The Destiny of the Dead (The Song of the Tears Book 3) (16 page)

‘I still remember my first battle,’ said Nish, with an
involuntary shiver.

The pass had been taken at little cost – five of the
militia slain, three more severely wounded and unlikely to survive, plus the
man who had fallen so noisily and raised the alarm. He had broken both legs and
his right hip, injuries that doomed him up here.

Clech had several flesh wounds, while Chissmoul had lost
most of her left ear to a skewering blow that could easily have killed her, and
several others in the vanguard of the attack had minor injuries, but the rest
of the militia had not seen action.

Nish sent down troops to defend the eastern and western
entrances, and organised work details to begin laying dry-stone walls across
them so the enemy could not retake the pass as readily as he had done. The
captured supply tents contained a good store of weapons, provisions, and dry
clothes. After ensuring that everyone was fed with the best there was to offer
and plenty of it, he had them change into clean, dry uniforms, and sleep.

Huwld came to Nish several times, bearing food and drink,
but he took nothing; his stomach was still clenched so tight that he did not
think he could get anything down.

Satisfied that he’d taken care of his people as best he
could, Nish and Flydd climbed a spur of the white-thorn peak, where they could
look down over the approaches to both the eastern and western entrances. It was
fully daylight now, and there was no one in sight in either direction, but with
Klarm’s enormous army moving this way, Nish could not relax.

‘Nice day,’ said Flydd laconically.

Nish eyed him warily, unsure if he had recovered from
yesterday’s fit of bad temper. ‘Every day we stay alive is a nice day.’

Flydd squirted brown wine from a wineskin into his mouth,
gagged, swallowed and made a face. ‘Yuk! Tastes as though it’s been strained
through a camel’s saddle blanket.’

‘Then why drink the filthy stuff? I can smell it from here.’

‘It numbs my guts.’

‘They’re still troubling you, then?’

‘With every breath; every step; and every thing I eat. I
curse the day I took renewal, Nish, and it’s getting worse, not better; some
days I’d sooner be dead.’

‘I’m sorry. I hadn’t realised it was that bad.’

‘Ah, well,’ said Flydd, raising the wineskin again. ‘I knew
the risks. Only great mancers can work the Renewal Spell at all, and more of
them die than survive it. And of those who do survive, a good few wish they
hadn’t.’

Nish couldn’t think of any suitable response, so he sat down
and looked around, and shortly Flydd perched beside him. A watery sun peeped
through the rushing clouds, but exposed to the wind as they were it was chilly,
though Nish was not unduly bothered by it. Having spent his early life in the
frigid south, he preferred cold to the suffocating, clammy heat he’d endured
since coming to Gendrigore.

Patches of snow and grainy ice, which had slid down the
steep slopes of the white-thorn peak, lay in crusted heaps on those parts of
the pass where the sun did not reach, though elsewhere the ground consisted of
bare rock or slaty rubble.

High above to their left a ridge extended out into the
enormous overhang he’d noted previously, resembling a beaky old man’s nose. Its
bridge and tip were covered in a thick sheet of ice, and as he stared at it
Nish’s dormant clear-sight flashed on for a few seconds and he saw that at the
end of the nose the ice was fissured. The wind howled around the bulbous tip
and through a pair of shallow caves on the lower side, like flaring nostrils.

‘I hope that ice doesn’t come down on us,’ he said,
adjusting the staff, which had grown hot again.

‘It looks solid enough,’ Flydd said carelessly, offering a
lump of cheese and the wine. ‘Though I dare say pieces fall off when the
weather warms up.’

‘I think this
is
warm weather, up here.’ Nish gnawed on a rind of cheese but did not take the
proffered wine skin. He was too tired and, with the enemy likely to attack at
any time, could not afford to dull his wits. ‘Well, Xervish, against the odds
we did it.’

‘Very satisfactory,’ said Flydd, rubbing his hands together.
‘I never imagined we could take the pass at all, much less that we’d capture it
at so little cost.’

Nish looked down. ‘We lost nine dead or doomed in the
attack,’ he said quietly. ‘I don’t call that a little cost.’

‘When you go to war, you have to expect casualties.’

‘I do, but I’ll never get used to ordering my friends and
comrades to their deaths.’

