Honoured Enemy
Honoured Enemy
William Forstchen
Raymond E. Feist
The whole of the magnificent Riftwar Cycle by bestselling author Raymond E. Feist, master of magic and adventure, now available in ebookFreedom at any price?Hartraft’s Marauders, a crack band of Kingdom raiders, are a special unit designed to infiltrate and fight behind enemy lines. They are currently heading for a frontier garrison, after a disastrous encounter with the Tsurani.Meanwhile, a Tsurani patrol is sent to support an assault on the same garrison. Both sides arrive at the same time and discover the garrison has been overrun by a migrating horde of moredhel (dark elves), and they are forced by circumstances to band together and fight as one unit to survive.The only problem is, who do they hate the most – their mutual enemy, or each other? As they make their way across the unknown Northlands to freedom, they have to struggle not only with the elements and their enemies, but also their conscience. For what is more important – one’s life or one’s honour?Honoured Enemy is the first book in the Legends of the Riftwar series. It is the first of three co-authored books that return to the world of Feist’s best-loved series.
RAYMOND E. FEIST
Honoured Enemy
Book One of Legends of the Riftwar
Copyright (#ulink_a480465e-4298-5f83-aaa4-a839bfd139b0)
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
HarperVoyager An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)
First published in Great Britain by Voyager 2001
Copyright © Raymond E. Feist & William R. Forstchen 2001
Raymond E. Feist & William R. Forstchen assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780006483885
Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2012 ISBN: 9780007381401
Version: 2016–11–23
Dedication (#ud4bbb4e8-f596-589b-a9ab-1a2c6ded613d)
This one’s for Janny Wurts, who showed me that two heads often were far better than one.
Raymond E Feist
When I think of Honour, Colonel Donald V Bennett, Fox-Green, Omaha Beach, and Sergeant Andy Andrew, Easy Red, Omaha Beach stand before me. When duty called, they served unflinchingly. I am honoured to call them my friends.
William R Forstchen
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#ua690fd76-d5eb-52d0-a2c6-d69efcda5dae)
Title Page (#uf6e739ab-5e67-5595-bc3b-1b5f3fe773a4)
Copyright (#u6cd6d6d2-f931-53a7-8485-f5d2736dd9a5)
Dedication (#ue141848e-0454-5600-a710-8aeee7a5eb95)
Map (#ubd35cb82-391c-536d-b0a9-b92c5dcfbb15)
Prologue: Intelligence (#u815de4ef-8410-5f8c-a263-75942e7b01bb)
Chapter One: Grieving (#u02e69d63-df3e-5e75-9b92-ce970f9257c2)
Chapter Two: Discovery (#u107c0aaf-2e1c-5076-8d7d-e33715f69888)
Chapter Three: Moredhel (#u8393eba4-e633-5aa5-bb28-5d8f9d0c97e6)
Chapter Four: Practicalities (#u80e131c7-3048-5e61-bf9f-2f3fb897bfb8)
Chapter Five: Accommodation (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six: Pursuit (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven: River (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight: Decisions (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine: Chances (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten: Valley (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven: Respite (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve: Blood Debts (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen: Accord (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen: Betrayal (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen: Flight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen: Confrontation (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen: Parting (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue: Reunion (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
Continue the Adventure … (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Map (#ulink_84af021d-1166-5b4c-9335-aa3f5ff5ae46)
• Prologue • (#ulink_b5232e66-5e09-5781-a95f-82d4559530ac)
Intelligence (#ulink_b5232e66-5e09-5781-a95f-82d4559530ac)
THE RAIN HAD STOPPED.
Lord Brucal, Knight-Marshal of the Armies of the West, entered the command pavilion, snorting like a warhorse and swearing under his breath. ‘Damn weather,’ he finally said. The elderly general, still broad-shouldered and fit, ran a gloved hand back from his forehead, getting the damp hair out of his eyes.
Borric, Duke of Crydee, and his second-in-command looked at his old friend with a wry smile. Brucal was a steadfast warrior and a reliable ally in the politics of the Kingdom of the Isles, as well as an able field general. But he had a tendency towards vanity, though. Borric knew he was getting irritated by the regal mane of hair now being plastered to his skull.
‘Still sick?’ Borric was a striking man of middle years, with more black in his hair and beard than grey. He had on his usual garments of black – the only colour he had donned since the death of his wife many years before – and over this he wore the brown tabard of Crydee, emblazoned with a golden gull above which perched a small golden crown, signifying Borric’s royal blood. His eyes were dark and piercing, and currently showed a slight amusement at his old friend’s bluster.
As Borric expected, the old grey-bearded duke swore an oath. ‘I’m not sick, damn it! Just a bit of a sniffle.’
Borric remembered Brucal when he was a young man, visiting Borric’s father at Crydee, his laughter, with his robust joy and a glint in his eye. Even when his reddish-brown hair and beard had turned grey, Brucal had been a man who lived each day to the fullest. Today was the first time Borric recognized that Brucal was now an old man.
On the other hand, it had to be said that Brucal was an old man who could quickly draw a sword and do considerable harm. And he refused to admit he was ill.
Brucal pulled off his heavy gauntlets and handed them to an aide. He allowed another to remove the heavy fur-lined weather-cloak he had worn from his own tent. He was dressed in simple blue trousers and a grey tunic, his tabard left behind in his tent. ‘And this bloody rain doesn’t help.’
‘Another week of this and the snows will be falling in earnest.’
‘According to our scouts, it’s already snowing heavily up north, around the Lake of the Sky,’ replied Brucal. ‘We should consider sending the reserves back to LaMut and Yabon for the winter.’
Borric nodded. ‘We might get one more week of clement weather before the winter storms come, though. Just enough time for the Tsurani to start something. I think we’ll keep half of the reserves close by; I’ll order the other half back to LaMut.’
Brucal looked at the campaign map on the large table before Borric. He said, ‘They haven’t been doing much, lately, have they?’
‘The same as last year,’ said Borric, pointing at the map. ‘A sortie here, a raid there, but there’s little evidence they seek to expand much any more.’
Borric studied the map: the invading Tsurani had taken a large chunk of the Grey Tower Mountains and the Free Cities of Natal, but had seemed satisfied to hold a stable front for the last five years of the war. The dukes had managed one successful raid through the valley in the mountains the Tsurani had used as their beachhead, and since then intelligence about what was occurring behind enemy lines was non-existent.
Brucal blew his nose in a rag used to oil weapons, and then threw it into a brazier nearby. His large nose now looked red and shiny. The nine-year campaign had taken its toll on him, Borric noticed.
Borric thought back a moment to when the first sightings of the Tsurani invaders had been reported, by two boys at his own keep who had found a wrecked Tsurani ship on the headlands near his castle at Crydee. Later, word had been brought by the Elven Queen of aliens in the forests that lay between her own Elvandar and the Duchy of Crydee.
The world had changed: the fact of an alien invasion from another world via a magic gate was no longer a source of wonder. Borric had a war to fight and win. He had added some marks with brush and ink to the campaign map.
‘What’s this?’ asked Brucal, pointing to a notation Borric had added earlier in the morning.
‘Another migration of Dark Brothers. It looks as if a fairly large contingent of them are moving down the southern foothills of the Great Northern Mountains. They’re treading a narrow path near the elven forests. I can’t understand why they’d come over the mountains at this time of year.’
‘Those blackhearts don’t have to have a reason,’ observed Brucal.
Borric nodded. ‘My son Arutha reported a large force tangled with the Tsurani while they were besieging my castle five years ago. But those were Dark Brothers driven from the Grey Towers by the Tsurani; they were striking north to join their kin in the Northlands. They’ve been quiet since then.’
‘There’s one possibility.’
Borric shrugged. ‘I’m listening, old friend.’
‘That’s a bloody long trek for nothing,’ observed Brucal, as he wiped his nose with the back of his hand. ‘They’re not fools.’
‘The Dark Brotherhood is many things, but never stupid,’ agreed Borric. ‘If they’re moving in force, it’s for a reason.’
‘Where are they now?’
Borric said, ‘Last reports from the scouts near the Elven Forest. They’re avoiding the dwarves at Stone Mountain and the elven patrols, heading east.’
‘Lake of the Sky is the only destination,’ said Brucal, ‘unless they’re going to turn south and attack the elves or the Tsurani.’
‘Why Lake of the Sky?’
‘It makes sense if they’re trying to get up to the eastern side of the Northlands. There’s a spur of mountains that runs north-east out of the Teeth of the World, hundreds of miles long and impassable. Over the Great Northerns, past the Lake of the Sky, and up a trail back north over the Teeth of the World is a short-cut, actually.’ The old duke stroked his still-wet beard. ‘It’s one of the reasons we have so much trouble with the bastards up in Yabon.’
Borric nodded. ‘They tend to leave us alone in Crydee, compared to the encounters your garrisons have with them.’
‘I just wish I knew why they were out in force, heading east, this close to winter,’ muttered Brucal.
‘Something’s up,’ said Borric.
Brucal nodded. ‘I’ve been fighting Clan Raven since I was a boy.’ He fell silent for a moment. ‘Their paramount chieftain is a murderous dog named Murad. If this bunch from the Northlands is looking to join with him …’
‘What?’
‘I don’t know, but it’ll be bad.’ Looking over the rest of the map, Brucal asked, ‘Do we have anyone in that area now?’
‘Just the garrison forts along the Tsurani front, and a few last patrols before winter,’ Borric replied.
Brucal leaned close to inspect each of the small ink marks on the map, then made a sound half-way between a snort and a laugh. ‘Hartraft.’
‘Who?’ asked Borric.
‘Son of one of my squires. Dennis Hartraft. Runs a company of thugs and cut-throats called the Marauders for Baron Moyet. He’s up there.’
‘What’s he doing?’ asked Borric. ‘The name is familiar, but I don’t recall any reports from him.’
‘Dennis is not one for paperwork,’ said Brucal. ‘What he’s doing is unleashing bloody murder on the Tsurani. It’s personal with him.’
‘Can we get word to him about this Dark Brothers migration?’
‘He’s an independent. He’ll come back to Moyet’s camp for the winter in the next week or two. I’ll send word to the Baron to get whatever information from Dennis he can.’ Then Brucal laughed. ‘Though it would be fitting for him and Clan Raven to tangle if it comes to that.’
‘Why?’
Brucal said, ‘Too long a story to tell now. Just say there’s even more history between his family and Murad’s blood-drinkers than there is between him and the Tsurani.’
‘So what happens if this Hartraft and the Dark Brothers meet up?’
Brucal sighed, and wiped his nose. ‘A lot of people are going to get dead.’
Borric took a step away from the map table and looked out of the pavilion’s door. A light mix of rain and snow was starting to fall. After a moment, he said, ‘Maybe they’ll miss each other and Hartraft will get back to Moyet’s camp.’
‘Maybe,’ said Brucal. ‘But if that bunch from the north gets between Dennis and Moyet’s camp, or some bunch from Clan Raven moves to meet with them …’
Brucal let the thought go unfinished. Borric knew what he thought. If that many Brothers got between Hartraft and his base, the chances for the Kingdom soldiers returning home alive were nearly non-existent. Borric let his mind wander for a moment, considering the cold hills of the north and the icy winter almost upon them, then he brushed away the thoughts. There were other fronts and other conflicts to worry about, and he couldn’t help Hartraft and his men, even if he knew where they were. Too many men had already died in this war for him to lose sleep about another high-risk unit out behind enemy lines. Besides, maybe they’d get lucky.
• Chapter One • (#ulink_7fced400-03b7-51c6-9574-61c611fdb866)
Grieving (#ulink_7fced400-03b7-51c6-9574-61c611fdb866)
THE GROUND WAS FROZEN.
Captain Dennis Hartraft, commander of the Marauders, was silent, staring at the shallow grave hacked into the frozen earth. The winter had arrived fast and hard, and earlier than usual; and after six days of light snow and freezing temperatures, the ground was now yielding only with a grudge.
So damned cold, he thought. It was bad enough you couldn’t give the men a proper funeral pyre here, lest the smoke betray their position to the Tsurani, but being stuck behind enemy lines meant the dead couldn’t even be taken back to the garrison for cremation. Just a hole in the ground to keep the wolves from eating them. Is this all there really is in the end, just the darkness and the icy embrace of the grave? With his left hand – his sword hand – he absently rubbed his right shoulder. The old wound always seemed to ache the most when snow lay on the ground.
A priest of Sung, mumbling a prayer, walked around the perimeter of the grave, making a sign of blessing. Dennis stood rigid, watching as some of the men also made signs to a different god – mostly to Tith-Onaka, God of War – while others remained motionless. A few looked towards him, saw his eyes, then turned away.
The men could sense his swallowed rage … and his emptiness.
The priest fell silent, head lowered, hands moving furtively, placing a ward upon the grave. The Goddess of Purity would protect the dead from defilement. Dennis shifted uncomfortably, looking up at the darkening clouds which formed an impenetrable wall of grey to the west. Over in the east, the sky darkened.
Night was coming on, and with it the promise of more snow, the first big storm of the year. Having lived in the region for years, Dennis knew that a long, hard winter was fast upon them, and his mission had to be to get his men safely back to their base at Baron Moyet’s camp. And if enough snow fell in the next few days, that could prove problematic.
The priest stepped back from the grave, raised his hands to the dark heavens and started to chant again.
‘The service is ended,’ Dennis said. He didn’t raise his voice, but his anger cut through the frigid air like a knife.
The priest looked up, startled. Dennis ignored him, and turned to face the men gathered behind him. ‘You’ve got one minute to say farewell.’
Someone came up to Dennis’s side and cleared his throat. Without even looking, Dennis knew it was Gregory of Natal. And he understood his lack of civility to the Priest of Sung was ill-advised.
‘We’re still behind enemy lines, Father. We move out as soon as the scout comes back,’ Dennis heard Gregory say to the priest. ‘Winter comes fast and we’d best be safely at Brendan’s Stockade should a blizzard strike.’
Dennis looked over his shoulder at Gregory, the towering, dark-skinned Natalese Ranger attached to his command.
Gregory returned his gaze, the flicker of a smile in his eyes. As always, it annoyed Dennis that the Ranger unfailingly seemed to know what he was thinking and feeling. He turned away and, pointing at the squad of a dozen men who had dug the shallow grave shouted: ‘Don’t just stand there gawking, fill it in!’
The men set to work as Dennis stalked off to the edge of the clearing which had once been a small farmstead on the edge of the frontier, long since abandoned in this the ninth year of the Riftwar.
His gaze lingered for a second on the caved-in ruins of the cabin, the decaying logs, the collapsed and blackened beams of the roof. Saplings, already head-high, sprouted out of the wreckage. It triggered a memory of other ruins, but they were fifty miles from this place and he forced them out of his mind. That was a memory he had learned long ago to avoid
He scanned the forest ahead, acting as if he was waiting for the return of their scouts. Normally, Gregory would lead any scouting patrols, but Dennis wanted him close by, in case they had to beat a swift retreat. Years of operating successfully behind Tsurani lines had taught him when to listen to his gut. Besides, the scout who was out there was the only one in the company able to surpass Gregory’s stealth in the forest.
Resisting the urge to sigh, Dennis quietly let his breath out slowly and leaned against the trunk of a towering fir. The air was crisp with the smell of winter, the brisk aroma of pine, the clean scent of snow, but he didn’t notice any of that; it was as if the world around him was truly dead, and he was one of the dead as well. All his attention was focused, instead, on the sound of the frozen earth being shovelled back into the grave behind him.
The priest, startled by the irreverent display, had watched Dennis leave the group and then stepped up to Gregory’s side and glanced up at the towering Natalese, but Gregory simply shook his head and looked around at the company. All were silent, save for the sound of a few desultory shovels striking the icy soil; all of them were gazing at their leader as he walked away and passed into the edge of the surrounding forest.
Gregory cleared his throat again, this time loudly and having caught the men’s attention he motioned for them to get on with the work at hand.
‘He hates me,’ Father Corwin said, a touch of sadness in his voice.
‘No, Father. He just hates all of this.’ Gregory nodded at the wreckage of battle that littered the small clearing: the trampled-down snow – much of it stained a slushy pink – broken weapons, arrows, and the fifty-two Tsurani corpses that lay where they fell, including the wounded who had been finished off with a knife across the throat.
His gaze was fixed on the priest. ‘The fact that you accidentally caused this fight, that wasn’t your fault.’
The priest wearily shook his head. ‘I’m sorry. I was lost out here and didn’t know the Tsurani were so close behind me.’
Gregory stared straight into the pale-blue eyes of the old priest but the priest looked straight back at him, not flinching, not lowering his gaze even for an instant. Mendicant priests of any order, even those of the Goddess of Purity, had to be tough enough to live off the land and whatever bounty providence offered. Gregory had no doubt that the mace at the priest’s belt was not unblooded and that Father Corwin had faced his share of dangers over the years. Besides, Gregory was an experienced judge of men, and while this priest seemed meek at the moment, there was obvious hardness beneath the apparently mild exterior.
‘I wish I’d never left my monastery to come here and help out,’ the priest sighed, finally dropping his gaze. ‘We got lost, brothers Valdin, Sigfried and I. We were making for the camp of Baron Moyet, took a wrong turn on the trail and found ourselves behind the Tsurani lines.’
‘Only Rangers and elves travel these paths without risk of getting lost, Father,’ Gregory offered. ‘These woods are treacherous. It is said that at times the forest itself will hide trails and make new ones to lead the unwary astray.’
‘Brothers Valdin and Sigfried were captured,’ the priest continued, spilling out his story. ‘I escaped. I was off the trail, relieving myself, when the Tsurani patrol took them. I ran in the opposite direction after my brothers were dragged away. I was a coward.’
The Natalese Ranger shrugged. ‘Some might call it prudence, rather than cowardice. You denied the Tsurani a third prisoner.’
The priest still appeared unconvinced.
‘There was nothing you could have done for them,’ Gregory added with certainty, ‘except join them as a captive.’
Corwin seemed slightly more reassured. ‘It was foolish of me to have run, you’ll agree. Had I been more stealthy I’d not have led them to you. When I saw one of your men hiding off the side of the trail, I just naturally went straight to him.’
Gregory’s eyes narrowed. ‘Well, if he’d been doing a better job of hiding, you wouldn’t have seen him, then, would you?’
‘I didn’t know they –’ he pointed towards the Tsurani corpses littering the field ‘– were right behind me.’
Gregory nodded.
What should have been a clean, quick ambush incurring minimal loss had turned into a bloodbath. Eighteen men from the Marauders – nearly a quarter of Dennis’s command – were dead, and six more were seriously wounded. As it was, the engagement had been a Kingdom victory, but at far greater cost than was necessary.
The priest rambled on, starting his tale yet again. Gregory continued to study him. It was obvious the man was badly shaken. He was poorly dressed, wearing sandals rather than boots. A couple of toes were already showing signs of frostbite. His hands shook slightly, and his voice was near to breaking.
The priest fell silent, and took a long moment to compose himself. At last, he let out a long sigh, then looked over to Dennis who stood alone, at the edge of the clearing. ‘What is wrong with your commander?’ he asked.
‘His oldest friend is in that grave,’ Gregory said quietly, nodding down at the eighteen bodies lying side by side in the narrow trench hacked out of the freezing ground. ‘Jurgen served Dennis’s grandfather before he served the grandson. The land the Tsurani now occupy, part of it once belonged to Dennis’s family. His father was Squire of Valinar, a servant of Lord Brucal. They lost everything early on in the war. Word of the invasion hadn’t even reached Valinar before the Tsurani. The old Squire and his men didn’t even know who they were fighting when they died. Dennis and Jurgen were among a handful of survivors of the initial assault; Jurgen was his last link to that past.’ Gregory paused, transferring his gaze to Father Corwin. ‘And now that link is gone.’
‘I’m sorry,’ the priest replied softly, I wish none of this had ever happened.’
‘Well, Father, it happened,’ Gregory said evenly.
The priest looked up at him, and there was moisture in his eyes. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said one more time.
Gregory nodded. ‘As my grandmother said, “Sorry won’t unbreak the eggs.” Just clean up the mess and move on. Let’s find you some boots or you’ll lose all your toes before tomorrow.’
‘Where?’
‘Off the dead of course.’ Gregory indicated boots, weapons, and cloaks that had been stripped off the dead before they were buried. ‘They don’t need them any more, and the living do,’ he added matter-of-factly. ‘We honour their memory, but it’s no use burying perfectly good weapons and boots with them.’ He motioned with his chin. ‘That pair over there looks about your size.’
Father Corwin shuddered but went over and picked up the boots, the Natalese had indicated
As the priest untied his sandals, Alwin Barry, the newly-appointed sergeant for the company, approached the edge of the grave, picked up a clump of frozen earth and tossed it in.
‘Save a seat for me in Tith’s Hall,’ he muttered, invoking the old belief among soldiers that the valiant were hosted for one night of feasting and drinking by the God of War before being sent to Lims-Kragma for judgment. Barry bowed his head for a moment in respect, then turned away, heading over to the trail that went through the middle of the clearing, and called for the men to form up in marching order.
Others hurriedly approached the grave, picking up handfuls of dirt and tossing them in. Some made signs of blessing; one uncorked a drinking flask, raised it, took a drink then emptied the rest of the brandy into the grave and threw the flask in.
Burial was not the preferred disposition of the dead in the Kingdom, but more than one soldier rested under the soil over the centuries and soldiers had their own rituals for saying farewell to the dead, rituals that had nothing to do with priests and gods. This wasn’t about sending comrades off to the Halls of Lims-Kragma, for they were already on their way. This was about saying goodbye to men who had shed their blood alongside them just hours before. This was about saying farewell to brothers.
Richard Kevinsson, the company’s newest recruit, was one of the last to approach. A young squire from Landonare, who had escaped from there when the Tsurani had overrun his family’s estates, he had joined full of blood and fire, vowing vengeance. Now there were tears in his eyes, his features were pale, and a trickle of blood coursed down his cheek from a slashing blow that had laid open his scalp just below the edge of his dented helmet. ‘I’m sorry,’ he gasped quietly. He knelt down and picked up a clump of earth, his gaze fixed on the old sergeant-at-arms lying in the centre of the grave, surrounded by his dead comrades. The grave-diggers were hard at work, but no earth had yet to fall on Jurgen. The man could have been asleep; except for his blood-soaked tunic he almost looked as if he would sit up and smile, revealing his crooked teeth. The young man had often dreamed of his first battle, and the heroic deeds he would accomplish. Instead he had been on the ground, looking up at his enemy like a frozen rabbit, fumbling for his dropped sword and screaming in terror … and then Jurgen had stormed in, cutting the Tsurani down with a single blow.
In saving Richard, however, Jurgen had left himself open to an enemy spearman who had charged straight in. Jurgen had been looking into Richard’s eyes when the spear struck; there had been a brief instant, almost a flicker of a smile, as if he was a kindly old man helping a child out of a minor scrape, just before the Tsurani spear struck him from behind. Then the shock of the blow distorted his face and the spear exploded out of his chest.
Richard had watched the life fade out of the old man’s eyes. It was only a moment, yet it seemed an eternity, the light fading, Richard knowing that the old man had made the sacrifice of his own life without hesitation.
He looked down at Jurgen now. The corpse’s eyes were closed, but in his mind, and in the nightmares that would come for the rest of his life, the eyes would be open, gazing back at him.
‘It should have been me instead of you,’ Richard whispered, barely able to speak for his grief.
He bent almost double, sobs wracking his body. He knew the others were watching, judging him. Why didn’t they cry? he wondered, and he felt ashamed for all his failures this day.
He let the earth fall from his hand, recoiling as the clump hit Jurgen’s face. Embarrassed, he drew back and turned away, shoulders hunched, shaking as he struggled unsuccessfully to hide his tears.
The few who followed Richard, most of them silent, tossed the ritual handful of earth into the grave then turned away, eyes empty of emotion.
The company formed up for the march, Alwin detailing men off to bear the litters of the wounded.
The grave-diggers were nearly finished. In spite of the cold their faces were streaked with sweat and their hot breath made clouds of steam in the air, as they hurriedly worked to complete their task.
At the edge of the clearing Dennis continued to stare with unfocused eyes at the forest. Something, a sensing, refocused his attention. A lone bird darted through the branches overhead. The angry chatter of a squirrel echoed.
His left hand drifted down to the hilt of his sword. He looked back over his shoulder. Gregory had been kneeling beside a Tsurani, studying the face of the enemy soldier as if he might learn something about the alien invaders from this man’s still features. He had sensed what Dennis had sensed, that someone was approaching. His gaze flickered to the men lining the trail. Several of the old hands were already reacting. Others, noticing this, started to react as well.
Dennis watched Alwin and was disappointed, for the new sergeant-at-arms was several seconds behind Gregory and himself, but finally he raised his left hand, palm outward, at the same time drawing his right hand across his throat, the signal for everyone to fall silent and freeze. Dennis turned to look back at the forest, not yet giving a command.
Gregory listened for a moment, then relaxed. He looked at Dennis and nodded once, then smiled.
A flicker of a shadow moved in the darkness of the forest on the trail ahead and Dennis relaxed, too.
The shadow stepped out from behind a tree, raised a hand and Dennis motioned for him to come in. The scout sprinted forward. He was clad in a white tunic streaked with cross-hatching lines of grey and black, the uniform designed by Dennis for the Marauders to wear during winter campaigning in the deep forest. He ran lightly, in the way only an elf could run, so softly that even in snow it was said that at times they would leave no prints.
As he approached Dennis, he nodded, and with a hand signal motioned for him to follow.
It was a bit of protocol that at times bothered Dennis. The scout was Gregory’s companion, not officially part of Dennis’s command, and as such he would report first to his friend. This, as much as anything else, was the reason Dennis preferred having Gregory lead any scouting mission; when the Natalese Ranger returned from a mission, he reported to Dennis. Dennis, for not the first time, considered it a petty irritation, yet he couldn’t rid himself of it.
‘Tinuva,’ several of the men sighed, as the elf came into the clearing. They were obviously relieved. Weapons were resheathed.
The elf nodded a greeting. He looked over at the burial detail, busy filling in the grave and paused for a moment, head lowered, offering his thoughts for the fallen. At last, he looked back at Gregory. ‘You were right, two of them did escape.’ he announced.
‘And?’ Gregory asked.
‘Good fighters, tough, a long chase,’ Tinuva said, matter-of-factly.
‘So you got all them?’ Dennis asked.
The elf shook his head. He was obviously winded after the long chase.
Dennis pulled a flask out from under his tunic and handed it over. After nodding his thanks, the elf drank then handed the flask back.
‘Not sure,’ Tinuva replied. ‘Their commander might have sent a runner back before the fight even started. There were too many tracks on the trail to tell. If I had more time to follow the way they came, I would know for certain, but you stressed getting back here quickly.’
Dennis cursed silently.
‘Then we must assume someone did get out,’ Gregory announced.
‘I always assume that,’ Dennis said coolly.
Gregory did not reply.
‘I sense something else here as well,’ the elf said.
‘The Dark Brothers?’ Gregory asked and the elf nodded.
‘Did you see signs?’ Dennis interjected.
The elf reached into a pouch dangling from his belt and drew out the broken shaft of an arrow. ‘It’s their make – Clan Raven. Not more than a league from here. I came across tracks as I was returning here after finding the two Tsurani. There was blood on the snow. Someone killed a stag, quartered it and then headed back north. Four of them, early this morning, an hour after the snow started to fall today.’
‘Only four?’ Dennis asked.
The elf shook his head. ‘No, there are more. What I found was just a hunting party foraging for food. The forest whispers of them. They’re out here: something is stirring.’ The elf nodded towards the mountains to the north, barely visible in a gathering darkness, to the north.
‘How many?’
Tinuva closed his eyes for a moment, as if to aid his thinking. ‘Hard to tell,’ he whispered. ‘We eledhel have history with the moredhel.’
Gregory gave a quick shake of his head to Dennis, warning him not to ask anything more.
‘They are as difficult to track as we are, unless they are close by or out in large numbers.’ He looked northward again. ‘Up there, distant, but in large numbers, I would judge.’
‘Why?’ asked Father Corwin, who was standing at the edge of the group.
Several of the men turned to look at the priest. Suddenly embarrassed, Father Corwin lowered his eyes.
No one answered. Finally the elf stirred.
‘Holy one,’ Tinuva said, softly. ‘Something is beginning to stir amongst those you call the Brotherhood of the Dark Path. This war with the Tsurani diverts us away from the threat of the dark ones to the north. Perhaps they see an advantage to be gained from humans slaughtering each other. Perhaps they seek to return south to the Green Heart and the Grey Towers – it isn’t hard to imagine they’ve worn out their welcome with the clans of the Northlands after nine winters.’
Gregory said, ‘Are they moving south?’
Tinuva shrugged. ‘The hunters whose signs I saw may have been foraging ahead of a larger company, or on the flank. It’s difficult to know if they’re heading south or in this direction.’
‘All the more reason for us to get the hell out of here now,’ Dennis interjected sharply. ‘We’ve been behind the lines too damn long as it is; the men deserve to spend the rest of the winter in Tyr-Sog getting drunk and spending their pay on whores.’
He looked back at the burial party. They were nearly finished; a couple of men were dragging out deadfall and branches to throw over the grave. Several of the men were already returning to the ranks, hooking the short-handled shovels onto their backpacks. A trained eye could easily pick out the burial site today but if it continued to snow, by tomorrow the grave and the nearby Tsurani dead would have disappeared. By springtime, when the snows melted and grass fed by the richness beneath sprang up, it would have disappeared back into the forest.
‘Alwin, move the men out.’
‘Sir, you said you wanted to speak to the boy first,’ Alwin replied softly.
Dennis nodded, scanning the line of troops. His gaze fell on Richard Kevinsson. ‘Boy, over here now,’ he snapped.
Nervously Richard looked up.
‘The rest of you start moving,’ Dennis rapped out ‘we want to make Brendan’s Stockade and our own lines by morning.’
Two men acting as trailbreakers sprinted forward, darting off to either side of the trail, lightly jumping over deadfalls and around tree trunks. Within seconds they had disappeared into the forest. Half a dozen men, the advanced squad, set out next, moving down the trail at a slow trot.
Richard Kevinsson approached, obviously ill-at-ease. ‘Captain?’ he asked, his voice shaking.
Dennis looked at Gregory, Tinuva, and the priest, his eyes commanding a dismissal. Tinuva stepped away, bowed in respect to the grave, then joined the column, but Gregory and the priest lingered.
‘Father, go join the wounded,’ Dennis said sharply.
‘I thank you for rescuing me, Captain,’ Father Corwin replied, ‘but I feel responsible for the trouble this lad is in and I wish to stay with him.’
Dennis was about to bark an angry command, but a look in Gregory’s eyes stilled him. He turned his attention back to Richard. ‘When we return to Baron Moyet’s camp I will have you dropped from the rolls of the company.’
‘Sir?’ Richard’s voice started to break.
‘I enrolled you in the company because I felt sorry for your loss, boy. It reminded me of my own, I guess. But doing so was a mistake. In the last fortnight you have barely managed to keep up with our march. I heard a rumour that you fell asleep while on watch two nights ago.’
He hesitated for an instant. It was Jurgen who had reported that, and then defended the boy, reminding Dennis that he had done so as well when out on his first campaign long years ago.
‘It was you that the priest saw from the trail wasn’t it?’
The boy hesitated.
‘It’s not his fault,’ Father Corwin said, impassioned. ‘I stopped because I was exhausted from running. I was staring straight at him, I couldn’t help but see him.’
‘That doesn’t matter,’ Dennis snapped, and the look in his eyes made it clear that he would not tolerate another word from the black-robed priest. ‘Well?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Richard replied weakly. ‘It was me.’
‘Why?’
‘I thought I was well concealed.’
‘If that old man could spot you, be certain a Tsurani trailbreaker would have seen you. You are a danger to yourself and to my command. I’m sending you back. You can tell your friends what you want. I suggest you find a position with a nice comfortable mounted unit down in Krondor. No brains needed there, just ride, point your lance, and charge. Then you can be a hero, like in the songs and ballads.’
‘I wanted to serve with you, sir,’ the boy whispered.
