The Destiny of the Dead (The Song of the Tears Book 3) (15 page)

A sharp edge of rock was digging into his breastbone but he
forced himself to ignore it. The next pass of the beam would come across
Chissmoul, himself and Flangers. The guards might not make them out at this
distance but any scrier with a wisp-watcher surely would. And Nish had an
unnerving feeling that they did have a scrier.

Holding his breath, he counted the seconds. The beam fanned
across him, swept back further down, and went out.

‘Stay!’ he hissed.

Stay
,
stay
,
stay
was repeated down the line. A minute went by in silence, then
without warning the beam swept back and forth, right over them. If anyone had
risen, they would have been seen.

The beam went out but he waited another minute, feeling
their chances ebbing away with every tick of his internal clock. Only minutes
until dawn.

‘When we get near,’ Nish said quietly, ‘try to breathe
shallowly so they don’t hear us. And before you attack, don’t forget to discard
the ropes.’

While the word was passed back, he worked his leg muscles,
hoping to prevent a last-minute cramp. After the brutal all-night march he had
just enough left for one brief onslaught, and it had better succeed. He would
not have the strength for a second attempt, or even a long fight.

‘Go,’ he whispered. ‘Quick and quiet as you can.’

Chissmoul sprang to her feet as if starting a race, and Nish
marvelled that she was able to. The rope pulled him forwards; he felt icy cold
now, no longer afraid, and perhaps because of that his clearsight snapped on
and he could see the track.

She went as fast as it was possible to go up such a steep
slope, and he went with her, counting the steps and concentrating on placing
his feet squarely and softly. Behind him Clech was moving easily, his long legs
covering a pace and a half with every stride, his huge feet finding a steady
purchase on the roughest surface.

They dropped over a lip of rock into a broad, shallow bowl.
Three or four spans deep and maybe twenty across, it had not been visible from
below. The sudden descent was so unexpected that Nish would have sprawled on
his face had the taut rope not held him up.

At the bottom, grit squeaked underfoot, as if the rock here
had been smashed by a mallet-wielding giant. He found his footing, moved
carefully across to minimise the noise, and up the other, steeper side of the
bowl.

Ahead the track curved left around a knob shaped like a
bladder-bat, then ran up steeply for the last sixty paces. Chissmoul turned
around the knob, slipped and her arms wheeled, but she found her feet and kept
going.

‘Rope!’ whispered Nish.

They untied, dropped it to one side and headed up the steep
pinch, and Nish felt a faint hope that they would make it to the slot undetected.
Fifty paces to go and his throat was burning; he was short of breath, and
trying to breathe shallowly and quietly made it worse.

Even so, he was making more noise than he cared to, and
someone behind him was panting. Forty paces; he landed hard on a small rock and
his right ankle almost turned; he just managed to save it from going over
though he felt a stinging pain in the top of his left foot and another shot up
his leg. Had he pulled a muscle?

He couldn’t stop. Thirty paces and his leg began to throb;
now a cramp was building in his right calf. He tried to adjust his stride to
stave it off but that made the pain in his left leg worse.

Twenty paces, and he didn’t think he could go much further.
But he had to; everything depended on surprise and the strength and
determination of the leaders. If they failed, the troops behind could not make
up the difference. He had to keep going, no matter how much it hurt.

Ten paces. They had to burst through the narrow slot before
the enemy realised they were there. If the sentries were alerted, even a
handful of soldiers could hold the pass against his little force.

Far below, someone lost their footing, fell with a stifled
cry, and a shield went clattering down the rocky slope, making enough noise to
rouse sleeping guards. But Klarm’s guards would always be at their posts.

‘Left!’ hissed Flangers and, like the trained soldiers they
were, Chissmoul, Nish and Clech went left off the path to the span-high
buttress blocking the left side of the pass. Flangers turned right.

‘I’ll throw you two up and over,’ whispered Clech. ‘Ready?’

They shrank against the rock face as a guard loomed in the
gap, drawing back the shutter of a lantern.

Chissmoul touched Clech’s arm to signal that she was. He
caught her under the arms and tensed.

