Springwar (69 page)

Could he trust them? He shifted his grip on his sword
and raised it before him as he crouched behind his shield, easing sideways to put himself between the foe and Strynn, whom he hoped had presence of mind to climb up the ladder. He’d be a target, but less one than otherwise, and maybe Merryn could get down there with a shield—

“Friends, Gods damn it!” One of them—the nearer—shouted again. Maybe. But the roar of the Ixtian’s former comrades, and the roar of the Eronese gathered on the walls drowned all but the most rudimentary inflection.

An arrow twanged. Air parted as a black shaft ripped by. Fletchings sprouted in the shoulder of the figure on the right. The closer one. The … male, Eddyn discovered, and suddenly felt a vast sickness well up in him.

A sickness confirmed by the name the unwounded deserter wailed.

“Tozzzriiiiii!” A long, agonized cry in the wind.

Eddyn froze where he stood. Dropped his sword to his side. Lowered his shield to peer over it uncertainly.

And felt pain beyond any he’d ever imagined, as a hammerblow slammed into his chest. An arrow came with it: buried to the fletchings below his right collarbone. Grazing a lung, he was certain, as he felt something bubble into his throat. He gasped, and winced at an explosion of pain. But somehow was moving again. Ducking behind his shield, while part of him determined what had happened, which was that a bolt intended for one of the deserters—for Tozri or Elvix or Olrix—had found him instead.

Tozri or Elvix or Olrix …

Elvix or Olrix …

One of them was dead. The last woman he’d loved. The only woman in years to have even halfway loved him. Dead in the snow. Or not.

With Strynn standing behind …

They had no idea who he was or who Strynn was, and probably not Merryn, armed and helmed like that. Fighting the pain that tore through him, he wrenched off his helm one-handed, fumbling to retain his sword.

Then came chaos indeed.

Shouts rained down from above. He could hear wild cries
as his former comrades leapt or climbed down to join him on the ground, while a rain of arrows kept the Ixtian troops at bay. It was a waste of arrows, but he knew what he had to do. “The ladder!” he yelled. “It’s your only chance.” Then, to the Eronese soldier who’d come up behind him, “They’re half ours. They’re friends. Get them up—and get Strynn up. Forget about me, you fool! Any one of them is worth a dozen of me!”

“Eed!”

“I’m dead; I just don’t know it,” Eddyn snapped, and raised his sword again. The motion jogged the arrow, and something else ripped inside. Blackness waved a flag before him. He staggered. Saw Merryn herself jump off the end of the ladder and reach for Strynn. Saw the remaining two triplets rushing back to retrieve their fallen sibling.

More darkness.

He fell. Rose to his knees in snow that came to his waist, and which was now splattered with red for spans around. His legs were awash with gore. He welcomed that, because some of the pain flowed with it.

He was getting light-headed.

Blackness again, and an arrow narrowly missed him, and two men were trying to get him up, with no idea how much pain they inflicted.

“Leave me!” he spat, fighting them off.

And then he was on his feet once more. “Elvix?” he shouted—not daring to hope.

One of the deserters turned. “Aye?”

That was it, then. There was one last thing he could do.

A quick glance showed Merryn with Strynn on the ladder, and men on the ramparts hauling it upward, even as the women climbed. Arrows rained down, but most fell short, and his group had found sense enough to send a half dozen shieldmen down.

As for the Ixtians—they seemed to be digging in. But not for long. This minor skirmish had drawn Eronese from farther along the walls. Already the bulk of the force was moving toward that perceived attack.

“Eddyn!” Merryn shrieked. “Come on. There’s nothing else you can do!”

“Oh yes there is!” Eddyn called back. And ran—toward the tower. He caught the ladder just before it swung out of reach, and with force of will he didn’t know he possessed, half walked up the walls, half climbed it overhand, so that his body shielded Strynn’s.

An arrow caught him in the thigh—which would’ve struck hers otherwise. Another caught him directly in the spine. His legs went numb, but half the pain went with them. Somehow he hung on grimly until they’d reached the top. He waited until he saw Merryn scrambling over the rampart to safety, and hands reaching out to receive him—and Strynn.