‘Well you did, and that’s now finished.’ He hesitated, but then his anger spilled out. ‘Go take a final look at that grave over there before we leave,’ he said with barely-contained fury, his soft voice more punishing than any screamed insult. ‘Now get out of my sight.’
The boy stiffened, face as pale as the first heavy flakes of snow that began to swirl down around them. The he nodded and turned about, shoulders sagging. As he rejoined the column the men around him looked away.
The priest took a step forward.
Dennis’s hand snapped out, and a finger pointed into the old man’s face. ‘I don’t like you,’ Dennis announced. ‘You were a bumbling fool wandering around out here where you had no business. Damn you, don’t you know there’s a war being fought out here? It’s not a war like the ones that fat monks and troubadours gossip about around the fireplace. I hope you got a good belly full of it today.’
‘Two of my “fat friends”, as you call them, are prisoners of the Tsurani this day,’ Father Corwin replied, and there was checked anger in his voice. ‘I volunteered to serve with the army as a healer. I just pray I don’t have to work on you some day. Stitching together flesh that has no soul is bitter work.’
The priest turned and stalked away. The middle part of the column, made up of the stretcher-bearers was starting off and Corwin joined them.
Gregory chuckled softly.
‘What the hell is so funny?’ Dennis snapped.
‘I think he got you on that one. You did go a bit too hard on the boy.’
‘I don’t think so. He almost got us all killed.’
‘He made no mistakes, I was but ten feet from him. I made sure he was well concealed.’ As if thinking of something, Gregory added, ‘That priest has unusually sharp eyes.’
‘Nevertheless, the boy goes back.’
‘Is that what Jurgen would have done?’
Dennis turned, eyes filled with bitterness. ‘Don’t talk to me about Jurgen.’
‘Someone has to. There’s not a man in your company that doesn’t share your pain. Not just over losing a man they respected, but because they bear a love for you as well, and now carry your burden of sorrow.’
‘Sorrow? How do you know what I feel?’
‘I know,’ Gregory announced softly. ‘I saw what happened too. Jurgen made his choice, he left himself open in order to save the boy. I would have done it, so would you.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘You and your Marauders have become hard men over the years, Dennis, but not soulless ones. You would have tried to save him, even at the cost of your own life, as Jurgen did. The lad has promise. You might not have noticed, and I’m not even sure he remembers it, but he did kill the first Tsurani that closed on him. The one that almost got him came up from behind.’
‘Nevertheless, the boy goes.’
‘It’ll kill him. We both know the type. Next battle he’ll do something stupid to regain his honour and die doing it.’
‘That’s his problem, not mine.’
‘And what if he gets a half-dozen others killed as well? What would Jurgen say of that?’
‘Jurgen is dead, damn you,’ Dennis hissed. ‘Never speak to me of him again.’
Gregory stepped back, raised his hands, then shook his head sadly, and walked over to the grave. Looking down at the rich brown earth being covered by the falling snow, he whispered, ‘Until we stand together again in the light.’
Then he went to join the company. Tinuva fell in by his side and the two of them headed up the trail in the opposite direction, double-checking to make sure that nothing was following the unit.
Dennis was left alone as the last of his men abandoned the clearing.
The heavy flakes swirled down, striking his face, melting into icy rivulets that dripped off a golden beard which was beginning to show the first greys of middle age.
When all were gone, and he knew no one was watching he walked up to the grave, reached down and picked up a clump of frozen earth.
‘Damn you,’ he sighed, ‘why did you leave me like this, Jurgen?’
Now there was no one left. Nothing but a flood of memories.
The holdings of the Hartrafts were not much to boast about; forest lands lying between Tyr-Sog and Yabon. A scattering of frontier villages on the border marches, a rural squire’s estates that the high-blood earls, barons, and dukes of the south and of the east would have scoffed at, or tossed aside as a trifle in a game of dice. But it had been his home, the home of his father and his father’s father.
Jurgen had been a young soldier for Dennis’s grandfather, old Angus Hartraft, called ‘Forkbeard’, who had first been granted the lands on the border for his stalwart service against the dark things that lived to the north. Jurgen had also been his father’s closest friend. And when his father died on the first day of the Riftwar, when the Tsurani flooded into their lands, it was Jurgen who had saved his life the night their keep was taken.
Dennis stared at the grave.
Better I had died that night, he thought, and there was a flash of resentment for old Jurgen.
Malena, his bride of barely six hours, died that night. His father had ordered him to take her through the secret passage out of the burning chaos of the estate’s central keep. He had fought his own desire to stay with his father and had taken Malena through the tunnel. Then outside the escape tunnel, just as freedom had been in reach, a crossbow bolt had stilled her heart forever. He had briefly glimpsed the assassin in the flickering light from the burning keep, and the image of the man as he turned and fled burned in Dennis’s memory. Jurgen had found him kneeling in the mud, clutching her lifeless body. He had fought to stay with her, until Jurgen knocked him out with the flat of his sword, then carried him down the river to safety.
Fifteen men from the garrison, including Jurgen and Dennis, survived that night. Carlin, the next to last had died just a month earlier from a wasting of the lungs. Now, of those fifteen men, only Dennis was left.
So now you’re dead old man. Died because of a damn stupid boy and a fat old priest. It would be like you to die for that, he thought, a sad smile creasing his features.
The ‘Luck of the Hartrafts’, it was called. No glory, no money, no fame. Just a retainer of a family with a minor title and nothing else. And then, in the end, you get a spear in your back because of a clumsy boy.
Yet, he knew that Jurgen, old smiling, laughing Jurgen, would not have wanted it any other way, that he had been more likely to die for the sake of a stupid squire than for any king. In fact, if it had been the mad king in far Rillanon, he most likely would have leaned on his sword and done nothing, figuring that such high and mighty types should take care of themselves.
A breeze stirred, the wind moaning softly through the rustling tree branches. The snow was coming down hard now, hissing, forcing him to lower his head.
Opening his hand, he let the clump of earth fall onto the grave. There was nothing left now of the past except a half-forgotten name and a sword strapped to his side. His father, Jurgen, Malena; all of them were in their graves, and the graves were all returning to the uncaring forest.
‘Dennis?’
He looked up. It was Gregory.
‘Nothing behind us, but we’d better move.’
Darkness was closing in. Tinuva was barely visible but a dozen paces away, waiting where the trail plunged back into the forest.
He looked around the clearing for a final time. Eventually the forest would reclaim all of this. The wind gusted around him and he shivered from the cold.
‘You still have the Marauders,’ Gregory whispered.
Dennis nodded and looked down at the Tsurani bodies scattered about the clearing. All that they have taken from me, he thought. He glanced up the trail where the men waited and while none of them was from Valinar, he saw faces that had become as familiar to him as those from his home. The Marauders still lived, and he had a responsibility to them.
He nodded. ‘And the war,’ he replied coldly, ‘I still have the war.’
Without a backward glance Captain Dennis Hartraft turned from the grave and left the clearing, disappearing into the darkness.
Gregory watched him and sadly shook his head, then followed him on to the path to Brendan’s Stockade.
It was cold.
Force Leader Asayaga threw a handful of charcoal on the warming brazier, pulled off his gloves and rubbed his hands over the fire.
‘Damnable country,’ he sighed.
He picked up the orders addressed to him and studied the attached map.
Madness. The first heavy snow of the season was falling from the skies and yet he was expected to start out at once with his command to reinforce a column which would strike a Kingdom outpost at dawn.
Why now? A day march would have been easy, but now darkness was closing in. Outside his tent the wind was stirring, the frozen canvas cracking and rattling, and he could hear the heavy snow falling from branches in the woods surrounding the camp.
The Game, always it was the Great Game, he realized with a detached fatalism. He knew with certainty he was being sent on a futile mission so that shame might be attached to one of his clan cousins. His House, the Kodeko, was not significant enough to warrant attention on its own, but it was related to those who were in the Kanazawai Clan. He put down the orders and sat back in his small canvas chair, wishing not for the first time that it had some sort of back support. Even more, he wished the frozen ground was covered in the soft lounging cushions that provided such comfort in his home. He ran his hand over his face, shaking his head. He was growing too suspicious. This was not necessarily part of another Minwanabi ploy to embarrass a political enemy back home; it could simply be a well-intentioned, badly-planned attack. Either way, his duty was clear.
Asayaga called for Sugama, his newly-appointed second-in-command.
‘Order the men to form. Full marching gear, five days’ rations. Make sure they have on those new furs and footwraps. We march before sunset.’
‘Where, Captain?’
He handed over the map and Sugama studied it intently.
Asayaga said nothing. Sugama, without a doubt, didn’t know a damned thing about what he was looking at on the parchment, but nevertheless he was staring at it determinedly, acting as if he were a scholar thinking profound thoughts.
‘Kingdom outpost. We were to take it today but the commander, in his brilliance, decided he needed more men first, and thus we are volunteered.’
‘It is an honour then that our commander selected us.’
Asayaga snorted.
‘Yes, an honour. In the Kingdom’s tongue our destination is called “Brendan’s Stockade”.’
Asayaga stumbled over the last two words, dropping the ‘s’.
‘Then it shall be a name of glory for the Empire.’
‘But of course,’ Asayaga said, features frozen in a mask that revealed nothing. ‘Another act of glory in a glorious war.’
• Chapter Two • (#ulink_3d5444a7-115f-5b97-8316-0919952118c3)
Discovery (#ulink_3d5444a7-115f-5b97-8316-0919952118c3)
ICY RAIN LASHED DOWN.
Carefully, silently, Dennis Hartraft slipped through the column of weary troops. In the early morning down-pours, his men crouched motionless, many with arrows nocked to their bows. In their dirty grey cloaks they were one with the forest. Even so, he could sense their tension; something was wrong. Their eyes followed him as he darted from tree to tree, staying low. During the night the snow had changing to a mix of sleet and icy rain. It had made the night march a misery, but some inner sense had compelled Dennis to push on, a decision that Gregory and Tinuva had fully endorsed. Swinging east of Mad Wayne’s Fort, which had fallen to the Tsurani the previous spring, they followed a path little more than a game trail back to Brendan’s Stockade, approaching from the north-east.
They were less than a quarter of a mile from Brendan’s when Alwin Barry, leading the advance squad, ordered a halt. A keen anticipation of downing pints of hot buttered mead and cold ale in a cosy tavern at the fort, instantly gave way to a grim foreboding.
Raised in these woods, Hartraft knew them intuitively. More than once that intuition had kept him alive, where sound logic would have got him killed.
Jurgen had taught him long ago truly to listen to the rhythm of the ancient woods, to be completely still, so quiet that eventually you became one with the forest and could sense the beating of its heart. That sense told him to be ready for the worst.
Jurgen … He pushed the thought away as he passed the head of the column and cautiously followed the tracks of the advance squad. Looking over his shoulder he saw Gregory stealthily moving opposite him on the trail to his right.
The two pressed forward as the rain began to let up.
Dennis heard the chatter of a squirrel, looked up and caught a glimpse of Alwin, crouched behind a fallen tree just back from the top of a low rise. He made for him, crawling the last fifty feet to stay concealed from whatever might be on the other side of the ridge.
Alwin didn’t talk, he simply pointed to Dennis, then pointed with two fingers to his own eyes and gestured towards the top of the rise, the hand signal for Dennis to go forward and see for himself.
Dennis nodded, crawling under the fallen tree and followed Alwin’s track on the slushy ground, trying to ignore the icy dampness seeping through his clothing.
As he moved slowly, he suddenly became aware of the scent of smoke hanging heavy in the air. It had been masked by the rain. On a clear day, he would have smelled it a half-mile farther back. There was more than wood scent to it, something else – cooking meat, perhaps?
He reached the crest, picking a spot between two boulders, crawled up between them, then cautiously raised his head.
Smoke concealed most of the clearing. The smoke was thick, clinging to the ground, and there was far too much of it to have come only from morning cooking fires. He knew what it meant even before an errant breeze blew the smoke away for a moment. The entire clearing, several hundred yards across, was revealed. In the centre, on top of a low ridge, Brendan’s Stockade was nothing but a flame-scorched, still-smouldering ruin. With a cold chill he realized that the scent of cooking meat was the stench of burned bodies.
What had happened?
His eyes darted back and forth, trying to soak up information, to evaluate if there was an immediate threat to his men, to see if they had just walked into a trap.
Nothing moved on the far ridge.
The wooden stockade had been breached at the gate with a battering ram mounted on rough wooden wheels. Scaling ladders leaned drunkenly against the wall to either side of the gate.
The moat had never been much, really nothing more than a ditch full of water that stank in the summer and froze over in the winter. He could see where the ice had been broken and had yet to refreeze. The fort must have been attacked late yesterday evening or during the night.
The open slopes around the fort were carpeted with Tsurani dead, perhaps a hundred or more. He stared at them for a moment. Curiously, many were lying facing downslope, as if killed while running away – and Dennis knew the Tsurani never ran away; a knot of them were clustered in the south-west corner of the clearing, piled on top of each other. Obviously they had made a last stand there, but against whom? Had the garrison been strong enough to sally forth and attack the Tsurani downhill, the walls and gates would still be standing and Hartraft’s Marauders would be inside at this very moment eating a warm meal.
If Brendan’s Stockade had fallen, where were the Tsurani? Dennis had been fighting them for the entire war, and they never left their dead to rot unless killed to the last man. Either way, the winners should now be putting out the fires and repairing the gate, for either side would hold this stockade once taken.
Nothing moved. It was a stockade of the dead.
‘There’s nothing right in this.’
Gregory had slipped up so silently that his whispered voice gave Dennis a start. Damn him, he enjoyed doing that, sneaking up and thus showing his skill, but Dennis didn’t let his flash of anger show.
‘Brendan and his lads are finished,’ Gregory whispered, ‘but so are the Tsurani.’
Dennis said nothing. In spite of the snow vultures were already circling in. A mile or more back he had noticed an absence of crows and ravens in the forest – inactive at night, they were usually noisy and busy first thing in the morning – now he knew where they were … enjoying a feast. A vulture dropped down inside the smoking ruins of the fort and did not come back out, yet another indicator that no one was left alive inside.
Could it be that the Tsurani had retreated at his approach?
No. If there were enough of them to take Brendan, they would stay and make a fight of it. The fall of this stockade, along with the Tsurani holding Mad Wayne’s to the north-west, made a hole twenty miles wide in the picket chain that covered the northern front. Why take this crucial point only to abandon it?
Ambush?
He looked back over his shoulder. Gregory was carefully looking about as well, and Dennis realized that the Natalese scout had been scanning the woods to either side, looking for any indicators that a trap was closing in.
Nothing. The crows and ravens were all down in the clearing, feasting, so there was none of their noisy cackling in the forest. The other sounds were normal: the ice-covered trees creaking in the breeze, the tinkling sound of now-light rain, the calls of other birds, and nothing else.
There was no ambush: it would already have been sprung.
Their eyes met and both had reached the same conclusion.
‘Dark Brothers,’ Dennis whispered.
Gregory nodded an agreement. ‘Unless the last Tsurani and the last Kingdom soldier conspired to kill one another at the same moment, that’s my guess.’
What he saw started to fit together. A Tsurani force had besieged the fort. Ringing the edge of the clearing he could see where the snow had been trampled down, and the torn remains of a dozen of their tents littered the ground, bits of canvas sticking out of the icy slush. Their besieging camp was at the edge of the forest less than a hundred yards away. Cooking pots still hung over cold fire-pits, and a battle pennant leaned against a half-collapsed tent covered with ice. He could even make out the spot where they had forged together their rough-hewn battering ram, for the stump of the freshly-cut tree was coated with melting ice.
Perhaps the Tsurani had just taken the fort, or were venturing an attack when the Dark Brothers had hit them, pressing right through to finish off Brendan’s defenders as well. The pattern of bodies indicated that the Tsurani had tried to break out, heading towards the south-west corner of the clearing and the trail that ran straight back to territory they held. The piled-up knot of dead were stopped a good hundred yards short of the main trail which headed into the heart of Tsurani-held territory.
He stared at the trail for a moment, feeling a knot in his stomach. He had walked it often enough as a boy; it was the trail back to his family’s estates … He forced his attention away from bitter memory and back to the present.
With fifty men in Brendan’s garrison the Tsurani would not have ventured an attack with less than two hundred. If the Dark Brothers had come into the fray it meant there were at least three hundred of them, maybe more. They didn’t risk a fight like this unless the odds were on their side. He had to know. With only sixty-five of his men left, four of the wounded having survived the night march and still needing to be carried, it was a deadly situation if the moredhel were still in the area.
He caught the scent of Tinuva. It was strange, there was something vaguely different about the scent of elves, not a perfume, but it seemed to carry a warmth, a vitality of life with it, like the first morning of spring. He felt the elf’s breath.
‘They’re here. Moredhel,’ Tinuva whispered, his voice drifting so gently it could not have been heard more than half a dozen feet away.
Dennis nodded. ‘How many?’
Tinuva weighed the question for what seemed to Dennis a long time. The elves’ sense of time was far more stately than humans’. After a long while, he said, ‘At least two hundred, maybe more.’
‘Are you certain?’ asked Dennis.
‘No,’ replied the elf. ‘But do you see any moredhel bodies out there?’
‘No,’ conceded Dennis.
‘Any dead or wounded they carried off. They would have had to come in numbers so overwhelming that the garrison and the Tsurani were quickly overrun, else we would see more sign of them. Look.’
Dennis looked to where the elf pointed and not understanding, finally asked, ‘What am I looking for?’
‘There are no broken moredhel arrows. They have cleared this area of their passing. They don’t want us to know they’ve been here.’
Gregory nodded. Pointing to the smoking char that had been the stockade, he said, ‘That’s sort of difficult to ignore, my friend.’
Tinuva said, ‘But if you found it in the spring, might you not think the Tsurani had overrun the fort and left behind this memento?’
Dennis didn’t hesitate. ‘No, the Tsurani would have claimed this position. To the north is the abandoned mine road that leads into the mountains. To the east are the marshlands and mountains. With the Tsurani controlling Mad Wayne’s and most of the land west of here … From here they could raid south behind our lines until we drove them out.’ Suddenly Dennis felt a stab of alarm. ‘The Dark Brothers are still close by!’ he hissed quietly.
‘They’re probably tending their wounded and waiting for the snow to stop before they return to dispose of the Tsurani dead,’ Gregory said in a hoarse whisper. ‘I don’t think they know we are here though,’ He glanced skyward as the snow slackened.
‘Don’t risk your life on that thought, my friend,’ Tinuva said, again his voice was a drifting shimmer barely heard.
‘Circle,’ Dennis whispered.
Dennis slid back down from boulders. Spying Alwin, he gestured for him to remain in position, indicating that the three of them would circle around the fort and that moredhel were in the area. After nine years in the field, the Marauders had a sophisticated system of hand signals to cover most situations. Alwin signed that he understood and would comply.
Having approached the fort from the west, Dennis started north, following the direction of the low ridge. The realm of the moredhel was to the north, though it didn’t necessarily mean that was the direction they had attacked from. Besides, the next major trail, the one that connected Brendan’s Stockade and Mad Wayne’s Fort, entered at the north-west corner of the clearing. Perhaps there would be signs there that could help unravel the mystery.
As he drifted along the ridge, staying low, he kept the remains of Brendan’s Stockade in view. Yet another link to the past lost within the last day, he thought.
The stockade was one of a dozen such along the Yabon frontier, garrisoned out of Tyr-Sog. Unlike the mountains to the east, which were dominated by major passes guarded by the border barons – Ironpass, Northwarden, and High Castle – the western mountains were shot through with trails and little passes. Smuggling in the west was common, but none of the passes was sufficient for any large-scale invasion southward. So the stockades had been constructed over the years.
Each was owned by a trader or innkeeper, who kept it repaired out of profits, while the Baron of Tyr-Sog and the Earl of LaMut paid for the garrison ensconced within; they were much-utilized stops for traders and caravans heading down into the heart of the Kingdom and as such very profitable before the war.
Brendan’s had been one of the more successful stops on the trade routes; from here one could turn south to the Kingdom proper, west toward Ylith or LaMut, or north for a shortcut route that would eventually lead to Yabon. Now Brendan and his family were certain to lie dead within.
Dennis kept his eyes busy as he circled, but he felt regret. Brendan had been a good sort, open-handed to those he liked, always ready to offer a pint and a joint of meat to someone down on their luck. As a boy Dennis had stopped there often enough with his father and Jurgen when they went hunting together. Brendan was that type that never seemed to age, perpetually frozen at a stocky middle-age, gravel-voiced, with an expansive girth that cascaded over a thick leather belt, a first-class brawler; and a damned good friend to all who lived a precarious existence along the frontier.
He was, as well, a notorious cheat when it came to gambling, a fact Dennis had witnessed when Jurgen had caught him at it. The fight that resulted had become something of a legend, with Jurgen’s nose permanently mashed over to one side and Brendan missing part of an ear.
The two had been good friends after that, both appreciating the mettle of the other, but never again did they venture into a game of dice or the new craze of cards with numbers and pictures painted on them. During the night march Dennis had thought about Brendan, and had pondered how he would react to the news that Jurgen was dead. No need to worry about that now and he wondered which had greeted the other at the entrance of Lims-Kragma’s Hall. Perhaps now they could gamble together again, if such games were allowed over there, while they waited to be judged by the Goddess of the Dead.
After covering two hundred yards the rise of ground dropped down towards a narrow forest stream, partly frozen over. The trail to Mad Wayne’s Fort, a position now in Tsurani hands, followed the stream and he paused, looking down on it from above.
There were tracks … and lying by the stream on the far side of the trail was a body, a Tsurani, his throat cut, the ground around him an icy pink.
The three waited for several minutes, carefully scanning the trail, stream, and surrounding woods. Dennis finally looked at Tinuva, who nodded. The elf pulled a bow out from under his cloak, nocked an arrow, and drew it half back.
Dennis took a deep breath and slipped down the trail, pouncing catlike, wincing slightly at the sound of the icy slush crunching beneath his feet. He looked first to the north-west in the direction of Mad Wayne’s and away from the smoking ruins of Brendan’s Stockade. The trail disappeared into the early morning mist.
Nothing.
Gregory landed beside him, swung out his bow and drew it, pointing it up the trail, tensed and ready.
Still nothing.
Dennis looked down at the ground and his heart stopped. It was churned into a muddy slop which was quickly icing over. He moved slowly, scanning for details. A large number had passed down the trail, heading towards the stockade; he could see frozen imprints that must have been made during the night.
The prints weren’t made by the heavy sandals and footcloths of the Tsurani, but by the booted feet of moredhel, men, and the deeper hoofprints of horses and mountain trolls.
What was chilling, though, was that there were prints heading back up the trail and they were fresh, so fresh that droplets of moisture were still oozing into them as ice formed. But not as many as had come in. It was hard to tell – perhaps fifty at most, and no horses.
Battle losses? No, he had not seen any moredhel corpses around the fort. There should have at least been some wounded, drops of blood, a dragging footstep, but these moredhel had been running. Why the haste?
He looked up. Tinuva was still above him, watchful. Dennis pointed to the trail then to the north-west and made the gesture for moredhel, then held his finger tips to his throat, indicating that it was only minutes, a matter of heart beats since their passing.
Tinuva nodded and moved out. Dennis looked at Gregory who set off as well, crossing to the other side of the trail and moving into the stream where he could travel without leaving tracks.
Dennis slipped down to the Tsurani body and touched its leg. The body was just stiffening, dead several hours at the most; had he died earlier in the night rigor would have set in. Looking at the ground, he could figure it out easily enough. The man was a sentry, guarding the trail while the attack on the fort went in, or had in fact already taken the position. It had been a clean kill, stealthy, throat cut from ear to ear and no sign of struggle other than the final spasmodic thrashing of a dying man.
Dennis looked back to the north-west and caught a glimpse of Gregory who was looking back. Dennis pointed to himself and then towards the stockade. Gregory nodded and disappeared into the mist-shrouded forest.
Choosing speed over caution Dennis got back up on to the trail and started off at a slow trot.
The task now was to find out which direction the rest of the moredhel had taken. If the band had split up, scattering after the attack to throw off any pursuit, he’d swing his own men in behind the group heading towards Mad Wayne’s Fort, finish them, then reoccupy Brendan’s. He’d send Gregory and Tinuva back to Lord Brucal’s base camp to ask for reinforcements while Dennis and his company repaired the stockade. But, if the moredhel were indeed returning in force to clean up the Tsurani dead, as Tinuva speculated, Dennis wanted to be well clear of the area before they got back. Defending a rebuilt stockade was one thing; fighting among the ashes on an exposed hillock while being hit from all sides was quite another.
He slowed as he reached the edge of the forest, slipping in behind a towering pine. Closer now to the stockade, he could pick out more details though the smoke was still thick. There were only a couple of Tsurani dead around the northern approach, for the bulk of them were by the gate and the road that headed south-west and the safety of their territory.
As he moved slowly, he noticed something down by the stream. A dark mound rose up amid a small copse of trees. It was almost covered with snow. It took a moment for Dennis’s eye to make sense of the dark shape, but then he saw it: moredhel dead, several dozen of them and the picture began to fit together in Dennis’s mind.
Clever bastards. They had carried off their dead to leave a puzzle, hiding them nearby. In another two hours, Dennis would have been looking at just another snow-covered bump in the earth. If that force was as large as Tinuva speculated, most of them might be heading up to visit the Tsurani now holding Mad Wayne’s, but chances were the rest were lurking nearby, watching, most likely on the other side of the clearing.
Damn clever. Then a more obvious possibility occurred to him.
If we and the Tsurani were fighting a battle here, Dennis thought, both sides would most likely be rushing up reinforcements even now. They’d reach the clearing and stop, the same way we did. Dennis wondered if at this very second there were other eyes, Tsurani eyes, gazing at the fort and wondering what to do next. Curiosity, however, would lead most finally to venture in. Once out in the open the trap would be sprung. He realized with a cold certainty that the moredhel heading up the trail to Mad Wayne’s were not a force heading out on an additional raid, or fleeing. They were an anvil, waiting for the trap to be sprung and for those fleeing the trap to run straight into them. It could be that they were less than a couple of hundred yards off, and no more than a quarter of a mile. As certain as he was of anything, Dennis knew that he was being watched by moredhel scouts. If they hadn’t seen Tinuva or Gregory, they might think him an advance trailbreaker who would soon return the way he had come to carry word to his commander; they would wait until the Kingdom soldiers returned in force, then spring their trap.
Now what?
Trap the trappers most likely deployed on the far side of the clearing, go after the smaller group circling behind him, or get the hell out now?
Use caution when dealing with their kind, Jurgen had always said. His old friend would have told him to get the hell out. If Brendan and the Tsurani had been wiped out by them, there were undoubtedly enough moredhel nearby to annihilate Dennis’s small command. Had the moredhel scout who was surely watching him known that a short distance down the trail sixty-odd cold, tired, and hungry Kingdom soldiers waited, he would be carrying word at this moment. Dennis knew what he must do.
Get out, circle around, then warn off any Kingdom troops that might be approaching from the south. He knew he would have to stand up, glance around as if satisfied that no danger lingered and move quickly back to where his command waited. Let the moredhel think him a solitary scout. Dennis would not be returning this way, and neither would any Kingdom force if he could intercept them. Let the Dark Brothers and the Tsurani fight with each other for a while. The moredhel would not linger to occupy a human stockade, and if the Tsurani managed to drive them away, Duke Brucal, Earl Vandros of LaMut, and Baron Moyet could decide how to drive them out of here and Mad Wayne’s next spring.
Dennis and his scouts had signals to use in these situations. He would remove his heavy cloak, shaking it as if he was trying to rid it of excess water. That would let Tinuva and Gregory know he was under scrutiny and they needed to withdraw without being seen. Dennis was on the verge of standing up to do just this when he saw the enemy. Stepping out of the forest, down on the south-west side of the clearing, a lone Tsurani appeared, easily picked out by his bright blue lacquered armour.
Dennis grinned. Damned fool, typical of them. Make a big show of bravado. A new plan instantly formed in Dennis’s mind. Except for a couple of their best units the Tsurani were blundering fools in the forest compared to his Marauders. The moredhel had to know additional Tsurani were here. In fact, it lessened the likelihood the moredhel knew that Dennis’s unit was nearby. The trap was set for the Tsurani. Let the two sides slaughter each other while we slip away, or with luck the Tsurani will so weaken the moredhel we might even finishthem both off and reclaim the fort for ourselves. This might actually get amusing, he thought with a wolfish smile, and then he heard the crack of a branch.
‘It is a trap,’ Force Leader Asayaga hissed, gesturing towards the smoking ruins of the stockade.
Sugama said nothing, but Asayaga could already read what his second-in-command was thinking, and what he would do.
The night march had been an exercise in stupidity and waste. Two hours of double-quick march in daylight could have brought them to this position, but instead they had endured a frigid, miserable night. His men were exhausted, shivering from the wretched cold, and the perverse gods of this world were sending down bucketful’s of snow.
Now this damnable disaster. It was obvious that Force Leader Hagamaka of the Gineisa had launched the attack without waiting for the reinforcements Asayaga was bringing up. The thought of a Minwanabi ally failing so miserably, so publicly, might have brought Asayaga some pleasure, except for the sight of so many fine soldiers of the Empire dead, slaughtered in a futile battle. It was yet another tragic waste of good men. But why the urgent command for a night march through dangerous territory if Hagamaka wasn’t going to wait?
He first suspected that Hagamaka had intended to embarrass him, to order reinforcements up, not wait and launch the attack, then accuse him of failing to arrive in a timely manner.
Yet, as he surveyed the carnage, he wondered: it was obvious the attack had turned into a rout, a pile of nearly two score dead were clumped on a low rise not a hundred paces into the clearing, and a trail of dead led all the way back to the fort.
No garrison of fifty Kingdom troops could have done this. Did they have more hidden inside the ruined fort, or a force waiting in the woods which had cut Hagamaka off? Then, if so, why the abandoned fort?
The Kingdom considered this a key link in their chain which guarded the shadowy northern front. From the Lake of the Sky’s eastern shore down to the northernmost peak of the Grey Tower Mountains, only the chains of stockades prevented the Tsurani from sweeping eastward, then south into Tyr-Sog and the other Kingdom cities of Yabon. Earlier in the year the forces of the Empire had taken Mad Wayne’s fort to the north-west. If they could also hold Brendan’s, they could control enough of this area to stage an invasion down into Yabon in the spring. With a second invasion pressing out of the Free Cities to the south-west, the Kingdom would lose Yabon inside a year. The Kingdom knew this, and were desperate to garrison and supplying these small fortresses. If they had destroyed Hagamaka they would, at this very moment, be barricading the shattered gate, making repairs … and looting the dead. Messages would already have been sent south for more reinforcements.
Asayaga shook his head. No. Something was dreadfully wrong with this entire situation. He looked over at Sugama but knew there would be no sage advice. He was, after all, of House Tondora, allegedly assigned to Asayaga’s force for training in anticipation of the Tondora joining the Warlord’s host in the spring. It was an unusual but not unprecedented situation to have a junior officer train with the forces of an ally, but everyone knew that this was simply a charade. The Tondora – while publicly ‘politically neutral’, in the Great Council – were Clan Shonshoni and a client House of the Minwanabi, so everything they did was at Minwanabi bidding.
Though supposedly second-in-command, his bloodline and rank in the courts at home would have placed him far above what Asayaga could ever hope to aspire to. So there could only be one reason he was in a subordinate role now: to keep close watch on Asayaga. Asayaga was a son of the Kodeko, a minor house, but of Clan Kanazawai, and the Shinzawai were most likely next on the list of opponents to be crushed by the Minwanabi. The Minwanabi were far too clever to openly confront House Keda, the most powerful Kanazawai Clan family, and one of the Five Great Families of the Empire. But the Shinzawai, while an old and honourable family, with a venerated lord in Kamatsu, retired abruptly from the war with the other families in the Blue Wheel Party, dealing the Warlord a major setback. The move had actually helped the Minwanabi cause, but had also marked the Shinzawai as a political force to be reckoned with. And the Minwanabi never ignored such potential opponents. By discrediting Clan Kanazawai, the Minwanabi would weaken the Keda and their allies. It was but another ploy in the Great Game.
