Authors: Nathan Hawke
The Last Bastion
NATHAN HAWKE
CONTENTS
In the end it is our defiance that redeems us
‘S
o where’s the Foxbeard then?’
Outside Witches’ Reach, Sarvic stared at the pyre for a good long time after Valaric had finished his tale. Valaric shook his head. The Marroc from the fort didn’t know either. They were exhausted, bleak-faced and grim even in their triumph. There were a dozen left and the first messages to reach the Crackmarsh had spoken of five or six times that number. Proud men, all of them, or they would be once it sunk in what they’d done. Names to be remembered.
‘Varyxhun probably,’ said a short needle-faced Marroc who stood in their midst, and it was only when she spoke that Sarvic realised she was a woman. ‘He’ll have gone to Varyxhun. And I’ll be following him. The fortress is yours, Valaric the Wolf. Be sure you have a good look at the Aulian door in your cellar. Could be there aren’t any forkbeards about know the secret of where it goes, but most likely there are. Still – could be a way out for a man clever enough to use it.’
Everything was black outside the circle of light from the pyre. Valaric stared at the flames a long time, Sarvic beside him. ‘Strangest thing,’ Valaric whispered, eyes fixed on the corpse of the iron devil still wreathed in fire. ‘Couldn’t have been that many forkbeards who saw him fall, but the ones who did, they just stopped. It was like they’d seen the sun go out and it went through them like fire through a hay barn.
I saw forkbeards truly afraid tonight, Sarvic, though I dare say they’ll get over it.’
They talked some more then about how mightily upset the forkbeards waiting by the Aulian Bridge were going to be to find that Valaric had slipped around behind them. They’d know by morning and they were only a few miles down the Varyxhun Road. Valaric reckoned that gave the Crackmarsh men until maybe a couple of hours after sunrise. A busy night for most of them then.
When they were done with their own wounded and finishing off any forkbeards too hurt to get away, they collected their dead and dragged them to be buried in the snow of the deep woods below the ridge where the Lhosir wouldn’t find them. After that they returned to the dead forkbeards, cutting the heads from the bodies. Valaric sent Angry Jonnic and a few others off to the Varyxhun Road with them, a trail of grisly little presents for the lot by the bridge to find when they came.
Sarvic had gone long before dawn but it was easy enough to imagine how that went. Brought a smile to his face every time, but by then he was slipping away to Varyxhun, up the valley with the needle-faced Marroc woman Achista and half a hundred others. Achista was off to rescue some Aulian wizard from the hangman, so she said, but Sarvic reckoned they might as well rescue a few Marroc while they were at it, and the two Jonnics figured that if they were going to be doing that, well then they might as well be ‘rescuing’ the whole of Varyxhun castle, and it was only afterwards that Sarvic realised this had been Valaric’s plan all along – to keep the forkbeard army out at Witches’ Reach while half his Crackmarsh men quietly crept off and did just that.
Gallow caught up with them that first day, set on the same thing as Achista. She asked him something about his family and his face went blank. The look Sarvic saw on him was a horror, like he really didn’t give a shit about anything any
more. Like he just wanted to die with as many forkbeard corpses around him as he could possibly manage. It made him shiver, that look.
T
here were riots in Varyxhun. Oribas couldn’t see what was going on but he could hear the screams and he could smell the smoke. No one told him what had happened, but on the day they decided to hang him and hauled him up to the castle yard he could hear and smell the turmoil. He could see it written on the Lhosir around the castle, on their faces and in the way they held themselves. He looked up at the gallows. They were going to hang him but he wasn’t going to be the only one. There were Marroc too. Pressed together with the other prisoners, he heard what had filled the streets of Varyxhun with revolt: the forkbeards were beaten. The iron devil was dead and Witches’ Reach still held.
Witches’ Reach still held
.
He knew then that Achista was still alive and so he’d hang with a smile on his face.