And let go. Fell backward, arms outstretched, as though he intended to fly. The last thing he saw was the flag of Eron above the tower, waving in a clear, and very blue, sky.

The last thing he heard was the crack of his neck as he struck ground. And Elvix’s anguished cry.

“How long is he going to wait?” Div muttered to the young Guardsman beside her. His name was Krynneth, and he was almost as handsome as Rann. Almost.

She shifted her weight anxiously, gaze sweeping left and right—as it had been for some time now.

There’d been a flurry of movement over to the west that she’d not been able to see well, by virtue of the men around her being taller, and a flagstaff being in the way. The King had gone strange then—almost had fallen, but then had shaken himself, and said, “Enough.” And gone back to watching.

“Not much longer,” Tryffon answered behind her, having overheard. “He’d be a fool if he doesn’t move soon.”

As if in answer, the King leapt atop a step, putting him half a body length higher than anyone else. “Mount up,” he said quietly, “in case they get through the gate—or try to go around.”

“Yes!”
Tryffon murmured, already moving toward the stair that laced up the back of the tower. Div was moving, too, though she had vast misgivings about fighting from horseback. Now if Gynn had someone he wanted skinned … But then she was pounding down the steps with the rest, and entering the corral where their horses waited. She found her mount, and leapt up, then rode through a gate in the middle wall and down to the lowest bailey. To wait again.

But not long. She heard a roar beyond the wall and, by rising on tiptoe in the stirrups, could see that the spreading black tide of Ixtian soldiers had reached the walls.

And then all she could hear was shouting.

For maybe two breaths before enemy arrows blackened the sky, and all she could do was raise her shield, duck beneath it, and pray.

Somewhere below, maybe twenty spans away, something struck the gate.

She heard it boom hollowly, and heard also the crack of timber.

And shuddered.

Rrath ran—or his body did, while his self hid down there in the cave it had carved in the heart of what he might once have called his mind.

… ran down corridors of darkness that might not be anywhere, because they were hidden in the larger body of the hold.

… ran, because he was aware, at some level, that he was moving, that feet were slapping the floor, and that he was lurching from side to side from the uneven mass of the armor he wore, and the weaponry he wielded. Every time he impacted, he heard the scrape of irreplaceable craftsmanship and precious metal.

His body was on fire. Every tiny portion of it was being burned alive by the power that had flooded into him, that wanted out, and that apparently thought he had to be dead to do it. He was mad, but part of him still knew what it wanted.

Part of him kept on pushing …

… making him run …

… to the last things in the world he cared about.

He could smell them. Or maybe, mad as he was, with his mind no longer firmly anchored to his body, he could reach out and touch their minds in turn. Feel his way into the terrible hungry, angry, ravening pits where they lived. The geens.

His mind was there ahead of him, drawing him on.

They welcomed him, because he was somehow in all of them at once—all … forty, if he could still reckon numbers.

It lasted but an instant. Long enough for Avall to clap his hands on his head, stagger back a step, and utter a panicked “Oh Eight, no, not Strynn!”

Long enough for him to clamp his hand hard around the gem that hung prisoned on his chest. For his face to twist in something between fear, rage, and desire—

And then he was gone.

The air exploded where he’d been, making small thunder as it struck itself and resounded. A chill coursed through Rann that made him stagger in turn, and reach out to brace against a stone merlon with one hand and the man beside him on the tower with the other. That man’s eyes were big as fists: big as the buckler he carried. He twisted sideways to dodge a stray arrow that had found its way there, as though being nearly impaled were of no consequence whatever, compared to what he’d just observed.

Eight
, it shook Rann, too, and he knew it was possible.

“What …?” the man asked shakily. And shivered indeed, as did everyone else around him.

“Reason to trust our King more than you fear the king of Ixti,” Rann retorted, through a shiver of his own, yet even as he spoke he was straining on his toes, trying to see what transpired a shot away, at the west tower. He could see nothing clearly, for Avall had taken the distance lenses, never mind the intensifying hail of arrows pouring down on them.