Against that possibility, Asayaga of House Kodeko was ordered to remain in the war by the clan leaders. Ostensibly of the Yellow Flower Party – still allied with the Warlord – Asayaga was the logical choice to be left behind to keep an eye on the Minwanabi. Someone had to be, for their plots and schemes were unending.
Asayaga recalled the disgust he had felt when word of the loss of Lord Sezu of the Acoma had reached him; while of Clan Hadama, Lord Sezu was nevertheless an honourable man worthy of respect. His death had been the result of a manipulation of the Minwanabi sub-commander, who had reinforcements arrive ‘too late’ to save Sezu and his son Lanakota from death. Now only Mara, his daughter, was left to shepherd her house, though by rumours reaching the front, she seemed adept at doing so.
Asayaga kept his disquiet to himself; this late arrival smacked of the same sort of machinations as that betrayal of Sezu in the first year of the war, and that made him uneasy. Fighting the soldiers of the Kingdom was one thing, and even facing the Forest Demons, those known as Dark Brothers to the enemy, was simple warfare. But the treachery of the Great Game, reaching as it did through the rift from the home world to this distant and icy frontier, that was an enemy impossible to confront directly. Besides, even back home Asayaga never liked politics. He took after his father in that regard, and it was for that reason above all others why the Kodeko had remained a minor house in Clan Kanazawai.
Asayaga’s gaze drifted to his senior Strike Leader, Tasemu, the true second-in-command, a veteran from the very start of the war. The one-eyed fighter nodded his understanding that they needed to talk in private, then motioned for them to pull back.
Sugama saw the interplay and cleared his throat. ‘We must find out what happened, Force Commander. Perhaps both sides annihilated each other. We can take the fort now and hold it, gaining great glory. Think of what would be said if this kingdom fort was indeed abandoned and then we simply ran away. If we miss this opportunity the disgrace will be known throughout the army.’
And you would be certain to spread it, Asayaga thought. For that matter Sugama, by that mere statement, had forced his hand. The comment had been made as friendly advice, and if ignored, Sugama would be seen to have been in the right and have won his point in the Game. It was impossible now to withdraw without first sending someone up to the fort and thereby reveal his presence.
Asayaga silently cursed. He looked back at Tasemu who stared back impassively.
‘What are you thinking, Strike Leader?’ Asayaga asked.
The mere fact that a Force Commander asked a Strike Leader for an opinion obviously shocked Sugama; but, no matter which clan he belonged to, he had to learn to leave Tsurani rigidity behind if he was going to fight with Force Commander Asayaga. This was war on an alien world and you didn’t live long if you held to forms and customs.
‘A third force did this,’ Tasemu announced.
‘Who?’
But Asayaga already knew the answer: the idea was half-formed within minutes of him first creeping up to the edge of the clearing.
‘The Forest Demons.’
‘Demons? Creatures of myth! Impossible!’ Sugama exclaimed.
‘They are mortal,’ Asayaga said, ‘but those here first called them demons because they are most difficult to close with. They drift among the trees like the mist, and they can strike without warning. The Kingdom call them “the Dark Brotherhood”. They are kin to those called “elves” we believe.’
Tasemu volunteered, ‘And they do fight like demons when they wish, Force Leader. They are … difficult.’
The mere mention of them had sent a shiver through more than one of Asayaga’s men. They were a strange, unknown factor on this world. Logic would have dictated that these creatures should have allied themselves with the Kingdom in order to repel a foreign invader, as had the elves and the short men called ‘dwarves’. Yet they obviously had not. They were often not seen for as long as a year, then suddenly a patrol would vanish or an outpost would be overrun; and when it was clear that the Kingdom had not had a hand, it was possible to conclude only one thing: it had been the Dark Brothers. This third player in the drama made every commander in the north uneasy, since the Forest Demons’ actions were impossible to anticipate.
Yet it was not their unpredictability that disturbed his men. They were soldiers and expected to die if needs be; that was their place in the order of things. Yes, the war against the Kingdom – especially here on the northern frontier – was deadly, the fighting brutal. Often there was no time to care for wounded, who were given the honourable death of the blade lest they be taken prisoner and shame their houses by being made slaves or, worse, being hanged as one would a criminal or slave.
But at least the Kingdom soldiers were men. They fought with an honour that Asayaga found he had initially been surprised by in barbarians. There had been an unspoken truce at the siege of Crydee, where Kamatsu of the Shinzawai, Asayaga’s cousin, had commanded. Both sides had calmly and silently collected their dead several times and had burned them on pyres of honour, before returning to their respective lines without incident, to resume the fighting the next day. The siege had ended with the withdrawal of the forces of the Blue Wheel Party.
Yet that siege had taught Asayaga what to expect from the Kingdom soldiers. With the Dark Brothers, however, the killing was different. More than once he had found bodies, Tsurani and Kingdom, butchered in horrible ways, the mutilation obviously done while the victim was still alive. Even the dead they disfigured: ears lopped off as trophies, heads placed on stakes. It was as if they loved to kill humans, and did so for the simple pleasure it gave them. And you could almost never see them coming. A superstition had come into being among the soldiers in the north, that if they died and were given funeral rites here on Midkemia, their spirits would be somehow sent back to their homeworld on Kelewan. But without speaking of it, the men had come to believe that should the Forest Demons butcher the dead and leave them for the carrion eaters, the spirits of the slaughtered Tsurani would wander this cold and alien landscape until the end of time. No priest of any order had been able to counter this belief. Asayaga, like every commander in the north, knew this superstition gave the Dark Brothers an advantage they scarcely needed.
He looked back at Sugama, hoping that Tasemu’s words had registered some doubt.
‘Shall I go to the fort, Force Commander, and lay claim to it?’ Sugama asked evenly, as if Tasemu’s words had merely been the whistling of the wind.
Asayaga was about to tell him to go to the devils of the underworld, but he held his tongue. He was trapped. A plan formed for a brief instant. He would order a retreat, hold Sugama back for a few minutes and slip a blade into his throat, thereby silencing him.
He knew his men would never ask what had become of Sugama when he caught up with them, but others back at the headquarters camp were not of House Kodeko, and they would almost certainly assume treachery if Sugama were the only casualty.
Send Sugama forward? No, damn it. If indeed the battle had been a mutual slaughter, or there was even the remote chance that the Kingdom troops had retreated after the fight, the shame of letting Sugama take the fort would be unbearable to his house. It would appear as well that he was a coward, ordering someone else to take the risk rather than set the proper example by doing it himself.
What was even more enraging was the realization that Sugama was following the same process of reasoning and thus dictating the rules of the game now being played.
Asayaga looked once more at Tasemu, but there was no need to say anything. Of the eighty men in his command most were new recruits; little more than boys called to serve by their blood ties to House Kodeko. They would obey without question, but they were untested. Asayaga would rely on his old core of twenty veterans, led by Tasemu, who knew the ways of this war. The Strike Leader nodded, raised a hand and gestured, Vashemi and Tarku, the most senior Patrol Leader and the wiliest old veteran without rank, respectively, half-stood and started back down the trail, checking to the rear as he went forward.
Asayaga shot a withering gaze at Sugama. ‘Stay here.’
Taking a deep breath, he stood up and stepped out of the forest and into the clearing. He strode forward, acting as if he was out for a morning walk along a road on his family’s estate, rather than advancing alone, fully exposed, heading towards a deserted, smoking ruin.
He passed the pile of bodies and as he drew closer he felt his heart constrict. All were dead, most from arrows, but the shafts had been snapped off by someone who wished to obscure the identity of the attackers. But the manner of death for some made it all too obvious. More than one of the warriors had been wounded first; but if it had been by Kingdom troops, the final dispatching would have been done with a certain professional respect for a worthy foe. A warrior from either side would often give the doomed a moment for final prayer and then cut his throat cleanly and quickly. He had done it often enough himself, both to Kingdom soldiers too injured to be taken back as slaves, and more than once to one of his own men whom he was forced to leave behind.
The dying had been murdered cruelly. Several had been decapitated. He slowed for a second, looking down at a face he vaguely recognized, an officer he had seen at times in camp. The mutilation was ghastly, the one most feared by any man. The agonized expression frozen on the dead man’s face was evidence enough that he had still been alive when the carving up had started.
Asayaga swallowed hard and kept going. The fort was now less than a hundred paces away: he was coming into easy arrowshot range. The gate was off its hinges, the inside of the compound visible, bodies littered the interior. Several vultures were perched on the expansive stomach of one of the dead.
Perhaps the fort was abandoned after all?
And yet …
He slowed. Something wasn’t right. The vultures, they weren’t eating, they had stopped and were looking not towards him but instead at something within the fort that he couldn’t see.
He stopped, and his hand went to the hilt of his sword.
Two things happened at nearly the same instant. The vultures, startled by something he couldn’t see inside the fort flapped their wings, croaking obscenely, struggling to lift into the air: and a shout of warning came from behind. It was Tasemu.
‘It’s a trap!’ Asayaga roared.
For the first few seconds he thought to rush the fort, but even as the vultures lifted off he knew someone was inside and if there was someone inside the smoking ruins of the barracks it meant there was most likely many of them, ready to hold the gate and riddle a charge with arrows.
He turned and sprinted back towards his men. Tasemu was standing out in the open, arms up, pointing back up the trail they had just come down.
‘Behind us!’ Tasemu cried, ‘The Forest Demons are coming!’
Asayaga stopped half-way between the fort and the edge of the clearing.
Damn them! We walked straight into it. It was clear what would happen. Already Sugama was ordering the men to rush the fort and take refuge.
No! That’s what the enemy want! They’ll block the gate: then we get caught in the open and shot full of arrows.
He had to think. He looked back at the fort. It had been but a dozen heartbeats since he had turned back from it. The vultures were barely clear of the gate, wings flapping. The shelter of it looked inviting: too inviting.
His men were streaming out of the woods, running hard, Sugama in the lead. Then one of the men, just barely out of the forest, collapsed, blood fountaining, an arrow driven through his throat.
Sugama came on quickly.
‘Hundreds of them!’ he shouted, his voice edged with panic.
In spite of the chaos Asayaga could not suppress a grin. They might all die in the next few minutes, but it was good to see Sugama get a taste of the reality of this world first.
Asayaga waved his sword over his head as a rallying signal.
When the men were less than ten yards off he pointed away from the fort to the north-west corner of the clearing.
‘Not the fort! Trap! Follow me!’
Sugama slowed for an instant, startled, as an arrow slashed past him. Then he turned to follow Asayaga.
Asayaga set off at a run. He had barely gone a dozen paces when he heard the blast of a horn echoing from the woods to the south. It was answered by another from within the fort!
He ran. The gate was no longer in view, and the west wall of the fort was now to his right and a hundred paces off. He led his column straight up the clearing, trying to keep an equal distance between the fort in the centre and the woods. An arrow skimmed past, kicking up a slushy spray of snow. He spared a quick glance at the fort. Dark forms lined the wall, bows raised. It was the Forest Demons, their distinctive visage clearly visible. Never had he seen so many of them and at such close quarters; before it had always been a furtive glance, a half-seeing as they drifted nightmarelike through the woods.
Asayaga had scouted this place several times over the last year and knew its layout. At the north-west corner a trail entered the clearing, leading to a fort taken by his command in the spring. It was four leagues to that place.
It would most likely be covered but it had to be tried. The east was Kingdom territory and impenetrable marshy ground for several leagues, a death trap. Straight north was the route to the realm of the Forest Demons, rocky game trails through high passes, a death trap as well.
Asayaga headed for the trail that might be either a trap, or a path to safety and then he saw someone stagger out from the trail clutching his chest, blood pulsing from between his clutching fingers. Stunned, he slowed to a stop as the dying person looked at him with blank eyes and then collapsed.
He stopped, not sure for an instant what to do next. He looked to his left, directly into the woods. Perhaps it was better to go that way rather than take the trail, for obviously something was covering that trail.
He started to run again, and his men following. Within seconds they were closing on the edge of the clearing and then a shower of arrows snapped out from the treeline, dropping half a dozen of his men.
Asayaga, sword held high, charged for the woods, praying that he could take one of his tormentors with him.
Dennis Hartraft stared into the eye of the archer poised not fifty paces away. The dark elf had his bow fully drawn and aimed. Remarkably, though, the moredhel had cracked a frozen branch when he stepped out from behind the tree to shoot – he must have been a relative youngster to make so basic a blunder.
It was, at best, a second of time since Dennis had heard that crack.
Time distorted and slowed; he saw the tips of the fingers relaxing, releasing the taut bowstring. Pushing off from the tree, he kicked backwards, eyes still fixed on his stalker. He saw the snap of mist breaking away from the bowstring, the blur of the arrow, the stinging brush of the feathers as the shaft creased his face.
He hit the ground, rolled across the trail, slammed up against a boulder. Two seconds, maybe three, had passed. He was on his feet, saw the elf flinging back his cloak, exposing a quiver.
Instinct drove him forward. In a single bound he vaulted the narrow stream, landed hard, slipping on the icy slope, then started up the rise, reaching for the dagger at his belt. The moredhel had the arrow drawn from the quiver, was reversing it, fitting the nock to the string.
Dennis sprinted forward, lost his footing on an ice-covered boulder, slipped and fell, nearly dropping his dagger, and came back up to his feet. The dark elf was drawing his bow and he knew he had lost the race.
Snakelike he lashed out with an underhand throw of the dagger. The spin was off, the dagger striking the elf in the chest, hilt first. But the impact startled him, he lost his grip on the bowstring and the arrow snapped off, missing Dennis.
Dennis leapt forward even as the dark elf dropped his bow and reached for his own dagger. Dennis dived in, catching the moredhel in the chest with his right shoulder. The pain to his old wound shocked him but he heard his foe grunt as well as the wind got knocked out of him.
The two fell together in a tangled heap, Dennis clutching at the dark elf’s arm, preventing him from drawing his blade. They grappled, rolling on the ground. The moredhel attempted to cry out; Dennis clamped his hand over his mouth. The moredhel bit down and Dennis clamped his jaws together to cut off his own cry of pain.
The two rolled back and forth on the slushy ground, kicking and clawing in a primal fight for survival. He caught a glimpse of his foe’s eyes – so strange, so like Tinuva’s, yet different, filled with fury and murderous rage.
As if from a great distance he heard shouts, but all his world was now focused on the dark elf, who writhed like an enraged serpent as he sought to escape. They rolled again, Dennis on top, faces only inches apart. The moredhel head-butted Dennis in the face. The blow stunned Dennis, blurring his vision.
They rolled down the slope and crashed into the icy creek. Dennis lost his grip and felt the moredhel break free of his grasp and draw his dagger. The moredhel’s arm snapped up. And then he moved with a spasmodic jerk. An arrow had slammed into the dark elf’s chest, going clean through his body. A mist of blood exploded from the elf’s back.
With a gurgling cry the moredhel staggered to his feet and started to run, blood pulsing out. Dennis gasped for breath and caught a glimpse of Tinuva standing up on the trail, already drawing a second arrow, tracking the moredhel, but then held his shot as the Dark Brother staggered into the clearing.
Tinuva relaxed his grip on his bow and looked down at Dennis.
‘Move now!’ Tinuva hissed.
Dennis, his heart pounding, shoulder aching, came to his feet and started up the slope to Tinuva’s side.
‘Trap, we’re in a trap!’ Tinuva announced.
As he gained the trail he caught a glimpse of the dying moredhel collapsing and confronting him, the column of Tsurani. There had been only one Tsurani, and now there was near on a hundred and he realized that his struggle with the moredhel must have dragged out for several dangerously long minutes.
Too much was happening too quickly and he leaned over, gasping for breath. The shock of his fight and near death was having its impact and he fought down an urge to vomit. Tinuva grabbed him by the shoulder and pushed him back off the trail.
‘The moredhel net is wide,’ Tinuva said quickly. ‘They are waiting on the trail, two hundred yards from here. Ambush prepared. ‘They didn’t know we were near and the one you killed was one of their flanking scouts. They will find us in a few minutes, crossing the trail we made in the snow. Gregory sent me back to tell you.’
At that same instant he saw that the Tsurani were turning, shying away from the trail and heading straight into the woods in the direction where his own men were concealed. The move triggered a response: a shower of arrows snapped out from the forest.
Damn! Now we are revealed.
He sprinted up the slope, Tinuva bounding forward by his side. Ground that had taken minutes to cover before he crossed in seconds. He caught a glimpse of Alwin Barry and a dozen of his men poised around the boulders firing down on the Tsurani. Several of the Tsurani had their alien short-bows out and crouching behind the stumps of trees in the clearing, were shooting back.
Horns now echoed all around them. From the east side of the clearing he saw dark-cloaked forms, a hundred or more charging, while others poured out of the fort. More were coming up from the south. It was chaos. He needed to think clearly, but the smashing blow to his head from the dark moredhel still had him stunned. Looking down at the Tsurani he saw one of them barely a hundred feet away charging, sword held high. There was something vaguely familiar about him, an enemy he had faced before.
‘Stop fighting!’
The booming cry echoed through the forest. It was Gregory, running hard, coming through the woods. He leapt onto the boulder they had hidden behind earlier and extended his arms wide so that even the Tsurani in the clearing could see him.
‘Stop fighting! Dark Brothers are closing in!’ Gregory shouted. ‘We settle our differences later!’ Then he said something else and Dennis recognized it as Tsurani. ‘If we fight one another, we die! No honour in throwing our lives away!’
The Tsurani warrior leading the charge slowed, then came to a halt.
Gregory said something else and pointed back across the clearing. ‘Those we call the Dark Brotherhood are upon us in strength.’
The leader turned and looked.
Gregory’s words forced Dennis to focus his attention.
I am in command, he remembered, and he felt a flicker of anger towards Gregory overstepping his bounds yet again, and yet again being right. If we and the Tsurani fight now, we all die. He turned the anger on himself. I should have grasped this immediately; Gregory realized it. Jurgen would have too.
He turned about in a full circle, judging sound, distances, ignoring the Tsurani. He saw a line of horse-mounted warriors emerge from the trail that headed south, one of them holding a banner aloft – human renegades serving with their moredhel masters. Dennis felt his stomach knot; the only time the moredhel hired mercenary cavalry was when they were mounting an offensive; they had no use for humans otherwise.
A dozen or more trolls swarmed about the standard-bearer like dogs about to be unleashed for the hunt. Others on foot were pouring out of the forest from the far side of the clearing.
Main force there, he realized.
From behind, to the west and north-west he heard horns. The blocking force on the trail were spreading out and closing the net. If they delay us even for a few minutes the mounted riders and other fell creatures accompanying them will close in for the kill.
It was obvious they planned for a fleeing force to turn and go up the trail, and straight into their doom.
To the north, nothing, only a few sentries. Arrogant of them: it was the way back to moredhel territory and they had left it open.
North then, it was the only way out!
He looked back to the clearing again, and the Tsurani were already gone, moving rapidly to the north. All he could see were their retreating backs.
Damn them, they were supposed to be the diversion and now he was the diversion instead!
Furious with himself he held a hand up, circled it then snapped it down and set off at a run, his men following.
He bounded back towards the trail to Mad Wayne’s, praying that perhaps the Tsurani had taken that turn and stumbled into the moredhel’s trap.
He hit the edge of the trail and without hesitation jumped down. Within seconds his men were sliding down around him.
He looked down. No Tsurani tracks.
Damn! They had slipped out some other way.
A man next to him, Beragorn, was an old veteran. He grunted and turned, clutching at his stomach where an arrow with black feathers quivered.
Out of the mist he saw them coming, half-a-dozen moredhel. More filtering through the trees to either side of the trail. Instinctively he crouched, and an arrow snapped overhead. More men were sliding down onto the trail, turning, ready to fight.
No. In a minute those in the field will close in.
‘Alwin! Block force. Then across creek!’ he shouted. ‘The rest of you, follow me north!’
He hesitated for a second, looking at Beragorn who was down on his knees. He reached for his dagger, to do the task any friend would do for a comrade when the moredhel were closing in.
Damn, his dagger was lost.
He glanced at Beragorn, whose eyes were glazing over as he fell backward against a bole. Taking a breath, Dennis seized the shaft sticking out of Beragorn’s stomach, and with a single push, jammed it up into his old comrade’s heart. The man stiffened and died.
Dennis sprinted off the trail, leaping the creek and running up the slope where he had fought the moredhel sentry.
This time his footing held. He looked back.
The tail end of his command were just now crossing the trail.
Alwin had heard him, calling out half a dozen men who stood to either side of the trail, their first volley of arrows slowing the dark elves’ charge. A couple more men went down from a return volley. He caught a glimpse of Tinuva leaping the stream, landing, turning, bow drawn. He let fly, aiming back towards Brendan’s Stockade. It was a long shot, yet it dropped a horse at the head of the trail, throwing the rider. Gregory sprinted past him, dodging through the trees.
‘Follow Gregory!’ Dennis shouted, pointing the way.
He waited a few more seconds, grabbing the shoulder of a man who started to slip back down the slope, pulling him up and over. It was the priest. He shoved him forward, screaming at him to run. He was about to shout for Alwin to break but the sergeant knew his business. The six men holding the trail leapt down to the stream and bounded across. Archers to either side of Dennis gave covering fire, killing two of the moredhel who tried to follow. Tinuva raced past, his retreat clear signal enough to withdraw. Riders were on the trail. Out in the clearing hundreds of the enemy were swarming in. But what of the other enemy, the Tsurani? There was no time to think of that now. It was time to run.
Behind him, the bloodlusting cries of the moredhel echoed in the clearing and the forest.
The hunt was on.
• Chapter Three • (#ulink_b93b3b0b-a91a-5e91-9fe3-cc03f0967ac0)
Moredhel (#ulink_b93b3b0b-a91a-5e91-9fe3-cc03f0967ac0)
ASAYAGA GASPED FOR BREATH.
‘Keep moving, keep moving, keep moving …’
The words were a chant, a prayer, blanking out his own agony.
One of his men was down, collapsed in the middle of the slushy trail. He slowed. Strike Leader Tasemu was standing over the man, struggling to pull him up.
‘Keep moving,’ Asayaga snapped, slapping the fallen warrior across the shoulder blades with the flat of his sword.
The warrior looked up. It was Sugama.
‘Damn you. You are an officer!’ Asayaga hissed at him so the men wouldn’t overhear. ‘Act like one. You were suppose to run lead with the scouts!’ As much as he despised the Tondora dog, he would not undermine his authority in front of the men. Not for the first time, Asayaga cursed this war in which officers not of his own house were sent to serve with his men.
Sugama staggered to his feet and lurched forward. Tasemu gazed at Asayaga and shook his head. Asayaga said nothing.
He looked back over his shoulder. His command was strung out on the trail behind them. Those who were not totally preoccupied with their own pain had seen the exchange, the humiliation of an officer from one House by another. They would of course say nothing, for the behaviour of their Force Commander made it clear it was to be ignored. Yet, they would think on it, and some might mention it quietly while on guard duty or around a cook-fire to those who had not witnessed it, and many of his men would dwell on one thing: that one whom they were expected to obey without question was obviously a flawed man, one who had been sent to the front for reasons having nothing to do with his competence as a soldier. He was either a man acting as a spy for the Minwanabi, an incompetent someone higher up in his clan wished to see conveniently dead, or both. That would give the men pause at critical moments, and Asayaga knew other men might die as a result.
If only there had been one more Kodeko officer left alive. Only one other Kodeko son remained on the homeworld, and should Asayaga be slain, the mantle of leadership would fall to his younger brother Tacumbe, but the last son of the House would never be sent here. Again he silently cursed a cruel destiny that left his house with no other competent officers at hand, and Minwanabi machinations that placed this fool at his right hand. If they survived this nightmare, he would name Tasemu his Force Leader, even though the man’s talents were better suited for his present role. He would return Sugama to his own family and let him deal with his shame. Fatalistically, Asayaga allowed himself the thought he couldn’t be more of an enemy to the House of Tondora than he already was. They can only kill me once, he thought as he again looked to see where his men were.
Motioning Sugama ahead he pressed on up the trail. Watching the back of the man as he hurried ahead, Asayaga wondered whether, if he fell, Tasemu would take commands from Sugama. Another very good reason not to get killed any time soon, he thought dryly.
The storm abated slightly as the day passed. As they turned a bend in the trail he could see a notch in the ridgeline ahead, the crests of the mountains to either side of the pass were concealed by the low grey clouds of the storm.
He paused for a moment, staring up the trail. He had never been this far north, for the ridgeline had always been a backdrop to his war, a distant mystery.
Hakaxa, his lead scout, was down on his knees, gasping for air, with Sugama bent double beside him. Hakaxa looked up as Asayaga approached.
‘Crest of trail just ahead.’
Tasemu grunted. ‘The crest. At the pass, they’ll have something there.’
Asayaga nodded. He looked back again. His men were staggering forward, pressing stoically up the steep incline.
‘Five minute rest here,’ Asayaga announced. ‘I’ll scout ahead.’
Tasemu cocked his head slightly, gazing at him with his one good eye. ‘No. Sugama with me.’
Tasemu gave him a bit of a hopeful gaze but Asayaga ignored it. No, there would be no knife in the back.
‘Sugama,’ Asayaga said quietly, and continued on. He could hear the ragged gasps for breath as Sugama struggled to stay up.
The storm was blowing straight into their faces from the north, and he could hear the moaning of the wind as it whistled through stunted trees in the pass just ahead.
He held his hand out, motioning for Sugama to stop, looked back and touched his nose, then flared his nostrils. Sugama stopped, looked at him curiously, and finally realized what Asayaga was signifying. He sniffed the air. His eyes grew wide.
Good, let him learn that he must use-all senses out here.
Asayaga drifted to the side of the trail and moved forward cautiously. The trail turned and his heart froze. Sugama slipped up to his side and a sigh of anguish escaped him.
Asayaga found himself staring intently at a stockade wall. The pass over the top of the mountains went through a notch, the walls of the pass sloping up nearly vertically for a hundred or more feet to either side. The passage was barricaded by a stone wall a dozen feet high, with a crude wooden gate in the centre. Beyond the wall he saw the roof of what must be a garrison house. He sighed inwardly at the thought of the comfort that must lie within.
He saw no one, but the smoke gave it all away. This far north the garrison had to be moredhel.
‘Can we go around it?’ Sugama asked, whispering.
Asayaga shook his head. ‘Not enough time. We don’t know how close the pursuit is – those Kingdom soldiers may have bought us time, but we don’t know how much. If we try to crawl our way over the mountain to either side, and the moredhel are still chasing us, we’ll be destroyed. They’ll go through the pass ahead, cut us off …’
‘But if we attack and those behind us, Kingdom or moredhel, come up, we’re doomed.’
Asayaga forced a grin. ‘We take it quickly and hold it. Then let the bastards from the Kingdom sit on the outside while the Dark Brothers come up and finish them. With forty good men I could hold it against three to four hundred. ‘And besides,’ he added, ‘it’s warm in there. We need rest, hot food, and a place to dry out.’
His words trailed off as he caught a glimpse of movement. A sentry, cloak pulled up over his head, peered over the top of the wall for a moment. Asayaga sensed that the sentry was looking straight at him, he froze. Long seconds passed and the head disappeared.
Asayaga crept back from the tree and started down the trail, Sugama following.
‘What you did back there, striking me,’ Sugama hissed, trying to force the words out through ragged gasps for breath.
Asayaga slowed, fixing him with his gaze. ‘If you are demanding a duel there’s no damn time now. No time for Tsurani honour, no time even for the Great Game, you Minwanabi lapdog. There is time only for survival. If we die, I can’t return home to see my younger brother grown, and you can’t serve your masters. Dead, neither of us serves. Do you understand?’
Sugama’s anger slowly subsided, and he looked around. Asayaga could almost see the comprehension dawning on the man as to just how alien this world was, how far from home they were, and how trivial matters of honour and politics were at this moment. Asayaga also knew that Sugama had never experienced cold like this in his life.
‘It’s going to get colder tonight, cold enough that if you sleep, you die.’
Sugama finally nodded.
Asayaga said, ‘Good. I need you to help lead. If we are to survive, no man can question your orders. A man who hesitates, who looks to me or Tasemu to see if your order is to be obeyed may get all of us killed. I need you to follow me through this as if I were Ruling Lord of your House. If we survive to get home safely, then we resolve this matter as you like; I will publicly fight a duel, or you may return to the Minwanabi and ask them to send an assassin to kill me. Whatever your honour dictates. But I will let you return home freely and unencumbered if you serve the men who obey us now.’
Sugama looked straight at him, stunned by the bluntness of Asayaga’s words.
‘We have no time,’ Asayaga repeated. ‘Will you co-operate?’
Finally Sugama nodded. Without comment, Asayaga gave him a single nod in return, then moved back down the trail, rounding the bend. He knew Sugama was a Minwanabi spy, but he was also a Tsurani noble, and he would never violate this trust. Asayaga had nothing more to fear from him until they were safely behind their own lines. Then there would come a reckoning.
One of his archers tensed, then lowered his bow, arms trembling, as they approached. The cold, the exhaustion, the fact that everyone was soaked to the skin was taking its toll. He had to seize the stockade or none of his command would survive the night.
The last of his men came up, Asayaga looked at them inquiringly.
‘Not sure, Force Commander,’ one of them reported, ‘several times I thought I heard something …’ He shrugged. ‘It was hard to tell with this wind.’
‘They’re close,’ Tasemu interjected softly.
Asayaga looked over. The old Strike Leader was staring at him with his one good eye. Tasemu had ‘the sense’.
Asayaga nodded, ordering the men to gather around.
‘Good news,’ Asayaga announced. The men looked at him, shivering, pushed to the final limit of exhaustion.
‘I found a nice warm cabin ahead. A hot fire, dry bedding, plenty of cooked food, perhaps even some hot wine that will put the fire back in your bellies.’
Some of them looked up, a few allowed their Tsurani impassivity to break with slight smiles.
‘We have to kill the owners first. Forest Demons.’
They huddled in close as he explained what had to be done, gazing into their eyes, trying to judge their strength, and also the desperation needed to charge a position not properly scouted.
The men formed up, the few carrying shields deployed to the front ranks, archers to the rear and flanks. As required by tradition he took the centre of the first rank of five.
There was no need to issue the command, he simply stepped forward, the tiny phalanx shuffled, stepping off to keep pace. He moved slowly at first, giving them a few extra minutes to get their wind even as they advanced up the steep slope.
Finally they turned the last bend in the trail and the stockade was directly ahead. He continued the walking pace for a few more seconds, perhaps the guard would be looking the other way, but even as the thought formed the high piercing wail of a horn echoed.
‘Charge!’
They sprinted straight for the gate, Asayaga leading the way, stumpy legs churning through the slushy snow. The range closed, fifty paces, forty, down to thirty. The lone guard raised a bow, took aim, and released the string. Asayaga heard the snap of the arrow hit the shield of the man next to him.
The gate loomed up in front of them and Asayaga braced himself for the impact. Without slowing the phalanx crashed into the wooden barrier, over four tons of human flesh and armour acting as a battering ram.
He had hoped that the barrier log would not be in place, or would be so weak that they’d crash right in. He felt the log gate give inward, groaning, his men continuing to push, running in place, feet slipping, churning up the frozen ground beneath.
The gate held.
The warrior to his left collapsed without a sound. A rock the size of a human head had crushed his skull in. Asayaga looked up. Directly above were half a dozen moredhel, several throwing rocks, one aiming a bow straight down at them. Spears arced up, catching one, but the rest loosed their deadly loads and several more men dropped.
The effort at the gate was useless. He couldn’t retreat now.
‘Spread out along the wall!’ Asayaga screamed, ‘Stay against the wall. Archers! Keep them down!’
His men spread out. He caught a glimpse of Tasemu dragging a wounded recruit up against the wall. Pressed hard against the stones they were relatively safe; an archer would have to lean over to shoot and his own archers deployed to either side of the trail and back a couple of dozen yards were effective in keeping the enemy down.
Asayaga waited a couple of minutes, trying to judge just how many were on the other side. If a dozen or less, perhaps his own archers could take most of them out. Two more minutes passed slowly.
A few rocks arced over the wall but his men remained pressed against the side of the stockade and were safe. It was a stalemate.
