Don’t tell, don’t tell
, Ishmael willed, and did not hear her reply as the pain in his chest wrung breath and thought from him—
idiot!
She wasn’t even a mage.
The Shadowborn was saying, “We want the manor, and enough staff to keep it livable, and we want the family.”
Was that brassy, confident voice the voice of a man whom Ishmael had mortally wounded not minutes ago, or of the stripling impersonator? And then his question was answered by the sound of his own voice. “Y’can tell them everything’s all right. Y’can hear I’m fine.”
Erich’s hand slammed into his shoulder, pinning him against the wall, before he was even aware he had moved. He got the point: if he so much as hiccoughed, the hand would be over his mouth. He tapped the other man’s wrist in acknowledgment, and waited, breath held, heart pounding.
“Do you really expect us to believe that?” Lavender said, without a tremor of uncertainty.
“Shadowborn.”
He could hear the quick breathing of the men around him—not the one-armed man, who knew how to make no sound, but one with a distinct wheeze, and two who were snoring, at least to his ears. From farther away, around the corner, he heard stones grumble and slide. Magic swelled sickeningly, and he heard stones grind on wood. “Down! Everyone
down
!” he roared, full voice, and threw himself flat, catching Erich by the belt and hauling him down, and twisting and kicking the feet of the nearest man out from under him just as the first stones ricocheted off the wall at the corner. A woman—
please not Lavender
—screamed from around the corner, and the improvised barricade before him shuddered violently under the barrage of brick, spars, and plaster. There was a thud of plaster on bone, and a man sprawled back from his place at the barrier. Ishmael rolled over and sonned, catching distorted shapes of fragments passing overhead. He heard yells from farther up the hall as the missiles reached the second barricade, but he’d noticed the barrage was thinning, seeming to travel high.
On the far side, he heard a crunch and a scrape, as of claws on wood, and felt the barricade tremble slightly—and his sonn caught the balewolf just as it scrambled onto the edge of a side-turned table. He rolled to his feet with a shout of “Wolves!” His left hand went out and caught the brute’s shaggy throat, and with the power of his legs and back behind it, he heaved it backward off the barricade, a feat he would never have ventured, let alone accomplished, in cool blood and sobriety. It landed, leaped, and caught someone’s bullet in its jaws. The entire corridor heaved with them. He heard yelling from the far corridor, and running feet approaching behind. Over his shoulder he shouted, “Fall
back
,
back
! We can’t hold here.” Maybe they could, but the enemy had to commit, had to come as deep as possible into the manor, and as long as they thought that the beasts were overrunning the defenders, maybe they would hold on the magic. Bordersmen could fight monsters, but magic . . . He caught the collar of one man who had not moved, who knelt still, fixedly firing and firing, and all but launched him down the corridor after the others. And then they were running back, two men carrying the one who had been felled by the stones. The one-armed man, covering the rear, went down beneath the claws of one of the brutes, but a second man ducked in with a knife the size of a short sword, impaled its open jaw, and slit its throat, while a third dragged Erich clear.
Above the abandoned barricade, the ceiling fell in, crushing the animals beneath it. He heard Neill’s cry, “Midora!” with a choke of pain at the end of it, and the woman’s laughter. Then from overhead he heard shooting—someone, two someones, firing through the cavity in the roof. Suicidally brave, with the ceiling coming down in pieces, but that let the defenders pile through the gap opened for them in the barricade, and fall to their haunches and knees for reloading. “Shit—,” someone gasped. “Aren’t I dead? Aren’t we all dead?”
By some miracle, none of them were, though several were bleeding from stone or bite wounds, and the man who’d been felled at the barricade was unconscious with what looked like a grave head injury, and another was likely to bleed to death from his torn groin, despite the best efforts of his fellows to staunch it. It was a wound Ishmael himself could have dealt with once. The one-armed man recalled his attention from bitter regret. “If they’ve not held th’other side, we’ll have some trouble on the retreat.”
Truer words were never spoken. If the defenders in the north corridor had to fall back into the vestibule and entrance to the ballroom, then he and the others would be cut off. They would have to retreat into the cellars. He took a deep breath, aware of his own shakiness. How long since he’d eaten or, even more important, had anything to drink? He rasped, “Anyone got water with them?”
