Lescari Revolution 03: Banners In The Wind (45 page)

Tathrin ran faster. They rounded the bend.

'Slowly, long lad.' Sorgrad stopped him with an unyielding hand.

Tathrin looked at the ruin of his home. Both wings of the tavern, set at right angles to each other, were burned ruins. The stables across the yard, the barn beyond and his brother-by-marriage's smithy by the roadway, all were utterly destroyed. Stone walls cracked beneath charred beams and tangles of laths that still bore fragments of shattered tiles.

He could not to go on. Nor could he retreat. What lay beneath that wreckage?

'Careful,' warned Gren.

Tathrin turned his helpless fury on the Mountain Man. 'In case I damage something?'

Gren shrugged. 'I imagine Failla would rather a falling rafter didn't split your skull.'

'Keep watch.' Sorgrad walked across the road towards the birch trees. He ran a finger down one charred bole, sniffing at the soot.

Tathrin followed; the lesser of his evil choices. 'Is this magecraft?'

He struggled to credit the possibility but Triolle's duchess had suborned a renegade mage.

Sorgrad rubbed his forefinger and thumb together. A faint flame flared and vanished. 'Pitch and sulphur,' he called out to Gren who was walking into the debris-choked yard.

'Always effective,' the younger Mountain Man approved.

Sorgrad crossed back over the road to the inn and turned to look at Tathrin, still hesitating on the verge.

'Come on, long lad. When will you next sleep, if you don't know?'

Reluctant yet desperate, Tathrin gazed at the fallen roof of the kitchen wing. His bedchamber had been up there. Childhood treasures that he'd left safe, his possessions sent back from Vanam when he abandoned Master Wyess's counting house; everything was gone.

Gren poked his sword at burned planks still held together by long iron hinges. 'I reckon this door was open, when the fire took hold.'

'Someone got out?' Tathrin tried not to hope. Forcing himself to go to the smoke-stained taproom entrance, he found any way in was blocked by charred floorboards fallen from the bedrooms above.

'This door was open too.' Sorgrad looked thoughtfully over his shoulder. 'I reckon someone came out to see those trees burning.'

'That would empty the taproom.'

Tathrin could picture the scene all too easily. The tavern would have been quiet, given the season and these uncertain times. Only local farmers and perhaps some labourers from the hamlet on track to the forest would have come in search of ale and conversation.

The weather had been clear, and as Gren had said, it would have been a nearly moonless night. Only the last sliver of the Lesser Moon would have risen, and late at that. They would all have rushed out, agog, when the light from the blazing grove burst through the unshuttered windows.

It was the last thing his father did each night: bolting the oak shutters, dousing the lamps that offered travellers welcome. Had it been the last thing he ever did?

Tathrin studied the blackened windows with their glass all smashed. The shutters hung from hinges twisted by the flames. But they were hanging open and the bolts were drawn back. 'This happened before my family went to bed.'

'I don't see any bodies.' Gren had gone into the kitchen through the gaping void where the fireplace in the end wall had collapsed. He shoved rubble aside with his boot.

'They'd hardly have been left for the crows.' Tathrin had to force the words out.

He looked around, helpless. They should have gone to the shrine. Master Granal would surely tell them more than this silent devastation.

But could the priest tell him who had died here? Or had he conducted Poldrion's rites for charred bodies so horribly disfigured that no one knew them for Tathrin's family or anyone else?

He closed his eyes on vile memories of the dead of Wyril. Tathrin hadn't shirked his share of the duty of retrieving those ghastly, contorted corpses from the drifts of ash.

A still more sickening thought wrung his heart. Had someone come to wreak their revenge on his family, for the sake of those who'd died at his order?

'I don't see any sign of rain,' Gren called out from the kitchen, 'but a lot of this is sodden. I reckon folk threw water on this blaze.'

'Or damped down the embers,' Tathrin countered bleakly, 'when they came to retrieve the dead.'

'No horses died in here.' Now Sorgrad was picking a careful path through the ruined stables.