‘We can’t stay here forever. I think our pursuers are close. If so they’ll slaughter us out here.’
It was Tasemu.
Asayaga nodded. ‘Pair up!’ he shouted. ‘Every other man vaults the wall. Get ready!’
Tasemu started to sheath his sword.
‘No, I go first.’
Softly, the old warrior asked, ‘Will you stop trying to get yourself killed?’
‘It’s my duty.’
‘Suppose you get killed, then Sugama takes over?’
Asayaga shook his head and kept his eyes locked on Tasemu. ‘I have no intention of dying, and if I do, you decide who takes over. Now, cup your hands.’
Tasemu grumbled but finally bent over and did as he was told.
‘Ready!’
He looked along the wall. Most of his men had doubled up and were prepared, and there was no time to wait for the laggards.
‘Now!’
He slammed his right foot into Tasemu’s cupped hands and at the same instant grabbed hold of his shoulders. Tasemu stood up with a grunt.
Asayaga vaulted and grabbed the top of the barrier. He scrambled to pull himself over. He caught a glimpse of a moredhel, back turned, striking down with an axe, splitting open the skull of the man to Asayaga’s right.
Asayaga rolled over the wall and landed on the rampart. The moredhel turned, letting go of the axe as his victim fell. He whipped out a dagger and with a snakelike hiss leapt on Asayaga. The two clutched each other and rolled off the rampart, falling half a dozen feet to the ground.
The blow knocked the wind out of Asayaga but he hung on to his foe, blocking a slashing strike to his eyes with his cloak wrapped around his forearm.
With his left hand Asayaga drew his own short blade and rammed it straight up, catching the moredhel under the ribs. He kicked himself free, stood up and, reaching over his shoulder, drew his long sword.
What he saw made his heart freeze. At least thirty moredhel were deployed as a reserve, most of them armed with bows, ready to slaughter any who made it over the wall. Raising his sword he charged straight at the encircling foe.
Perched on top of a cliff, Dennis watched the slaughter down below.
‘They’re losing,’ Gregory announced.
‘I don’t need you to tell me that,’ Dennis replied calmly.
He couldn’t help but admire the mad idea of storming the gate as a human battering ram. It had failed, however, and the element of surprise was lost.
He watched as the Tsurani spread out while on the inside of the pass the moredhel garrison poured out of the log barracks and formed up, ready to slaughter anyone who made it over the wall.
‘Around thirty of them,’ Gregory whispered.
Dennis nodded.
Damn.
This was old territory for him. His father had built the barrier down below as part of the outer line of the northern marches. The moredhel had obviously reversed the gate and wooden ramparts, and put in the cabin on the other side – the original barracks Dennis’s father had built on this side of the wall had been burned down when Dennis had been a boy. Tactically it wasn’t a sound position; anyone who knew the area could easily flank it by scaling the ridge on either side from old trails that smugglers and other weapons runners frequently used. It was why Dennis’s father had eventually abandoned the position and built the small fortress that had become Brendan’s Stockade.
It was just such a smuggler’s route he had decided to take, when they had closed to within spitting distance of the Tsurani a mile back.
Even as the Tsurani hesitated then formed up for their attack he and his men went to the east of the pass, scaling the steep slope. The storm had driven the garrison inside as he had hoped, so there were no patrols waiting to ambush them.
‘Look.’
Gregory pointed back to the south. It was hard to see, since wisps of cloud cloaked them, then parted, but he caught a glimpse of the main trail as it crossed a low ridgeline a couple of miles back.
Riders, moving cautiously, but pressing forward. Then the clouds closed in again.
Dennis’s men were coming up behind him. They were numb with exhaustion, soaked to the skin.
‘I was hoping one side could slaughter the other,’ Dennis muttered, ‘then we finish off what’s left. We need that shelter and the gate secured or we’re all finished.’
Gregory nodded, staring at him, saying nothing.
‘Oh damn it,’ Dennis hissed, as he looked down. ‘This is insane.’
The first of the moredhel archers fired, the arrow striking a glancing blow across Asayaga’s helmet. He charged in blindly, hoping that at the very least a dying thrust would take one of the foes down with him.
And then he caught a glimpse of a moredhel staggering forward, the point of a spear sticking out of his chest. Another went down and then another.
A shrieking battle cry echoed on the wind, a spine-tingling scream that sounded like the baying of wolves closing in on their prey.
Looking up he saw Kingdom soldiers sliding down the near vertical wall of the pass. Several of them lost control on the icy slope and fell screaming, crashing to the ground, one of them landing directly on top of a moredhel, the blow killing both of them. Most of the soldiers managed to brake their fall by grabbing hold of stunted bushes that grew along the icy wall, stopping for a second, letting go, sliding again, braking, then finally alighting on the ground.
The first to land safely drew a heavy two-handed sword from a scabbard slung over his shoulder and with a murderous cry charged forward. A moredhel turned, backing up, swinging desperately, trying to use his bow as a shield. A single blow nearly cut him in half.
The leader spun around, catlike, ducking low as a moredhel charged in with levelled spear. In an amazing display of swordsmanship the leader delivered a backhanded blow while down on one knee, cutting the moredhel’s leg off at mid-thigh as he charged past.
More and yet more Kingdom troops crashed down, some landing on the roof of the barracks, then leaping down from there.
Asayaga looked back up at the wall. A dozen of his men were struggling with the moredhel along the rampart, while others were still trying to get over, and several lay dead.
He turned his back on the Kingdom troops and sprinted to the gate. Two moredhel, swords raised, guarded it. It was over in seconds as he parried the first one, spun about, catching the second under the armpit as he raised his sword to strike, then reversed and swung back high, slashing the other across the face, blinding him. The moredhel went down, a quick blow across the back of the neck ended his agony.
Grabbing the end of the log which locked the gate he lifted it up and tossed it aside. The barrier immediately swung open and his men poured in, swords raised …
At the sight of the Kingdom soldiers dispatching the last of the moredhel they slowed in confusion. Asayaga prepared himself.
Dennis, recovering from the back-handed blow which had taken off the leg of the moredhel came up, sword poised, looking for another foe. Another dark-elf, battle axe raised, charged and then pitched backwards, arrow in the throat. Then Tinuva was at his side, already nocking another arrow.
He caught a glimpse of Gregory crashing onto the roof of the barracks and leaping down to duck inside the door.
At this point, several of the moredhel turned and ran. Dennis whistled, catching Alwin’s attention. He pointed. Alwin nodded, shouted a command and with half a dozen men set off in pursuit.
He turned, saw the gate swing open and was stunned at the sight of at least a score of Tsurani pouring in.
In a flash of memory he saw his father’s estate falling at the start of the war, the Tsurani charging through the shattered gate, his father collapsing from an arrow which had caught him in the eye.
Dennis felt an icy chill, a cold, killing anger at the memory of that time, the memory of Jurgen, of all the dead.
He raised his sword and stepped forward, ready to meet the charge.
There was something vaguely familiar about one of the Tsurani, the one who had charged the gate and in a masterful display of swordsmanship dropped two moredhels in a matter of seconds. This Tsurani shouted something to the warriors around him, even as he stepped to the fore and raised his sword. Dennis immediately recognized the gesture, it was the chaka, the ritual position assumed by a combatant in a one-on-one duel, a two-handed hold, blade vertical, duellist turned sideways, blade poised behind the left shoulder. Dennis had seen it once before, when a Tsurani soldier had taken some occurrence along a picket line personally, and had challenged another to a duel. Two years later, a freed Tsurani slave had explained what he had seen to Dennis.
Dennis shook his head in disbelief. This damned bastard wanted to fight a duel! Several of his men chuckled and one of them started to raise a bow to drop the Tsurani, but in spite of his cynical attitude towards the entire show there was something about the gesture that caught him.
All this had taken but a matter of seconds and even as the Tsurani leader stepped forward to fight, his own men were deploying out after the slaughter of the moredhel, ready to riddle the Tsurani coming through the gate and along the wall. A quick glance revealed that the Tsurani had yet to bring any archers up from outside.
And yet … Dennis realized the man wasn’t challenging him, but rather announcing that he was ready to fight him. It was only a duel if Dennis accepted the offer of combat. He looked at the Tsurani soldiers waiting calmly to see what occurred and realized they were the mirror image of his own men in misery and fatigue.
Dennis pointedly turned his back on the Tsurani commander.
‘Close the gate,’ Dennis shouted in the King’s Tongue, then struggled to form the words in Tsurani. His command of the language was limited, brief snatches learned from Gregory, but fortunately one of them was the command ‘close’!
The Tsurani leader dropped his formal pose and growled an angry reply.
Dennis realized the leader had interpreted the command as an order to block off his warriors still outside. At that same instant a horn sounded from beyond the gate, echoing up from the south. A Tsurani, left eye a milky white, and features distorted by a twisted scar that ran from brow to chin, dashed through the gate and slid to a stop at the sight of the Kingdom troops moving in.
‘Moredhel!’ the runner shouted, the word the same in all languages, and he pointed back outside.
All froze. Dennis stared at the Tsurani and their eyes locked. He could sense Tinuva by his side and saw the elf lower his bow and turn it to one side.
Dennis felt the calculating gaze of the Tsurani upon him, knew that the hatred and distrust was mutual, and yet also sensed the deeper fear, not just of death, but of falling into the hands of the moredhel. That was not the professional hatred of one warrior for another in the heat of battle, in which even beneath the hatred there still existed a certain begrudging respect. This was a primal fear, a loathing, a realization that somehow the soul of a dark universe lurked in the hearts of the foe who was closing in.
Dennis lowered his sword, letting the point touch the ground.
‘Truce,’ Dennis shouted to his men. ‘We fight the moredhel, then settle our differences with the Tsurani later.’
Several of his men muttered but most grunted a chorus of agreement. Blades, spear points and bows started to lower.
The Tsurani leader shouted something and Dennis detected a similar reaction from the other side. Dennis pointed to the wall east of the gate and then to himself. The Tsurani nodded, pointed to himself, then to the west side and barked out a command.
‘Archers!’ Dennis cried. ‘Man the wall and keep low. Volley on command!’
He ran to the still-open gate. The last of the Tsurani were coming through. One of them, at the sight of Dennis, let out a roar, raised his sword and charged. The Tsurani leader, shouted, jumped in front of Dennis and parried the strike. The attacking Tsurani glared at Dennis and then pushed past him.
Two Tsurani, dragging a wounded comrade, came in last and their commander leaned into the gate. Dennis joined him. Together they slammed it shut, hoisted the log and dropped it into place.
Dennis peered out through a crack between the logs of the gate. Seconds later a renegade human, mounted, came around the bend in the trail, half a dozen wood trolls running beside him. He reined in hard. Dennis caught a glimpse of more riders stopping just around the bend in the trail. The lone rider started to turn about.
‘Kill him!’ Dennis shouted.
His archers stood up and within seconds the rider, his horse and all the trolls were down.
He caught a sidelong glance from the Tsurani commander and a grunt of approval.
Shouts of anger greeted the volley. There was a bark of command followed by silence. Dennis watched intently, hoping the scum would dare to mount a charge: if so it’d be a slaughter.
Several minutes passed.
Tinuva slipped off the wall and came up to Dennis’s side. The Tsurani looked at the elf, wide-eyed. Tinuva nodded and said something in Tsurani. Caught by surprise the Tsurani made a quick reply.
‘What did you say?’ Dennis asked.
‘“Honours to his House”, the traditional Tsurani greeting. Then I complimented him on his swordsmanship. I don’t know if you saw it, a masterful double kill.’
Dennis nodded.
‘Where’s Gregory?’ Dennis asked.
‘One of the men said he ran right into a roof support when he charged into the barracks: he was stunned for a moment, but is all right.’
‘I’ll find time to enjoy the humour of that if we live through the night,’ Dennis said quietly.
Tinuva fell silent. He looked through a crack between the logs and then turned back to Dennis.
‘They won’t attack for a while. I think this is just an advance party. We laid enough traps along the trail to slow them down. They’ll wait for the rest of their command to come up first then fan out and flank us.’
Dennis looked back at the pass. The mist was closing in, blanketing them, a cold wind slicing through the pass. The full fury of the storm was slashing against the other side of the mountain. Out of the mist he saw Alwin returning. The sergeant slowed at the sight of the Tsurani then came forward.
‘Got them.’
Dennis let out a sigh of relief. At least one thing had gone right. No word of their presence had gone ahead.
He looked over at the Tsurani.
Damn, what a fix.
‘This is what we do,’ Dennis whispered to Alwin and Tinuva. ‘Half the men stand down, get into the barracks. Get the fire in there roaring. Strip down, dry off, get some hot food. See what dry clothing we can take from the bastards that were here. Two hours, then we shift the other half in.’
He pointed to either side of the pass.
‘Tinuva, I want you to detail a dozen archers, get them up on the flanks and keep the moredhel and their trolls back – I don’t want them coming down on us the same way we came down on them. My guess is those scum are as exhausted as we are. Once they find out we hold the heights as well they’ll give up for tonight. There’s some old dwarven mine shafts a mile or so back down the slope. My bet is they pull in there, build fires to warm up, and wait till dawn to fan out and trap us. We’ll get out a couple hours before dawn, dried and rested.’
‘And our friends?’ Tinuva asked, eyes flicking towards the Tsurani commander.
Damn, Dennis thought.
‘I guess we settle it before we leave. The Broad River, you remember it?’
Tinuva smiled and nodded. The thought struck Dennis that a hundred years before he was even born Tinuva undoubtedly knew of the river. Again he realized just how ancient the elven race was and with it came the recognition of just how much they risked when facing battle: it wasn’t just a score of years in the balance, it was a score of decades. An elven couple might have two children in a century. Each death was magnified far beyond what any human could understand in terms of loss to the race.
‘With this storm the river should be up. We make for Garth’s Ford. Get across and there we’ve got a position that a thousand Dark Brothers wouldn’t dare to attack. There’s a small stockade there, we stay warm, wait till they give up chasing us, then find a way home.’
‘Good plan,’ Tinuva whispered. He looked again at the Tsurani, nodded and went back up to the wall.
Men started to slip off from the wall, heading for the barracks, while Tinuva picked out the unfortunate ones who would have to climb up out of the pass to guard the flanks.
The Tsurani turned, shouted a command. The one-eyed warrior barked out an order, and half of the Tsurani started towards the barracks as well. Dennis watched as the one-eye stopped several of the men, whispered something and they nodded, returned to their posts, as the one-eye ordered others, who were obviously near final collapse, to head for shelter.
The two groups slowed as they drew near to each other, obviously torn between the desire to get inside versus the uneasiness of being so close to a sworn foe.
One of the Tsurani said something, pointing at the Kingdom troops and began to draw his sword. The one-eyed leader knocked the sword from his hand.
‘It’s warm in here, you bastards. Come on in!’
It was Gregory, standing in the open doorway, the glow of the fire behind him a cheery and welcome sight. He wondered if the Natalese Ranger had deliberately stoked up the fire within to lure the men inside.
The two groups still hung back, looking at each other.
Gregory said something else, this time in Tsurani, and made a formal gesture of welcome. The one-eyed warrior laughed gruffly and went through the doorway, his men pouring in behind him, followed by the Kingdom troops.
‘His Tsurani is really quite good.’
Startled, Dennis turned. It was the Tsurani commander.
Dennis glared at him. ‘I didn’t know you spoke our language.’
‘You didn’t ask.’
‘Damn you, you should have said something.’
‘Really? Tell me, how far to this Broad River?’
‘Find out yourself, if you outlive me.’
The Tsurani smiled. ‘Let our men warm up, you and I too, then we can decide who shall outlive whom tomorrow.’
Dennis said nothing. He looked down at one of the two dead moredhel lying by the gate. Bending over, he tore the cloak off one and wrapped it around his shoulders.
The Tsurani did likewise and leaned against the gate not saying another word, his gaze fixed on Dennis as the darkness of night settled about them.
• Chapter Four • (#ulink_e9b885e2-7e5a-5d54-b6d3-1a68385333d9)
Practicalities (#ulink_e9b885e2-7e5a-5d54-b6d3-1a68385333d9)
THE FIRE WAS SOOTHING.
Richard Kevinsson sat by the corner of the fireplace, boots off, luxuriating in the near-painful sensation of his feet thawing out. Rubbing his hands, he extended them towards the flames.
Gregory and the Tsurani with the missing eye shouldered through the crush around the fireplace and heaved armfuls of logs into the roaring flames. Steam coiled up from a heavy iron kettle filled with stew, suspended in the fireplace. A few of the men, Richard included, had hesitated at first to eat it. It was, after all, a meal that the moredhel had been cooking and who knew what was in it – though Tinuva had reassured the Kingdom soldiers that stories of moredhel eating things indigestible to humans were myth only – but old beliefs were hard to ignore. Eventually, ravenous hunger won out over squeamishness and the men – both Kingdom and Tsurani – had gathered around, holding out tin cups and earthen mugs while the bubbling stew was dished out.
A freshly-killed stag had been found hanging outside the garrison house as well, and as fast as pieces of it were cooked in the open fire men snatched them out and devoured the venison, the first hot cooked meat both sides had tasted in days.
Many of the men were now fast asleep, curled up on the wooden planked floor. Of those awake, some were smoking, a few playing cards, others were just sitting about the fireplace.
Richard watched as two Tsurani played a game with intricately carved pieces of ivory on a small chequered piece of cloth. One of the players, as if sensing his gaze, looked up. Their eyes held for a second.
The Tsurani’s hand drifted to his side, resting on the hilt of a dagger, his eyes locked with Richard’s. The young soldier quickly averted his gaze and there was a gruff laugh, not from the Tsurani but from a Kingdom soldier sitting beside him who had been watching the silent interplay.
‘He’ll cut your throat from ear to ear, boy.’
It was Darvan, one of the ‘old men’, of the unit, recruited when Dennis and the others from Valinar formed the Marauders. He had his shirt off, and was hanging it up to dry, revealing a cross-hatching of battle scars on his forearms. One shoulder was slightly hunched from a broken collarbone that had not healed straight.
Darvan spat into the fire.
‘You just lost face, boy. You lowered your eyes. In their lingo that means you are nothing but a cowering worm. Those bastards are laughing at you now.’
Richard spared a quick glance back at the two Tsurani, both of whom were leaning over their game, whispering to each other. Neither was laughing, but Richard wondered if they were talking about him.
‘Bet they’re saying how you don’t have any manhood below your belt. I wouldn’t let them get away with that, boy: it’s bad for our company. You showed yourself a coward once before, are you going to do it in front of the Tsurani as well?’
Richard shifted uncomfortably.
Hearing him move, both of the Tsurani glanced up at him.
‘Darvan!’
Alwin Barry stepped between them and the Tsurani. ‘Shut the hell up,’ he hissed, his voice barely a whisper.
Darvan grinned.
‘We’re in a bad enough fix as is without you egging the boy on to a fight.’
‘They stink up this place,’ Darvan growled. ‘I say let’s kill the bastards in here now, then go out and finish the rest.’
‘Captain’s orders. We stand down for the night.’
‘The Captain –’ Darvan started to say more but Alwin’s hand shot out and grabbed Darvan by the throat, stilling his voice.
‘You want to fight come morning?’ Barry whispered, his voice filled with menace and his eyes boring into Darvan. ‘Fine. We do it when the captain says so and not before. For now, leave this boy alone. Use him to start any trouble, and I’ll kill you myself.’
Turning his back to the Tsurani, who were watching the exchange with open curiosity, Darvan could barely croak out words, with Alwin’s hand around his throat. ‘This boy?’ he asked, pulling Alwin’s hand from his throat. Still whispering, he added, ‘We all know he’s a coward. Jurgen died to save this piece of offal. And for what?’
Richard flushed, feeling as if every eye inside the room had suddenly shifted to him. Honour was now at stake.
His heart began to race, and though he was sitting next to a furnacelike fire, a cold chill swept through him. Then came the memory of all the dead in that cold frozen field, the angry gaze of the Captain, the eyes of Jurgen going dark and empty.
Knees trembling, he started to stand up, his hand going to dagger. Though terrified, he had to face the challenge.
‘Not now!’ Alwin snarled. ‘Damn it boy, sit down before this place explodes!’
Richard caught a glimpse of the two Tsurani. They were both standing, one of them going for his own dagger and Richard instantly realized that somehow the Tsurani, not understanding the conversation, had assumed that the exchange of glances was turning into a challenge for a duel. Others, both Kingdom and Tsurani were moving, shifting apart into two groups, the room going silent.
As he shoved Richard back into his seat on the bench, Alwin rounded on Darvan. ‘I’ll personally flog you from one end of camp to the other if you get out of this alive!’ With a back-handed blow he struck Darvan across the face, knocking the man backwards.
Darvan slammed into the wooden wall, his legs still hooked over the bench. Men were standing all over the cabin, weapons being drawn. Only the fact that it was two Kingdom men who were confronting one another made the Tsurani hesitate in attacking the nearest enemy. Darvan looked up, grinning, wiping the blood from his split lip. ‘Afterwards, Barry. I’ll remember this.’
Alwin half-turned to face the two Tsurani who were looking from Darvan to Richard, and extended his hands, palms out, in a calming gesture. The one-eyed Tsurani came up, saying something unintelligible. He pointed at Darvan and barked out a gruff laugh. The tension edged back down, the two sat and returned to their game. Other Tsurani around the room returned to their previous activities. Darvan rose slowly, and glared hatred at the Tsurani, whom he assumed to be a sergeant. The one eyed warrior spared him a mere glance, and turned away as if entirely unconcerned.
Alwin and the Tsurani Strike Leader looked at each other, but nothing was said, simply a nod of a head. Both understood the other and what had just played out … and what would eventually have to be played out. For the moment though, fire, a hot meal, drying out, and a few minutes of sleep were more important.
Richard, no longer comfortable in his corner by the fire, stood up and moved away. None of the other men in his company looked at him, or even acted as if they had noticed the encounter, but he could sense their indifference, or far worse, their contempt.
He looked around the crowded room. Cloaks, blankets, jerkins, boots, and foot-wrappings hung suspended from the low rafters, casting strange shadows in the firelight. Part of the ceiling, caved in by the assault, was roughly tacked over with a torn tent and a steady trickle of icy water puddled down from it onto the floor. Bunks of the former inhabitants had been looted for dry blankets, clothing, anything dry and warm. The room stank of wet wool, leather, sweat, the stew and – Darvan was indeed right, the Tsurani did smell different – a musky scent. Watching a pair of Tsurani take a small pouch out of their packs and add a pinch of a pungent spice to their bowls of stew, Richard decided that was where the scent came from, but it was disquieting, somehow emphasizing their alien nature.
Gregory, Alwin, and the man Richard thought of as ‘the Tsurani sergeant’ paced back and forth, keeping an eye on everyone, ready to quell any explosion before it ignited.
Richard spotted Father Corwin, kneeling in the far corner of the room where the wounded lay. A dozen men of the company had various injuries acquired over the last two days. Of the eight from the encounter in the forest clearing, not one was still alive. The four who had survived the long night march to Brendan’s Stockade had been left behind in the retreat, their throats cut to spare them the agony of falling into the hands of the moredhel.
Richard moved over to the priest and looked down. He didn’t know the name of the soldier the priest was treating, but he was young, features pale, sweat beading his face. He had suffered a broken leg in their crashing assault down into the stockade. Corwin had set the leg with the help of a couple of men and was tying off the splint, talking soothingly as if comforting a child.
‘Will I be able to walk in the morning?’ the soldier asked.
‘We’ll worry about that then, son.’
The young soldier looked up at Richard.
‘I could help him,’ Richard ventured.
‘We’ll ask the Captain,’ the priest replied, but Richard could tell by his tone that the answer would be no. Either the boy walked on his own or died.
Corwin patted the soldier reassuringly on the shoulder, stood up, and looked over to where a Tsurani lay with a crossbow bolt buried deep in his upper thigh. A comrade was by his side, trying to get him to take a little food.
‘Poor bastard,’ Corwin sighed and without hesitation went over and knelt beside him. The two looked at Corwin, turning to him masklike visages on which there was no expression. They looked straight through Corwin and Richard as if they didn’t even exist.
‘Really got you,’ Corwin said quietly, motioning to the arrow.
The two said nothing.
‘Got to get it out sooner or later.’
Again no response.
‘Damn it, don’t they take care of their wounded?’ Richard asked.
‘It’s obvious they don’t have a chirugeon with them,’ replied the Priest of Sung. ‘This arrow’s in deep. I guess they figure they’ll just leave him here – no sense in putting him through the agony of trying to get it out. Richard, go fetch me some boiling water and I want you to take these two knives, stick one in the fire for a minute or so, the second one, leave it in the fire.’
As he spoke he drew two small daggers belted to his waist and handed them up. Richard followed the priest’s orders and returned with a tin pot filled with boiling hot tea and the dagger which was shimmering with heat.
‘No water, just the boiled tea.’
The priest chuckled. ‘It’ll do,’ he said. He reached into his tunic, pulled out a small roll of white linen, tore off a piece and stuck it into the boiling liquid. Then he motioned at the arrow and made a gesture as if pulling it out.
The wounded man looked at him wide-eyed and shook his head, and his comrade said something and made a gesture, waving his hand over the arrow as if to block Corwin.
‘He says they already tried to get it out, that it’s snagged on the bone,’ Gregory announced, coming up behind the group. ‘Priest, just leave him alone, he’s finished. You can’t draw it without cutting the poor bastard to pieces. Those damned moredhel arrows are four-barbed.’
‘Just shut up and stay out of my way,’ Corwin growled. He reached into his tunic, pulled out a small leather case and unrolled it, drawing out several needles which already had threads attached, tweezers and tiny brass clamps.
He looked straight into the eyes of the Tsurani and began a low chant in a strange tongue. Those around him fell silent for the words carried a power, a sense of otherworldliness and Richard felt a cold shiver. The chanting continued for several minutes. Then Corwin slowly reached out, placing his right hand on the Tsurani’s forehead and let it gently slip down to cover the man’s eyes. Finally he drew his hand back. The Tsurani’s eyes were still open but were now glazed.
Corwin gripped the arrow with his left hand and ever so slowly tried to pull it out. It didn’t budge.
‘Snagged on the bone, like he said,’ the priest whispered. ‘Richard, help roll him on to his side then hold him tight.’
Richard followed the priest’s orders. The wounded man’s eyes were still unfocused. Richard cradled the man on his lap and looked back down at the priest who was carefully examining the wound, running his fingers around the back of the man’s leg.
Corwin picked up the still hot dagger with his right hand, positioned it underneath the wounded man’s leg on the opposite side from the wound and drove the blade in half way to the hilt and rotated the blade.
A gasp escaped the wounded man. Richard looked into his eyes and saw that consciousness was returning: the Tsurani’s pupils went wide.
‘Hold him!’ the priest snapped.
With his left hand he grabbed the arrow and started to push even as he pulled the dagger back out. A second latter the head of the arrow exploded out of the hole cut by the dagger.
The wounded Tsurani cried out, and began to struggle, but Richard grabbed hold of him, ‘It’s all right; you’ll be all right,’ he began to say over and over.
‘Damn it, priest, he’s bleeding to death!’ Gregory cried.
‘Just shut up and get the hot knife from the fire!’
The priest continued to push the arrow through the wound, finally pulling it out and flinging it aside. He picked his dagger back up, cut the exit wound wider and, using one of the brass clamps, pulled the wound apart. He motioned for the wounded man’s comrade to hold the clamp. Taking a pair of tweezers from his kit he reached into the wound, drawing the artery which was spurting blood.
‘Not the main one, thank the Goddess,’ he muttered, even as Gregory knelt by his side, holding the now-glowing dagger fresh from the fire, the hilt wrapped with a piece of smouldering canvas.
The priest took the dagger, cursing when he singed his fingertips, then deftly touched the blade against the artery. A steamy cloud of boiling blood hissed up from the wound.
The man jerked, trying to kick, but Richard held him tight. He realized that for some strange reason he was beginning to cry.
This is a Tsurani, damn it. He felt a wave of anger for the man even as he held him tight and continued to try and reassure him.
‘Almost done,’ the priest announced.
He drew out the hot dagger, turned, and then cauterized the entry wound. Finally he drew out the boiled bandages, stuffed both wounds, then tightly wrapped a compress around the leg.
‘We’ll stitch him up later, I want to keep it open so I can get in quick in case he starts to bleed again.’
The whole operation had taken no more than a couple of minutes. The priest sat back, then took the hand of the Tsurani who had been helping and guided it to a pressure point above the wound to help slow the bleeding.
‘All right Richard, you did well, son.’
Richard, shaking, looked down at the Tsurani. There were tears in the corner of the man’s eyes and he suddenly realized just how young his enemy was: about the same age as himself and the wounded Kingdom soldier with the broken leg. The Tsurani was obviously struggling for control, looking up at Richard in confusion, his emotions mixed between gratitude and hatred for an enemy.
The priest knelt, softly muttered a prayer and made a sign of blessing over the wound, finishing by lightly touching the man’s forehead again.
Wiping the now-cooled daggers, he bundled up his kit and then picked up the arrow, which was covered with blood, and a hunk of flesh still on the barbs.
‘Evil weapon,’ he sighed, ‘No bone splinters though; he just might make it.’
He tossed the arrow aside. The room was silent: all were staring at him.
‘I’m pledged to healing,’ the priest said, ‘it doesn’t matter who.’ He looked back over at Richard. ‘You’re a brave lad for helping.’
The Tsurani Patrol Leader approached, bowed to the priest and said something.
Corwin looked over at Gregory.
‘He said that the wounded man, Osami, now owes you a debt which the clan must honour. If we fight and they don’t kill you, they must make you a slave. So if we fight, they’ll let you leave before they kill all of us, so they won’t have to capture or kill you.’ Gregory explained.
Corwin said nothing for a moment and then began to chuckle softly. ‘Hell, tell him I think you’re all crazy,’ Corwin replied. ‘When you’re done killing each other I’ll take all your coins, and whatever the Tsurani use, and consider it a donation to the church.’
Gregory translated and now the Tsurani laughed. The tension in the room eased for a moment.
Gregory knelt next to Corwin. ‘You a chirugeon?’ He pointed to the small kit Corwin had used and was now cleaning ready to put away.
The priest shrugged. ‘As a boy I apprenticed to one for a while.’
‘What happened?’ asked the Ranger. ‘Get the calling?’
Putting away his medical tools, the priest said, ‘No, that came later. I was a mercenary for a while.’
Remembering how frightened the priest had been when they had first met, Gregory could barely hide his surprise. ‘A mercenary?’
Corwin nodded. ‘Not all mercenaries are swordsmen, Ranger. I have no skill with blade or bow. I earned my living with a company of engineers building siege machines. Give me two men with axes and in less than a day I can turn a tree into a ram that would knock down that stone wall out there in under ten minutes. Throw in a pair of hammers and one bow saw, and I can do it in six hours.’ He paused as if remembering. ‘Saw most of my fighting from a distance, though I’ve had a few close calls under a wall or two, trying to collapse a foundation.’ He smiled at Gregory’s blank expression. ‘I used to be a fair sapper, too.’ He sighed and lost his smile. ‘And I had more than my share of practice keeping other men alive, I can tell you.’ He stood, and Gregory did as well. ‘Then I got the calling and entered the temple.’
Gregory nodded. ‘I thought you priests used your magic to heal.’
Corwin shrugged. ‘Like anything else, healing magic takes talent. Some brothers could heal every man here in a couple of days. A rare few can lay on hands and make a wound vanish or a bone heal in an hour. I have no such gift. I have to rely on my tools and prayer. The bit of “magic” I used to calm the boy is simply a healer’s trick; anyone can learn it.’
Gregory didn’t comment.
