Assail (59 page)

The big fellow frowned. ‘No one passed us.’

‘Nevertheless. If I may?’

The three parted. ‘Certainly. If you wish.’

Orman nodded and continued on. The three stood motionless, peering after him until the coursing fog closed between them once more.

He walked until he began to suspect that he’d somehow lost the trail, or had perhaps passed where the weapon had fallen. He paused then, listening. A stream of some sort rushed and hissed a good distance off. A freshening wind shushed through tree boughs. Far off, people called to one another through the fog.

An explosive wet cough sounded to one side. Orman tightened his grip on his weapons and closed. He found Lotji standing, tottering. The spear Svalthbrul had driven through him straight up and down; its end stood above his head, the haft disappearing into one shoulder. The spearhead stood forward, almost straight down, from his pelvis. At some noise from Orman the Bain turned, slowly, in lurching steps.

His grin was a smear of blood-red. The mouth worked and out came a faint: ‘You win.’

‘I care nothing for your damned feuds. Where is he?’

‘Who?’

‘
Jass!
Damn you!’

‘Ah. Him.’ The man drew a shuddering breath. His eyes closed, then fluttered, blinking. It occurred to Orman that the man could not fall even if he wanted to. The haft of Svalthbrul held him rigid, tree-straight. His knees buckled and he fell straight down. Svalthbrul’s blade drove into the ground and the man moaned an agony beyond reason. His head rose, revealing that he grinned once more as if at some cosmic jest. ‘I would try the Greathall,’ he mouthed.

Enraged, Orman kicked him down. He fell and lay motionless.

Bending, Orman took hold of the wet, bloodied haft close behind the spearhead and yanked. He set one boot against the man’s thigh and yanked again. The haft came sliding free in a slither of fluids. Mist curled from the gore-slick length.

‘And what of Jass?’ Vala spoke from behind and Orman spun. She stood breathing deeply, her long-knives bloodied to the grips, her forearms splashed.

‘He said to try the Greathall.’

The news rocked the woman. Open dread filled her alien oval eyes. ‘The Greathall is more than a day south of here,’ she breathed, appalled.

Orman wasn’t certain he understood. ‘But then …’

Vala did not pause to answer. She spun and ran. He took a few faltering steps after her, calling, ‘Vala! Vala … Dammit to the Abyss.’

Twin figures came jogging up through the thinning fog: the Reddin brothers. Both appeared hale, if sliced and cut by minor wounds. Neither carried his shield, which must have been battered to pieces in the fighting. ‘Here you are,’ said one, Keth perhaps.

‘Where is Bain Greathall?’ he demanded.

‘South of here,’ answered the other.

‘South? Where?’

One brother extended an arm, gesturing downhill. ‘South.’

Orman took off at a jog. After a short time he found the brothers flanking him. ‘What is it?’ one asked.

‘Jass is at the Greathall.’

They entered a more mature forest of tall pine and birch and the ground opened up. They had left behind the localized banks of fog. Orman glimpsed other figures also fleeing south through the woods. He ignored them.

‘If there are any Bains left they will be defending the Greathall,’ one brother offered.

‘Let us hope,’ Orman muttered beneath his breath.

Through the rest of the day and into the night they alternated between walking and jogging. The sky was clear and bright. The Great Ice Bridge could clearly be seen spanning the entire inverted bowl above. It glittered from one horizon to the other. The moon, battered and blurry still from the strange fires that burst upon it years ago, was a sickle blade waxing.

They ran straight past camps of some few stragglers, or latecomers. These men and women watched them without a shouted curse, a yell, or a fired arrow. It was as if they considered them some sort of ghosts, such as the Eithjar.

Dawn’s orange light brightened behind an eastern ridge. In its glow Orman spotted the faint smudge of black smoke rising from the forest canopy below. He broke into a run.

The pall was quite distant; he had to splash through two small streams while he pushed his way through the underbrush. He heard the brothers following. He burst through to cleared fields and saw ahead the Bain Greathall, aflame. Figures surrounded it.