The metal shutter scraped and the beam shone down the track,
revealing the next four militiamen only ten spans down. ‘We’re under –’
the guard cried, then died with Flangers’s knife in his throat.

He fell forward and down. Flangers tore the knife free and
shouldered him off the path. As he did, Clech sent Chissmoul flying up onto the
top of the buttress, then took Nish under the arms and, with a mighty heave,
hurled him after her. Nish landed in black shadow, wrenching his foot again,
but recovered and lay prone. Flangers was thrown after him, landed like a cat
and caught his arm.

‘It’s Nish,’ Nish said. ‘Chissmoul is ahead.’

Behind the other buttress, a lantern was unshuttered
momentarily, revealing a group of sentries coming to their feet, half a dozen
or more. Good, Nish thought, squinting to protect his vision. They’ve just lost
their night sight and we still have ours.

‘We’re under attack!’ bellowed one of the sentries, and
there were a few moments of chaos while they snatched up their weapons.
‘Reinforcements, down to the eastern pass!’

In the slot, sword clanged on sword. Clech was trying to
force the entrance to the pass all by himself.

‘We’re in and they don’t know we’re here,’ whispered
Flangers, and Nish could tell that he was smiling. The warrior was back in his
element at last, and with his vast experience he was worth three ordinary
soldiers. ‘I’ll take these guards from behind. Go up; stay in the shadows and
attack the reinforcements as they come.’ He crept down the upper side of the
buttress.

A long way up the pass, the embers of a small fire glowed
faintly, as if through the cracks of a stone fireplace. The camp would be
nearby, no doubt, and presumably the other, western entrance to the pass would
also be well guarded, though Nish did not know how far away it was. He and
Chissmoul headed up.

Swords clashed at the slot; the leading militiamen would
have reached Clech by now. Unfortunately they could only fight three abreast
and, striking up such a steep slope, would be at a severe disadvantage. And if
Flangers fell …

‘We’ve got to stop the reinforcements,’ Nish said to
Chissmoul. ‘I’ll scout further up. Wait here to ambush any I miss.’

She drew her blade and ducked behind a rock outcrop. From
below, Nish heard a grunt and a liquid gush, and prayed that the blood spilled
was the enemy’s. He ran on tiptoes up the pass, which broadened out towards its
crest; here it was ten paces wide. It was almost pitch dark at this level but
the growing light had begun to illuminate the snowy top of each peak.

The defenders guarding the western entry to the pass would
be over the crest and down, but Nish did not think they would leave their posts
without a direct order, in case of an enemy attack from both sides of the range
at once. He passed the camp fire, but where was the camp? He could not see any
tents.

With a high-pitched whistle, a skyrocket shot up from behind
the slot on a column of fire and burst high above the pass in thousands of red
sparks that would be visible for leagues. Nish cursed. It was an emergency
signal, and Klarm’s army couldn’t miss it.

The red glare starkly revealed the pass and a neat curve of
supply tents fifty paces away against the cliff wall of the white-thorn peak.
Scuffling came from the tents – soldiers pulling on their boots; one
minute could mean the difference between victory and oblivion.

Ignoring his bruised feet and throbbing leg, he raced for
the tents and slashed the ropes along the outside with huge swings of his
sabre, then did the same on the other side, collapsing the tents on their
occupants.

In the fading light of the skyrocket he saw movement at the
end of the closest tent. Nish crept down and, as the first head appeared, took
a mighty swing and cut it off. Blood spurted in his face; he dashed it away
with his sleeve. A soldier began scrabbling out of the third tent on hands and
knees.

Running at him, Nish thrust his sabre through the man’s
guard and into his side while he was still off-balance. He wrenched out the
blade, put his foot in the centre of the soldier’s chest and drove him
backwards onto the next man.

They were now coming out too quickly to attack. He ran into
the darkness and limped back towards the slot, praying that his militia had won
through. If it had not, it might be too late.

There was still no light down here, which was to his
advantage. He could hear people moving about and talking quietly, though it was
impossible to tell if they were his troops or the enemy. He felt another
prickle of fear. Had he miscalculated, leaving Chissmoul and Flangers to attack
from the rear? She was not trained in hand-to-hand fighting, while Flangers was
just one man.