It was a disagreement they’d had many times over the years,
and he did not have the strength to repeat it. Nish closed his eyes, but saw
the blade pierce Gi’s heart, then Forzel beheaded, and had to open his eyes
again, for all the other deaths he was responsible for, recent and long ago,
were waiting in line to torment him and undermine the small satisfaction he’d
taken in the victory.

It’s all right for you, his dead seemed to be saying, but
what about us? And then there was Maelys. He hadn’t entirely given up hope, yet
how could she have survived?

‘Still, I thank you,’ Nish added after a long pause.

‘What for?’ said Flydd, tearing at a dark strip of leathery
dried meat – horse or buffalo.

‘For driving me to attempt the impossible. How did you know
it
was
possible?’

‘I didn’t, but I couldn’t let Klarm win; not until he’s
earned it, at any rate.’

‘You don’t believe we can beat him?’

Nish took off his boots and peeled off the filthy, slimy
socks to inspect his feet, which were bruised, swollen and had blisters upon
blisters.

‘You should have attended to your feet,’ said Flydd. ‘What’s
the matter with you?’

‘I had to take care of my troops, first.’

‘The best way to take care of them is for you to be fit for
action.’ Flydd stared down the eastern pass, and said, ‘Beat Klarm here? If we
can, they’ll have to make a new Great Tale about it, for it will surely be the
greatest victory against the odds of all time.’

‘In Gendrigore I was told that a few hundred could hold this
pass against an army.’

‘That’s easy to say when you’re fifty leagues away, and full
of piss and ale.’

‘Once we’ve walled off the two entrances,’ said Nish, ‘I
reckon we might be able to hold it.’

‘We’ll make them pay dearly for every life they take, but
even if we could slay ten of them for every man of ours, how can the result be
in doubt? You’ve got a hundred and fifty bone-weary troops, if you count the
cook’s boy, Huwld. Klarm has, what, eight or nine thousand. He can take losses
of sixty to our one, and wear us down. There comes a time when even the
strongest man can no longer lift his sword, and then he falls. Or Klarm could
simply starve us out – which would only take a week and a half.’

‘He can’t wait that long,’ Nish said gloomily. ‘The
really wet
season is coming and he’s got
to get his army down to the lowlands before it hits.’

‘Anyway, he’s got the air-sled,’ said Flydd. ‘He can spy out
our defences from above, then fly over the pass and drop thirty soldiers behind
us, and do it again and again. As long as he can fly, the result can’t be in
doubt. He may also have flappeters or other flying, flesh-formed beasts.’

Nish’s morale was sliding by the second, but he could not
give in; the consequences were too dire. ‘We’ve got to think of a way to beat
him,’ he said dully.

A rain squall swept up the eastern side of the range towards
them. Nish shivered, and could not bear to wear his filthy, bloodstained
clothes for another minute. ‘I’m going down.’

‘Good idea. Get some rest. You’re going to need it.’

‘You haven’t slept in days,’ Nish retorted.

‘I can doze on my feet. I’ve got a lot to think about.’

Taking the half-gnawed strip of meat from his mouth, Flydd
inspected it, looked disgusted, then put it back and headed further up the
ridge, swinging the stave. The serpent’s green eyes caught the light and
momentarily their gleam echoed Flydd’s own – at those times when he’d
looked at the tears.

Down at the eastern entrance, Nish found an exhausted
Flangers supervising a dozen militiamen who were blocking the slot and fitting
broken rock together on top of the buttresses, raising walls there so they
could not be scaled. Huwld was carrying stone up, running back and forth like a
little dervish. Nish eyed the work distractedly – there didn’t seem much
point when Klarm could fly over on the air-sled.

Chissmoul was slumped on a rock at Flangers’s feet, as pale
as the snow. The bandage wrapped around her head was bloodstained over her
missing ear and she was shivering.

‘I’ll take over,’ said Nish. ‘Get some rest, you two, and
take everyone but the pass guards with you.’

‘You need rest more than I do, surr,’ Flangers said
stubbornly.

‘It’s an order,
Lieutenant
Flangers.’

Flangers turned around, staring at him disbelievingly.
‘Surr?’

‘No man who ever served me has deserved promotion more,’
said Nish.

‘But …’

‘Get moving. You’re my best and most experienced officer and
I can’t do without you – well fed and rested.’