Orman could not be certain, but believed he howled something as he charged. Faces turned his way. He crashed into armed men and women, thrust right and left. He was now truly blind in a red mist of fury and a crushing dread. More lowlanders came closing in from surrounding the hall. The brothers joined him but instead of remaining within their cover he charged from one man or woman to the next. Some remaining rational part of him seemed to watch this and wonder whether Old Bear’s talent of ferocious shapeshifting had passed to him.

He then became aware of himself standing motionless, spellbound, exhausted, his limbs quivering, before the dark opening of the gaping entrance. The arrow-pierced corpse of an Iceblood, an old man, lay upon the stairs. Vala held the doorway. Smoke gouted out about her in a black river. Embers glowed in her hair. Her leathers were slashed over countless wounds – but that was as nothing to the agony in her wild staring eyes. Devastation had hollowed them completely. But most of all what held him breathless and fascinated was their grim and absolute despair.

He reached out to her; she flinched away as if some wild beast, turned, and ran within to disappear among the licking flames and smoke. He lunged up the stairs but hands held him back. He believe he howled and fought then froze, transfixed.

Through the billowing smoke he’d glimpsed something.

Amid the churning coils, the collapsing roof-timbers, something hung from the immense log that was the roof crossbeam. A small figure swinging ever so slightly. His leathers were curling and smoking in the intense heat. His hands were tied behind his back and he’d been thrust through the chest.

Thrust through by Svalthbrul – the weapon he now held in his hands. A burden he now knew to be wholly and inescapably cursed.

He screamed then. Bellowed to the sky. Howled on and on until something struck him and he fell, knowing nothing more.

*

He awoke in an out-building, a small hut of chinked logs. He smelled stale smoke. Svalthbrul stood leaning next to his cot. He left it there and arose to push open the door of thin wooden slats. It was late in the day. White smoke wafted from the collapsed ruins of the burnt Greathall.

Keth Reddin stood without, arms crossed. Orman nodded him a greeting.

‘The Bains are no more,’ Keth said.

‘Yes.’

‘I am sorry for the loss of your half-brother.’

‘Thank you.’

Keth nodded; he’d said what he meant to say and was finished.

Orman took a deep breath of the reviving air. ‘We must return to Sayer Hall to bring word of this … this loss.’ Keth nodded again.

The Reddin brother shifted to peer back through the open door. Orman followed his gaze. Yes. Svalthbrul. He took a hard breath to steel himself and re-entered the hut. Yes. He closed a fist upon the weapon. Though he now hated it, it was his. His burden to carry. His curse. If it could speak, he now understood it would be laughing at all the blood it had drunk, the discord and violence it had sown.

He ducked from the hut and crossed to the smouldering ruins. The brothers followed. He stood for a time facing the pile of ash and blackened logs, Svalthbrul cradled in his arms. He adjusted the patch of ragged leather he’d cut to cover his eye. He bowed to his fallen kin. There were no words to say. No tears to shed. His heart had been thrust through as irrevocably as Jass’s. He was done, finished; as burnt and ashen within as the hulk of this Greathall.

He set off north.

* * *

It had taken only one salvo from Cartheron’s springals to destroy the foremost of the vessels pursuing them. It erupted in a blast of flying timbers and cartwheeling men, and sank as if pulled from beneath. The rest of the flotilla eased up oars. Their bow-waves disappeared in a wash of dispersing foam, and Jute watched them diminish to the rear.

Another two days’ journey brought them rounding a headland to enter a broad bay, its shore one of tall rock cliffs. Jutting from these cliffs, hard up to their very edge, stood the blunt cylinder of grey rock that was the Keep at Mantle town. As they approached, he kept an eye on the structure; something about its dimensions bothered him.

He leaned on the railing next to where the ex-Malazan officer, Giana Jalaz, stood with her bare forearms over the wood, an apple in one hand. ‘I see ships,’ he commented. Indeed, the masts of some handful of vessels rose from the waves at the base of the cliff beneath the tower. ‘They are blockaded, you say?’