Someone passed him a flask; he drank, using the moment to think and to listen to the far side. He had not been able to listen to what was happening elsewhere while he was scrambling to save his own life, but from the sound of firing, he believed they were holding. Had to believe they were holding, and that Lavender was still alive.
So much,
he thought ruefully,
for Stranhorne wanting us in the vanguard.
How long had it been? Long enough for the muster and breakout to be ready? He corked the flask and handed it back to its owner with a nod, then said to the one-armed man, “What’s the signal, then? Ours, that we’re breaking contact, or theirs that they’re breaking out?”
With a crash, the ceiling collapsed, carrying the two snipers with it. Both were women. Ishmael surged to his feet. The defenders shot frantically, but there was just too little time—one had no chance at all to rise, while the other had no sooner gained her feet than a wolf leaped for her throat and dragged her into the mass. Her blank, terrified face and her wide, crying mouth seared into his memory. The man whom Ish had hauled from his post at the first barricade screamed obscenities and shot and shot and shot again, oblivious to the hammer falling on an empty chamber.
“Ishmael!” It was Lavender, her throat raw. “Break—break now.” And then Ishmael heard a sound he would never again be able to mistake, any more than he would the magic that fuelled it—the
whumph
of erupting fire. He moved before he thought. Ten strides took him to the door into the central gallery, through which he plunged in utter disregard of what might be waiting on the other side. Nothing was; he sprinted the width, hit the door, threw it open; met smoke and the roil of heat and flame to his right. He yelled, “Lavender!” and heard her answer, from the far side. He shouted, “Y’have to run—run through. Run t’my voice. I’m clear.” How long? He felt magic pour over him, heard a
whumph
behind him, and the gallery ignited. He roared, tasting blood, “Fall back, fall back to the muster!” The men on the other side had to come through the west gallery or hall, or go down to the cellar, and they had to do it now.
Two figures suddenly burst, solid, from the flame: Lavender, leading the young troop who had given up his horse to Ishmael. She almost fell into his arms, as her sister had. He did not greet her with an embrace, but with frantic slaps at the smoldering edges of her clothing. She twisted and shouted, “I’m through. Come! Come! Come!
Come!
” To her urging, raw with need and nothing like command, they came in twos and threes, bursting out of the fire on courses toward her.
Jeremiah Coulter wore his buccaneer’s grin. “Reminds me of a ceremony on one of th’far south islands. . . .”
Ishmael heard running and stumbling feet on wood behind them, and turned to sonn the men and women from the barricade. He could weep with relief that they’d found their way. They helped him catch and slap down the men and women emerging from the fire. The one-armed man was not with them. The one on whom the leadership had devolved said, “Erich went down to the baron. He said they’d break out through th’south.”
Through the bricked-up entrance they’d need to blow to get free.
Sweet Imogene.
He caught Lavender as she moved, with a harder grip than he’d ever taken of her. “No! Your place is here.” He couldn’t tell her her father would be fine. “We need t’get clear, and we need t’get clear now.”
The last through the fire, a young woman, caught Lavender’s arm. “Ronina and the Prescotts—they won’t come—”
Ishmael stepped forward, almost up to the fire. “Y’come and y’live, or y’die right here!” he challenged.
In answer, he heard three shots. Lavender, beside him, made a sound like a puppy crushed beneath a wheel. He said, hoarsely, “This is it—sound the breakout.”
“The fire . . . ,” she whispered. “If it reaches—”
“Erich’s gone to warn.” He caught her hand.
“Come.”
He led them, a ragged, wounded, indomitable band, into the ballroom, but she had to force him to release her so she could sound the bell—Mother bless that Stranhorne had at least been willing to allow mechanical bells. She threw the switch and the final retreat began to peal, thin against the building roar of fire. She turned back to him, crying, but unaware of it. He said, “We’ll be back, lass. We’ll be back.”
She plunged ahead, toward the heaving mass of people pushing out the far doors, and Ishmael followed.
Balthasar
Cold roused Balthasar where he lay, rain, close to sleet, needling his exposed skin. Breathing hurt, every inhalation pulling at his side. Beneath his hand, he could feel icy rainwater pooling on the outstretched wing of a dead Shadowborn. He could hear the spatter of wind-driven rain, and a bell ringing in staccato bursts. And he could smell fire, the rank smoke of wood and fabric.
