Heir of Stone (The Cloudmages #3) (83 page)

“It’s still Geraghty’s brother out there with the Arruk,” one of the tiarna shot back. “With the Heart.”

“Aye, ’tis,” Padraic agreed. “And it was my da . . .” he hesitated there, swallowing hard, and everyone saw the anguished glance he gave Edana, “. . . my da who was part of the conspiracy that caused that to happen. But he . . . he saw that he was wrong in the end, and he was strong enough to try to rectify that. Kayne has that same strength; he’ll do what he must. You will, too, all of you—or if you won’t, you should go now. Go back and wait for the Arruk to come to you. Mam—Banrion Mac Ard—will give you leave.”

Padraic waited, leaning heavily on the crutch under his shoulder. No one spoke. Finally Padraic nodded. He hobbled around slightly to face Kayne. “You’re the Ard, Kayne Geraghty,” he said, “no matter what the other Ríthe say. Give us your orders. Tell us what we need to do.”

Kayne grasped Padraic’s shoulder, his fingers squeezing. For the moment, that was enough. Then he began to speak.

The Narrows was painted with a palette of black and white. The sky was the gray of wood ash, and the clouds were heavy and somber. A thin rain fell, gray curtains flowing over a gray landscape, all the colors muted in the mist. In the hidden distance, down the slopes that led up to the long plateau of the pass itself, there came the slow, insistent beating of the Arruk drums: implacable, relentless, unstoppable, like the beating of some great beast’s heart.

In the long climb to the summit of the Narrows, the High Road moved through a sequence of sections where cliff walls rose high on either side, so that any large force using the road was forced to slow and elongate its column. A force sufficiently familiar with the territory might have been able to split into several components and follow the convolutions of the wrinkled, folded landscape through to the rolling hills around Lough Tory, but their army would be split and the various units would take days to reassemble on the far side of the mountains. Following the High Road through the Narrows Pass was the only viable alternative. The Fingerlanders had taken advantage of the physical properties of the Narrows for generations.

As they did now.

Kayne had Rodhlann’s men direct the building of walls of broken rock across all the narrowest points of the road. He had no illusions that the makeshift barriers would stop the Arruk: what had happened at Bunús Wall and at their first skirmish the day before had left no hope for that. But at worst, they would slow and stretch out the invaders; at best, it would force Ennis to use the Heart to open the way, which meant that the Heart would have that much less power when the real battle came, and give the Clochs Mór a chance to deal with him.

Kayne set Fingerlander archers near the barriers to pick off the Arruk that they could and make it more imperative for Ennis to use the Heart. Beyond that, they did nothing.

High up near the Narrow’s highest point the road opened up slightly in a long twisting canyon, with side canyons leading off to both west and east. There, he set the Daoine forces, and they waited. Fingerlander runners came and went during the day with reports:
the Arruk force had reached the first barrier; Ennis had eventually used the Heart, and the Svarti with the spell-sticks had raked the hillsides with the archers as well. They’d come to the second barrier, but they simply swarmed over and around the wall; it hadn’t stopped them at all. At the third wall, Ennis had used the Heart again . . .

The runners had all returned. Rodhlann and the Fingerlander archers had come back as well, their quivers emptied. The High Road was littered with the corpses of Arruk struck down by Fingerlanders in their high ledges and hiding places, but the dead were but a few buckets of water stolen from a river that pushed on, unnoticing and uncaring. Kayne sent the Fingerlanders to the fletchers in the camp to replenish their quivers, then sent some to the Narrow’s heights and the rest to their places with the foot soldiers.

Astride his horse on a small rise to one side of the High Road, with his greada, Alby, Edana, and Rodhlann beside him, Kayne blinked into a spray of rain. The banner of the Rí Ard, set with all the colors of the Tuatha, flapped wet and heavy alongside him on a long pole. The weather matched his mood; he wondered if Séarlait were not responsible, weeping for him with the Mother. “The world cries for what will happen here today,” he said.

“You still have no hope?” Edana asked, and Kayne shook his head, sending droplets scattering from the ends of his hair.