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William Forstchen
Raymond E. Feist
The whole of the magnificent Riftwar Cycle by bestselling author Raymond E. Feist, master of magic and adventure, now available in ebookFreedom at any price?Hartraft’s Marauders, a crack band of Kingdom raiders, are a special unit designed to infiltrate and fight behind enemy lines. They are currently heading for a frontier garrison, after a disastrous encounter with the Tsurani.Meanwhile, a Tsurani patrol is sent to support an assault on the same garrison. Both sides arrive at the same time and discover the garrison has been overrun by a migrating horde of moredhel (dark elves), and they are forced by circumstances to band together and fight as one unit to survive.The only problem is, who do they hate the most – their mutual enemy, or each other? As they make their way across the unknown Northlands to freedom, they have to struggle not only with the elements and their enemies, but also their conscience. For what is more important – one’s life or one’s honour?Honoured Enemy is the first book in the Legends of the Riftwar series. It is the first of three co-authored books that return to the world of Feist’s best-loved series.
RAYMOND E. FEIST
Honoured Enemy
Book One of Legends of the Riftwar
Copyright (#ulink_a480465e-4298-5f83-aaa4-a839bfd139b0)
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
HarperVoyager An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)
First published in Great Britain by Voyager 2001
Copyright © Raymond E. Feist & William R. Forstchen 2001
Raymond E. Feist & William R. Forstchen assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9780006483885
Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2012 ISBN: 9780007381401
Version: 2016–11–23
Dedication (#ud4bbb4e8-f596-589b-a9ab-1a2c6ded613d)
This one’s for Janny Wurts, who showed me that two heads often were far better than one.
Raymond E Feist
When I think of Honour, Colonel Donald V Bennett, Fox-Green, Omaha Beach, and Sergeant Andy Andrew, Easy Red, Omaha Beach stand before me. When duty called, they served unflinchingly. I am honoured to call them my friends.
William R Forstchen
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#ua690fd76-d5eb-52d0-a2c6-d69efcda5dae)
Title Page (#uf6e739ab-5e67-5595-bc3b-1b5f3fe773a4)
Copyright (#u6cd6d6d2-f931-53a7-8485-f5d2736dd9a5)
Dedication (#ue141848e-0454-5600-a710-8aeee7a5eb95)
Map (#ubd35cb82-391c-536d-b0a9-b92c5dcfbb15)
Prologue: Intelligence (#u815de4ef-8410-5f8c-a263-75942e7b01bb)
Chapter One: Grieving (#u02e69d63-df3e-5e75-9b92-ce970f9257c2)
Chapter Two: Discovery (#u107c0aaf-2e1c-5076-8d7d-e33715f69888)
Chapter Three: Moredhel (#u8393eba4-e633-5aa5-bb28-5d8f9d0c97e6)
Chapter Four: Practicalities (#u80e131c7-3048-5e61-bf9f-2f3fb897bfb8)
Chapter Five: Accommodation (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six: Pursuit (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven: River (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight: Decisions (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine: Chances (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten: Valley (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven: Respite (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve: Blood Debts (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen: Accord (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen: Betrayal (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen: Flight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen: Confrontation (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen: Parting (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue: Reunion (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
Continue the Adventure … (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Map (#ulink_84af021d-1166-5b4c-9335-aa3f5ff5ae46)
• Prologue • (#ulink_b5232e66-5e09-5781-a95f-82d4559530ac)
Intelligence (#ulink_b5232e66-5e09-5781-a95f-82d4559530ac)
THE RAIN HAD STOPPED.
Lord Brucal, Knight-Marshal of the Armies of the West, entered the command pavilion, snorting like a warhorse and swearing under his breath. ‘Damn weather,’ he finally said. The elderly general, still broad-shouldered and fit, ran a gloved hand back from his forehead, getting the damp hair out of his eyes.
Borric, Duke of Crydee, and his second-in-command looked at his old friend with a wry smile. Brucal was a steadfast warrior and a reliable ally in the politics of the Kingdom of the Isles, as well as an able field general. But he had a tendency towards vanity, though. Borric knew he was getting irritated by the regal mane of hair now being plastered to his skull.
‘Still sick?’ Borric was a striking man of middle years, with more black in his hair and beard than grey. He had on his usual garments of black – the only colour he had donned since the death of his wife many years before – and over this he wore the brown tabard of Crydee, emblazoned with a golden gull above which perched a small golden crown, signifying Borric’s royal blood. His eyes were dark and piercing, and currently showed a slight amusement at his old friend’s bluster.
As Borric expected, the old grey-bearded duke swore an oath. ‘I’m not sick, damn it! Just a bit of a sniffle.’
Borric remembered Brucal when he was a young man, visiting Borric’s father at Crydee, his laughter, with his robust joy and a glint in his eye. Even when his reddish-brown hair and beard had turned grey, Brucal had been a man who lived each day to the fullest. Today was the first time Borric recognized that Brucal was now an old man.
On the other hand, it had to be said that Brucal was an old man who could quickly draw a sword and do considerable harm. And he refused to admit he was ill.
Brucal pulled off his heavy gauntlets and handed them to an aide. He allowed another to remove the heavy fur-lined weather-cloak he had worn from his own tent. He was dressed in simple blue trousers and a grey tunic, his tabard left behind in his tent. ‘And this bloody rain doesn’t help.’
‘Another week of this and the snows will be falling in earnest.’
‘According to our scouts, it’s already snowing heavily up north, around the Lake of the Sky,’ replied Brucal. ‘We should consider sending the reserves back to LaMut and Yabon for the winter.’
Borric nodded. ‘We might get one more week of clement weather before the winter storms come, though. Just enough time for the Tsurani to start something. I think we’ll keep half of the reserves close by; I’ll order the other half back to LaMut.’
Brucal looked at the campaign map on the large table before Borric. He said, ‘They haven’t been doing much, lately, have they?’
‘The same as last year,’ said Borric, pointing at the map. ‘A sortie here, a raid there, but there’s little evidence they seek to expand much any more.’
Borric studied the map: the invading Tsurani had taken a large chunk of the Grey Tower Mountains and the Free Cities of Natal, but had seemed satisfied to hold a stable front for the last five years of the war. The dukes had managed one successful raid through the valley in the mountains the Tsurani had used as their beachhead, and since then intelligence about what was occurring behind enemy lines was non-existent.
Brucal blew his nose in a rag used to oil weapons, and then threw it into a brazier nearby. His large nose now looked red and shiny. The nine-year campaign had taken its toll on him, Borric noticed.
Borric thought back a moment to when the first sightings of the Tsurani invaders had been reported, by two boys at his own keep who had found a wrecked Tsurani ship on the headlands near his castle at Crydee. Later, word had been brought by the Elven Queen of aliens in the forests that lay between her own Elvandar and the Duchy of Crydee.
The world had changed: the fact of an alien invasion from another world via a magic gate was no longer a source of wonder. Borric had a war to fight and win. He had added some marks with brush and ink to the campaign map.
‘What’s this?’ asked Brucal, pointing to a notation Borric had added earlier in the morning.
‘Another migration of Dark Brothers. It looks as if a fairly large contingent of them are moving down the southern foothills of the Great Northern Mountains. They’re treading a narrow path near the elven forests. I can’t understand why they’d come over the mountains at this time of year.’
‘Those blackhearts don’t have to have a reason,’ observed Brucal.
Borric nodded. ‘My son Arutha reported a large force tangled with the Tsurani while they were besieging my castle five years ago. But those were Dark Brothers driven from the Grey Towers by the Tsurani; they were striking north to join their kin in the Northlands. They’ve been quiet since then.’
‘There’s one possibility.’
Borric shrugged. ‘I’m listening, old friend.’
‘That’s a bloody long trek for nothing,’ observed Brucal, as he wiped his nose with the back of his hand. ‘They’re not fools.’
‘The Dark Brotherhood is many things, but never stupid,’ agreed Borric. ‘If they’re moving in force, it’s for a reason.’
‘Where are they now?’
Borric said, ‘Last reports from the scouts near the Elven Forest. They’re avoiding the dwarves at Stone Mountain and the elven patrols, heading east.’
‘Lake of the Sky is the only destination,’ said Brucal, ‘unless they’re going to turn south and attack the elves or the Tsurani.’
‘Why Lake of the Sky?’
‘It makes sense if they’re trying to get up to the eastern side of the Northlands. There’s a spur of mountains that runs north-east out of the Teeth of the World, hundreds of miles long and impassable. Over the Great Northerns, past the Lake of the Sky, and up a trail back north over the Teeth of the World is a short-cut, actually.’ The old duke stroked his still-wet beard. ‘It’s one of the reasons we have so much trouble with the bastards up in Yabon.’
Borric nodded. ‘They tend to leave us alone in Crydee, compared to the encounters your garrisons have with them.’
‘I just wish I knew why they were out in force, heading east, this close to winter,’ muttered Brucal.
‘Something’s up,’ said Borric.
Brucal nodded. ‘I’ve been fighting Clan Raven since I was a boy.’ He fell silent for a moment. ‘Their paramount chieftain is a murderous dog named Murad. If this bunch from the Northlands is looking to join with him …’
‘What?’
‘I don’t know, but it’ll be bad.’ Looking over the rest of the map, Brucal asked, ‘Do we have anyone in that area now?’
‘Just the garrison forts along the Tsurani front, and a few last patrols before winter,’ Borric replied.
Brucal leaned close to inspect each of the small ink marks on the map, then made a sound half-way between a snort and a laugh. ‘Hartraft.’
‘Who?’ asked Borric.
‘Son of one of my squires. Dennis Hartraft. Runs a company of thugs and cut-throats called the Marauders for Baron Moyet. He’s up there.’
‘What’s he doing?’ asked Borric. ‘The name is familiar, but I don’t recall any reports from him.’
‘Dennis is not one for paperwork,’ said Brucal. ‘What he’s doing is unleashing bloody murder on the Tsurani. It’s personal with him.’
‘Can we get word to him about this Dark Brothers migration?’
‘He’s an independent. He’ll come back to Moyet’s camp for the winter in the next week or two. I’ll send word to the Baron to get whatever information from Dennis he can.’ Then Brucal laughed. ‘Though it would be fitting for him and Clan Raven to tangle if it comes to that.’
‘Why?’
Brucal said, ‘Too long a story to tell now. Just say there’s even more history between his family and Murad’s blood-drinkers than there is between him and the Tsurani.’
‘So what happens if this Hartraft and the Dark Brothers meet up?’
Brucal sighed, and wiped his nose. ‘A lot of people are going to get dead.’
Borric took a step away from the map table and looked out of the pavilion’s door. A light mix of rain and snow was starting to fall. After a moment, he said, ‘Maybe they’ll miss each other and Hartraft will get back to Moyet’s camp.’
‘Maybe,’ said Brucal. ‘But if that bunch from the north gets between Dennis and Moyet’s camp, or some bunch from Clan Raven moves to meet with them …’
Brucal let the thought go unfinished. Borric knew what he thought. If that many Brothers got between Hartraft and his base, the chances for the Kingdom soldiers returning home alive were nearly non-existent. Borric let his mind wander for a moment, considering the cold hills of the north and the icy winter almost upon them, then he brushed away the thoughts. There were other fronts and other conflicts to worry about, and he couldn’t help Hartraft and his men, even if he knew where they were. Too many men had already died in this war for him to lose sleep about another high-risk unit out behind enemy lines. Besides, maybe they’d get lucky.
• Chapter One • (#ulink_7fced400-03b7-51c6-9574-61c611fdb866)
Grieving (#ulink_7fced400-03b7-51c6-9574-61c611fdb866)
THE GROUND WAS FROZEN.
Captain Dennis Hartraft, commander of the Marauders, was silent, staring at the shallow grave hacked into the frozen earth. The winter had arrived fast and hard, and earlier than usual; and after six days of light snow and freezing temperatures, the ground was now yielding only with a grudge.
So damned cold, he thought. It was bad enough you couldn’t give the men a proper funeral pyre here, lest the smoke betray their position to the Tsurani, but being stuck behind enemy lines meant the dead couldn’t even be taken back to the garrison for cremation. Just a hole in the ground to keep the wolves from eating them. Is this all there really is in the end, just the darkness and the icy embrace of the grave? With his left hand – his sword hand – he absently rubbed his right shoulder. The old wound always seemed to ache the most when snow lay on the ground.
A priest of Sung, mumbling a prayer, walked around the perimeter of the grave, making a sign of blessing. Dennis stood rigid, watching as some of the men also made signs to a different god – mostly to Tith-Onaka, God of War – while others remained motionless. A few looked towards him, saw his eyes, then turned away.
The men could sense his swallowed rage … and his emptiness.
The priest fell silent, head lowered, hands moving furtively, placing a ward upon the grave. The Goddess of Purity would protect the dead from defilement. Dennis shifted uncomfortably, looking up at the darkening clouds which formed an impenetrable wall of grey to the west. Over in the east, the sky darkened.
Night was coming on, and with it the promise of more snow, the first big storm of the year. Having lived in the region for years, Dennis knew that a long, hard winter was fast upon them, and his mission had to be to get his men safely back to their base at Baron Moyet’s camp. And if enough snow fell in the next few days, that could prove problematic.
The priest stepped back from the grave, raised his hands to the dark heavens and started to chant again.
‘The service is ended,’ Dennis said. He didn’t raise his voice, but his anger cut through the frigid air like a knife.
The priest looked up, startled. Dennis ignored him, and turned to face the men gathered behind him. ‘You’ve got one minute to say farewell.’
Someone came up to Dennis’s side and cleared his throat. Without even looking, Dennis knew it was Gregory of Natal. And he understood his lack of civility to the Priest of Sung was ill-advised.
‘We’re still behind enemy lines, Father. We move out as soon as the scout comes back,’ Dennis heard Gregory say to the priest. ‘Winter comes fast and we’d best be safely at Brendan’s Stockade should a blizzard strike.’
Dennis looked over his shoulder at Gregory, the towering, dark-skinned Natalese Ranger attached to his command.
Gregory returned his gaze, the flicker of a smile in his eyes. As always, it annoyed Dennis that the Ranger unfailingly seemed to know what he was thinking and feeling. He turned away and, pointing at the squad of a dozen men who had dug the shallow grave shouted: ‘Don’t just stand there gawking, fill it in!’
The men set to work as Dennis stalked off to the edge of the clearing which had once been a small farmstead on the edge of the frontier, long since abandoned in this the ninth year of the Riftwar.
His gaze lingered for a second on the caved-in ruins of the cabin, the decaying logs, the collapsed and blackened beams of the roof. Saplings, already head-high, sprouted out of the wreckage. It triggered a memory of other ruins, but they were fifty miles from this place and he forced them out of his mind. That was a memory he had learned long ago to avoid
He scanned the forest ahead, acting as if he was waiting for the return of their scouts. Normally, Gregory would lead any scouting patrols, but Dennis wanted him close by, in case they had to beat a swift retreat. Years of operating successfully behind Tsurani lines had taught him when to listen to his gut. Besides, the scout who was out there was the only one in the company able to surpass Gregory’s stealth in the forest.
Resisting the urge to sigh, Dennis quietly let his breath out slowly and leaned against the trunk of a towering fir. The air was crisp with the smell of winter, the brisk aroma of pine, the clean scent of snow, but he didn’t notice any of that; it was as if the world around him was truly dead, and he was one of the dead as well. All his attention was focused, instead, on the sound of the frozen earth being shovelled back into the grave behind him.
The priest, startled by the irreverent display, had watched Dennis leave the group and then stepped up to Gregory’s side and glanced up at the towering Natalese, but Gregory simply shook his head and looked around at the company. All were silent, save for the sound of a few desultory shovels striking the icy soil; all of them were gazing at their leader as he walked away and passed into the edge of the surrounding forest.
Gregory cleared his throat again, this time loudly and having caught the men’s attention he motioned for them to get on with the work at hand.
‘He hates me,’ Father Corwin said, a touch of sadness in his voice.
‘No, Father. He just hates all of this.’ Gregory nodded at the wreckage of battle that littered the small clearing: the trampled-down snow – much of it stained a slushy pink – broken weapons, arrows, and the fifty-two Tsurani corpses that lay where they fell, including the wounded who had been finished off with a knife across the throat.
His gaze was fixed on the priest. ‘The fact that you accidentally caused this fight, that wasn’t your fault.’
The priest wearily shook his head. ‘I’m sorry. I was lost out here and didn’t know the Tsurani were so close behind me.’
Gregory stared straight into the pale-blue eyes of the old priest but the priest looked straight back at him, not flinching, not lowering his gaze even for an instant. Mendicant priests of any order, even those of the Goddess of Purity, had to be tough enough to live off the land and whatever bounty providence offered. Gregory had no doubt that the mace at the priest’s belt was not unblooded and that Father Corwin had faced his share of dangers over the years. Besides, Gregory was an experienced judge of men, and while this priest seemed meek at the moment, there was obvious hardness beneath the apparently mild exterior.
‘I wish I’d never left my monastery to come here and help out,’ the priest sighed, finally dropping his gaze. ‘We got lost, brothers Valdin, Sigfried and I. We were making for the camp of Baron Moyet, took a wrong turn on the trail and found ourselves behind the Tsurani lines.’
‘Only Rangers and elves travel these paths without risk of getting lost, Father,’ Gregory offered. ‘These woods are treacherous. It is said that at times the forest itself will hide trails and make new ones to lead the unwary astray.’
‘Brothers Valdin and Sigfried were captured,’ the priest continued, spilling out his story. ‘I escaped. I was off the trail, relieving myself, when the Tsurani patrol took them. I ran in the opposite direction after my brothers were dragged away. I was a coward.’
The Natalese Ranger shrugged. ‘Some might call it prudence, rather than cowardice. You denied the Tsurani a third prisoner.’
The priest still appeared unconvinced.
‘There was nothing you could have done for them,’ Gregory added with certainty, ‘except join them as a captive.’
Corwin seemed slightly more reassured. ‘It was foolish of me to have run, you’ll agree. Had I been more stealthy I’d not have led them to you. When I saw one of your men hiding off the side of the trail, I just naturally went straight to him.’
Gregory’s eyes narrowed. ‘Well, if he’d been doing a better job of hiding, you wouldn’t have seen him, then, would you?’
‘I didn’t know they –’ he pointed towards the Tsurani corpses littering the field ‘– were right behind me.’
Gregory nodded.
What should have been a clean, quick ambush incurring minimal loss had turned into a bloodbath. Eighteen men from the Marauders – nearly a quarter of Dennis’s command – were dead, and six more were seriously wounded. As it was, the engagement had been a Kingdom victory, but at far greater cost than was necessary.
The priest rambled on, starting his tale yet again. Gregory continued to study him. It was obvious the man was badly shaken. He was poorly dressed, wearing sandals rather than boots. A couple of toes were already showing signs of frostbite. His hands shook slightly, and his voice was near to breaking.
The priest fell silent, and took a long moment to compose himself. At last, he let out a long sigh, then looked over to Dennis who stood alone, at the edge of the clearing. ‘What is wrong with your commander?’ he asked.
‘His oldest friend is in that grave,’ Gregory said quietly, nodding down at the eighteen bodies lying side by side in the narrow trench hacked out of the freezing ground. ‘Jurgen served Dennis’s grandfather before he served the grandson. The land the Tsurani now occupy, part of it once belonged to Dennis’s family. His father was Squire of Valinar, a servant of Lord Brucal. They lost everything early on in the war. Word of the invasion hadn’t even reached Valinar before the Tsurani. The old Squire and his men didn’t even know who they were fighting when they died. Dennis and Jurgen were among a handful of survivors of the initial assault; Jurgen was his last link to that past.’ Gregory paused, transferring his gaze to Father Corwin. ‘And now that link is gone.’
‘I’m sorry,’ the priest replied softly, I wish none of this had ever happened.’
‘Well, Father, it happened,’ Gregory said evenly.
The priest looked up at him, and there was moisture in his eyes. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said one more time.
Gregory nodded. ‘As my grandmother said, “Sorry won’t unbreak the eggs.” Just clean up the mess and move on. Let’s find you some boots or you’ll lose all your toes before tomorrow.’
‘Where?’
‘Off the dead of course.’ Gregory indicated boots, weapons, and cloaks that had been stripped off the dead before they were buried. ‘They don’t need them any more, and the living do,’ he added matter-of-factly. ‘We honour their memory, but it’s no use burying perfectly good weapons and boots with them.’ He motioned with his chin. ‘That pair over there looks about your size.’
Father Corwin shuddered but went over and picked up the boots, the Natalese had indicated
As the priest untied his sandals, Alwin Barry, the newly-appointed sergeant for the company, approached the edge of the grave, picked up a clump of frozen earth and tossed it in.
‘Save a seat for me in Tith’s Hall,’ he muttered, invoking the old belief among soldiers that the valiant were hosted for one night of feasting and drinking by the God of War before being sent to Lims-Kragma for judgment. Barry bowed his head for a moment in respect, then turned away, heading over to the trail that went through the middle of the clearing, and called for the men to form up in marching order.
Others hurriedly approached the grave, picking up handfuls of dirt and tossing them in. Some made signs of blessing; one uncorked a drinking flask, raised it, took a drink then emptied the rest of the brandy into the grave and threw the flask in.
Burial was not the preferred disposition of the dead in the Kingdom, but more than one soldier rested under the soil over the centuries and soldiers had their own rituals for saying farewell to the dead, rituals that had nothing to do with priests and gods. This wasn’t about sending comrades off to the Halls of Lims-Kragma, for they were already on their way. This was about saying goodbye to men who had shed their blood alongside them just hours before. This was about saying farewell to brothers.
Richard Kevinsson, the company’s newest recruit, was one of the last to approach. A young squire from Landonare, who had escaped from there when the Tsurani had overrun his family’s estates, he had joined full of blood and fire, vowing vengeance. Now there were tears in his eyes, his features were pale, and a trickle of blood coursed down his cheek from a slashing blow that had laid open his scalp just below the edge of his dented helmet. ‘I’m sorry,’ he gasped quietly. He knelt down and picked up a clump of earth, his gaze fixed on the old sergeant-at-arms lying in the centre of the grave, surrounded by his dead comrades. The grave-diggers were hard at work, but no earth had yet to fall on Jurgen. The man could have been asleep; except for his blood-soaked tunic he almost looked as if he would sit up and smile, revealing his crooked teeth. The young man had often dreamed of his first battle, and the heroic deeds he would accomplish. Instead he had been on the ground, looking up at his enemy like a frozen rabbit, fumbling for his dropped sword and screaming in terror … and then Jurgen had stormed in, cutting the Tsurani down with a single blow.
In saving Richard, however, Jurgen had left himself open to an enemy spearman who had charged straight in. Jurgen had been looking into Richard’s eyes when the spear struck; there had been a brief instant, almost a flicker of a smile, as if he was a kindly old man helping a child out of a minor scrape, just before the Tsurani spear struck him from behind. Then the shock of the blow distorted his face and the spear exploded out of his chest.
Richard had watched the life fade out of the old man’s eyes. It was only a moment, yet it seemed an eternity, the light fading, Richard knowing that the old man had made the sacrifice of his own life without hesitation.
He looked down at Jurgen now. The corpse’s eyes were closed, but in his mind, and in the nightmares that would come for the rest of his life, the eyes would be open, gazing back at him.
‘It should have been me instead of you,’ Richard whispered, barely able to speak for his grief.
He bent almost double, sobs wracking his body. He knew the others were watching, judging him. Why didn’t they cry? he wondered, and he felt ashamed for all his failures this day.
He let the earth fall from his hand, recoiling as the clump hit Jurgen’s face. Embarrassed, he drew back and turned away, shoulders hunched, shaking as he struggled unsuccessfully to hide his tears.
The few who followed Richard, most of them silent, tossed the ritual handful of earth into the grave then turned away, eyes empty of emotion.
The company formed up for the march, Alwin detailing men off to bear the litters of the wounded.
The grave-diggers were nearly finished. In spite of the cold their faces were streaked with sweat and their hot breath made clouds of steam in the air, as they hurriedly worked to complete their task.
At the edge of the clearing Dennis continued to stare with unfocused eyes at the forest. Something, a sensing, refocused his attention. A lone bird darted through the branches overhead. The angry chatter of a squirrel echoed.
His left hand drifted down to the hilt of his sword. He looked back over his shoulder. Gregory had been kneeling beside a Tsurani, studying the face of the enemy soldier as if he might learn something about the alien invaders from this man’s still features. He had sensed what Dennis had sensed, that someone was approaching. His gaze flickered to the men lining the trail. Several of the old hands were already reacting. Others, noticing this, started to react as well.
Dennis watched Alwin and was disappointed, for the new sergeant-at-arms was several seconds behind Gregory and himself, but finally he raised his left hand, palm outward, at the same time drawing his right hand across his throat, the signal for everyone to fall silent and freeze. Dennis turned to look back at the forest, not yet giving a command.
Gregory listened for a moment, then relaxed. He looked at Dennis and nodded once, then smiled.
A flicker of a shadow moved in the darkness of the forest on the trail ahead and Dennis relaxed, too.
The shadow stepped out from behind a tree, raised a hand and Dennis motioned for him to come in. The scout sprinted forward. He was clad in a white tunic streaked with cross-hatching lines of grey and black, the uniform designed by Dennis for the Marauders to wear during winter campaigning in the deep forest. He ran lightly, in the way only an elf could run, so softly that even in snow it was said that at times they would leave no prints.
As he approached Dennis, he nodded, and with a hand signal motioned for him to follow.
It was a bit of protocol that at times bothered Dennis. The scout was Gregory’s companion, not officially part of Dennis’s command, and as such he would report first to his friend. This, as much as anything else, was the reason Dennis preferred having Gregory lead any scouting mission; when the Natalese Ranger returned from a mission, he reported to Dennis. Dennis, for not the first time, considered it a petty irritation, yet he couldn’t rid himself of it.
‘Tinuva,’ several of the men sighed, as the elf came into the clearing. They were obviously relieved. Weapons were resheathed.
The elf nodded a greeting. He looked over at the burial detail, busy filling in the grave and paused for a moment, head lowered, offering his thoughts for the fallen. At last, he looked back at Gregory. ‘You were right, two of them did escape.’ he announced.
‘And?’ Gregory asked.
‘Good fighters, tough, a long chase,’ Tinuva said, matter-of-factly.
‘So you got all them?’ Dennis asked.
The elf shook his head. He was obviously winded after the long chase.
Dennis pulled a flask out from under his tunic and handed it over. After nodding his thanks, the elf drank then handed the flask back.
‘Not sure,’ Tinuva replied. ‘Their commander might have sent a runner back before the fight even started. There were too many tracks on the trail to tell. If I had more time to follow the way they came, I would know for certain, but you stressed getting back here quickly.’
Dennis cursed silently.
‘Then we must assume someone did get out,’ Gregory announced.
‘I always assume that,’ Dennis said coolly.
Gregory did not reply.
‘I sense something else here as well,’ the elf said.
‘The Dark Brothers?’ Gregory asked and the elf nodded.
‘Did you see signs?’ Dennis interjected.
The elf reached into a pouch dangling from his belt and drew out the broken shaft of an arrow. ‘It’s their make – Clan Raven. Not more than a league from here. I came across tracks as I was returning here after finding the two Tsurani. There was blood on the snow. Someone killed a stag, quartered it and then headed back north. Four of them, early this morning, an hour after the snow started to fall today.’
‘Only four?’ Dennis asked.
The elf shook his head. ‘No, there are more. What I found was just a hunting party foraging for food. The forest whispers of them. They’re out here: something is stirring.’ The elf nodded towards the mountains to the north, barely visible in a gathering darkness, to the north.
‘How many?’
Tinuva closed his eyes for a moment, as if to aid his thinking. ‘Hard to tell,’ he whispered. ‘We eledhel have history with the moredhel.’
Gregory gave a quick shake of his head to Dennis, warning him not to ask anything more.
‘They are as difficult to track as we are, unless they are close by or out in large numbers.’ He looked northward again. ‘Up there, distant, but in large numbers, I would judge.’
‘Why?’ asked Father Corwin, who was standing at the edge of the group.
Several of the men turned to look at the priest. Suddenly embarrassed, Father Corwin lowered his eyes.
No one answered. Finally the elf stirred.
‘Holy one,’ Tinuva said, softly. ‘Something is beginning to stir amongst those you call the Brotherhood of the Dark Path. This war with the Tsurani diverts us away from the threat of the dark ones to the north. Perhaps they see an advantage to be gained from humans slaughtering each other. Perhaps they seek to return south to the Green Heart and the Grey Towers – it isn’t hard to imagine they’ve worn out their welcome with the clans of the Northlands after nine winters.’
Gregory said, ‘Are they moving south?’
Tinuva shrugged. ‘The hunters whose signs I saw may have been foraging ahead of a larger company, or on the flank. It’s difficult to know if they’re heading south or in this direction.’
‘All the more reason for us to get the hell out of here now,’ Dennis interjected sharply. ‘We’ve been behind the lines too damn long as it is; the men deserve to spend the rest of the winter in Tyr-Sog getting drunk and spending their pay on whores.’
He looked back at the burial party. They were nearly finished; a couple of men were dragging out deadfall and branches to throw over the grave. Several of the men were already returning to the ranks, hooking the short-handled shovels onto their backpacks. A trained eye could easily pick out the burial site today but if it continued to snow, by tomorrow the grave and the nearby Tsurani dead would have disappeared. By springtime, when the snows melted and grass fed by the richness beneath sprang up, it would have disappeared back into the forest.
‘Alwin, move the men out.’
‘Sir, you said you wanted to speak to the boy first,’ Alwin replied softly.
Dennis nodded, scanning the line of troops. His gaze fell on Richard Kevinsson. ‘Boy, over here now,’ he snapped.
Nervously Richard looked up.
‘The rest of you start moving,’ Dennis rapped out ‘we want to make Brendan’s Stockade and our own lines by morning.’
Two men acting as trailbreakers sprinted forward, darting off to either side of the trail, lightly jumping over deadfalls and around tree trunks. Within seconds they had disappeared into the forest. Half a dozen men, the advanced squad, set out next, moving down the trail at a slow trot.
Richard Kevinsson approached, obviously ill-at-ease. ‘Captain?’ he asked, his voice shaking.
Dennis looked at Gregory, Tinuva, and the priest, his eyes commanding a dismissal. Tinuva stepped away, bowed in respect to the grave, then joined the column, but Gregory and the priest lingered.
‘Father, go join the wounded,’ Dennis said sharply.
‘I thank you for rescuing me, Captain,’ Father Corwin replied, ‘but I feel responsible for the trouble this lad is in and I wish to stay with him.’
Dennis was about to bark an angry command, but a look in Gregory’s eyes stilled him. He turned his attention back to Richard. ‘When we return to Baron Moyet’s camp I will have you dropped from the rolls of the company.’
‘Sir?’ Richard’s voice started to break.
‘I enrolled you in the company because I felt sorry for your loss, boy. It reminded me of my own, I guess. But doing so was a mistake. In the last fortnight you have barely managed to keep up with our march. I heard a rumour that you fell asleep while on watch two nights ago.’
He hesitated for an instant. It was Jurgen who had reported that, and then defended the boy, reminding Dennis that he had done so as well when out on his first campaign long years ago.
‘It was you that the priest saw from the trail wasn’t it?’
The boy hesitated.
‘It’s not his fault,’ Father Corwin said, impassioned. ‘I stopped because I was exhausted from running. I was staring straight at him, I couldn’t help but see him.’
‘That doesn’t matter,’ Dennis snapped, and the look in his eyes made it clear that he would not tolerate another word from the black-robed priest. ‘Well?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Richard replied weakly. ‘It was me.’
‘Why?’
‘I thought I was well concealed.’
‘If that old man could spot you, be certain a Tsurani trailbreaker would have seen you. You are a danger to yourself and to my command. I’m sending you back. You can tell your friends what you want. I suggest you find a position with a nice comfortable mounted unit down in Krondor. No brains needed there, just ride, point your lance, and charge. Then you can be a hero, like in the songs and ballads.’
‘I wanted to serve with you, sir,’ the boy whispered.
‘Well you did, and that’s now finished.’ He hesitated, but then his anger spilled out. ‘Go take a final look at that grave over there before we leave,’ he said with barely-contained fury, his soft voice more punishing than any screamed insult. ‘Now get out of my sight.’
The boy stiffened, face as pale as the first heavy flakes of snow that began to swirl down around them. The he nodded and turned about, shoulders sagging. As he rejoined the column the men around him looked away.
The priest took a step forward.
