Fingerlander archers all along where they placed the barricade, who were pouring deadly fire down into the Arruk force. No more than a double-hand of Arruk could move along the High Road abreast. Already there were a hundred or more of the creatures spilling out onto the plateau.