‘I might say as much to you,
surr
,’ Flangers said quietly.

‘Where are they?’ said Nish that afternoon. ‘Why aren’t
they coming?’

He had cleaned himself up, been to the healers, and slept
for five restless hours. Now he was sitting on the wall above the partly
blocked slot, looking down the approaches to the pass. It was afternoon yet
there was still no sign of the enemy, though the wind was wailing eerily
between the peaks and the superstitious Gendrigoreans were muttering about evil
ghosts and mad spectres coming for them in the night.

Nish wasn’t looking forward to darkness either. The weather
was thoroughly miserable; already they’d had rain, sleet and snow, and the last
of the wood the enemy had left here had been burned.

Several militiamen, miners back home, had dug chunks from a
thin seam of oil shale in the wall of the unnamed peak, and had managed to get
the waxy rock to burn, though with clouds of pungent black smoke and a yellow
flame that had little heat in it. Still, any fire was better than none and it
would be particularly welcome when night fell.

‘They can’t be far below us, can they?’ said Chissmoul.

‘It didn’t look that way when they fired their signal
rocket,’ said Flydd. ‘I’d say Klarm is deliberately holding back.’

‘Why would he do that?’

‘He’s a prudent man, and he’s used to controlling
everything. We’ve shocked him twice in days –’

‘Twice?’ said Nish.

‘He lost five hundred men in the lower clearing yesterday
and he can’t be sure why. Was that flood just an accident – or did we
make it happen with mancery?’

‘Or was a higher agency involved?’ said Nish. ‘Stilkeen! And
are we in league with it?’

‘I hadn’t considered that,’ Flydd said thoughtfully,
stroking his serpent staff. ‘Yes! If we could make him believe that …’

He rose, took a turn up to the crest of the pass and back,
warmed his hands at the oil-shale fire, on which Huwld the cook’s boy was
stirring hot soup in a cauldron, and sat down again.

‘I don’t think he will,’ Flydd added, ‘but until Klarm
understands what happened yesterday and how we got away, he won’t move against
us. Boobelar will have spilled his guts, but he’s an unreliable witness and
Klarm will want to see for himself. He’s probably searching the clearings and
the river now and checking our dead.’

‘Before he attacks, he has to know if I’m here,’ said Nish.
‘And Maelys, and Yggur and you – his prizes and his enemies. If he knows
I’m
here, he’s got to extract me alive
–’

‘Of course he knows you’re here. The guards who got away
would have told him, and so would your friend Boobelar.’

Nish yawned. ‘But not Yggur or Maelys. Boobelar wouldn’t
have known if they were among us.’

‘Klarm’s other worry must be how he lost the pass. For a man
who takes pride in controlling everything, this defeat would have been an even
bigger shock. How did we survive the flood; how did we break his defences with
so few? He’s got to know before he moves. Get some more sleep, Nish.’

‘There’s too much to do. I’ve got to find a way to
neutralise the air-sled – and his advantage in numbers.’

‘You’re not indispensable, no matter how much you might like
to think so.’

Nish bridled, until he realised that Flydd was baiting him.

 
TWELVE

The afternoon passed, and most of the night, without a
sign of the enemy. An hour and a half before dawn, the mist began to lift.

‘They’re here,’ said Flangers.

Nish looked over the wall and saw a vast carpet of lights
fanning out down the mountain from a few hundred paces below them. Though he had
been expecting it, the sight so shocked him that he rubbed his eyes and looked
again.

‘It’s still there,’ said Flydd from his left, with a
mirthless chuckle. ‘I wonder what Klarm’s plan is?’

‘It wouldn’t matter if he was the best general in the
world,’ said Flangers. ‘There’s only one way to attack, and we’ve got it
covered.’

‘We haven’t got the air-sled covered,’ said Flydd.

Nish glanced upwards, involuntarily, but saw nothing save
the jutting, nose-shaped ridge of rock with the ice sheet on top. The cavities
at the lower end were hung with icicles, like oozing nostrils.

‘Those icicles are hanging above the track,’ he said
thoughtfully. ‘Do you reckon we could shoot some off, down onto the soldiers as
they come?’

‘Pick the nose and flick it at the enemy, as it were. I like
it,’ grinned Flydd. ‘Though even if you killed a dozen or two, it wouldn’t make
any difference.’