The King's Assassin (Thief Takers Apprentice 3) (14 page)

Tarn yelled at them to move out of the surf and up onto the beach while he and the tallest of the soldiers helped to turn the boats around and back out again. The waves knocked Berren forward, almost made him fall, and he was still wading out of the water, dripping and soaked, when the fighting started. Maybe the first shouts from the scouts had come as they were climbing out of the boats, but if so no one had heard over the breaking surf. Now the skirmishers were running back out onto the beach, waving their arms. Tarn roared at them, and then there were other men coming from the trees, dozens of them in a ragged horde, yelling and waving swords and axes and spears and clubs. The skirmishers ran as far as Tarn and his cohort and then turned. There was nowhere else for them to go.

‘Stand!’ bellowed Tarn. ‘Stand together! Hold firm!’

Berren could see the eyes of the first man charging at him now, wide and wild, full of fear and thoughtless rage. Those eyes terrified him. This wasn’t fighting in Tasahre’s circle or Silvestre’s square; this was death coming at him, over in a flash, one swing, one stab and then one of them would be dead. The urge to run was almost overwhelming.

‘Stand fast!’ screamed Tarn.

Berren took a step back. The two cohorts had formed a single line of shields. All he had behind him was the sea, the boats still struggling through the waves back towards Talon’s ship. A madman with an axe rushed at him. Out of the corner of his eye he saw someone fall, staggering back as though he’d been shot. He made himself stand firm and never mind how his heart was racing or how much he was sweating and his hands shaking. His mouth was dry with fear, his hands too tight on his sword, his legs had lost all strength and his feet had grown roots. It wasn’t an axe coming at him, he realised, it was a cleaver and it looked big enough to fell a horse. He was going to die!

And then it was almost as though he stood and watched and it was someone else who calmly stepped aside. The man with the cleaver tore past and swung, but where Berren had been only his blade remained. The man took a few more steps, stumbled, then fell face down onto the sand, his guts spilling around him. Berren blinked. The world seemed to go quiet for a moment. He stared at the man on the sand behind him, doubled up, clutching at himself as he spread a red strain across the beach. Then he looked at his hand, already holding his sword straight out in front of him, aimed at the eyes of the next man racing towards him. He stared at the steel, at the blood dripping from it . . .

. . . and snapped back to where the air was filled with shouts from so many voices that nothing made any sense, with the ringing sounds of steel on steel and with screams. The next man came at him with a sword. Berren didn’t move, didn’t flinch, just kept his own steel pointed straight at the man’s face. The man’s charge faltered. He slowed; the look in his eyes changed, fear winning out over fury, until he almost stopped, and it was the easiest thing in the world for Berren to step forward, lunge and stab him in the neck.

The Hawk to Berren’s right fell, ribs smashed open by the blow of an axe. The force knocked him sideways and he clawed at Berren’s arm as he died. The man who’d killed him was screaming bloody murder and already swinging again. Berren jumped out of the way of both of them. He stepped inside the swing of the axe, chopped the axeman’s arm off with one blow, smashed him with his shield and then stabbed him between the ribs.

More raiders were emerging from the woods. Bodies littered the sand now, some of them dead, most still moving, the crippled and the dying simply trying to get away. Outnumbered like this the two cohorts of the Hawks were supposed to form a single circle of swords and shields that would simply shrink back into itself whenever a man fell. They all knew it but they hadn’t drilled it, and Berren had no idea how it was supposed to work when the only thing you could do was jump out of the way of an axe and your own dying brother trying to drag you to the ground. They were all muddled together now, the mercenaries and the men from the woods, in a swirling melee where every man fought for himself with no idea of what was going on around him.

Berren danced amid the press of swords, dodging whichever way would keep space around him. Men fell, Hawks and raiders both. He had no idea how many there were, how hopeless the battle might be, whether they were on the brink of victory or defeat. All he could see was the space around him, the circle that marked the reach of his sword and anything that breached it. Another man with an axe came at Berren and lost his hand, and at the same time a heavy blow landed on his back. It knocked him forward but he was already spinning and pushing himself away. The man who’d attacked him had a club, raised for another blow. Berren split his face in half before he could bring it down.

