Authors: Victor Gischler
Instead of following up with a kill strike, she turned back to the other one, who was moving to chop down at her with a two-handed swing. She blocked, ducked around and tried to slice low at his belly, but he got his blade back in time to parry her.
Now both came at her at once. They were well trained, she realized, and not underestimating her as had the warrior she’d killed earlier.
Think, idiot. What would Kork tell you?
He’d say to remember your strengths
.
She wasn’t strong, but she was fast.
Rina launched at the two warriors, her blade a blur between the two of them, metal
clanging
and
tinging
—thrust, block, stab. They were forced to stay on defense. Rina roared, high-pitched and ragged, not in grief as before, but in pure rage. She kept pressing forward, the muscles in her sword arm beginning to burn hot. How much longer could she keep this up?
You know what Kork would say. “You think your muscles hurt? Try a blade in the belly
.”
One of the warriors slipped in a puddle of his comrade’s blood. He righted himself instantly, but his defense wavered. Only for an instant, but it was enough.
Rina thrust the sword into the warrior’s throat. He fell back, gurgling blood, his eyes beaming disbelief. It looked painful.
Good.
But you don’t have time to gloat, stupid girl
.
She turned to the other one, swinging wildly now, desperate to end the fight. Her heart thundered against her chest. She panted, lungs burning. Kork had pushed her often in practice sessions, emphasizing the importance of good conditioning. But it was never the real thing—the smell of blood and sweat, the screams of the dying, the thrill of blood lust through her entire body while simultaneously feeling she could collapse any second.
Her foe took advantage of her sloppy swings, knocked her sword aside and stepped in, aiming a thrust at her midsection. If her reflexes had been any slower at all, he would have finished her there, slicing open her belly, but she sidestepped just in time. The thrust cut a long slice in her shift, and she gasped as she felt the sword tip draw a shallow four-inch line across her side.
But Kork’s training held. Even as part of her brain registered the wound, another more decisive part took in the enemy’s posture. He’d had to give up some defense to make his attack. Rina brought her own sword down hard, and only the warrior’s bracer kept him from losing his hand at the wrist. The bloody wound was enough to force him to drop the sword.
Panic blazed suddenly in his eyes as Rina pressed her attack. He tried to go for a dagger on his belt, but Rina swung, once, twice, three, four times, some of the blows glancing off armor but others biting through into flesh. He went down, babbling his foreign tongue. Rina imagined he was begging for mercy.
You’ve come to the wrong shop for mercy
.
With two hands, she jabbed the sword down into his open mouth, felt it punch through the back of his head and helm and strike the stone floor.
She yanked the sword out immediately, held it in front of her as she spun a complete circle. Where was her next enemy? From which direction would the next attack come?
She saw only Kork, pulling his great sword from the torso of a Perranese warrior.
And the bodies.
Oh, Dumo, so many bodies
. More than a score she could see now. Most lay still, but others twitched. None rose to trouble her. The hall was thick with the copper stench of death and loosened bowels.
Rina looked down at herself, a sweaty, blood-spattered mess. Her hands, completely slick and red, did not seem like her own. She blinked stupidly.
Kork was suddenly next to her, dragging her by the wrist.
“Come.”
Rina tore her gaze from her hands, blinked at Kork. “What?”
“There is no time,” Kork said. “The castle is overrun. They may already be looking for you. I don’t know. Now hurry.”
And suddenly Kork was pulling her through the castle hallways. She followed numbly, her heart going leaden, knowing hopelessly that the nightmare continued, and she couldn’t wake up.
Rina wasn’t paying attention to where Kork was taking her. She didn’t care. If Kork had let her, she would have simply crawled into a corner and gone to sleep, and if she never woke up again, that would be just fine.
It wasn’t until she’d tripped down her fourth flight of stairs that Rina grew curious. In Castle Klaar,
down
wasn’t synonymous with
out
. At least not in this case. They’d already passed the storage rooms and were heading to the dungeons. Kork paused at the doorway to the little room reserved for the jailer, cocked his head and listened for a long moment.
Kork nodded, satisfied. “He’s not in there. Probably died out on one of the walls, defending the city.”