'Someone got the beasts out alive?' Tathrin drew a shivering breath.

'Look out!' Gren sprang onto the ash-choked kitchen range.

Tathrin was already turning when the arrow struck him. The bodkin point split his hauberk's steel rings apart to bite deep into the back of his shoulder.

Even as he staggered from the brutal impact, he realised he'd been lucky. If he hadn't been moving, it would have gone right through his chest. Better yet, that was his off-side. He could still use his sword arm. Though the numbness of shock was yielding to sickening pain, he turned, ripping his blade free of its scabbard.

Appearing from the slope beyond the birches, a double handful of men ran across the highway. All wore chain mail, some wielded two blades, others favoured shields with a single sword.

They had been watching for just such an opportunity, Tathrin realised angrily, waiting till the three of them were so awkwardly divided.

He retreated as best he could, hampered by the wreckage underfoot. Gren was running forward from the kitchen, shouting ripely offensive insults. Sorgrad sprang onto the soot-blackened wall of the barn, only to retreat. There was no safe landing if he jumped down into the yard just there.

Three men advanced on Tathrin. He could retreat no further. If he tripped, he'd be dead. At least the ruination meant they couldn't get behind him. But could he still fight?

He swept his blade around and gasped at the agony in his wounded shoulder. But it was worth it to see the advancing men hesitate. He had the reach on them all; none were close to his own height.

The first tried to close on his wounded side. His swarthy skin indicated Archipelagan blood while his shield and round helmet looked Relshazri.

Tathrin thrust hard before cutting across to parry a crop-headed youth's questing blade. He wore an unlaced mail coif and a bold red kerchief round his neck.

As their blades met, with a shock of pain that made Tathrin bellow, the red-kerchiefed youth recoiled. Tathrin couldn't follow up that advantage, needing instead to smash aside a downward stroke from the bald and burly third man who was cursing him in clotted Caladhrian.

The Relshazri cut again. Tathrin parried. The red-kerchiefed youth and the bald Caladhrian both attacked but hampered each other's strokes. Tathrin took a sidestep closer to the taproom wall.

Better protected, but now cornered, the best he could do was turn their vicious blades aside. His shoulder was excruciating. He felt terrifyingly cold, far more than the chill day should warrant, yet sweat was sticking his shirt to his back. Tathrin was just grateful he couldn't feel blood running down his arm. The arrowhead must be plugging the wound.

A man died with a bubbling shriek. As the red-kerchiefed youth and the Relshazri's eyes flickered across to the far side of the yard, Tathrin reached for the long dagger sheathed on his belt. Two blades would be better than one--

It was nearly a fatal mistake. Hot agony blurred his vision. As he gasped, every breath prompted fresh anguish. Worse, his wounded arm now hung limp and useless. All he could do was swing his sword in a reckless arc.

That was enough. Taken unawares, all three attackers recoiled.

Tathrin summoned all his resolve and arched his back, desperately twisting his shoulders. That lifted his helpless arm just far enough to hook his thumb onto his sword-belt. The agony receded to the fragile edge of endurable pain.

The Relshazri drove the hammered boss of his shield straight at Tathrin's face. He drove it back with a hacking stroke. The red-kerchiefed youth stabbed at his thigh, the blade scraping against Tathrin's long hauberk.

Stumbling, he saw the Relshazri's sword come down towards his injured shoulder. Tathrin met the descending blade with a stroke born of sheer instinct. Pain froze the breath in his chest.

In that same instant, the Caladhrian's blade sliced through his leather breeches, just above his knee. The cut burned. Tathrin wrenched his sword around and had the brief satisfaction of ripping the point across the Caladhrian's throat.

Clapping a hand to his neck the man sneered. 'A cat-scratch.'

Then blood flooded through his fingers and he sank to his knees, slumping dead on the sooty cobbles.

Tathrin parried a murderous blow from the Relshazri. The red-kerchiefed youth redoubled his assaults. Tathrin knew he was weakening fast. A thrust by the Relshazri scraped the mail protecting his ribs. Misjudging a stroke from the red-kerchiefed youth cost him a bruising smash across the knuckles. He could feel blood from the wound in his thigh pooling inside his boot.