His hand jerked, twitching his soaked sleeve out of the puddle. He closed his fist, opened it. Not ensorcellment; the stiffness of exertion and cold. Making himself move, making himself lift his head, rise on his elbow, sonn around himself, was one of the most urgent efforts he had ever made in his life. Sonn caught shapes moving, and something growled. He froze. The movements came no closer, though the restless shapes continued to prowl. His sonn, probing the rain, delineated the gaping wall, the neat channel of cleared rubble.
Moving very slowly, he pushed up his shirt, explored the wound with his fingers. It was closed, though puckered and drawn. Something fell from his shirt with a dull clunk. Drawing it to him, he found a deformed bullet. He remembered the Shadowborn touching him, the pain. Yet it had been a curative pain.
From deep within the manor came a low, rumbling belch. Through the flagstones he felt a vibration, and, with the next, louder—an explosion, he realized—he felt a distinct twitch, as though the earth itself were shrugging. The very walls of the manor wavered with the force of the third explosion, and the ceiling slumped into the gap. Warm air rolled over Balthasar, reeking of a munitions factory. From beyond the wall a bugle blared and a winch whined. Then a yelled command, a volley, another shout, another volley, and he heard wheels and hooves—a great many of both—on pavestones. A woman’s voice screamed, hoarse with shouting, “
Drive! Run!
All speed to the Crosstracks. We hold the rear!” The manor shuddered again, though those massive walls remained intact. The woman—Lavender or Laurel—shouted,
“Father! We hold the rear!”
This made sense of the whispers and exchanges he had overheard while he worked. The Stranhornes had planned for defeat, planned for retreat, planned even for betrayal. He listened with shuddering exaltation. The coaches would be carrying the wounded and those unable to keep the pace on foot. Anyone who could walk and run would do so, carrying those they could, and those who could fight would be on foot and horse in the van- and rear guard. Laurel and Lavender Stranhorne would be riding with them. But he feared now that he understood some of the silences that had fallen around Xavier Stranhorne, and the exaltation went out of him. Someone must have fired the charges placed inside the manor, someone who had chosen to risk being entombed with Shadowborn invaders in the gutted interior of his manor.
With a few more tired coughs, a few more tremors, the manor settled into its warrior’s death. The wheels receded into the night. Wind and rain drowned the running footsteps. The bugle cried again in thin defiance, and then all that remained was the dwindling noise of hard-shod hooves. His skin was so numb he could not know either the temperature or the force of the rain. Sunrise would not be long coming.
At that thought, and regardless of what else prowled around those ruins, he staggered to his feet. The first step almost pitched him back into the puddles, but he shuffled toward the manor, though whether to shelter or succor, he did not know. What was not already destroyed in the explosion would be burning. Anyone living in that shell would not long remain so. Balthasar was dizzied by the war between free and ensorcelled emotions, an impotent, murderous rage that he knew was close to insanity, and a helpless pity for them all, including that child monster who held him enthralled. He hoped—how he hoped—that the Stranhornes had not left any of their own alive, but knew that some must have barred the entrance to the ballroom to the last, and some of the wounded would not survive the journey—he remembered Linneas’s revolver—if they even began it.
Within the gap, he heard someone cough thickly. He barely caught himself from revealing sonn, and pressed his back against the wall, listening to the crunch and slither of stumbling feet on the untidy rubble.
“Don’t—,” a man’s voice grunted.
“Let me—” Balthasar heard a bubbling groan, and the sound of rainwet leather slapping and slithering against the wall. A familiar young voice gasped, “Neill—Neill, what do I do?
Help me
.”
The ensorcellment jerked tight on his viscera at that “Help me” and dragged him forward. The boy crouched, his hands bracing Neill’s shoulders against the rough wall. Neill’s patchwork jacket was gone. Of the once-fine shirt, only its side panels and shoulders remained; the sleeves were in rags, and the front torn open. To the right of his sternum was a cavity in the flesh that frothed at every exhalation. With that wound, he ought to be dead. But he was obviously capable of healing magic, of a sort.