More intensely every moment, it appeared, for he found
himself having to crouch behind the rampart, with his shield raised over his back like a turtle, while arrows hissed and slid across leather and wood and steel. One landed beside his foot; he jerked it back reflexively. And then the air rattled again, like a flock of birds taking wing, as the archers in the citadel itself, and in the top ring of walls, once more came into play.

Relieved of the need to guard Avall, he was left simply to be a soldier. Which was better in many ways, since if you were defending yourself or looking for targets, you had no time in which to be afraid—or worry.

With that in mind, he peered through the arrow slot in the nearest embrasure—and felt a chill that had nothing to do with Avall’s departure. The ground had gone black with Ixtians, and something complex was occurring down at the main gate that involved ladders, and men scaling those ladders only to be cut down on the walls or knocked off again.

But something was happening closer to hand as well.

He squinted. The force that had been pointed toward them had halted, and the front several ranks had raised their shields to hide frenzied activity on the ground. Rann saw a flurry of movement, but nothing clearly until the air suddenly resounded with furious barking and the shouts of soldiers, not all of them happy—whereupon the quarter shot of pristine white between wall and invading army was disrupted by a double dozen dark, low-slung shapes that raced across the melting snow so quickly they barely sank in.

War hounds.

Heavy as a small man, and oft-rumored but seldom seen.

Hounds that had, apparently, been caged and muzzled until now.

But for what possible reason?

Why assail stone walls with beasts?

Forgetting himself, Rann shifted enough to gaze through the embrasure proper. And saw more clearly. The dogs wore spiky armor on heads, necks, and shoulders. But there was something on their backs as well. Something that leaked darkness on the snow in their wake.

On and on they came—to what end, Rann had no idea, as
he had little more notion how they could tell friend from foe under these conditions.

But then they reached the wall, just to the right of his tower, and were leaping and yelping and barking like black demons, as they sought vainly to scale the stone. An archer took one. Another fell in its tracks. A particularly well-placed shot killed two with one shaft. Bodies piled along the wall, dark in the snow.

The wind shifted. Rann smelled something. Something familiar yet strange—in this context.

Just as arrows flew from the Ixtian force.

Flaming
arrows.

Impacting the mostly dead dogs and those odd, leaking casks upon their backs.

“Duck!” Rann yelled desperately, yanking at the man beside him, as he threw himself flat on the stones.

“What—?”

“Quick-fire! They must have raided every store they could find in South Gorge. They—”

The world turned to impossible light and deafening noise. The tower shook. He heard a boom, followed by another and a yelp cut off with a heart-rending whine, and then men shouting in both Eronese and Ixtian.

And then a lower rumble, and, very distinctly, someone shouting, in which the only intelligible words were “the wall.”

A sound like an avalanche …

… panicked shouting, and the clang of weapons falling …

… and a joyful cheer from Ixti’s army that chilled him to the bone.

A cheer that grew louder by the instant, to rival the stony thunder of collapsing walls as that army rushed wildly forward—toward a breach Rann didn’t need to see, which had been blown in the adjoining wall.

He was there …

Who
was?

Oh,
he
was: Rrath. Rrath syn … Garnill. Yes, that was it.
That was him. Rrath. And Priest-Clan. Weather. Weather-witching. And he wished he could witch away the pain in him right now, which stabbed through his skull, and between his eyes, and ran up to meet that pain from either hand, connecting each other in a triangle of something beyond pain. Something that wanted to be somewhere else.

But where was it
now?

Oh …

The geens.

He’d found the geen pens, which turned out to be where
there
was. He’d found them and …

Yes, indeed, there certainly were geens down there.

He blinked back to partial sanity, as he stared down from the landing he’d just blundered onto—down at the cavern-enclosure that roared out and away before him. Light showed at the opposite end, maybe a quarter shot away—the place was that huge—and he could see bits of trees.

Which made no sense—until he recalled that the tunnel he’d taken ran
beneath
the hold, clear through to a narrow valley beyond. One with walls too steep to climb, except in one place which … Nyllol (if that was the name that went with the face in his memory) had shown him.