King's Shield (49 page)

Valda breathed deeply in equal pain. “That was an act of war, not of magical necessity. Just as it was when our dags ruined the hinges of the castle gates. Though everyone called it aid, because no weapons were involved. Mekki did not deny it when I confronted her. And so she has been given the time these young messengers might have lived, twice eighty years, in which to meditate upon her actions in betrayal of our oaths,” Valda added in the mode of
it-shall-be.

Signi understood by these words that Brit Valda, Chief of the Sea Dags, had placed Mekki under a stone spell. To all evidence the body is so frozen that it takes in physical time half a year to move a finger. But the mind is free. One hundred sixty years as stone—a merciful sentence only because Mekki had been ordered to do what she had done.

Signi’s temples panged. She knew she might not be granted that much mercy if Erkric caught up with her.

“What do you see as my duty, Valda?” Signi asked, as the sounds shifted to drums and chanted ballads from a balcony somewhat closer to the tower’s prominence.

Valda sat up, fingers clasping around her token. “I will remove the last of Erkric’s wards, freeing your magic. You can do nothing, I can do nothing, Falk Ulaffa can do nothing, to stop the war. With our own path so fouled by the dust of ambition, I must leave your actions to your conscience. Afterward, your purpose is still to find a way to get to Sartor.”

Noise outside: the brave, syncopated rolling rhythm of drums broke of a sudden into patter, and laughter.

Valda whispered, and vanished.

 

 

 

Halfway through the night, the heat broke over embattled Castle Andahi. The mountain-reinforced echo of thunder, the crack of bluish-violet lightning did not diminish the occasional screams from inside.

Hilda Commander Talkar, in charge of the land portion of the invasion, knew those screams mostly came from the throats of his own men.

Talkar had set up a command post directly inside the outer curtain wall, his advance force one command from march-readiness around him.

He wrote in his scroll-case twice, asking for a report of the Drenga captain inside. To his surprise, and increasing displeasure, there was no response. Did they shirk duty? No, he must not cloud his mind with distrust of the Oneli, with anger. The noise, the sudden, red-glowing gouts of fire in windows, the intermittent cries, indicated strenuous effort of some kind inside.

Once again he suppressed the instinct to send in his own men. A fight in an unknown space, especially in the dark, could easily end up with his force and the Drenga already inside thinking one another targets. A signal for reinforcements would be different. But no signal came.

At dawn the Drenga captain himself emerged from the inner castle wall to report, covered by two men, shields high. Arrows rained down, rattling on the shields. Talkar peered up at the walls, making out vague shapes that appeared just long enough to shoot, then vanished.

Talkar waited at his camp table, having signed for an orderly to bring steamed milk with honey, which Captain Henga downed gratefully at a sign. His eyes were red-rimmed with exhaustion.

“Captain Henga. You do not have the castle yet?” Talkar asked.

“No. But we believe we have one more section to go, and that most of them are dead.” Henga’s voice was a husky croak. “Unless there are more waiting for a last stand. Everything is dark in there . . . sabotaged,” he finally said, because he couldn’t think of a word strong enough to encompass such thorough, single-minded ferocity. “Every passage, stair, room was blocked or diverted. Most with traps. All the stairwells have brought down rains of burning matter, oil, even furniture flung on us in the dark.” He waved a gauntleted hand vaguely. “Diverted over to the side where the mountain came down. Into traps. Burying my men alive.” He threw back his head, staring blindly through the opening of the tent to the massive castle looming against the sky. “In pairs,” he added in a low, tired voice.

Talkar said, “Then it’s not a matter of doors to batter down?”

“If there is a direct way through to gain access to the road beyond, we have not found it.” He hesitated, reviewing the nightmare since the dags had broken down the last door: all the glowglobes had been smashed. Their reserve torches extinguished with tipped barrels of dirty water, leaving them floundering in the dark, to serve as targets for yet more arrows, knives, boiling liquids poured down onto their heads. Fire traps. Arrows shot from openings impossible to descry. Ugly traps, like sharpened spikes in walls and floors.

The worst, though, the worst had been entire floors sawn through in the two western towers. In both cases young girls had darted past his men, each of them carrying pieces of paper. Of course the men gave chase, one party under Henga’s direction.

He’d just reached the door himself when the girl stopped in the middle of one of the round tower rooms, with its bare wooden floor. She looking back over her shoulder at them, and time seemed to halt for one rush and thump of his heart: this girl was just the age of his daughter, about fifteen, freckles across her nose, her hair light, her braids tousled. Her pulse beating in her skinny neck above the rumpled tunic much like Venn children wear during their brief summer.

Thump.
His men moved in slowly, surrounding her, she stuck out her tongue. Then she tensed, glanced down—an abrupt, instinctive reaction.

And the floor dropped.

The entire floor, taking them all three floors down to death.

The second one he heard, not a hundred heartbeats afterward, across the length of the castle. That is, he heard the same
crack!
of sawn wood giving way, the smashing long fall, the screams and shouts of terror, and then that awful silence.