He continued, sabre bared, and just caught sight of the
flash of steel, swinging in a huge arc.

‘Clech, it’s me!’ he cried, dropping to the ground. ‘What’s
going on?’

‘The guards are dead. We’ve done it, Nish. The pass is
ours.’

‘Not yet. Their reinforcements are on the way, maybe thirty.
We’ll have to try and take them down as they come.’

‘No, we won’t,’ said Clech. ‘There they are. Get down.’

He pulled Nish down flat. The running enemy were silhouetted
in the dim light at the crest of the pass, and Clech roared, ‘Fire!’

A fusillade of arrows whistled overhead from Nish’s archers,
who were already through the pass, and many of the enemy reinforcements fell. A
second salvo took down more, whereupon the rest turned and ran.

‘
Now
we have the
pass,’ said Nish, feeling a quiet satisfaction that they’d won it at so little
cost. But how long could they keep it?

‘Hold your fire!’ said Clech. ‘Archers, this way.’

As he and Nish headed up to the crest, a second rocket shot
up from further down the mountain behind them, bursting with an ice-blue flare
that cast a cold light on the enemy dead and the snowy peaks to either side.
The last of the reinforcements were bolting down towards the western gate of
the pass.

‘That’s Klarm’s answer,’ said Flydd, stepping out from
behind a crag and wiping his blade on one of the fallen soldiers. ‘He’s on his
way.’

 
ELEVEN

The light was growing rapidly now. ‘Come on!’ Nish
yelled. ‘We’re not done yet. They still hold the western gate.’

He led half a dozen archers down the winding track, pieces
of the slaty rock crunching underfoot. The pass was broader here, though it
narrowed again towards the western entrance, which was several hundred paces
below. It was guarded by eight soldiers plus the three survivors from the
tents, and a scrier with a wisp-watcher.

‘I knew I’d sensed a scrier,’ he said to Flydd.

‘Lucky he wasn’t watching the eastern side,’ grunted Flydd.

‘At attack from that side wasn’t very likely, fortunately.
What do we do with them?’ said Nish, though he already knew. With a mighty army
approaching, he was going to need every fighter he had, and he could not afford
to waste any on guarding prisoners.

‘Cut them down. That’s what they were going to do to us.’

The archers fired and two of the enemy fell, but the scrier
and the other soldiers scrambled over their barricade, out of sight, and by the
time Nish and Flydd had reached the gate they were way down the track, out of
range.

‘I hope we’re not going to regret allowing them to escape,’
Nish said, studying the defences.

This gate of the pass was, if anything, even more difficult
to attack than the other, for the track up to it followed the crest of a
knife-edged ridge for the last couple of hundred paces. Only a handful of
troops could walk abreast, and barely three for the last fifty paces, where the
ground was extremely steep and broken.

The enemy had built a low dry-stone wall across the
entrance, only chest high, but a major obstacle on that slope. Nish would need
ten troops to man it, plus reinforcements within shouting distance. Klarm’s
army was approaching from the other side of the range, but with the air-sled he
could drop soldiers anywhere and both entrances to the pass might need to be
defended at once.

The light was growing rapidly and for once it was not
raining, though it was windy and dank. Now that the action had passed, Nish was
cold and hungry, and he could feel every blister and ache. He sent a detail up
to ransack the enemy bodies for weapons and provisions.

‘And when you’ve finished, dump them well down the track in
Klarm’s path. I’ve got enough sick men and women without having rotting bodies
spreading disease.’

‘Good idea,’ said Flydd. ‘His troops will have to pass their
dead comrades to get to us, and that won’t be good for morale.’

‘They’re professional soldiers. It’ll take more than that to
shake them.’

‘They’re well trained, certainly,’ said Flydd. ‘But the
world has been at peace since Jal-Nish crushed the last opposition seven or
eight years ago. Most of his soldiers would never have seen real action, and no
amount of training can make up for being blooded in mortal combat, as your
militia have been. Until men have experienced that, you never know which of
them will fight, which will freeze and which will run.’