Dennis’s hand snapped out, and a finger pointed into the old man’s face. ‘I don’t like you,’ Dennis announced. ‘You were a bumbling fool wandering around out here where you had no business. Damn you, don’t you know there’s a war being fought out here? It’s not a war like the ones that fat monks and troubadours gossip about around the fireplace. I hope you got a good belly full of it today.’
‘Two of my “fat friends”, as you call them, are prisoners of the Tsurani this day,’ Father Corwin replied, and there was checked anger in his voice. ‘I volunteered to serve with the army as a healer. I just pray I don’t have to work on you some day. Stitching together flesh that has no soul is bitter work.’
The priest turned and stalked away. The middle part of the column, made up of the stretcher-bearers was starting off and Corwin joined them.
Gregory chuckled softly.
‘What the hell is so funny?’ Dennis snapped.
‘I think he got you on that one. You did go a bit too hard on the boy.’
‘I don’t think so. He almost got us all killed.’
‘He made no mistakes, I was but ten feet from him. I made sure he was well concealed.’ As if thinking of something, Gregory added, ‘That priest has unusually sharp eyes.’
‘Nevertheless, the boy goes back.’
‘Is that what Jurgen would have done?’
Dennis turned, eyes filled with bitterness. ‘Don’t talk to me about Jurgen.’
‘Someone has to. There’s not a man in your company that doesn’t share your pain. Not just over losing a man they respected, but because they bear a love for you as well, and now carry your burden of sorrow.’
‘Sorrow? How do you know what I feel?’
‘I know,’ Gregory announced softly. ‘I saw what happened too. Jurgen made his choice, he left himself open in order to save the boy. I would have done it, so would you.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘You and your Marauders have become hard men over the years, Dennis, but not soulless ones. You would have tried to save him, even at the cost of your own life, as Jurgen did. The lad has promise. You might not have noticed, and I’m not even sure he remembers it, but he did kill the first Tsurani that closed on him. The one that almost got him came up from behind.’
‘Nevertheless, the boy goes.’
‘It’ll kill him. We both know the type. Next battle he’ll do something stupid to regain his honour and die doing it.’
‘That’s his problem, not mine.’
‘And what if he gets a half-dozen others killed as well? What would Jurgen say of that?’
‘Jurgen is dead, damn you,’ Dennis hissed. ‘Never speak to me of him again.’
Gregory stepped back, raised his hands, then shook his head sadly, and walked over to the grave. Looking down at the rich brown earth being covered by the falling snow, he whispered, ‘Until we stand together again in the light.’
Then he went to join the company. Tinuva fell in by his side and the two of them headed up the trail in the opposite direction, double-checking to make sure that nothing was following the unit.
Dennis was left alone as the last of his men abandoned the clearing.
The heavy flakes swirled down, striking his face, melting into icy rivulets that dripped off a golden beard which was beginning to show the first greys of middle age.
When all were gone, and he knew no one was watching he walked up to the grave, reached down and picked up a clump of frozen earth.
‘Damn you,’ he sighed, ‘why did you leave me like this, Jurgen?’
Now there was no one left. Nothing but a flood of memories.
The holdings of the Hartrafts were not much to boast about; forest lands lying between Tyr-Sog and Yabon. A scattering of frontier villages on the border marches, a rural squire’s estates that the high-blood earls, barons, and dukes of the south and of the east would have scoffed at, or tossed aside as a trifle in a game of dice. But it had been his home, the home of his father and his father’s father.
Jurgen had been a young soldier for Dennis’s grandfather, old Angus Hartraft, called ‘Forkbeard’, who had first been granted the lands on the border for his stalwart service against the dark things that lived to the north. Jurgen had also been his father’s closest friend. And when his father died on the first day of the Riftwar, when the Tsurani flooded into their lands, it was Jurgen who had saved his life the night their keep was taken.
Dennis stared at the grave.
Better I had died that night, he thought, and there was a flash of resentment for old Jurgen.
Malena, his bride of barely six hours, died that night. His father had ordered him to take her through the secret passage out of the burning chaos of the estate’s central keep. He had fought his own desire to stay with his father and had taken Malena through the tunnel. Then outside the escape tunnel, just as freedom had been in reach, a crossbow bolt had stilled her heart forever. He had briefly glimpsed the assassin in the flickering light from the burning keep, and the image of the man as he turned and fled burned in Dennis’s memory. Jurgen had found him kneeling in the mud, clutching her lifeless body. He had fought to stay with her, until Jurgen knocked him out with the flat of his sword, then carried him down the river to safety.
Fifteen men from the garrison, including Jurgen and Dennis, survived that night. Carlin, the next to last had died just a month earlier from a wasting of the lungs. Now, of those fifteen men, only Dennis was left.
So now you’re dead old man. Died because of a damn stupid boy and a fat old priest. It would be like you to die for that, he thought, a sad smile creasing his features.
The ‘Luck of the Hartrafts’, it was called. No glory, no money, no fame. Just a retainer of a family with a minor title and nothing else. And then, in the end, you get a spear in your back because of a clumsy boy.
Yet, he knew that Jurgen, old smiling, laughing Jurgen, would not have wanted it any other way, that he had been more likely to die for the sake of a stupid squire than for any king. In fact, if it had been the mad king in far Rillanon, he most likely would have leaned on his sword and done nothing, figuring that such high and mighty types should take care of themselves.
A breeze stirred, the wind moaning softly through the rustling tree branches. The snow was coming down hard now, hissing, forcing him to lower his head.
Opening his hand, he let the clump of earth fall onto the grave. There was nothing left now of the past except a half-forgotten name and a sword strapped to his side. His father, Jurgen, Malena; all of them were in their graves, and the graves were all returning to the uncaring forest.
‘Dennis?’
He looked up. It was Gregory.
‘Nothing behind us, but we’d better move.’
Darkness was closing in. Tinuva was barely visible but a dozen paces away, waiting where the trail plunged back into the forest.
He looked around the clearing for a final time. Eventually the forest would reclaim all of this. The wind gusted around him and he shivered from the cold.
‘You still have the Marauders,’ Gregory whispered.
Dennis nodded and looked down at the Tsurani bodies scattered about the clearing. All that they have taken from me, he thought. He glanced up the trail where the men waited and while none of them was from Valinar, he saw faces that had become as familiar to him as those from his home. The Marauders still lived, and he had a responsibility to them.
He nodded. ‘And the war,’ he replied coldly, ‘I still have the war.’
Without a backward glance Captain Dennis Hartraft turned from the grave and left the clearing, disappearing into the darkness.
Gregory watched him and sadly shook his head, then followed him on to the path to Brendan’s Stockade.
It was cold.
Force Leader Asayaga threw a handful of charcoal on the warming brazier, pulled off his gloves and rubbed his hands over the fire.
‘Damnable country,’ he sighed.
He picked up the orders addressed to him and studied the attached map.
Madness. The first heavy snow of the season was falling from the skies and yet he was expected to start out at once with his command to reinforce a column which would strike a Kingdom outpost at dawn.
Why now? A day march would have been easy, but now darkness was closing in. Outside his tent the wind was stirring, the frozen canvas cracking and rattling, and he could hear the heavy snow falling from branches in the woods surrounding the camp.
The Game, always it was the Great Game, he realized with a detached fatalism. He knew with certainty he was being sent on a futile mission so that shame might be attached to one of his clan cousins. His House, the Kodeko, was not significant enough to warrant attention on its own, but it was related to those who were in the Kanazawai Clan. He put down the orders and sat back in his small canvas chair, wishing not for the first time that it had some sort of back support. Even more, he wished the frozen ground was covered in the soft lounging cushions that provided such comfort in his home. He ran his hand over his face, shaking his head. He was growing too suspicious. This was not necessarily part of another Minwanabi ploy to embarrass a political enemy back home; it could simply be a well-intentioned, badly-planned attack. Either way, his duty was clear.
Asayaga called for Sugama, his newly-appointed second-in-command.
‘Order the men to form. Full marching gear, five days’ rations. Make sure they have on those new furs and footwraps. We march before sunset.’
‘Where, Captain?’
He handed over the map and Sugama studied it intently.
Asayaga said nothing. Sugama, without a doubt, didn’t know a damned thing about what he was looking at on the parchment, but nevertheless he was staring at it determinedly, acting as if he were a scholar thinking profound thoughts.
‘Kingdom outpost. We were to take it today but the commander, in his brilliance, decided he needed more men first, and thus we are volunteered.’
‘It is an honour then that our commander selected us.’
Asayaga snorted.
‘Yes, an honour. In the Kingdom’s tongue our destination is called “Brendan’s Stockade”.’
Asayaga stumbled over the last two words, dropping the ‘s’.
‘Then it shall be a name of glory for the Empire.’
‘But of course,’ Asayaga said, features frozen in a mask that revealed nothing. ‘Another act of glory in a glorious war.’
• Chapter Two • (#ulink_3d5444a7-115f-5b97-8316-0919952118c3)
Discovery (#ulink_3d5444a7-115f-5b97-8316-0919952118c3)
ICY RAIN LASHED DOWN.
Carefully, silently, Dennis Hartraft slipped through the column of weary troops. In the early morning down-pours, his men crouched motionless, many with arrows nocked to their bows. In their dirty grey cloaks they were one with the forest. Even so, he could sense their tension; something was wrong. Their eyes followed him as he darted from tree to tree, staying low. During the night the snow had changing to a mix of sleet and icy rain. It had made the night march a misery, but some inner sense had compelled Dennis to push on, a decision that Gregory and Tinuva had fully endorsed. Swinging east of Mad Wayne’s Fort, which had fallen to the Tsurani the previous spring, they followed a path little more than a game trail back to Brendan’s Stockade, approaching from the north-east.
They were less than a quarter of a mile from Brendan’s when Alwin Barry, leading the advance squad, ordered a halt. A keen anticipation of downing pints of hot buttered mead and cold ale in a cosy tavern at the fort, instantly gave way to a grim foreboding.
Raised in these woods, Hartraft knew them intuitively. More than once that intuition had kept him alive, where sound logic would have got him killed.
Jurgen had taught him long ago truly to listen to the rhythm of the ancient woods, to be completely still, so quiet that eventually you became one with the forest and could sense the beating of its heart. That sense told him to be ready for the worst.
Jurgen … He pushed the thought away as he passed the head of the column and cautiously followed the tracks of the advance squad. Looking over his shoulder he saw Gregory stealthily moving opposite him on the trail to his right.
The two pressed forward as the rain began to let up.
Dennis heard the chatter of a squirrel, looked up and caught a glimpse of Alwin, crouched behind a fallen tree just back from the top of a low rise. He made for him, crawling the last fifty feet to stay concealed from whatever might be on the other side of the ridge.
Alwin didn’t talk, he simply pointed to Dennis, then pointed with two fingers to his own eyes and gestured towards the top of the rise, the hand signal for Dennis to go forward and see for himself.
Dennis nodded, crawling under the fallen tree and followed Alwin’s track on the slushy ground, trying to ignore the icy dampness seeping through his clothing.
As he moved slowly, he suddenly became aware of the scent of smoke hanging heavy in the air. It had been masked by the rain. On a clear day, he would have smelled it a half-mile farther back. There was more than wood scent to it, something else – cooking meat, perhaps?
He reached the crest, picking a spot between two boulders, crawled up between them, then cautiously raised his head.
Smoke concealed most of the clearing. The smoke was thick, clinging to the ground, and there was far too much of it to have come only from morning cooking fires. He knew what it meant even before an errant breeze blew the smoke away for a moment. The entire clearing, several hundred yards across, was revealed. In the centre, on top of a low ridge, Brendan’s Stockade was nothing but a flame-scorched, still-smouldering ruin. With a cold chill he realized that the scent of cooking meat was the stench of burned bodies.
What had happened?
His eyes darted back and forth, trying to soak up information, to evaluate if there was an immediate threat to his men, to see if they had just walked into a trap.
Nothing moved on the far ridge.
The wooden stockade had been breached at the gate with a battering ram mounted on rough wooden wheels. Scaling ladders leaned drunkenly against the wall to either side of the gate.
The moat had never been much, really nothing more than a ditch full of water that stank in the summer and froze over in the winter. He could see where the ice had been broken and had yet to refreeze. The fort must have been attacked late yesterday evening or during the night.
The open slopes around the fort were carpeted with Tsurani dead, perhaps a hundred or more. He stared at them for a moment. Curiously, many were lying facing downslope, as if killed while running away – and Dennis knew the Tsurani never ran away; a knot of them were clustered in the south-west corner of the clearing, piled on top of each other. Obviously they had made a last stand there, but against whom? Had the garrison been strong enough to sally forth and attack the Tsurani downhill, the walls and gates would still be standing and Hartraft’s Marauders would be inside at this very moment eating a warm meal.
If Brendan’s Stockade had fallen, where were the Tsurani? Dennis had been fighting them for the entire war, and they never left their dead to rot unless killed to the last man. Either way, the winners should now be putting out the fires and repairing the gate, for either side would hold this stockade once taken.
Nothing moved. It was a stockade of the dead.
‘There’s nothing right in this.’
Gregory had slipped up so silently that his whispered voice gave Dennis a start. Damn him, he enjoyed doing that, sneaking up and thus showing his skill, but Dennis didn’t let his flash of anger show.
‘Brendan and his lads are finished,’ Gregory whispered, ‘but so are the Tsurani.’
Dennis said nothing. In spite of the snow vultures were already circling in. A mile or more back he had noticed an absence of crows and ravens in the forest – inactive at night, they were usually noisy and busy first thing in the morning – now he knew where they were … enjoying a feast. A vulture dropped down inside the smoking ruins of the fort and did not come back out, yet another indicator that no one was left alive inside.
Could it be that the Tsurani had retreated at his approach?
No. If there were enough of them to take Brendan, they would stay and make a fight of it. The fall of this stockade, along with the Tsurani holding Mad Wayne’s to the north-west, made a hole twenty miles wide in the picket chain that covered the northern front. Why take this crucial point only to abandon it?
Ambush?
He looked back over his shoulder. Gregory was carefully looking about as well, and Dennis realized that the Natalese scout had been scanning the woods to either side, looking for any indicators that a trap was closing in.
Nothing. The crows and ravens were all down in the clearing, feasting, so there was none of their noisy cackling in the forest. The other sounds were normal: the ice-covered trees creaking in the breeze, the tinkling sound of now-light rain, the calls of other birds, and nothing else.
There was no ambush: it would already have been sprung.
Their eyes met and both had reached the same conclusion.
‘Dark Brothers,’ Dennis whispered.
Gregory nodded an agreement. ‘Unless the last Tsurani and the last Kingdom soldier conspired to kill one another at the same moment, that’s my guess.’
What he saw started to fit together. A Tsurani force had besieged the fort. Ringing the edge of the clearing he could see where the snow had been trampled down, and the torn remains of a dozen of their tents littered the ground, bits of canvas sticking out of the icy slush. Their besieging camp was at the edge of the forest less than a hundred yards away. Cooking pots still hung over cold fire-pits, and a battle pennant leaned against a half-collapsed tent covered with ice. He could even make out the spot where they had forged together their rough-hewn battering ram, for the stump of the freshly-cut tree was coated with melting ice.
Perhaps the Tsurani had just taken the fort, or were venturing an attack when the Dark Brothers had hit them, pressing right through to finish off Brendan’s defenders as well. The pattern of bodies indicated that the Tsurani had tried to break out, heading towards the south-west corner of the clearing and the trail that ran straight back to territory they held. The piled-up knot of dead were stopped a good hundred yards short of the main trail which headed into the heart of Tsurani-held territory.
He stared at the trail for a moment, feeling a knot in his stomach. He had walked it often enough as a boy; it was the trail back to his family’s estates … He forced his attention away from bitter memory and back to the present.
With fifty men in Brendan’s garrison the Tsurani would not have ventured an attack with less than two hundred. If the Dark Brothers had come into the fray it meant there were at least three hundred of them, maybe more. They didn’t risk a fight like this unless the odds were on their side. He had to know. With only sixty-five of his men left, four of the wounded having survived the night march and still needing to be carried, it was a deadly situation if the moredhel were still in the area.
He caught the scent of Tinuva. It was strange, there was something vaguely different about the scent of elves, not a perfume, but it seemed to carry a warmth, a vitality of life with it, like the first morning of spring. He felt the elf’s breath.
‘They’re here. Moredhel,’ Tinuva whispered, his voice drifting so gently it could not have been heard more than half a dozen feet away.
Dennis nodded. ‘How many?’
Tinuva weighed the question for what seemed to Dennis a long time. The elves’ sense of time was far more stately than humans’. After a long while, he said, ‘At least two hundred, maybe more.’
‘Are you certain?’ asked Dennis.
‘No,’ replied the elf. ‘But do you see any moredhel bodies out there?’
‘No,’ conceded Dennis.
‘Any dead or wounded they carried off. They would have had to come in numbers so overwhelming that the garrison and the Tsurani were quickly overrun, else we would see more sign of them. Look.’
Dennis looked to where the elf pointed and not understanding, finally asked, ‘What am I looking for?’
‘There are no broken moredhel arrows. They have cleared this area of their passing. They don’t want us to know they’ve been here.’
Gregory nodded. Pointing to the smoking char that had been the stockade, he said, ‘That’s sort of difficult to ignore, my friend.’
Tinuva said, ‘But if you found it in the spring, might you not think the Tsurani had overrun the fort and left behind this memento?’
Dennis didn’t hesitate. ‘No, the Tsurani would have claimed this position. To the north is the abandoned mine road that leads into the mountains. To the east are the marshlands and mountains. With the Tsurani controlling Mad Wayne’s and most of the land west of here … From here they could raid south behind our lines until we drove them out.’ Suddenly Dennis felt a stab of alarm. ‘The Dark Brothers are still close by!’ he hissed quietly.
‘They’re probably tending their wounded and waiting for the snow to stop before they return to dispose of the Tsurani dead,’ Gregory said in a hoarse whisper. ‘I don’t think they know we are here though,’ He glanced skyward as the snow slackened.
‘Don’t risk your life on that thought, my friend,’ Tinuva said, again his voice was a drifting shimmer barely heard.
‘Circle,’ Dennis whispered.
Dennis slid back down from boulders. Spying Alwin, he gestured for him to remain in position, indicating that the three of them would circle around the fort and that moredhel were in the area. After nine years in the field, the Marauders had a sophisticated system of hand signals to cover most situations. Alwin signed that he understood and would comply.
Having approached the fort from the west, Dennis started north, following the direction of the low ridge. The realm of the moredhel was to the north, though it didn’t necessarily mean that was the direction they had attacked from. Besides, the next major trail, the one that connected Brendan’s Stockade and Mad Wayne’s Fort, entered at the north-west corner of the clearing. Perhaps there would be signs there that could help unravel the mystery.
As he drifted along the ridge, staying low, he kept the remains of Brendan’s Stockade in view. Yet another link to the past lost within the last day, he thought.
The stockade was one of a dozen such along the Yabon frontier, garrisoned out of Tyr-Sog. Unlike the mountains to the east, which were dominated by major passes guarded by the border barons – Ironpass, Northwarden, and High Castle – the western mountains were shot through with trails and little passes. Smuggling in the west was common, but none of the passes was sufficient for any large-scale invasion southward. So the stockades had been constructed over the years.
Each was owned by a trader or innkeeper, who kept it repaired out of profits, while the Baron of Tyr-Sog and the Earl of LaMut paid for the garrison ensconced within; they were much-utilized stops for traders and caravans heading down into the heart of the Kingdom and as such very profitable before the war.
Brendan’s had been one of the more successful stops on the trade routes; from here one could turn south to the Kingdom proper, west toward Ylith or LaMut, or north for a shortcut route that would eventually lead to Yabon. Now Brendan and his family were certain to lie dead within.
Dennis kept his eyes busy as he circled, but he felt regret. Brendan had been a good sort, open-handed to those he liked, always ready to offer a pint and a joint of meat to someone down on their luck. As a boy Dennis had stopped there often enough with his father and Jurgen when they went hunting together. Brendan was that type that never seemed to age, perpetually frozen at a stocky middle-age, gravel-voiced, with an expansive girth that cascaded over a thick leather belt, a first-class brawler; and a damned good friend to all who lived a precarious existence along the frontier.
He was, as well, a notorious cheat when it came to gambling, a fact Dennis had witnessed when Jurgen had caught him at it. The fight that resulted had become something of a legend, with Jurgen’s nose permanently mashed over to one side and Brendan missing part of an ear.
The two had been good friends after that, both appreciating the mettle of the other, but never again did they venture into a game of dice or the new craze of cards with numbers and pictures painted on them. During the night march Dennis had thought about Brendan, and had pondered how he would react to the news that Jurgen was dead. No need to worry about that now and he wondered which had greeted the other at the entrance of Lims-Kragma’s Hall. Perhaps now they could gamble together again, if such games were allowed over there, while they waited to be judged by the Goddess of the Dead.
After covering two hundred yards the rise of ground dropped down towards a narrow forest stream, partly frozen over. The trail to Mad Wayne’s Fort, a position now in Tsurani hands, followed the stream and he paused, looking down on it from above.
There were tracks … and lying by the stream on the far side of the trail was a body, a Tsurani, his throat cut, the ground around him an icy pink.
The three waited for several minutes, carefully scanning the trail, stream, and surrounding woods. Dennis finally looked at Tinuva, who nodded. The elf pulled a bow out from under his cloak, nocked an arrow, and drew it half back.
Dennis took a deep breath and slipped down the trail, pouncing catlike, wincing slightly at the sound of the icy slush crunching beneath his feet. He looked first to the north-west in the direction of Mad Wayne’s and away from the smoking ruins of Brendan’s Stockade. The trail disappeared into the early morning mist.
Nothing.
Gregory landed beside him, swung out his bow and drew it, pointing it up the trail, tensed and ready.
Still nothing.
Dennis looked down at the ground and his heart stopped. It was churned into a muddy slop which was quickly icing over. He moved slowly, scanning for details. A large number had passed down the trail, heading towards the stockade; he could see frozen imprints that must have been made during the night.
The prints weren’t made by the heavy sandals and footcloths of the Tsurani, but by the booted feet of moredhel, men, and the deeper hoofprints of horses and mountain trolls.
What was chilling, though, was that there were prints heading back up the trail and they were fresh, so fresh that droplets of moisture were still oozing into them as ice formed. But not as many as had come in. It was hard to tell – perhaps fifty at most, and no horses.
Battle losses? No, he had not seen any moredhel corpses around the fort. There should have at least been some wounded, drops of blood, a dragging footstep, but these moredhel had been running. Why the haste?
He looked up. Tinuva was still above him, watchful. Dennis pointed to the trail then to the north-west and made the gesture for moredhel, then held his finger tips to his throat, indicating that it was only minutes, a matter of heart beats since their passing.
Tinuva nodded and moved out. Dennis looked at Gregory who set off as well, crossing to the other side of the trail and moving into the stream where he could travel without leaving tracks.
Dennis slipped down to the Tsurani body and touched its leg. The body was just stiffening, dead several hours at the most; had he died earlier in the night rigor would have set in. Looking at the ground, he could figure it out easily enough. The man was a sentry, guarding the trail while the attack on the fort went in, or had in fact already taken the position. It had been a clean kill, stealthy, throat cut from ear to ear and no sign of struggle other than the final spasmodic thrashing of a dying man.
Dennis looked back to the north-west and caught a glimpse of Gregory who was looking back. Dennis pointed to himself and then towards the stockade. Gregory nodded and disappeared into the mist-shrouded forest.
Choosing speed over caution Dennis got back up on to the trail and started off at a slow trot.
The task now was to find out which direction the rest of the moredhel had taken. If the band had split up, scattering after the attack to throw off any pursuit, he’d swing his own men in behind the group heading towards Mad Wayne’s Fort, finish them, then reoccupy Brendan’s. He’d send Gregory and Tinuva back to Lord Brucal’s base camp to ask for reinforcements while Dennis and his company repaired the stockade. But, if the moredhel were indeed returning in force to clean up the Tsurani dead, as Tinuva speculated, Dennis wanted to be well clear of the area before they got back. Defending a rebuilt stockade was one thing; fighting among the ashes on an exposed hillock while being hit from all sides was quite another.
He slowed as he reached the edge of the forest, slipping in behind a towering pine. Closer now to the stockade, he could pick out more details though the smoke was still thick. There were only a couple of Tsurani dead around the northern approach, for the bulk of them were by the gate and the road that headed south-west and the safety of their territory.
As he moved slowly, he noticed something down by the stream. A dark mound rose up amid a small copse of trees. It was almost covered with snow. It took a moment for Dennis’s eye to make sense of the dark shape, but then he saw it: moredhel dead, several dozen of them and the picture began to fit together in Dennis’s mind.
Clever bastards. They had carried off their dead to leave a puzzle, hiding them nearby. In another two hours, Dennis would have been looking at just another snow-covered bump in the earth. If that force was as large as Tinuva speculated, most of them might be heading up to visit the Tsurani now holding Mad Wayne’s, but chances were the rest were lurking nearby, watching, most likely on the other side of the clearing.
Damn clever. Then a more obvious possibility occurred to him.
If we and the Tsurani were fighting a battle here, Dennis thought, both sides would most likely be rushing up reinforcements even now. They’d reach the clearing and stop, the same way we did. Dennis wondered if at this very second there were other eyes, Tsurani eyes, gazing at the fort and wondering what to do next. Curiosity, however, would lead most finally to venture in. Once out in the open the trap would be sprung. He realized with a cold certainty that the moredhel heading up the trail to Mad Wayne’s were not a force heading out on an additional raid, or fleeing. They were an anvil, waiting for the trap to be sprung and for those fleeing the trap to run straight into them. It could be that they were less than a couple of hundred yards off, and no more than a quarter of a mile. As certain as he was of anything, Dennis knew that he was being watched by moredhel scouts. If they hadn’t seen Tinuva or Gregory, they might think him an advance trailbreaker who would soon return the way he had come to carry word to his commander; they would wait until the Kingdom soldiers returned in force, then spring their trap.
Now what?
Trap the trappers most likely deployed on the far side of the clearing, go after the smaller group circling behind him, or get the hell out now?
Use caution when dealing with their kind, Jurgen had always said. His old friend would have told him to get the hell out. If Brendan and the Tsurani had been wiped out by them, there were undoubtedly enough moredhel nearby to annihilate Dennis’s small command. Had the moredhel scout who was surely watching him known that a short distance down the trail sixty-odd cold, tired, and hungry Kingdom soldiers waited, he would be carrying word at this moment. Dennis knew what he must do.
Get out, circle around, then warn off any Kingdom troops that might be approaching from the south. He knew he would have to stand up, glance around as if satisfied that no danger lingered and move quickly back to where his command waited. Let the moredhel think him a solitary scout. Dennis would not be returning this way, and neither would any Kingdom force if he could intercept them. Let the Dark Brothers and the Tsurani fight with each other for a while. The moredhel would not linger to occupy a human stockade, and if the Tsurani managed to drive them away, Duke Brucal, Earl Vandros of LaMut, and Baron Moyet could decide how to drive them out of here and Mad Wayne’s next spring.
Dennis and his scouts had signals to use in these situations. He would remove his heavy cloak, shaking it as if he was trying to rid it of excess water. That would let Tinuva and Gregory know he was under scrutiny and they needed to withdraw without being seen. Dennis was on the verge of standing up to do just this when he saw the enemy. Stepping out of the forest, down on the south-west side of the clearing, a lone Tsurani appeared, easily picked out by his bright blue lacquered armour.
Dennis grinned. Damned fool, typical of them. Make a big show of bravado. A new plan instantly formed in Dennis’s mind. Except for a couple of their best units the Tsurani were blundering fools in the forest compared to his Marauders. The moredhel had to know additional Tsurani were here. In fact, it lessened the likelihood the moredhel knew that Dennis’s unit was nearby. The trap was set for the Tsurani. Let the two sides slaughter each other while we slip away, or with luck the Tsurani will so weaken the moredhel we might even finishthem both off and reclaim the fort for ourselves. This might actually get amusing, he thought with a wolfish smile, and then he heard the crack of a branch.
‘It is a trap,’ Force Leader Asayaga hissed, gesturing towards the smoking ruins of the stockade.
Sugama said nothing, but Asayaga could already read what his second-in-command was thinking, and what he would do.
The night march had been an exercise in stupidity and waste. Two hours of double-quick march in daylight could have brought them to this position, but instead they had endured a frigid, miserable night. His men were exhausted, shivering from the wretched cold, and the perverse gods of this world were sending down bucketful’s of snow.
Now this damnable disaster. It was obvious that Force Leader Hagamaka of the Gineisa had launched the attack without waiting for the reinforcements Asayaga was bringing up. The thought of a Minwanabi ally failing so miserably, so publicly, might have brought Asayaga some pleasure, except for the sight of so many fine soldiers of the Empire dead, slaughtered in a futile battle. It was yet another tragic waste of good men. But why the urgent command for a night march through dangerous territory if Hagamaka wasn’t going to wait?
He first suspected that Hagamaka had intended to embarrass him, to order reinforcements up, not wait and launch the attack, then accuse him of failing to arrive in a timely manner.
Yet, as he surveyed the carnage, he wondered: it was obvious the attack had turned into a rout, a pile of nearly two score dead were clumped on a low rise not a hundred paces into the clearing, and a trail of dead led all the way back to the fort.
No garrison of fifty Kingdom troops could have done this. Did they have more hidden inside the ruined fort, or a force waiting in the woods which had cut Hagamaka off? Then, if so, why the abandoned fort?
The Kingdom considered this a key link in their chain which guarded the shadowy northern front. From the Lake of the Sky’s eastern shore down to the northernmost peak of the Grey Tower Mountains, only the chains of stockades prevented the Tsurani from sweeping eastward, then south into Tyr-Sog and the other Kingdom cities of Yabon. Earlier in the year the forces of the Empire had taken Mad Wayne’s fort to the north-west. If they could also hold Brendan’s, they could control enough of this area to stage an invasion down into Yabon in the spring. With a second invasion pressing out of the Free Cities to the south-west, the Kingdom would lose Yabon inside a year. The Kingdom knew this, and were desperate to garrison and supplying these small fortresses. If they had destroyed Hagamaka they would, at this very moment, be barricading the shattered gate, making repairs … and looting the dead. Messages would already have been sent south for more reinforcements.
Asayaga shook his head. No. Something was dreadfully wrong with this entire situation. He looked over at Sugama but knew there would be no sage advice. He was, after all, of House Tondora, allegedly assigned to Asayaga’s force for training in anticipation of the Tondora joining the Warlord’s host in the spring. It was an unusual but not unprecedented situation to have a junior officer train with the forces of an ally, but everyone knew that this was simply a charade. The Tondora – while publicly ‘politically neutral’, in the Great Council – were Clan Shonshoni and a client House of the Minwanabi, so everything they did was at Minwanabi bidding.
Though supposedly second-in-command, his bloodline and rank in the courts at home would have placed him far above what Asayaga could ever hope to aspire to. So there could only be one reason he was in a subordinate role now: to keep close watch on Asayaga. Asayaga was a son of the Kodeko, a minor house, but of Clan Kanazawai, and the Shinzawai were most likely next on the list of opponents to be crushed by the Minwanabi. The Minwanabi were far too clever to openly confront House Keda, the most powerful Kanazawai Clan family, and one of the Five Great Families of the Empire. But the Shinzawai, while an old and honourable family, with a venerated lord in Kamatsu, retired abruptly from the war with the other families in the Blue Wheel Party, dealing the Warlord a major setback. The move had actually helped the Minwanabi cause, but had also marked the Shinzawai as a political force to be reckoned with. And the Minwanabi never ignored such potential opponents. By discrediting Clan Kanazawai, the Minwanabi would weaken the Keda and their allies. It was but another ploy in the Great Game.
Against that possibility, Asayaga of House Kodeko was ordered to remain in the war by the clan leaders. Ostensibly of the Yellow Flower Party – still allied with the Warlord – Asayaga was the logical choice to be left behind to keep an eye on the Minwanabi. Someone had to be, for their plots and schemes were unending.