“Not without Lámh Shábhála. And even then, without the rest of the Clochs Mór . . .” He shrugged. “I wonder if the Songmasters will sing of this one day . . . those Daoine who are still alive. The Arruk, from what I’ve seen, don’t seem to make songs.”

“They just pound on their Mother-damned drums,” Rodhlann grumbled. “We heard them all through the mountains of the Finger.”

“Let’s hope that we don’t hear them through all the Tuatha,” Kayne’s greada said, “nor in Inish Thuaidh.” Kyle MacEagan shifted his weight uncomfortably on his mount, fingering the stone around his neck. “The Order’s mages are ready and our gardai are in position, Kayne,” he said. “Alby and I should be with them.”

“Go with the Mother, Greada,” Kayne told him. Leaning toward the man, he grasped Kyle’s arm and nodded to the silent Alby, watching from his horse nearby, who looked uncomfortable in the steel-ringed armor he wore. Kayne wanted to give his great-da some word of comfort, but there were none he could speak. His great-da let the hood of his clóca fall from the plumed leather helmet he wore over his balding and grayed head, and swept the folds back from the scabbard of his sword. “I’ll find you on the battlefield, great-son,” he said, and kicked his heels into his horse’s side, galloping swiftly away with Alby at his side. Rodhlann followed a moment later, with a grim nod to Kayne. Edana and Kayne remained on the hill: as the drums pounded, as in the distance the gray fog darkened with the vanguard of the Arruk force. Kayne could feel his own heart beating in time. His blood sang in his body.

“We’ve both lost too many of our family and our friends already,” Edana said to him. She was peering down at the defenders to where those wearing the gray clóca of Dún Laoghaire were gathered, where Padraic—his leg splinted and padded, and clad in his green clóca—waited for the battle. “Here, we can take our anger and our grief for those we’ve lost and use them as our swords. How can the Arruk stand against that?”

Kayne smiled at her: this longtime friend of his mam, the woman he’d gone to often as a child when his mam wasn’t there, who had cuddled him and kissed his skinned knees and elbows as if he’d been one of her own children. “Thank you, Aunt. I hope you’re right.” He could see the individual motes of the Arruk now, could see the waving cloth of their banners and the swaying of the officers’ litters. “We’ll know very soon, won’t we?”

He pulled the flag of the Ard from the ground. Taking the stout pole in his hands, he waved it high. From down the lines of the Daoine defenders, banners waved in response.

The drums of the Arruk quickened, and in the rain came the sound of their challenge. The howls were like the screams of the Black Haunts, circling in the clouds above and waiting. The Arruk war drums slowed again, sending a different, more urgent beat as they saw the Daoine force ahead, as the archers on the walls of the canyon began to fire clouds of arrows through the rain. Kayne, from the hill, waved his banner once more; this time a cry went up from the mounted Daoine.

They charged.

He knew that if they hoped to cut down the Arruk force and hold them as long as possible, then they could not meet them where the Kralj could bring the full brunt of his army against their own outnumbered troops. In this position, the Daoine had the advantage both of attacking from higher ground and having the ability to maneuver in the open plain, while the Arruk were still compressed within the walls of the pass. They could attack the Arruk from three sides: from canyons to the east where Kayne had placed the Fingerlanders and the remnants of his da’s original troops; from the west, where the Inishlanders waited; with the main flanks from the north with all the Tuathaian gardai and troops. Already the Inish and Fingerlanders had come against the Arruk: he heard the clash of steel and the howls of the Arruk mingling with the war cry of the Inish. He started to kick his own horse into motion when he felt Edana’s hand on his arm.

“A commander’s place is behind his troops.”

“That was never Da’s belief,” Kayne told her gently but urgently. “And that’s my brother we ride against. I want—I need—to be there when they reach him, when the Heart opens.”

“I’ll go with you,” Edana told him. “You’ll need Demon-Caller.” She smiled into his beginning protest. “You’re not going to tell me that a Banrion’s place is behind the troops, are you?”

“No,” he said. “Not here. Not now.” He nodded. “We ride, Aunt.” He kicked his heels into the stallion’s ribs. “For the Daoine!” he shouted, and the wind took his words as the horse leaped forward, Edana and the gardai around them following.