Yes, Rina remembered. All able bodied men reported for duty at such times. How many butchers and blacksmiths and stable hands had thought themselves safe behind Klaar’s walls only to die at the end of a Perranese sword?
She thought fleetingly of the boy who’d helped her with her boot. She’d thought him cute and had teased him on a whim. Oh, Dumo, had that really only happened a few hours ago? It seemed like a lifetime. And now he was dead like the rest, whoever he was. The world in which she could tease boys on a whim was gone forever.
Kork took a torch from the hallway bracket and handed it to Rina. “Hold this.”
He opened the door, and they entered the jailer’s room. It was squalid. A chair and a narrow bunk.
Kork heaved the bunk aside, knelt and brushed dust off the floor until he found a perfectly round stone about the side of a grapefruit. He used the hilt of his sword to push down hard, and with a quiet scraping sound, the stone lowered into the floor. More sounds, clunks and scraping, and a panel of stones behind the bunk swung inward. The secret doorway was barely four feet high. Kork ducked his head and entered.
A moment later he reappeared and gestured to Rina. “Come on.”
She followed him into the secret passage. He pulled a lever and the doorway closed behind them. In the flickering torchlight, she saw a man-made passage, angling gently downward. He gestured her to follow.
“Kork?”
“Yes?”
“Where … Where were you?” She heard the tremble in her voice, steadied herself.
“Giffen,” Kork said. “He found me, told me your father wanted me to inspect the defenses. I’m sorry, Rina. Sorry I wasn’t there. Sorry I failed you.”
“No.” She sniffed. “But if you’d been another minute …” She gulped breath, trying to hold back a sob.
“Don’t talk now,” he said. “We need to hurry.”
She trudged after him for what seemed like hours. The tunnel leveled off and soon turned into a natural cavern. The floor grew slick, a sudden stench hitting her. Rina realized with revulsion that the castle’s sewage system must feed into these tunnels.
She tried not to think about it, putting one foot in front of the other, but it became ankle deep. She gagged, turned her head and retched.
“Come,” Kork said. “We’re nearly out.”
She convulsed and vomited again, giving up some meal she didn’t even remember eating, consumed by a different person, living another life. She stumbled, shivering and light-headed, through the filth, felt Kork lift her by the elbow.
A hundred more steps and then Kork tossed the torch into the watery sewage at their feet and it sputtered out. Before Rina could ask why he’d plunged them into darkness, she saw the light at the end. They’d come to the tunnel’s exit.
They marched toward the blur of light and thirty seconds later found themselves outside, ankle-deep in the snow. The cold seeped into her wet, thin slippers immediately. She shivered, the icy wind piercing her thin shift. As if it had been waiting for them, a steady snowfall began. The sky was a dark gray, almost like night.
She fell to her knees. The snow was bitterly cold but clean. She grabbed a handful of it, rubbed it on her lips, rubbed more on her tongue to remove the acid taste of vomit. She tried to stand, couldn’t, looked up blankly at her bodyguard.
Kork lifted her again, took off his blood-splattered cloak and draped it around her.
The tunnel had come out in a ravine below Klaar. She turned to look back. Pillars of smoke rose here and there from the city.
“Some still fight, I think,” Kork said.
“Can they win?” Rina asked. “Can they take the city back?”
“No.”
She began to cry. “Kork, they … Mother.… Father …”
He took her shoulders in his enormous hands. “Look at me.”
Rina looked up at him, his face hazy through her hot tears.
“You are still alive,” Kork said. “Many are dead, but not
you
. I live for one thing. To see to your safety. That is my honor oath to your father, an oath that endures even after his death. But I need help.”
“Where can we get help out here?” Rina asked. “It’s … impossible.”
“There is the old mage.”
“The … what?”
Rina shivered almost uncontrollably now, teeth chattering. She was tired and bloody. She tried to recall some faint memory, something about an old court mage, but her brain wouldn’t work. She was exhausted. “What are you talking about? What mage? Where?”
Kork turned, pointed to the rocky, snow-capped mountain that loomed over them, rising into dark clouds. “There.”