Then he saw Tarn with three of the enemy around him. He leaped through the fight the way Tasahre had taught him, moving so fast that no one could touch him, chopped most of the way through the first man’s neck and barged the second aside with his shield. Tarn finished the third. Berren lunged again, but then there was another coming at him and he had to jump away, back towards Tarn, except Tarn wasn’t where he’d been, and now there was
another
man coming at him, this time with a spear, and all he could do was bat that aside and jump again, swinging at another raider as he did, missing, all the while feeling the sharpness seeping from his arms and his legs, the edge of speed draining away.

And then the raider in front of him turned his back and ran; and as Berren took a step after him, he saw that they were all running, twenty or thirty of them, fleeing back up the sand towards the woods. There were bodies everywhere.

‘After them!’ Berren felt a fresh surge of energy, his first rush of victory. He raced the other mercenaries, seeing which of them would be the first to bring a man down, but then they were at the edge of the woods and Tarn was screaming at them to stop, to hold, to watch for ambushes and archers. The hunger for more was strong, the urge to rush on and finish the enemy almost too much to resist. Berren tried to catch his breath and then, when he’d done that, he tried to work out what had actually happened.

‘Hold! Hold here!’ That was Tarn trying to sort out who was alive and who was dead, how many could still fight and how many were hurt. The men who’d made it to the woods were unscathed or else carried only small wounds, a nick or a sprain. There were others, though, left on the beach. You didn’t get in the way of a man swinging an axe and come out with just a scratch, after all. The scouts had taken the worst of it. Most of Tarn’s cohort was still standing as far as Berren could see, and so far they all had the usual number of arms and legs.

‘You fought like a man possessed. Like a demon.’ Tarn grinned as he passed. ‘Hurt?’

Berren shook his head.

‘How many did you send back to the sun?’

‘Four, I think. Maybe five.’

‘Maybe six or seven, more likely.’ Tarn laughed. ‘There’s about twenty of them lying on the beach back there and there’s six of us gone to the sun. Think about that.’ He nodded. ‘Glad to be your sergeant, soldier.’

They waited at the edge of the woods, tense and on their guard in case whoever had attacked them came back, but there was no more fighting. When the boats returned to the shore once more, Talon was with them with two fresh cohorts. There were a few hasty words with Tarn and then they were all at a run, Talon at the front, straight through the woods. The cohorts that followed would burn the dead and tend to the wounded, but for now Talon wanted to bring the raiders to bay before they had a chance to escape.

Ten minutes later they were standing in fields staring at a collection of huts that had been crudely thrown together from mud and wood. The Hawks swarmed through. Berren and Tarn kicked in door after door, shields raised and blades poised, but one after another the huts were empty. Berren was shaking: the excitement of the fight and then the charge through the woods and now the air of danger, the threat of every shadow, they all had a hold on him. His eyes flicked this way and that, and with every sign of movement, his hand flashed to his sword.

They passed a hut whose door was hanging broken from its frame. Tarn went straight past, but Berren thought he caught a flicker of movement, and when he stopped and looked again, he saw a pair of eyes looking back at him from the far corner of the floor. At first he couldn’t understand what he was seeing, but when he took a step through the doorway, the eyes rose and a woman scrabbled to her feet, showering cold ashes everywhere. She was dressed in rags, old and with a bad leg. Someone who couldn’t run. She had a knife and she was pointing it at him, holding it as far away from her as she could. She’d hidden in the firepit, covering herself with ash and half-burned wood and they’d almost missed her.

For a second they stared at each other and neither said a word, and then the woman lunged at him, stabbing at his face with her knife, hissing. Berren stepped around the knife and flicked the tip of his sword at her throat. Blood sprayed across the room and she collapsed where she stood.
A stroke of mercy
, he thought, but as he stared at her lying on the ground in a pool of blood all he saw was Tasahre on the deck of Radek’s ship, and she was shaking her head at him, and the last light in her eyes as they died was full of sadness. Action without thought. An old woman with a blunt and pitted knife. There were so many ways he could have spared her and yet his instinct had killed her. He looked at his hands. They’d betrayed him. They’d shown him who he really was.