'No you don't, you son of your grandfather!'

Sorgrad leaped the wreckage. His blades were swift and deadly and the Relshazri retreated from the storm of blows.

The red-kerchiefed youth's attack faltered. Tathrin threw all his fading strength into driving his sword into the youth's face. The thrust went clean though his skull, the emerging blade dragging his unlaced coif backwards.

But Tathrin couldn't pull free. His sword was caught in bone and steel. The dying youth toppled backwards. Tathrin tried to let go but his bruised fingers were too slow.

The best he could do was drop to his knees rather than sprawl headlong. The jolt sent fresh agony through his shoulder. Bile surged into his mouth. He grabbed desperately for the fallen Caladhrian's sword. It lay just out of reach.

The Relshazri shouted, startled. Tathrin saw Sorgrad had punched a dagger right through the leather and wood of his shield. The Mountain Man ripped it out of the startled Relshazri's hand to fling it away.

The Relshazri swung at Sorgrad's unarmoured head. Sorgrad blocked the stroke with his sword. As he did so, his free hand seized the Relshazri's sword-arm. Pulling the startled man towards him, the Mountain Man smashed the studded hilt of his own blade hard into his enemy's face.

The Relshazri staggered, spitting blood and teeth. Sorgrad kicked him viciously in the side of the knee. The man screamed at the crack of bone and sinew and fell hard, landing flat on his back.

His shoulders barely touched the ground before Sorgrad's sword-point pricked his throat.

'Where are they? The folk from the inn?'

All sound of fighting had given way to a few dying whimpers. Tathrin ignored them, his attention fixed on the fallen man.

'Where are the family who lived here?' Sorgrad asked again with growing menace.

The Relshazri hissed something in an unknown tongue. Tathrin saw Sorgrad's face harden. The very tip of the Mountain mage's sword pierced the man's windpipe and Tathrin heard the Relshazri's breath whistling through the wound.

Forcing the man's chin up with his blade, Sorgrad leaned down and pressed a finger to seal the hole. 'Tell me, or I cut the rest of your throat.'

The man tried to spit in his face, blood from his broken teeth sliding down his cheeks.

'Your choice.' Sorgrad sliced through his neck as efficiently as any slaughterman. The man thrashed for a moment and lay limp.

Sorgrad glanced at Tathrin. 'Find something that belonged to your family. I'll see what I can scry.' His eyes were as cold as winter in the Mountains. 'If Jilseth turns up to ream out my arse for unsanctioned magic, she can make herself useful and find out where this bastard has been.'

Before Tathrin could speak, Gren stormed across the courtyard, yelling at Sorgrad in their Mountain tongue, his wrath beyond all reason.

Despite the agonies in his shoulder and thigh, Tathrin stayed still and silent. Draw Gren's attention and just at this moment he honestly feared the Mountain Man would kill him, before he knew what he was doing.

Now Sorgrad was shouting back, just as spirited.

Gren slashed the empty air with his sword, roaring with incandescent rage.

Sorgrad was still shouting him down.

Finally the younger Mountain Man stormed away, to hack at the charred beams of the barn, heedless of damage to his blade.

Tathrin struggled to speak through his pain. 'What was that all about?'

Sorgrad pursed his lips before deciding to answer. 'One of the men who attacked me was Karn.'

'Duchess Litasse's man?' Tathrin tried to look around the yard but the slightest movement was torture. 'Did you kill him?'

Sorgrad shook his head. 'That's why Gren's so cross.'

'Didn't he try to kill you?' Tathrin fought to make sense of this.

When they had last met, both brothers had promised the Triolle spy a violent death. The man Karn had responded in kind.

Sorgrad looked at him, contemplative. 'I think they wanted you dead. That's why I had to let the bastard run.' He kicked the dead Caladhrian's boot. 'To stop these heroes gutting you.'