As he galloped toward the chaos of the battle, Kayne took Blaze in his hand, opening it with his mind and letting the landscape of the clochs mingle with the vision of his eyes. The fighting was fiercest near the center of the pass where the Arruk were thickest. In his mage-sight, Kayne could see the flickering of spells being cast from the Svarti’s spell-sticks, matching the minor fire of clochmions and slow magic of the Order of Inishfeirm and the Riocha. To his far left was Rodhlann with the cold fire of Winter, the sight of Séarlait’s Cloch Mór bringing the grief back hard to Kayne’s chest; to the far right, he could glimpse the ruddy conflagration of Greada with Firerock. Close by, somewhere just ahead, blue lines snaked and whipped toward the Arruk: Padraic with Snarl.

Around them, through the gray-seeming sight of his eyes, he could see the hand-to-hand fighting of swords against Arruk jaka. Despite the efforts of the Clochs Mór, the Arruk were threatening to break the Daoine line, and Ennis had yet to appear with Treoraí’s Heart. Kayne plunged into the fray, using Blaze to scatter the Arruk that stood in his way. The beast that lived inside Edana’s cloch Demon-Caller strode alongside him, a horned, dark creature roaring challenge, and it plucked up an Arruk in either hand and smashed them together, casting the bodies aside as it grabbed for two more of the creatures.

The onslaught of the additional Clochs Mór had an immediate effect: the first line of the Arruk sagged and broke, and the Daoine held a momentary clear space for a few breaths. But more Arruk charged from the confines of the pass to take their place. They pushed those Arruk back as well, and from a hundred Daoine throats came a cry of savage victory: premature, Kayne knew, but he yelled with them, urging the Daoine foot soldiers forward, wondering if they could plug the gap that was the Narrows, if they could fill it with Arruk bodies in a barrier of their own dead. A Svarti spell-stick loosed lightning at Kayne; he felt the attack and flicked the bolt aside with a burst from his cloch, turning the spell back on its owner. The Svarti screamed and vanished under the continuing flood of its own kind. A hand of Arruk charged him en masse, screaming; he cut them down in fire and blood. For a breath, he was alone on the field, and from his vantage point on his warhorse, he could see the canopies of the Arruk officers’ litters. He could see the flags of the Kralj’s litter not far back in the canyon, and another litter next to it with a Svarti’s insignia fluttering from its poles.

Ennis . . .
He knew it even before he felt the Heart open in his mage-vision: a looming red-black darkness, throbbing in time to the drums, and behind it the shadow of the boy who wielded it. The Heart lifted like a vast storm wall in front of them, its immensity dwarfing the Clochs Mór of the Daoine and making the lightning from the spell-sticks of the other Svarti seem like the sparks from a flint.

He wondered again at the depth and strength of the Heart, and if his mam had known what she held.

The appearance of the Kralj and his Svarti rallied the Arruk. The drums began to beat harder, and their jaka flashed in time, and now it was the Daoine who were forced to give ground. “Hold!” Kayne shouted to those around him. “We must hold!” If the line broke, if the Arruk pushed out from the vise of rocks and into the wider section of the Narrows, their numbers would overwhelm the Daoine.

The war drums boomed in mocking answer; the Arruk howled. The bloody wall of the Heart gathered itself like a tidal wave on the horizon, rising and lifting as if ready to crash down on them.

The drums beat as one, then went ominously silent. In the silence, the wave broke.

The pulse from the Heart knew neither ally nor foe. Indiscriminate, wild, it swept all before it. It smashed to ground near the front ranks of the Arruk and pushed north, taking with it screams and broken bodies. “By the Mother!” Kayne heard Edana gasp as the fury cascaded toward them. Kayne barely had time to place a shielding wall of mage-power between himself and the mad surf of dead and wounded. He felt the impact pounding at his mind through the cloch, the wall nearly collapsing in shock. Then it was past him and fading. Kayne gasped, blinking into the rain that now soaked a field of dead—Arruk and Daoine both—for several strides around him. He could feel Edana near him, but the mage-demon had vanished under Ennis’ assault.