Asayaga recalled the disgust he had felt when word of the loss of Lord Sezu of the Acoma had reached him; while of Clan Hadama, Lord Sezu was nevertheless an honourable man worthy of respect. His death had been the result of a manipulation of the Minwanabi sub-commander, who had reinforcements arrive ‘too late’ to save Sezu and his son Lanakota from death. Now only Mara, his daughter, was left to shepherd her house, though by rumours reaching the front, she seemed adept at doing so.
Asayaga kept his disquiet to himself; this late arrival smacked of the same sort of machinations as that betrayal of Sezu in the first year of the war, and that made him uneasy. Fighting the soldiers of the Kingdom was one thing, and even facing the Forest Demons, those known as Dark Brothers to the enemy, was simple warfare. But the treachery of the Great Game, reaching as it did through the rift from the home world to this distant and icy frontier, that was an enemy impossible to confront directly. Besides, even back home Asayaga never liked politics. He took after his father in that regard, and it was for that reason above all others why the Kodeko had remained a minor house in Clan Kanazawai.
Asayaga’s gaze drifted to his senior Strike Leader, Tasemu, the true second-in-command, a veteran from the very start of the war. The one-eyed fighter nodded his understanding that they needed to talk in private, then motioned for them to pull back.
Sugama saw the interplay and cleared his throat. ‘We must find out what happened, Force Commander. Perhaps both sides annihilated each other. We can take the fort now and hold it, gaining great glory. Think of what would be said if this kingdom fort was indeed abandoned and then we simply ran away. If we miss this opportunity the disgrace will be known throughout the army.’
And you would be certain to spread it, Asayaga thought. For that matter Sugama, by that mere statement, had forced his hand. The comment had been made as friendly advice, and if ignored, Sugama would be seen to have been in the right and have won his point in the Game. It was impossible now to withdraw without first sending someone up to the fort and thereby reveal his presence.
Asayaga silently cursed. He looked back at Tasemu who stared back impassively.
‘What are you thinking, Strike Leader?’ Asayaga asked.
The mere fact that a Force Commander asked a Strike Leader for an opinion obviously shocked Sugama; but, no matter which clan he belonged to, he had to learn to leave Tsurani rigidity behind if he was going to fight with Force Commander Asayaga. This was war on an alien world and you didn’t live long if you held to forms and customs.
‘A third force did this,’ Tasemu announced.
‘Who?’
But Asayaga already knew the answer: the idea was half-formed within minutes of him first creeping up to the edge of the clearing.
‘The Forest Demons.’
‘Demons? Creatures of myth! Impossible!’ Sugama exclaimed.
‘They are mortal,’ Asayaga said, ‘but those here first called them demons because they are most difficult to close with. They drift among the trees like the mist, and they can strike without warning. The Kingdom call them “the Dark Brotherhood”. They are kin to those called “elves” we believe.’
Tasemu volunteered, ‘And they do fight like demons when they wish, Force Leader. They are … difficult.’
The mere mention of them had sent a shiver through more than one of Asayaga’s men. They were a strange, unknown factor on this world. Logic would have dictated that these creatures should have allied themselves with the Kingdom in order to repel a foreign invader, as had the elves and the short men called ‘dwarves’. Yet they obviously had not. They were often not seen for as long as a year, then suddenly a patrol would vanish or an outpost would be overrun; and when it was clear that the Kingdom had not had a hand, it was possible to conclude only one thing: it had been the Dark Brothers. This third player in the drama made every commander in the north uneasy, since the Forest Demons’ actions were impossible to anticipate.
Yet it was not their unpredictability that disturbed his men. They were soldiers and expected to die if needs be; that was their place in the order of things. Yes, the war against the Kingdom – especially here on the northern frontier – was deadly, the fighting brutal. Often there was no time to care for wounded, who were given the honourable death of the blade lest they be taken prisoner and shame their houses by being made slaves or, worse, being hanged as one would a criminal or slave.
But at least the Kingdom soldiers were men. They fought with an honour that Asayaga found he had initially been surprised by in barbarians. There had been an unspoken truce at the siege of Crydee, where Kamatsu of the Shinzawai, Asayaga’s cousin, had commanded. Both sides had calmly and silently collected their dead several times and had burned them on pyres of honour, before returning to their respective lines without incident, to resume the fighting the next day. The siege had ended with the withdrawal of the forces of the Blue Wheel Party.
Yet that siege had taught Asayaga what to expect from the Kingdom soldiers. With the Dark Brothers, however, the killing was different. More than once he had found bodies, Tsurani and Kingdom, butchered in horrible ways, the mutilation obviously done while the victim was still alive. Even the dead they disfigured: ears lopped off as trophies, heads placed on stakes. It was as if they loved to kill humans, and did so for the simple pleasure it gave them. And you could almost never see them coming. A superstition had come into being among the soldiers in the north, that if they died and were given funeral rites here on Midkemia, their spirits would be somehow sent back to their homeworld on Kelewan. But without speaking of it, the men had come to believe that should the Forest Demons butcher the dead and leave them for the carrion eaters, the spirits of the slaughtered Tsurani would wander this cold and alien landscape until the end of time. No priest of any order had been able to counter this belief. Asayaga, like every commander in the north, knew this superstition gave the Dark Brothers an advantage they scarcely needed.
He looked back at Sugama, hoping that Tasemu’s words had registered some doubt.
‘Shall I go to the fort, Force Commander, and lay claim to it?’ Sugama asked evenly, as if Tasemu’s words had merely been the whistling of the wind.
Asayaga was about to tell him to go to the devils of the underworld, but he held his tongue. He was trapped. A plan formed for a brief instant. He would order a retreat, hold Sugama back for a few minutes and slip a blade into his throat, thereby silencing him.
He knew his men would never ask what had become of Sugama when he caught up with them, but others back at the headquarters camp were not of House Kodeko, and they would almost certainly assume treachery if Sugama were the only casualty.
Send Sugama forward? No, damn it. If indeed the battle had been a mutual slaughter, or there was even the remote chance that the Kingdom troops had retreated after the fight, the shame of letting Sugama take the fort would be unbearable to his house. It would appear as well that he was a coward, ordering someone else to take the risk rather than set the proper example by doing it himself.
What was even more enraging was the realization that Sugama was following the same process of reasoning and thus dictating the rules of the game now being played.
Asayaga looked once more at Tasemu, but there was no need to say anything. Of the eighty men in his command most were new recruits; little more than boys called to serve by their blood ties to House Kodeko. They would obey without question, but they were untested. Asayaga would rely on his old core of twenty veterans, led by Tasemu, who knew the ways of this war. The Strike Leader nodded, raised a hand and gestured, Vashemi and Tarku, the most senior Patrol Leader and the wiliest old veteran without rank, respectively, half-stood and started back down the trail, checking to the rear as he went forward.
Asayaga shot a withering gaze at Sugama. ‘Stay here.’
Taking a deep breath, he stood up and stepped out of the forest and into the clearing. He strode forward, acting as if he was out for a morning walk along a road on his family’s estate, rather than advancing alone, fully exposed, heading towards a deserted, smoking ruin.
He passed the pile of bodies and as he drew closer he felt his heart constrict. All were dead, most from arrows, but the shafts had been snapped off by someone who wished to obscure the identity of the attackers. But the manner of death for some made it all too obvious. More than one of the warriors had been wounded first; but if it had been by Kingdom troops, the final dispatching would have been done with a certain professional respect for a worthy foe. A warrior from either side would often give the doomed a moment for final prayer and then cut his throat cleanly and quickly. He had done it often enough himself, both to Kingdom soldiers too injured to be taken back as slaves, and more than once to one of his own men whom he was forced to leave behind.
The dying had been murdered cruelly. Several had been decapitated. He slowed for a second, looking down at a face he vaguely recognized, an officer he had seen at times in camp. The mutilation was ghastly, the one most feared by any man. The agonized expression frozen on the dead man’s face was evidence enough that he had still been alive when the carving up had started.
Asayaga swallowed hard and kept going. The fort was now less than a hundred paces away: he was coming into easy arrowshot range. The gate was off its hinges, the inside of the compound visible, bodies littered the interior. Several vultures were perched on the expansive stomach of one of the dead.
Perhaps the fort was abandoned after all?
And yet …
He slowed. Something wasn’t right. The vultures, they weren’t eating, they had stopped and were looking not towards him but instead at something within the fort that he couldn’t see.
He stopped, and his hand went to the hilt of his sword.
Two things happened at nearly the same instant. The vultures, startled by something he couldn’t see inside the fort flapped their wings, croaking obscenely, struggling to lift into the air: and a shout of warning came from behind. It was Tasemu.
‘It’s a trap!’ Asayaga roared.
For the first few seconds he thought to rush the fort, but even as the vultures lifted off he knew someone was inside and if there was someone inside the smoking ruins of the barracks it meant there was most likely many of them, ready to hold the gate and riddle a charge with arrows.
He turned and sprinted back towards his men. Tasemu was standing out in the open, arms up, pointing back up the trail they had just come down.
‘Behind us!’ Tasemu cried, ‘The Forest Demons are coming!’
Asayaga stopped half-way between the fort and the edge of the clearing.
Damn them! We walked straight into it. It was clear what would happen. Already Sugama was ordering the men to rush the fort and take refuge.
No! That’s what the enemy want! They’ll block the gate: then we get caught in the open and shot full of arrows.
He had to think. He looked back at the fort. It had been but a dozen heartbeats since he had turned back from it. The vultures were barely clear of the gate, wings flapping. The shelter of it looked inviting: too inviting.
His men were streaming out of the woods, running hard, Sugama in the lead. Then one of the men, just barely out of the forest, collapsed, blood fountaining, an arrow driven through his throat.
Sugama came on quickly.
‘Hundreds of them!’ he shouted, his voice edged with panic.
In spite of the chaos Asayaga could not suppress a grin. They might all die in the next few minutes, but it was good to see Sugama get a taste of the reality of this world first.
Asayaga waved his sword over his head as a rallying signal.
When the men were less than ten yards off he pointed away from the fort to the north-west corner of the clearing.
‘Not the fort! Trap! Follow me!’
Sugama slowed for an instant, startled, as an arrow slashed past him. Then he turned to follow Asayaga.
Asayaga set off at a run. He had barely gone a dozen paces when he heard the blast of a horn echoing from the woods to the south. It was answered by another from within the fort!
He ran. The gate was no longer in view, and the west wall of the fort was now to his right and a hundred paces off. He led his column straight up the clearing, trying to keep an equal distance between the fort in the centre and the woods. An arrow skimmed past, kicking up a slushy spray of snow. He spared a quick glance at the fort. Dark forms lined the wall, bows raised. It was the Forest Demons, their distinctive visage clearly visible. Never had he seen so many of them and at such close quarters; before it had always been a furtive glance, a half-seeing as they drifted nightmarelike through the woods.
Asayaga had scouted this place several times over the last year and knew its layout. At the north-west corner a trail entered the clearing, leading to a fort taken by his command in the spring. It was four leagues to that place.
It would most likely be covered but it had to be tried. The east was Kingdom territory and impenetrable marshy ground for several leagues, a death trap. Straight north was the route to the realm of the Forest Demons, rocky game trails through high passes, a death trap as well.
Asayaga headed for the trail that might be either a trap, or a path to safety and then he saw someone stagger out from the trail clutching his chest, blood pulsing from between his clutching fingers. Stunned, he slowed to a stop as the dying person looked at him with blank eyes and then collapsed.
He stopped, not sure for an instant what to do next. He looked to his left, directly into the woods. Perhaps it was better to go that way rather than take the trail, for obviously something was covering that trail.
He started to run again, and his men following. Within seconds they were closing on the edge of the clearing and then a shower of arrows snapped out from the treeline, dropping half a dozen of his men.
Asayaga, sword held high, charged for the woods, praying that he could take one of his tormentors with him.
Dennis Hartraft stared into the eye of the archer poised not fifty paces away. The dark elf had his bow fully drawn and aimed. Remarkably, though, the moredhel had cracked a frozen branch when he stepped out from behind the tree to shoot – he must have been a relative youngster to make so basic a blunder.
It was, at best, a second of time since Dennis had heard that crack.
Time distorted and slowed; he saw the tips of the fingers relaxing, releasing the taut bowstring. Pushing off from the tree, he kicked backwards, eyes still fixed on his stalker. He saw the snap of mist breaking away from the bowstring, the blur of the arrow, the stinging brush of the feathers as the shaft creased his face.
He hit the ground, rolled across the trail, slammed up against a boulder. Two seconds, maybe three, had passed. He was on his feet, saw the elf flinging back his cloak, exposing a quiver.
Instinct drove him forward. In a single bound he vaulted the narrow stream, landed hard, slipping on the icy slope, then started up the rise, reaching for the dagger at his belt. The moredhel had the arrow drawn from the quiver, was reversing it, fitting the nock to the string.
Dennis sprinted forward, lost his footing on an ice-covered boulder, slipped and fell, nearly dropping his dagger, and came back up to his feet. The dark elf was drawing his bow and he knew he had lost the race.
Snakelike he lashed out with an underhand throw of the dagger. The spin was off, the dagger striking the elf in the chest, hilt first. But the impact startled him, he lost his grip on the bowstring and the arrow snapped off, missing Dennis.
Dennis leapt forward even as the dark elf dropped his bow and reached for his own dagger. Dennis dived in, catching the moredhel in the chest with his right shoulder. The pain to his old wound shocked him but he heard his foe grunt as well as the wind got knocked out of him.
The two fell together in a tangled heap, Dennis clutching at the dark elf’s arm, preventing him from drawing his blade. They grappled, rolling on the ground. The moredhel attempted to cry out; Dennis clamped his hand over his mouth. The moredhel bit down and Dennis clamped his jaws together to cut off his own cry of pain.
The two rolled back and forth on the slushy ground, kicking and clawing in a primal fight for survival. He caught a glimpse of his foe’s eyes – so strange, so like Tinuva’s, yet different, filled with fury and murderous rage.
As if from a great distance he heard shouts, but all his world was now focused on the dark elf, who writhed like an enraged serpent as he sought to escape. They rolled again, Dennis on top, faces only inches apart. The moredhel head-butted Dennis in the face. The blow stunned Dennis, blurring his vision.
They rolled down the slope and crashed into the icy creek. Dennis lost his grip and felt the moredhel break free of his grasp and draw his dagger. The moredhel’s arm snapped up. And then he moved with a spasmodic jerk. An arrow had slammed into the dark elf’s chest, going clean through his body. A mist of blood exploded from the elf’s back.
With a gurgling cry the moredhel staggered to his feet and started to run, blood pulsing out. Dennis gasped for breath and caught a glimpse of Tinuva standing up on the trail, already drawing a second arrow, tracking the moredhel, but then held his shot as the Dark Brother staggered into the clearing.
Tinuva relaxed his grip on his bow and looked down at Dennis.
‘Move now!’ Tinuva hissed.
Dennis, his heart pounding, shoulder aching, came to his feet and started up the slope to Tinuva’s side.
‘Trap, we’re in a trap!’ Tinuva announced.
As he gained the trail he caught a glimpse of the dying moredhel collapsing and confronting him, the column of Tsurani. There had been only one Tsurani, and now there was near on a hundred and he realized that his struggle with the moredhel must have dragged out for several dangerously long minutes.
Too much was happening too quickly and he leaned over, gasping for breath. The shock of his fight and near death was having its impact and he fought down an urge to vomit. Tinuva grabbed him by the shoulder and pushed him back off the trail.
‘The moredhel net is wide,’ Tinuva said quickly. ‘They are waiting on the trail, two hundred yards from here. Ambush prepared. ‘They didn’t know we were near and the one you killed was one of their flanking scouts. They will find us in a few minutes, crossing the trail we made in the snow. Gregory sent me back to tell you.’
At that same instant he saw that the Tsurani were turning, shying away from the trail and heading straight into the woods in the direction where his own men were concealed. The move triggered a response: a shower of arrows snapped out from the forest.
Damn! Now we are revealed.
He sprinted up the slope, Tinuva bounding forward by his side. Ground that had taken minutes to cover before he crossed in seconds. He caught a glimpse of Alwin Barry and a dozen of his men poised around the boulders firing down on the Tsurani. Several of the Tsurani had their alien short-bows out and crouching behind the stumps of trees in the clearing, were shooting back.
Horns now echoed all around them. From the east side of the clearing he saw dark-cloaked forms, a hundred or more charging, while others poured out of the fort. More were coming up from the south. It was chaos. He needed to think clearly, but the smashing blow to his head from the dark moredhel still had him stunned. Looking down at the Tsurani he saw one of them barely a hundred feet away charging, sword held high. There was something vaguely familiar about him, an enemy he had faced before.
‘Stop fighting!’
The booming cry echoed through the forest. It was Gregory, running hard, coming through the woods. He leapt onto the boulder they had hidden behind earlier and extended his arms wide so that even the Tsurani in the clearing could see him.
‘Stop fighting! Dark Brothers are closing in!’ Gregory shouted. ‘We settle our differences later!’ Then he said something else and Dennis recognized it as Tsurani. ‘If we fight one another, we die! No honour in throwing our lives away!’
The Tsurani warrior leading the charge slowed, then came to a halt.
Gregory said something else and pointed back across the clearing. ‘Those we call the Dark Brotherhood are upon us in strength.’
The leader turned and looked.
Gregory’s words forced Dennis to focus his attention.
I am in command, he remembered, and he felt a flicker of anger towards Gregory overstepping his bounds yet again, and yet again being right. If we and the Tsurani fight now, we all die. He turned the anger on himself. I should have grasped this immediately; Gregory realized it. Jurgen would have too.
He turned about in a full circle, judging sound, distances, ignoring the Tsurani. He saw a line of horse-mounted warriors emerge from the trail that headed south, one of them holding a banner aloft – human renegades serving with their moredhel masters. Dennis felt his stomach knot; the only time the moredhel hired mercenary cavalry was when they were mounting an offensive; they had no use for humans otherwise.
A dozen or more trolls swarmed about the standard-bearer like dogs about to be unleashed for the hunt. Others on foot were pouring out of the forest from the far side of the clearing.
Main force there, he realized.
From behind, to the west and north-west he heard horns. The blocking force on the trail were spreading out and closing the net. If they delay us even for a few minutes the mounted riders and other fell creatures accompanying them will close in for the kill.
It was obvious they planned for a fleeing force to turn and go up the trail, and straight into their doom.
To the north, nothing, only a few sentries. Arrogant of them: it was the way back to moredhel territory and they had left it open.
North then, it was the only way out!
He looked back to the clearing again, and the Tsurani were already gone, moving rapidly to the north. All he could see were their retreating backs.
Damn them, they were supposed to be the diversion and now he was the diversion instead!
Furious with himself he held a hand up, circled it then snapped it down and set off at a run, his men following.
He bounded back towards the trail to Mad Wayne’s, praying that perhaps the Tsurani had taken that turn and stumbled into the moredhel’s trap.
He hit the edge of the trail and without hesitation jumped down. Within seconds his men were sliding down around him.
He looked down. No Tsurani tracks.
Damn! They had slipped out some other way.
A man next to him, Beragorn, was an old veteran. He grunted and turned, clutching at his stomach where an arrow with black feathers quivered.
Out of the mist he saw them coming, half-a-dozen moredhel. More filtering through the trees to either side of the trail. Instinctively he crouched, and an arrow snapped overhead. More men were sliding down onto the trail, turning, ready to fight.
No. In a minute those in the field will close in.
‘Alwin! Block force. Then across creek!’ he shouted. ‘The rest of you, follow me north!’
He hesitated for a second, looking at Beragorn who was down on his knees. He reached for his dagger, to do the task any friend would do for a comrade when the moredhel were closing in.
Damn, his dagger was lost.
He glanced at Beragorn, whose eyes were glazing over as he fell backward against a bole. Taking a breath, Dennis seized the shaft sticking out of Beragorn’s stomach, and with a single push, jammed it up into his old comrade’s heart. The man stiffened and died.
Dennis sprinted off the trail, leaping the creek and running up the slope where he had fought the moredhel sentry.
This time his footing held. He looked back.
The tail end of his command were just now crossing the trail.
Alwin had heard him, calling out half a dozen men who stood to either side of the trail, their first volley of arrows slowing the dark elves’ charge. A couple more men went down from a return volley. He caught a glimpse of Tinuva leaping the stream, landing, turning, bow drawn. He let fly, aiming back towards Brendan’s Stockade. It was a long shot, yet it dropped a horse at the head of the trail, throwing the rider. Gregory sprinted past him, dodging through the trees.
‘Follow Gregory!’ Dennis shouted, pointing the way.
He waited a few more seconds, grabbing the shoulder of a man who started to slip back down the slope, pulling him up and over. It was the priest. He shoved him forward, screaming at him to run. He was about to shout for Alwin to break but the sergeant knew his business. The six men holding the trail leapt down to the stream and bounded across. Archers to either side of Dennis gave covering fire, killing two of the moredhel who tried to follow. Tinuva raced past, his retreat clear signal enough to withdraw. Riders were on the trail. Out in the clearing hundreds of the enemy were swarming in. But what of the other enemy, the Tsurani? There was no time to think of that now. It was time to run.
Behind him, the bloodlusting cries of the moredhel echoed in the clearing and the forest.
The hunt was on.
• Chapter Three • (#ulink_b93b3b0b-a91a-5e91-9fe3-cc03f0967ac0)
Moredhel (#ulink_b93b3b0b-a91a-5e91-9fe3-cc03f0967ac0)
ASAYAGA GASPED FOR BREATH.
‘Keep moving, keep moving, keep moving …’
The words were a chant, a prayer, blanking out his own agony.
One of his men was down, collapsed in the middle of the slushy trail. He slowed. Strike Leader Tasemu was standing over the man, struggling to pull him up.
‘Keep moving,’ Asayaga snapped, slapping the fallen warrior across the shoulder blades with the flat of his sword.
The warrior looked up. It was Sugama.
‘Damn you. You are an officer!’ Asayaga hissed at him so the men wouldn’t overhear. ‘Act like one. You were suppose to run lead with the scouts!’ As much as he despised the Tondora dog, he would not undermine his authority in front of the men. Not for the first time, Asayaga cursed this war in which officers not of his own house were sent to serve with his men.
Sugama staggered to his feet and lurched forward. Tasemu gazed at Asayaga and shook his head. Asayaga said nothing.
He looked back over his shoulder. His command was strung out on the trail behind them. Those who were not totally preoccupied with their own pain had seen the exchange, the humiliation of an officer from one House by another. They would of course say nothing, for the behaviour of their Force Commander made it clear it was to be ignored. Yet, they would think on it, and some might mention it quietly while on guard duty or around a cook-fire to those who had not witnessed it, and many of his men would dwell on one thing: that one whom they were expected to obey without question was obviously a flawed man, one who had been sent to the front for reasons having nothing to do with his competence as a soldier. He was either a man acting as a spy for the Minwanabi, an incompetent someone higher up in his clan wished to see conveniently dead, or both. That would give the men pause at critical moments, and Asayaga knew other men might die as a result.
If only there had been one more Kodeko officer left alive. Only one other Kodeko son remained on the homeworld, and should Asayaga be slain, the mantle of leadership would fall to his younger brother Tacumbe, but the last son of the House would never be sent here. Again he silently cursed a cruel destiny that left his house with no other competent officers at hand, and Minwanabi machinations that placed this fool at his right hand. If they survived this nightmare, he would name Tasemu his Force Leader, even though the man’s talents were better suited for his present role. He would return Sugama to his own family and let him deal with his shame. Fatalistically, Asayaga allowed himself the thought he couldn’t be more of an enemy to the House of Tondora than he already was. They can only kill me once, he thought as he again looked to see where his men were.
Motioning Sugama ahead he pressed on up the trail. Watching the back of the man as he hurried ahead, Asayaga wondered whether, if he fell, Tasemu would take commands from Sugama. Another very good reason not to get killed any time soon, he thought dryly.
The storm abated slightly as the day passed. As they turned a bend in the trail he could see a notch in the ridgeline ahead, the crests of the mountains to either side of the pass were concealed by the low grey clouds of the storm.
He paused for a moment, staring up the trail. He had never been this far north, for the ridgeline had always been a backdrop to his war, a distant mystery.
Hakaxa, his lead scout, was down on his knees, gasping for air, with Sugama bent double beside him. Hakaxa looked up as Asayaga approached.
‘Crest of trail just ahead.’
Tasemu grunted. ‘The crest. At the pass, they’ll have something there.’
Asayaga nodded. He looked back again. His men were staggering forward, pressing stoically up the steep incline.
‘Five minute rest here,’ Asayaga announced. ‘I’ll scout ahead.’
Tasemu cocked his head slightly, gazing at him with his one good eye. ‘No. Sugama with me.’
Tasemu gave him a bit of a hopeful gaze but Asayaga ignored it. No, there would be no knife in the back.
‘Sugama,’ Asayaga said quietly, and continued on. He could hear the ragged gasps for breath as Sugama struggled to stay up.
The storm was blowing straight into their faces from the north, and he could hear the moaning of the wind as it whistled through stunted trees in the pass just ahead.
He held his hand out, motioning for Sugama to stop, looked back and touched his nose, then flared his nostrils. Sugama stopped, looked at him curiously, and finally realized what Asayaga was signifying. He sniffed the air. His eyes grew wide.
Good, let him learn that he must use-all senses out here.
Asayaga drifted to the side of the trail and moved forward cautiously. The trail turned and his heart froze. Sugama slipped up to his side and a sigh of anguish escaped him.
Asayaga found himself staring intently at a stockade wall. The pass over the top of the mountains went through a notch, the walls of the pass sloping up nearly vertically for a hundred or more feet to either side. The passage was barricaded by a stone wall a dozen feet high, with a crude wooden gate in the centre. Beyond the wall he saw the roof of what must be a garrison house. He sighed inwardly at the thought of the comfort that must lie within.
He saw no one, but the smoke gave it all away. This far north the garrison had to be moredhel.
‘Can we go around it?’ Sugama asked, whispering.
Asayaga shook his head. ‘Not enough time. We don’t know how close the pursuit is – those Kingdom soldiers may have bought us time, but we don’t know how much. If we try to crawl our way over the mountain to either side, and the moredhel are still chasing us, we’ll be destroyed. They’ll go through the pass ahead, cut us off …’
‘But if we attack and those behind us, Kingdom or moredhel, come up, we’re doomed.’
Asayaga forced a grin. ‘We take it quickly and hold it. Then let the bastards from the Kingdom sit on the outside while the Dark Brothers come up and finish them. With forty good men I could hold it against three to four hundred. ‘And besides,’ he added, ‘it’s warm in there. We need rest, hot food, and a place to dry out.’
His words trailed off as he caught a glimpse of movement. A sentry, cloak pulled up over his head, peered over the top of the wall for a moment. Asayaga sensed that the sentry was looking straight at him, he froze. Long seconds passed and the head disappeared.
Asayaga crept back from the tree and started down the trail, Sugama following.
‘What you did back there, striking me,’ Sugama hissed, trying to force the words out through ragged gasps for breath.
Asayaga slowed, fixing him with his gaze. ‘If you are demanding a duel there’s no damn time now. No time for Tsurani honour, no time even for the Great Game, you Minwanabi lapdog. There is time only for survival. If we die, I can’t return home to see my younger brother grown, and you can’t serve your masters. Dead, neither of us serves. Do you understand?’
Sugama’s anger slowly subsided, and he looked around. Asayaga could almost see the comprehension dawning on the man as to just how alien this world was, how far from home they were, and how trivial matters of honour and politics were at this moment. Asayaga also knew that Sugama had never experienced cold like this in his life.
‘It’s going to get colder tonight, cold enough that if you sleep, you die.’
Sugama finally nodded.
Asayaga said, ‘Good. I need you to help lead. If we are to survive, no man can question your orders. A man who hesitates, who looks to me or Tasemu to see if your order is to be obeyed may get all of us killed. I need you to follow me through this as if I were Ruling Lord of your House. If we survive to get home safely, then we resolve this matter as you like; I will publicly fight a duel, or you may return to the Minwanabi and ask them to send an assassin to kill me. Whatever your honour dictates. But I will let you return home freely and unencumbered if you serve the men who obey us now.’
Sugama looked straight at him, stunned by the bluntness of Asayaga’s words.
‘We have no time,’ Asayaga repeated. ‘Will you co-operate?’
Finally Sugama nodded. Without comment, Asayaga gave him a single nod in return, then moved back down the trail, rounding the bend. He knew Sugama was a Minwanabi spy, but he was also a Tsurani noble, and he would never violate this trust. Asayaga had nothing more to fear from him until they were safely behind their own lines. Then there would come a reckoning.
One of his archers tensed, then lowered his bow, arms trembling, as they approached. The cold, the exhaustion, the fact that everyone was soaked to the skin was taking its toll. He had to seize the stockade or none of his command would survive the night.
The last of his men came up, Asayaga looked at them inquiringly.
‘Not sure, Force Commander,’ one of them reported, ‘several times I thought I heard something …’ He shrugged. ‘It was hard to tell with this wind.’
‘They’re close,’ Tasemu interjected softly.
Asayaga looked over. The old Strike Leader was staring at him with his one good eye. Tasemu had ‘the sense’.
Asayaga nodded, ordering the men to gather around.
‘Good news,’ Asayaga announced. The men looked at him, shivering, pushed to the final limit of exhaustion.
‘I found a nice warm cabin ahead. A hot fire, dry bedding, plenty of cooked food, perhaps even some hot wine that will put the fire back in your bellies.’
Some of them looked up, a few allowed their Tsurani impassivity to break with slight smiles.
‘We have to kill the owners first. Forest Demons.’
They huddled in close as he explained what had to be done, gazing into their eyes, trying to judge their strength, and also the desperation needed to charge a position not properly scouted.
The men formed up, the few carrying shields deployed to the front ranks, archers to the rear and flanks. As required by tradition he took the centre of the first rank of five.
There was no need to issue the command, he simply stepped forward, the tiny phalanx shuffled, stepping off to keep pace. He moved slowly at first, giving them a few extra minutes to get their wind even as they advanced up the steep slope.
Finally they turned the last bend in the trail and the stockade was directly ahead. He continued the walking pace for a few more seconds, perhaps the guard would be looking the other way, but even as the thought formed the high piercing wail of a horn echoed.
‘Charge!’
They sprinted straight for the gate, Asayaga leading the way, stumpy legs churning through the slushy snow. The range closed, fifty paces, forty, down to thirty. The lone guard raised a bow, took aim, and released the string. Asayaga heard the snap of the arrow hit the shield of the man next to him.
The gate loomed up in front of them and Asayaga braced himself for the impact. Without slowing the phalanx crashed into the wooden barrier, over four tons of human flesh and armour acting as a battering ram.
He had hoped that the barrier log would not be in place, or would be so weak that they’d crash right in. He felt the log gate give inward, groaning, his men continuing to push, running in place, feet slipping, churning up the frozen ground beneath.
The gate held.
The warrior to his left collapsed without a sound. A rock the size of a human head had crushed his skull in. Asayaga looked up. Directly above were half a dozen moredhel, several throwing rocks, one aiming a bow straight down at them. Spears arced up, catching one, but the rest loosed their deadly loads and several more men dropped.
The effort at the gate was useless. He couldn’t retreat now.
‘Spread out along the wall!’ Asayaga screamed, ‘Stay against the wall. Archers! Keep them down!’
His men spread out. He caught a glimpse of Tasemu dragging a wounded recruit up against the wall. Pressed hard against the stones they were relatively safe; an archer would have to lean over to shoot and his own archers deployed to either side of the trail and back a couple of dozen yards were effective in keeping the enemy down.
Asayaga waited a couple of minutes, trying to judge just how many were on the other side. If a dozen or less, perhaps his own archers could take most of them out. Two more minutes passed slowly.
A few rocks arced over the wall but his men remained pressed against the side of the stockade and were safe. It was a stalemate.
‘We can’t stay here forever. I think our pursuers are close. If so they’ll slaughter us out here.’
It was Tasemu.
Asayaga nodded. ‘Pair up!’ he shouted. ‘Every other man vaults the wall. Get ready!’
Tasemu started to sheath his sword.
‘No, I go first.’
Softly, the old warrior asked, ‘Will you stop trying to get yourself killed?’
‘It’s my duty.’
‘Suppose you get killed, then Sugama takes over?’