Alem dug himself deeper into the hay of the stable loft, the screams of the dying loud and clear in the street just outside. Below him, the horses snorted and fidgeted. They were well trained and not easily spooked, but none had heard such fierce fighting in the streets of Klaar since … well, it had
never
been heard.
Somehow the enemy had come across the Long Bridge. The gates had been opened.
A grizzled veteran had shoved a dull infantryman’s axe into Alem’s hands along with a wooden shield and pointed Alem toward the battle. If an officer hadn’t urgently demanded a horse, Alem would now lie at the bottom of a pile of bodies. He’d sprinted through the chaos, back to the stable and had frantically saddled a sturdy gelding. He’d returned to find the officer and his entire platoon slain, the buildings along the cobblestone street in flames.
So Alem had done the only thing he could think of. He had run back to the stable and hidden. And there was no point feeling like a coward. He was no warrior, and anyway, the city was hopelessly and obviously lost.
Now he held his breath under the hay as the stable door creaked open. But instead of Perranese soldiers, it was a man of Klaar who entered, an ordinary soldier in chainmail and a simple bowl helm. A bland man of medium height, a broad, lazy face, brown hair curling from under the rim of the helm.
Alem allowed himself the fleeting hope that by some miracle the Klaar military had rallied and turned back the invaders. The thought that this soldier had come to tell those in hiding that it was safe to come out now turned laughable as Alem watched the soldier toss aside his armor and livery.
The solider was a deserter and Alem suddenly felt an irrational pang of disgust.
Okay, yeah, I’m hiding under a pile of hay, but this guy is supposed to be a professional
.
Alem leaned out over the edge of the loft. “What are you doing?”
The soldier yelped and flinched, turned abruptly. “You startled the shit out of me. Who the hell are you?”
“Shouldn’t you be fighting the battle?” Alem said.
“Battle?” The soldier snorted. “That’s no battle, kid. That’s a fucking slaughter, and running out there and taking a spear in the gut won’t change anything. So if it’s all the same to you, I resign.”
Alem bristled at the word
kid
. And he was pretty sure you couldn’t just resign from the army whenever you felt like it.
On the other hand, the man didn’t want to die, and Alem could understand that.
“What’s your name?” Alem asked.
“Tosh.”
“How bad is it?”
“Bad,” Tosh said. “I think somebody must have opened the gates from the inside. They came pouring across the Long Bridge and there was no stopping them. I threw my spear, but I didn’t even see where it landed.” He shrugged. “Next I knew they were all over the walls.”
“How many did you kill?”
“How many did I—?” Tosh shook his head, rolled his eyes. “Look, kid, I didn’t kill anyone. A bunch of us pressed through a mob of those foreigners trying to get off the wall and retreat back to the keep. I took a swipe at one of the bastards, but he deflected me. Half the time I didn’t know if the man behind me was one of ours or one of theirs. Next I know, half my guys are dead and we’re just
running
, okay? That’s when I had the thought maybe I could come here and grab a horse, maybe ride for it. But there’s no way I’d make it to one of the gates.”
Alem frowned. If Tosh was a typical example of the Klaarian army it was no wonder the city was lost.
Tosh correctly interpreted the look on Alem’s face. “Whatever glorious nonsense you’ve heard about war, just forget it. It’s all screaming and confusion and trying not to shit yourself.”
Alem considered his brief sprint through the chaos when the officer had sent him for a horse. That was in the early part of the battle, before things had gone from bad to worse. Alem imagined himself in Tosh’s position, with death coming at him from every direction.
Okay, so maybe I shouldn’t judge the man
.
Still, it would have been nice to think his countrymen had put up
some
kind of fight.
And that’s when Alem started to feel it in his gut. What had been simple fear before was now a cold feeling of dread as he realized the battle and the slaughter in the streets of Klaar was only the beginning. For the survivors there would be … what? Alem didn’t know, and surprisingly the unknown future like a blank slate in front of him was terrifying. Would the conquerors enslave the survivors? Torture them? Or maybe a stable boy was too unimportant to even be noticed. Maybe he’d wake up in the morning, muck out the stalls, feed and water the horses as usual, the new masters no different from the old.