‘What did you do that for?’ asked Tarn behind him. Berren turned his back on both of them and walked out of the hut. Outside, the search of the village was largely over. He walked blindly through it.
I’ve become him
, he thought.
I’ve become Master Sy
.

‘Hey!’ Tarn came after him. ‘Who made you the bloody judge of life and death?’

Berren didn’t answer and the killing was forgotten before long, at least by everyone else, but the name would stick to him for ever.
The Bloody Judge
.

16

THE STONES BY THE SEA

T
he village was no raiders’ camp after all. Women and children had lived there, though they’d fled before the Hawks arrived. They’d had livestock and poultry which they’d hurriedly driven away. There were farm tools. It had been a village, a living village and not some summer camp like the one the Hawks had left outside Forgenver. As the rest of the soldiers landed from the ship, Talon called a company council. This sounded like a grand thing to Berren until he saw that it was simply Talon and all the cohort sergeants getting together for a chat, and anyone else who wanted to join in was perfectly welcome. Berren left them to it. Slaughtering women and children, razing villages, salting the earth, all these things were anathema to a soldier, or at least they were supposed to be. Berren had no idea whose kingdom they were in but this place surely belonged to someone. There would be consequences for what the Hawks had done here.

The old woman he’d killed haunted him. He wandered away from the village looking for some solitude, and took a path that went back into the woods towards the beach. It led him to the sea by a cluster of boulders, some as big as a house. The ground underfoot was sandy and he could hear the waves and taste the salt in the air. He found himself a slab to lean against, warm in the sun, and stared out across the sea, out to the ship that had brought them here.

Why did you do it? Why?
He couldn’t even begin to answer. Before today he’d killed two men: Radek of Kalda because the warlock Saffran Kuy had made him do it, and he’d killed the sailor Klaas. Klaas had been a pig and a bully, a thief and a coward who’d got exactly what he deserved, but Berren had still thought about what he’d done for weeks afterwards, wondering if there could have been some other way. Maybe he could simply have run? Before that he’d barely even been in a fight, unless you counted the childhood fisticuffs with Master Hatchet’s boys. And now, today, he’d killed half a dozen men he didn’t even know, who didn’t know him, and he’d killed a woman too.

What troubled him most was how he remembered it. Everything was a blur, even the woman. He remembered exactly what he’d done but as though he was watching someone else do it, the same way he’d felt in the battle. He’d killed her but he couldn’t begin to say why. Because she’d come at him with a knife, yes, but what sort of reason was that when he was a soldier, armoured and with a sword, and she’d had almost nothing? Instinct, that’s what it was. Simple instinct, and his had been to kill, because that’s what they’d all taught him, one after the other: Master Sy, Master Silvestre, even Tasahre, although she would have wept at what he’d done today.

There’d been another man in the battle, too – he remembered now. They’d exchanged blows, and then Berren had lunged. He’d felt his sword hit something but then another soldier had barged into him, almost knocking him flat, and when Berren had looked up, the man he’d been fighting was gone. Now he was left not knowing whether the man was even injured, and the not-knowing bothered him. Was there someone out there who would forever see scars on his belly and think of that dark-skinned wiry short-arse on the beach?

A movement in the corner of his eye shattered his thoughts. He dodged sideways in time to see a hammer smash into the rock where his head had been. He grabbed hold of the hand that held it and pulled, yanking a man even smaller than he was out into the open. For a few seconds they wrestled, Berren and a shrieking, swearing fireball of elbows, knees, feet and fists, until he managed to smack his attacker’s head into a rock and put an end to it. Berren had his own dagger in his hand at once, then stopped. The stunned man groping in the sand at his feet wasn’t a man at all – he was a boy, maybe eleven or twelve years old but no more.

Another figure appeared from a crack between the rocks – a woman, much older. ‘Please, sir! Please!’ The crack was tight and she was having trouble getting out. Berren watched her and all the while he rested one foot on the boy’s neck to make sure he stayed on the ground. The flash of bloodlust that had made him draw his dagger was gone now.