Asayaga shook his head and kept his eyes locked on Tasemu. ‘I have no intention of dying, and if I do, you decide who takes over. Now, cup your hands.’
Tasemu grumbled but finally bent over and did as he was told.
‘Ready!’
He looked along the wall. Most of his men had doubled up and were prepared, and there was no time to wait for the laggards.
‘Now!’
He slammed his right foot into Tasemu’s cupped hands and at the same instant grabbed hold of his shoulders. Tasemu stood up with a grunt.
Asayaga vaulted and grabbed the top of the barrier. He scrambled to pull himself over. He caught a glimpse of a moredhel, back turned, striking down with an axe, splitting open the skull of the man to Asayaga’s right.
Asayaga rolled over the wall and landed on the rampart. The moredhel turned, letting go of the axe as his victim fell. He whipped out a dagger and with a snakelike hiss leapt on Asayaga. The two clutched each other and rolled off the rampart, falling half a dozen feet to the ground.
The blow knocked the wind out of Asayaga but he hung on to his foe, blocking a slashing strike to his eyes with his cloak wrapped around his forearm.
With his left hand Asayaga drew his own short blade and rammed it straight up, catching the moredhel under the ribs. He kicked himself free, stood up and, reaching over his shoulder, drew his long sword.
What he saw made his heart freeze. At least thirty moredhel were deployed as a reserve, most of them armed with bows, ready to slaughter any who made it over the wall. Raising his sword he charged straight at the encircling foe.
Perched on top of a cliff, Dennis watched the slaughter down below.
‘They’re losing,’ Gregory announced.
‘I don’t need you to tell me that,’ Dennis replied calmly.
He couldn’t help but admire the mad idea of storming the gate as a human battering ram. It had failed, however, and the element of surprise was lost.
He watched as the Tsurani spread out while on the inside of the pass the moredhel garrison poured out of the log barracks and formed up, ready to slaughter anyone who made it over the wall.
‘Around thirty of them,’ Gregory whispered.
Dennis nodded.
Damn.
This was old territory for him. His father had built the barrier down below as part of the outer line of the northern marches. The moredhel had obviously reversed the gate and wooden ramparts, and put in the cabin on the other side – the original barracks Dennis’s father had built on this side of the wall had been burned down when Dennis had been a boy. Tactically it wasn’t a sound position; anyone who knew the area could easily flank it by scaling the ridge on either side from old trails that smugglers and other weapons runners frequently used. It was why Dennis’s father had eventually abandoned the position and built the small fortress that had become Brendan’s Stockade.
It was just such a smuggler’s route he had decided to take, when they had closed to within spitting distance of the Tsurani a mile back.
Even as the Tsurani hesitated then formed up for their attack he and his men went to the east of the pass, scaling the steep slope. The storm had driven the garrison inside as he had hoped, so there were no patrols waiting to ambush them.
‘Look.’
Gregory pointed back to the south. It was hard to see, since wisps of cloud cloaked them, then parted, but he caught a glimpse of the main trail as it crossed a low ridgeline a couple of miles back.
Riders, moving cautiously, but pressing forward. Then the clouds closed in again.
Dennis’s men were coming up behind him. They were numb with exhaustion, soaked to the skin.
‘I was hoping one side could slaughter the other,’ Dennis muttered, ‘then we finish off what’s left. We need that shelter and the gate secured or we’re all finished.’
Gregory nodded, staring at him, saying nothing.
‘Oh damn it,’ Dennis hissed, as he looked down. ‘This is insane.’
The first of the moredhel archers fired, the arrow striking a glancing blow across Asayaga’s helmet. He charged in blindly, hoping that at the very least a dying thrust would take one of the foes down with him.
And then he caught a glimpse of a moredhel staggering forward, the point of a spear sticking out of his chest. Another went down and then another.
A shrieking battle cry echoed on the wind, a spine-tingling scream that sounded like the baying of wolves closing in on their prey.
Looking up he saw Kingdom soldiers sliding down the near vertical wall of the pass. Several of them lost control on the icy slope and fell screaming, crashing to the ground, one of them landing directly on top of a moredhel, the blow killing both of them. Most of the soldiers managed to brake their fall by grabbing hold of stunted bushes that grew along the icy wall, stopping for a second, letting go, sliding again, braking, then finally alighting on the ground.
The first to land safely drew a heavy two-handed sword from a scabbard slung over his shoulder and with a murderous cry charged forward. A moredhel turned, backing up, swinging desperately, trying to use his bow as a shield. A single blow nearly cut him in half.
The leader spun around, catlike, ducking low as a moredhel charged in with levelled spear. In an amazing display of swordsmanship the leader delivered a backhanded blow while down on one knee, cutting the moredhel’s leg off at mid-thigh as he charged past.
More and yet more Kingdom troops crashed down, some landing on the roof of the barracks, then leaping down from there.
Asayaga looked back up at the wall. A dozen of his men were struggling with the moredhel along the rampart, while others were still trying to get over, and several lay dead.
He turned his back on the Kingdom troops and sprinted to the gate. Two moredhel, swords raised, guarded it. It was over in seconds as he parried the first one, spun about, catching the second under the armpit as he raised his sword to strike, then reversed and swung back high, slashing the other across the face, blinding him. The moredhel went down, a quick blow across the back of the neck ended his agony.
Grabbing the end of the log which locked the gate he lifted it up and tossed it aside. The barrier immediately swung open and his men poured in, swords raised …
At the sight of the Kingdom soldiers dispatching the last of the moredhel they slowed in confusion. Asayaga prepared himself.
Dennis, recovering from the back-handed blow which had taken off the leg of the moredhel came up, sword poised, looking for another foe. Another dark-elf, battle axe raised, charged and then pitched backwards, arrow in the throat. Then Tinuva was at his side, already nocking another arrow.
He caught a glimpse of Gregory crashing onto the roof of the barracks and leaping down to duck inside the door.
At this point, several of the moredhel turned and ran. Dennis whistled, catching Alwin’s attention. He pointed. Alwin nodded, shouted a command and with half a dozen men set off in pursuit.
He turned, saw the gate swing open and was stunned at the sight of at least a score of Tsurani pouring in.
In a flash of memory he saw his father’s estate falling at the start of the war, the Tsurani charging through the shattered gate, his father collapsing from an arrow which had caught him in the eye.
Dennis felt an icy chill, a cold, killing anger at the memory of that time, the memory of Jurgen, of all the dead.
He raised his sword and stepped forward, ready to meet the charge.
There was something vaguely familiar about one of the Tsurani, the one who had charged the gate and in a masterful display of swordsmanship dropped two moredhels in a matter of seconds. This Tsurani shouted something to the warriors around him, even as he stepped to the fore and raised his sword. Dennis immediately recognized the gesture, it was the chaka, the ritual position assumed by a combatant in a one-on-one duel, a two-handed hold, blade vertical, duellist turned sideways, blade poised behind the left shoulder. Dennis had seen it once before, when a Tsurani soldier had taken some occurrence along a picket line personally, and had challenged another to a duel. Two years later, a freed Tsurani slave had explained what he had seen to Dennis.
Dennis shook his head in disbelief. This damned bastard wanted to fight a duel! Several of his men chuckled and one of them started to raise a bow to drop the Tsurani, but in spite of his cynical attitude towards the entire show there was something about the gesture that caught him.
All this had taken but a matter of seconds and even as the Tsurani leader stepped forward to fight, his own men were deploying out after the slaughter of the moredhel, ready to riddle the Tsurani coming through the gate and along the wall. A quick glance revealed that the Tsurani had yet to bring any archers up from outside.
And yet … Dennis realized the man wasn’t challenging him, but rather announcing that he was ready to fight him. It was only a duel if Dennis accepted the offer of combat. He looked at the Tsurani soldiers waiting calmly to see what occurred and realized they were the mirror image of his own men in misery and fatigue.
Dennis pointedly turned his back on the Tsurani commander.
‘Close the gate,’ Dennis shouted in the King’s Tongue, then struggled to form the words in Tsurani. His command of the language was limited, brief snatches learned from Gregory, but fortunately one of them was the command ‘close’!
The Tsurani leader dropped his formal pose and growled an angry reply.
Dennis realized the leader had interpreted the command as an order to block off his warriors still outside. At that same instant a horn sounded from beyond the gate, echoing up from the south. A Tsurani, left eye a milky white, and features distorted by a twisted scar that ran from brow to chin, dashed through the gate and slid to a stop at the sight of the Kingdom troops moving in.
‘Moredhel!’ the runner shouted, the word the same in all languages, and he pointed back outside.
All froze. Dennis stared at the Tsurani and their eyes locked. He could sense Tinuva by his side and saw the elf lower his bow and turn it to one side.
Dennis felt the calculating gaze of the Tsurani upon him, knew that the hatred and distrust was mutual, and yet also sensed the deeper fear, not just of death, but of falling into the hands of the moredhel. That was not the professional hatred of one warrior for another in the heat of battle, in which even beneath the hatred there still existed a certain begrudging respect. This was a primal fear, a loathing, a realization that somehow the soul of a dark universe lurked in the hearts of the foe who was closing in.
Dennis lowered his sword, letting the point touch the ground.
‘Truce,’ Dennis shouted to his men. ‘We fight the moredhel, then settle our differences with the Tsurani later.’
Several of his men muttered but most grunted a chorus of agreement. Blades, spear points and bows started to lower.
The Tsurani leader shouted something and Dennis detected a similar reaction from the other side. Dennis pointed to the wall east of the gate and then to himself. The Tsurani nodded, pointed to himself, then to the west side and barked out a command.
‘Archers!’ Dennis cried. ‘Man the wall and keep low. Volley on command!’
He ran to the still-open gate. The last of the Tsurani were coming through. One of them, at the sight of Dennis, let out a roar, raised his sword and charged. The Tsurani leader, shouted, jumped in front of Dennis and parried the strike. The attacking Tsurani glared at Dennis and then pushed past him.
Two Tsurani, dragging a wounded comrade, came in last and their commander leaned into the gate. Dennis joined him. Together they slammed it shut, hoisted the log and dropped it into place.
Dennis peered out through a crack between the logs of the gate. Seconds later a renegade human, mounted, came around the bend in the trail, half a dozen wood trolls running beside him. He reined in hard. Dennis caught a glimpse of more riders stopping just around the bend in the trail. The lone rider started to turn about.
‘Kill him!’ Dennis shouted.
His archers stood up and within seconds the rider, his horse and all the trolls were down.
He caught a sidelong glance from the Tsurani commander and a grunt of approval.
Shouts of anger greeted the volley. There was a bark of command followed by silence. Dennis watched intently, hoping the scum would dare to mount a charge: if so it’d be a slaughter.
Several minutes passed.
Tinuva slipped off the wall and came up to Dennis’s side. The Tsurani looked at the elf, wide-eyed. Tinuva nodded and said something in Tsurani. Caught by surprise the Tsurani made a quick reply.
‘What did you say?’ Dennis asked.
‘“Honours to his House”, the traditional Tsurani greeting. Then I complimented him on his swordsmanship. I don’t know if you saw it, a masterful double kill.’
Dennis nodded.
‘Where’s Gregory?’ Dennis asked.
‘One of the men said he ran right into a roof support when he charged into the barracks: he was stunned for a moment, but is all right.’
‘I’ll find time to enjoy the humour of that if we live through the night,’ Dennis said quietly.
Tinuva fell silent. He looked through a crack between the logs and then turned back to Dennis.
‘They won’t attack for a while. I think this is just an advance party. We laid enough traps along the trail to slow them down. They’ll wait for the rest of their command to come up first then fan out and flank us.’
Dennis looked back at the pass. The mist was closing in, blanketing them, a cold wind slicing through the pass. The full fury of the storm was slashing against the other side of the mountain. Out of the mist he saw Alwin returning. The sergeant slowed at the sight of the Tsurani then came forward.
‘Got them.’
Dennis let out a sigh of relief. At least one thing had gone right. No word of their presence had gone ahead.
He looked over at the Tsurani.
Damn, what a fix.
‘This is what we do,’ Dennis whispered to Alwin and Tinuva. ‘Half the men stand down, get into the barracks. Get the fire in there roaring. Strip down, dry off, get some hot food. See what dry clothing we can take from the bastards that were here. Two hours, then we shift the other half in.’
He pointed to either side of the pass.
‘Tinuva, I want you to detail a dozen archers, get them up on the flanks and keep the moredhel and their trolls back – I don’t want them coming down on us the same way we came down on them. My guess is those scum are as exhausted as we are. Once they find out we hold the heights as well they’ll give up for tonight. There’s some old dwarven mine shafts a mile or so back down the slope. My bet is they pull in there, build fires to warm up, and wait till dawn to fan out and trap us. We’ll get out a couple hours before dawn, dried and rested.’
‘And our friends?’ Tinuva asked, eyes flicking towards the Tsurani commander.
Damn, Dennis thought.
‘I guess we settle it before we leave. The Broad River, you remember it?’
Tinuva smiled and nodded. The thought struck Dennis that a hundred years before he was even born Tinuva undoubtedly knew of the river. Again he realized just how ancient the elven race was and with it came the recognition of just how much they risked when facing battle: it wasn’t just a score of years in the balance, it was a score of decades. An elven couple might have two children in a century. Each death was magnified far beyond what any human could understand in terms of loss to the race.
‘With this storm the river should be up. We make for Garth’s Ford. Get across and there we’ve got a position that a thousand Dark Brothers wouldn’t dare to attack. There’s a small stockade there, we stay warm, wait till they give up chasing us, then find a way home.’
‘Good plan,’ Tinuva whispered. He looked again at the Tsurani, nodded and went back up to the wall.
Men started to slip off from the wall, heading for the barracks, while Tinuva picked out the unfortunate ones who would have to climb up out of the pass to guard the flanks.
The Tsurani turned, shouted a command. The one-eyed warrior barked out an order, and half of the Tsurani started towards the barracks as well. Dennis watched as the one-eye stopped several of the men, whispered something and they nodded, returned to their posts, as the one-eye ordered others, who were obviously near final collapse, to head for shelter.
The two groups slowed as they drew near to each other, obviously torn between the desire to get inside versus the uneasiness of being so close to a sworn foe.
One of the Tsurani said something, pointing at the Kingdom troops and began to draw his sword. The one-eyed leader knocked the sword from his hand.
‘It’s warm in here, you bastards. Come on in!’
It was Gregory, standing in the open doorway, the glow of the fire behind him a cheery and welcome sight. He wondered if the Natalese Ranger had deliberately stoked up the fire within to lure the men inside.
The two groups still hung back, looking at each other.
Gregory said something else, this time in Tsurani, and made a formal gesture of welcome. The one-eyed warrior laughed gruffly and went through the doorway, his men pouring in behind him, followed by the Kingdom troops.
‘His Tsurani is really quite good.’
Startled, Dennis turned. It was the Tsurani commander.
Dennis glared at him. ‘I didn’t know you spoke our language.’
‘You didn’t ask.’
‘Damn you, you should have said something.’
‘Really? Tell me, how far to this Broad River?’
‘Find out yourself, if you outlive me.’
The Tsurani smiled. ‘Let our men warm up, you and I too, then we can decide who shall outlive whom tomorrow.’
Dennis said nothing. He looked down at one of the two dead moredhel lying by the gate. Bending over, he tore the cloak off one and wrapped it around his shoulders.
The Tsurani did likewise and leaned against the gate not saying another word, his gaze fixed on Dennis as the darkness of night settled about them.
• Chapter Four • (#ulink_e9b885e2-7e5a-5d54-b6d3-1a68385333d9)
Practicalities (#ulink_e9b885e2-7e5a-5d54-b6d3-1a68385333d9)
THE FIRE WAS SOOTHING.
Richard Kevinsson sat by the corner of the fireplace, boots off, luxuriating in the near-painful sensation of his feet thawing out. Rubbing his hands, he extended them towards the flames.
Gregory and the Tsurani with the missing eye shouldered through the crush around the fireplace and heaved armfuls of logs into the roaring flames. Steam coiled up from a heavy iron kettle filled with stew, suspended in the fireplace. A few of the men, Richard included, had hesitated at first to eat it. It was, after all, a meal that the moredhel had been cooking and who knew what was in it – though Tinuva had reassured the Kingdom soldiers that stories of moredhel eating things indigestible to humans were myth only – but old beliefs were hard to ignore. Eventually, ravenous hunger won out over squeamishness and the men – both Kingdom and Tsurani – had gathered around, holding out tin cups and earthen mugs while the bubbling stew was dished out.
A freshly-killed stag had been found hanging outside the garrison house as well, and as fast as pieces of it were cooked in the open fire men snatched them out and devoured the venison, the first hot cooked meat both sides had tasted in days.
Many of the men were now fast asleep, curled up on the wooden planked floor. Of those awake, some were smoking, a few playing cards, others were just sitting about the fireplace.
Richard watched as two Tsurani played a game with intricately carved pieces of ivory on a small chequered piece of cloth. One of the players, as if sensing his gaze, looked up. Their eyes held for a second.
The Tsurani’s hand drifted to his side, resting on the hilt of a dagger, his eyes locked with Richard’s. The young soldier quickly averted his gaze and there was a gruff laugh, not from the Tsurani but from a Kingdom soldier sitting beside him who had been watching the silent interplay.
‘He’ll cut your throat from ear to ear, boy.’
It was Darvan, one of the ‘old men’, of the unit, recruited when Dennis and the others from Valinar formed the Marauders. He had his shirt off, and was hanging it up to dry, revealing a cross-hatching of battle scars on his forearms. One shoulder was slightly hunched from a broken collarbone that had not healed straight.
Darvan spat into the fire.
‘You just lost face, boy. You lowered your eyes. In their lingo that means you are nothing but a cowering worm. Those bastards are laughing at you now.’
Richard spared a quick glance back at the two Tsurani, both of whom were leaning over their game, whispering to each other. Neither was laughing, but Richard wondered if they were talking about him.
‘Bet they’re saying how you don’t have any manhood below your belt. I wouldn’t let them get away with that, boy: it’s bad for our company. You showed yourself a coward once before, are you going to do it in front of the Tsurani as well?’
Richard shifted uncomfortably.
Hearing him move, both of the Tsurani glanced up at him.
‘Darvan!’
Alwin Barry stepped between them and the Tsurani. ‘Shut the hell up,’ he hissed, his voice barely a whisper.
Darvan grinned.
‘We’re in a bad enough fix as is without you egging the boy on to a fight.’
‘They stink up this place,’ Darvan growled. ‘I say let’s kill the bastards in here now, then go out and finish the rest.’
‘Captain’s orders. We stand down for the night.’
‘The Captain –’ Darvan started to say more but Alwin’s hand shot out and grabbed Darvan by the throat, stilling his voice.
‘You want to fight come morning?’ Barry whispered, his voice filled with menace and his eyes boring into Darvan. ‘Fine. We do it when the captain says so and not before. For now, leave this boy alone. Use him to start any trouble, and I’ll kill you myself.’
Turning his back to the Tsurani, who were watching the exchange with open curiosity, Darvan could barely croak out words, with Alwin’s hand around his throat. ‘This boy?’ he asked, pulling Alwin’s hand from his throat. Still whispering, he added, ‘We all know he’s a coward. Jurgen died to save this piece of offal. And for what?’
Richard flushed, feeling as if every eye inside the room had suddenly shifted to him. Honour was now at stake.
His heart began to race, and though he was sitting next to a furnacelike fire, a cold chill swept through him. Then came the memory of all the dead in that cold frozen field, the angry gaze of the Captain, the eyes of Jurgen going dark and empty.
Knees trembling, he started to stand up, his hand going to dagger. Though terrified, he had to face the challenge.
‘Not now!’ Alwin snarled. ‘Damn it boy, sit down before this place explodes!’
Richard caught a glimpse of the two Tsurani. They were both standing, one of them going for his own dagger and Richard instantly realized that somehow the Tsurani, not understanding the conversation, had assumed that the exchange of glances was turning into a challenge for a duel. Others, both Kingdom and Tsurani were moving, shifting apart into two groups, the room going silent.
As he shoved Richard back into his seat on the bench, Alwin rounded on Darvan. ‘I’ll personally flog you from one end of camp to the other if you get out of this alive!’ With a back-handed blow he struck Darvan across the face, knocking the man backwards.
Darvan slammed into the wooden wall, his legs still hooked over the bench. Men were standing all over the cabin, weapons being drawn. Only the fact that it was two Kingdom men who were confronting one another made the Tsurani hesitate in attacking the nearest enemy. Darvan looked up, grinning, wiping the blood from his split lip. ‘Afterwards, Barry. I’ll remember this.’
Alwin half-turned to face the two Tsurani who were looking from Darvan to Richard, and extended his hands, palms out, in a calming gesture. The one-eyed Tsurani came up, saying something unintelligible. He pointed at Darvan and barked out a gruff laugh. The tension edged back down, the two sat and returned to their game. Other Tsurani around the room returned to their previous activities. Darvan rose slowly, and glared hatred at the Tsurani, whom he assumed to be a sergeant. The one eyed warrior spared him a mere glance, and turned away as if entirely unconcerned.
Alwin and the Tsurani Strike Leader looked at each other, but nothing was said, simply a nod of a head. Both understood the other and what had just played out … and what would eventually have to be played out. For the moment though, fire, a hot meal, drying out, and a few minutes of sleep were more important.
Richard, no longer comfortable in his corner by the fire, stood up and moved away. None of the other men in his company looked at him, or even acted as if they had noticed the encounter, but he could sense their indifference, or far worse, their contempt.
He looked around the crowded room. Cloaks, blankets, jerkins, boots, and foot-wrappings hung suspended from the low rafters, casting strange shadows in the firelight. Part of the ceiling, caved in by the assault, was roughly tacked over with a torn tent and a steady trickle of icy water puddled down from it onto the floor. Bunks of the former inhabitants had been looted for dry blankets, clothing, anything dry and warm. The room stank of wet wool, leather, sweat, the stew and – Darvan was indeed right, the Tsurani did smell different – a musky scent. Watching a pair of Tsurani take a small pouch out of their packs and add a pinch of a pungent spice to their bowls of stew, Richard decided that was where the scent came from, but it was disquieting, somehow emphasizing their alien nature.
Gregory, Alwin, and the man Richard thought of as ‘the Tsurani sergeant’ paced back and forth, keeping an eye on everyone, ready to quell any explosion before it ignited.
Richard spotted Father Corwin, kneeling in the far corner of the room where the wounded lay. A dozen men of the company had various injuries acquired over the last two days. Of the eight from the encounter in the forest clearing, not one was still alive. The four who had survived the long night march to Brendan’s Stockade had been left behind in the retreat, their throats cut to spare them the agony of falling into the hands of the moredhel.
Richard moved over to the priest and looked down. He didn’t know the name of the soldier the priest was treating, but he was young, features pale, sweat beading his face. He had suffered a broken leg in their crashing assault down into the stockade. Corwin had set the leg with the help of a couple of men and was tying off the splint, talking soothingly as if comforting a child.
‘Will I be able to walk in the morning?’ the soldier asked.
‘We’ll worry about that then, son.’
The young soldier looked up at Richard.
‘I could help him,’ Richard ventured.
‘We’ll ask the Captain,’ the priest replied, but Richard could tell by his tone that the answer would be no. Either the boy walked on his own or died.
Corwin patted the soldier reassuringly on the shoulder, stood up, and looked over to where a Tsurani lay with a crossbow bolt buried deep in his upper thigh. A comrade was by his side, trying to get him to take a little food.
‘Poor bastard,’ Corwin sighed and without hesitation went over and knelt beside him. The two looked at Corwin, turning to him masklike visages on which there was no expression. They looked straight through Corwin and Richard as if they didn’t even exist.
‘Really got you,’ Corwin said quietly, motioning to the arrow.
The two said nothing.
‘Got to get it out sooner or later.’
Again no response.
‘Damn it, don’t they take care of their wounded?’ Richard asked.
‘It’s obvious they don’t have a chirugeon with them,’ replied the Priest of Sung. ‘This arrow’s in deep. I guess they figure they’ll just leave him here – no sense in putting him through the agony of trying to get it out. Richard, go fetch me some boiling water and I want you to take these two knives, stick one in the fire for a minute or so, the second one, leave it in the fire.’
As he spoke he drew two small daggers belted to his waist and handed them up. Richard followed the priest’s orders and returned with a tin pot filled with boiling hot tea and the dagger which was shimmering with heat.
‘No water, just the boiled tea.’
The priest chuckled. ‘It’ll do,’ he said. He reached into his tunic, pulled out a small roll of white linen, tore off a piece and stuck it into the boiling liquid. Then he motioned at the arrow and made a gesture as if pulling it out.
The wounded man looked at him wide-eyed and shook his head, and his comrade said something and made a gesture, waving his hand over the arrow as if to block Corwin.
‘He says they already tried to get it out, that it’s snagged on the bone,’ Gregory announced, coming up behind the group. ‘Priest, just leave him alone, he’s finished. You can’t draw it without cutting the poor bastard to pieces. Those damned moredhel arrows are four-barbed.’
‘Just shut up and stay out of my way,’ Corwin growled. He reached into his tunic, pulled out a small leather case and unrolled it, drawing out several needles which already had threads attached, tweezers and tiny brass clamps.
He looked straight into the eyes of the Tsurani and began a low chant in a strange tongue. Those around him fell silent for the words carried a power, a sense of otherworldliness and Richard felt a cold shiver. The chanting continued for several minutes. Then Corwin slowly reached out, placing his right hand on the Tsurani’s forehead and let it gently slip down to cover the man’s eyes. Finally he drew his hand back. The Tsurani’s eyes were still open but were now glazed.
Corwin gripped the arrow with his left hand and ever so slowly tried to pull it out. It didn’t budge.
‘Snagged on the bone, like he said,’ the priest whispered. ‘Richard, help roll him on to his side then hold him tight.’
Richard followed the priest’s orders. The wounded man’s eyes were still unfocused. Richard cradled the man on his lap and looked back down at the priest who was carefully examining the wound, running his fingers around the back of the man’s leg.
Corwin picked up the still hot dagger with his right hand, positioned it underneath the wounded man’s leg on the opposite side from the wound and drove the blade in half way to the hilt and rotated the blade.
A gasp escaped the wounded man. Richard looked into his eyes and saw that consciousness was returning: the Tsurani’s pupils went wide.
‘Hold him!’ the priest snapped.
With his left hand he grabbed the arrow and started to push even as he pulled the dagger back out. A second latter the head of the arrow exploded out of the hole cut by the dagger.
The wounded Tsurani cried out, and began to struggle, but Richard grabbed hold of him, ‘It’s all right; you’ll be all right,’ he began to say over and over.
‘Damn it, priest, he’s bleeding to death!’ Gregory cried.
‘Just shut up and get the hot knife from the fire!’
The priest continued to push the arrow through the wound, finally pulling it out and flinging it aside. He picked his dagger back up, cut the exit wound wider and, using one of the brass clamps, pulled the wound apart. He motioned for the wounded man’s comrade to hold the clamp. Taking a pair of tweezers from his kit he reached into the wound, drawing the artery which was spurting blood.
‘Not the main one, thank the Goddess,’ he muttered, even as Gregory knelt by his side, holding the now-glowing dagger fresh from the fire, the hilt wrapped with a piece of smouldering canvas.
The priest took the dagger, cursing when he singed his fingertips, then deftly touched the blade against the artery. A steamy cloud of boiling blood hissed up from the wound.
The man jerked, trying to kick, but Richard held him tight. He realized that for some strange reason he was beginning to cry.
This is a Tsurani, damn it. He felt a wave of anger for the man even as he held him tight and continued to try and reassure him.
‘Almost done,’ the priest announced.
He drew out the hot dagger, turned, and then cauterized the entry wound. Finally he drew out the boiled bandages, stuffed both wounds, then tightly wrapped a compress around the leg.
‘We’ll stitch him up later, I want to keep it open so I can get in quick in case he starts to bleed again.’
The whole operation had taken no more than a couple of minutes. The priest sat back, then took the hand of the Tsurani who had been helping and guided it to a pressure point above the wound to help slow the bleeding.
‘All right Richard, you did well, son.’
Richard, shaking, looked down at the Tsurani. There were tears in the corner of the man’s eyes and he suddenly realized just how young his enemy was: about the same age as himself and the wounded Kingdom soldier with the broken leg. The Tsurani was obviously struggling for control, looking up at Richard in confusion, his emotions mixed between gratitude and hatred for an enemy.
The priest knelt, softly muttered a prayer and made a sign of blessing over the wound, finishing by lightly touching the man’s forehead again.
Wiping the now-cooled daggers, he bundled up his kit and then picked up the arrow, which was covered with blood, and a hunk of flesh still on the barbs.
‘Evil weapon,’ he sighed, ‘No bone splinters though; he just might make it.’
He tossed the arrow aside. The room was silent: all were staring at him.
‘I’m pledged to healing,’ the priest said, ‘it doesn’t matter who.’ He looked back over at Richard. ‘You’re a brave lad for helping.’
The Tsurani Patrol Leader approached, bowed to the priest and said something.
Corwin looked over at Gregory.
‘He said that the wounded man, Osami, now owes you a debt which the clan must honour. If we fight and they don’t kill you, they must make you a slave. So if we fight, they’ll let you leave before they kill all of us, so they won’t have to capture or kill you.’ Gregory explained.
Corwin said nothing for a moment and then began to chuckle softly. ‘Hell, tell him I think you’re all crazy,’ Corwin replied. ‘When you’re done killing each other I’ll take all your coins, and whatever the Tsurani use, and consider it a donation to the church.’
Gregory translated and now the Tsurani laughed. The tension in the room eased for a moment.
Gregory knelt next to Corwin. ‘You a chirugeon?’ He pointed to the small kit Corwin had used and was now cleaning ready to put away.
The priest shrugged. ‘As a boy I apprenticed to one for a while.’
‘What happened?’ asked the Ranger. ‘Get the calling?’
Putting away his medical tools, the priest said, ‘No, that came later. I was a mercenary for a while.’
Remembering how frightened the priest had been when they had first met, Gregory could barely hide his surprise. ‘A mercenary?’
Corwin nodded. ‘Not all mercenaries are swordsmen, Ranger. I have no skill with blade or bow. I earned my living with a company of engineers building siege machines. Give me two men with axes and in less than a day I can turn a tree into a ram that would knock down that stone wall out there in under ten minutes. Throw in a pair of hammers and one bow saw, and I can do it in six hours.’ He paused as if remembering. ‘Saw most of my fighting from a distance, though I’ve had a few close calls under a wall or two, trying to collapse a foundation.’ He smiled at Gregory’s blank expression. ‘I used to be a fair sapper, too.’ He sighed and lost his smile. ‘And I had more than my share of practice keeping other men alive, I can tell you.’ He stood, and Gregory did as well. ‘Then I got the calling and entered the temple.’
Gregory nodded. ‘I thought you priests used your magic to heal.’
Corwin shrugged. ‘Like anything else, healing magic takes talent. Some brothers could heal every man here in a couple of days. A rare few can lay on hands and make a wound vanish or a bone heal in an hour. I have no such gift. I have to rely on my tools and prayer. The bit of “magic” I used to calm the boy is simply a healer’s trick; anyone can learn it.’
Gregory didn’t comment.
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William Forstchen и Raymond E. Feist
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Книги о приключениях
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: The whole of the magnificent Riftwar Cycle by bestselling author Raymond E. Feist, master of magic and adventure, now available in ebookFreedom at any price?Hartraft’s Marauders, a crack band of Kingdom raiders, are a special unit designed to infiltrate and fight behind enemy lines. They are currently heading for a frontier garrison, after a disastrous encounter with the Tsurani.Meanwhile, a Tsurani patrol is sent to support an assault on the same garrison. Both sides arrive at the same time and discover the garrison has been overrun by a migrating horde of moredhel (dark elves), and they are forced by circumstances to band together and fight as one unit to survive.The only problem is, who do they hate the most – their mutual enemy, or each other? As they make their way across the unknown Northlands to freedom, they have to struggle not only with the elements and their enemies, but also their conscience. For what is more important – one’s life or one’s honour?Honoured Enemy is the first book in the Legends of the Riftwar series. It is the first of three co-authored books that return to the world of Feist’s best-loved series.