She took a bite, chewed. ‘So I was told,’ she answered round the mouthful. She raised the apple. ‘Good thing you brought supplies.’

‘That was not my intention, you can be sure …’ he said, but she was moving now, signing something to the other soldiers who had accompanied her. They began pulling on their armour.

Giana herself simply yanked her thin blouse over her head and tossed it to Jute. Mechanically, unthinkingly, he caught and held it; it was warm from her body. Her upper torso was wide and muscular, her breasts small and high, the areoles dark. Only then did Jute realize he was staring and spin away.

‘Hang on to that,’ she told him. ‘That’s my one good shirt.’

He stammered, ‘Of course.’

A low laugh from Ieleen made his ears heat. ‘Getting changed, are we?’ she enquired sweetly.

‘Could be a fight,’ Giana explained. He heard her armour rattle and jangle as she pulled it on. ‘Buckle me up, won’t you?’

Still with his back to the disturbing north Genabackan woman, he said, ‘Perhaps someone else …’

‘Well, seeing as I’m blind,’ Ieleen offered, ‘she might not like the result if I took a hand. Go ahead, dear. You can tell me all about it later.’ Then, even more disturbingly, the two women shared a laugh.

Jute decided that he was at a distinct disadvantage and that perhaps it would be best if he just went along with things. He turned and found the ex-Malazan officer waiting, her side to him, buckles of her hauberk presented. He set to work.

He was almost done when the woman yanked forward out of his grip. She growled, ‘What in the name of the nitwit Boles is he doing?’ Jute found the clasps again and finished up, squinting ahead: the
Resolute
had surged onward, sweeps flashing.

‘Charging the blockade, looks like.’

The woman turned to where the
Ragstopper
continued its steady pace. ‘No flags. No signalling … Cartheron’s letting them go?’

‘They pretty much do whatever they want.’

She sent him a sceptical glance. ‘You say those soldiers are Blue Shields?’

‘Aye.’

‘This I
have
to see. Can we close up?’

Jute considered. They could, he supposed. The Malazans would fight if it came to that – not that he was expecting any real resistance to Tyvar and his Blue Shields. He nodded, went to the stern railing, called, ‘Follow the
Resolute
, Buen.’

‘Aye, captain.’ His first mate started chivvying the men and women at the oars.

He asked Giana, ‘And once we are at Mantle? Then what?’

‘That’s Cartheron’s call.’

‘You must have some idea. What would you do?’

‘Me?’ She rubbed her jaw. ‘I was never staff level. Strategy’s not my strength. But seeing as that gang outside the walls wants our blood already …’ She shrugged. ‘Ever work as a mercenary, Captain Hernan?’

Mercenary? Him? He glanced back to Ieleen; she sat with her chin resting upon her walking stick. Her head was tilted as if she was listening to something faint and far off. Her expression was intent and focused, but not alarmed. ‘I’m a businessman, not a mercenary,’ he told Giana.

‘Same thing,’ she said. ‘One just cleans up better than the other.’

As they neared base, the blockade resolved into five man-o’-wars anchored in a wide semicircle, presumably just outside the range of what appeared to be two mangonels just visible atop the cliffs.

The
Resolute
did not pause. It pulled alongside the middle vessel, sweeps were shipped and grapnels flew to span the gap.

At his side, Giana allowed a grudging, ‘Well executed, that.’

Yet the action at the vessels could not capture Jute’s attention; something about that squat so-called fortress kept nagging at him and now he recognized what it was: the damned thing was hardly larger than a guard tower.

This was it? The fabled fortress of the north? A wretched three-storey pile of rock that wouldn’t count for more than a border keep back home in Falar?

Giana grunted a soft, ‘
Damn
…’

He spared the attack a glimpse: the
Resolute
had moved on to the next vessel to port, while the first, obviously captured, was now moving towards its brother in line on the starboard. He cleared his throat. ‘Have you
been
to Mantle, Lieutenant Jalaz?’