He swallowed, knowing that if he survived this battle, he would always remember that girl, how she stood poised, not letting herself look down at that sabotaged floor until it was too late for them all.

He blinked, forcing his attention back to Talkar, and reported how many they’d lost—dead, burned, punctured, wounded with shattered limbs who would no more march through the pass than they could fly.

It was absurd in the face of the thousands waiting, a desperately absurd defense. In another circumstance one could say a gallant one.

Now? Right now they could not afford the time.

“Get control of that castle. We know there is a tunnel, leading up around the headland onto the pass. They have to have bricked it up, or buried it. Do whatever you have to do to find it.”

The man swallowed again, summoned his men, and the three ran heavily back inside, armor jingling, arrows clattering on the shields.

Chapter Seven

Having finished dispatching a meal to the dag imprisoned up in the archive and orders for new quarters in the city, Evred went hunting for Inda.

He strictly controlled his impatience at the crowds everywhere: they all had things to do but not enough space to do them in.

After a thoughtful glance at his face, Kened shoved unceremoniously ahead, elbowing aside Runners, Runners’ aides, stable hands, horses and men moving this way and that, a few boys dashing between them, most laughing.

The startled glances sent Evred’s way would have amused him at any other time, especially one without the prospect of a battle pressing against his skull in the form of constant headache.

A brown, unruly horsetail was surrounded by taller heads, mostly blond. Was that Inda? Yes. Inda bounced on his toes, his eyes briefly appearing above the press in the court as far too many people tried to shoulder their way to their particular task.

“It’s as ready as it ever will be,” Inda called to Evred as they worked their way toward one another, and when Evred cupped his hand to his ear, repeated it louder.

Exasperated beyond endurance, Evred made a rare, flat-handed swipe, and Kened signaled to the duty guards to clear enough space for them to go inside.

“What did you say?”

“Remind me about the rings.” Inda poked his finger under the owl clasp and rubbed his scalp vigorously, making a face. “The parley room is ready for tomorrow. We’ve got the ruse all laid along. But Sponge, I need another look at that map—”

Inda’s big, scarred hands rubbed over his face, his eyes blanked as once again his thoughts turned inward, and Evred said shortly, “Let’s go upstairs.”

They ran up the stairs to the top floor of the east tower. Now the clamor was just a low, steady rumble far below.

Then Inda whirled around, his coat skirt flaring, and dropped onto the top step at the landing, head in his hands.

Below the open window an entire wing of men shouted in cadence; from behind them the rumble of laden wagons smothered the clatter of iron-shod horse hooves against stone. Evred moved across the landing and pulled the heavy shutters closed.

Inda rocked back and forth, his unruly hair as always escaping from his horsetail in wild curling strands. Evred stared down at a lock caught in the glittering ruby dangling against Inda’s scar-slashed cheek, was overwhelmed by a skin-prickling onslaught of affection. So intense and so unfamiliar an emotion had an unsettling, vertiginous effect on his perceptions; the inexorable pressure of imminent battle fractured his habitual control. Words were so difficult, and usually so was gesture—even proximity, but now—

Inda. Loyal Inda. Everything Evred asked Inda granted, with the unthinking generosity of the ten-year-old he’d once been.

Evred stretched out his hand, fingers open, and just touched the sweat-damp, tousled top of Inda’s head.

The gesture partook more of the warmth of affection than the heat of desire, but desire there was, there always was.

Affection and desire snuffed when Inda jerked upright, his face hardened into a killing glare all the more shocking because Evred had, as yet, never seen him in battle.

Just for a moment, then it was gone, but the deep, uncontrollable recoil forced Inda to his feet, color flooding his face.

He said to the ceiling, “Chart.”

Then he whirled and sprinted to the office, trying to outrun that stomach-churning nausea, a visceral reaction from the days he lay under Wafri’s stroking hands after torture.

Inda thumped against the map table, and threw his arms wide, as though flinging away the sensation brought by memory.
Wafri is not here. It was probably a spider, or the edge of his coat.

He fought to shed the unwanted memory of Wafri’s twisted passions, and to reclaim the insight that had eluded him for weeks. “That’s it. That’s
it.
I knew it would come to me, I just had to have quiet. Sponge! Look!”

He pointed down at the map. Inda slapped the back of his fingers against the carefully detailed top of the pass. “What do you see?”

They’d mulled over the map at least twice since their arrival, but Evred said in a voice devoid of any emotion, “Sheer cliffs at either side. Above the cliffs, the lakes on one side, and on the other, the source of the Andahi River.”

“Exactly.” Inda breathed hard. “Evred, that’s the mistake we’ve all been making, and I knew better. I knew better, which was why I was thinking of charts: on land, water’s a barrier. In the sea, it’s your access. It’s
land
that’s the barrier.”

“And so?”

“Don’t you see? Talkar, their Hilda commander, is a land warrior. He’s going to think the same thing!”