There was an angry crowd somewhere outside the castle. Oribas could hear them shouting, calling out the names of the Marroc who were to die beside him. The snow was thick on the stones and the walls wherever it hadn’t been trampled into ice. A heavy fall had come in the night but now the sky was clear, the sun cold and bright, the frozen air as sharp as broken glass. There were a few Lhosir in the castle yard, come up from Varyxhun to watch, but not many. The last time he’d been here Varyxhun had been thick with Lhosir fighting men, each sporting the forked braided beard from which they got their name. Today the castle felt
empty. Maybe the cold was keeping them away or maybe they’d gone to Witches’ Reach and now half of them were dead. The thought brought a flash of glee, quickly turning to shame. The death of a child, the death of a woman, the death of a man, he’d been taught there was never a place for joy in any of these things.
Then again. . .
In the deserts of old Aulia people had robbed him, tricked him, lied to him, but no one had ever tried to kill him. Since he’d crossed the mountains with Gallow, it never seemed to stop.
An old Lhosir marched him up the steps onto the scaffold. At least the castle walls and the mountainside into which it was built kept them sheltered from the wind that scoured the valley; even so his hands were already numb in the cold. From the scaffold he could see a few Marroc among the Lhosir in the yard. Not many, but he could see the gates now too, the last of the six gates that rose in a single solid line up the mountain slope and barred the switchback road from Varyxhun to the castle. A line of mailed Lhosir soldiers with spears and shields stood across the entrance to the yard, barring the way to a crowd of hostile Marroc. Behind them lay the Dragon’s Maw, a gaping hole in the mountainside barred so tight with thick rusting iron that even a child couldn’t slip through. The dragon of Varyxhun lived in that cave, the castle’s guardian, waiting to devour any army that breached the last gate. The dragon was only a story but the crowd was real enough. The air was taut with their anger.
He looked at the Marroc men beside him. He had no idea who they were or what they’d done but he’d heard their wails and their screams for mercy in the darkness over the last few days and it seemed to Oribas that they were mostly ordinary men from Varyxhun. He heard his own name called from the crowd now and then, or more often ‘The Aulian’. He wasn’t sure how the Marroc even knew who
he was, never mind what he’d done, but they did. It was a terrible thing, shameful, not something to shout about, but the Marroc shouted anyway.
The Lhosir hangman positioned Oribas on the scaffold, hands tied behind his back, facing away from the crowd with the rope right in front of his eyes.
The iron devil is dead
. He had to wonder about that, had to wonder how anyone had managed to kill the ironskin and who else knew how a creature like that could be laid to rest; and then wonder who had made it and what for, and why the iron devils of the Lhosir seemed so akin to whatever had once been entombed beneath Witches’ Reach; but he couldn’t find any answers and there was a limit to how much wondering even Oribas could manage, staring at his own noose.
The hangman turned him round to face the crowd as the last of the Marroc were poked and prodded to the scaffold. The forkbeards inside the castle were mostly old or crippled; the ones who were fit to fight had gone with Cithjan to Witches’ Reach. Now Cithjan was dead and half his army with him, but the other half was still out there, and while it was, the peace in Varyxhun remained fragile as a winter morning.
He hadn’t taken everyone. The Lhosir who held back the Marroc at the gates weren’t old or wounded. They were arrogant, these forkbeards, but not stupid.
A bull-like voice called out his name and began to proclaim his crimes. A few of them were true, the worst ones, although the Lhosir seemed to have added a few more for good measure. Oribas couldn’t imagine why. Burning fifty men alive was enough, wasn’t it? Certainly enough to hang a man but he’d have done it again in a flash if it was the only way to keep his Achista safe. At the edge of the crowd a Lhosir soldier with furs wrapped across his face against the cold was heading for the gatehouse dragging a Marroc woman in his wake, pulled along by a rope tied around
her hands. A weight of sadness pinched Oribas’s lips. Keep Achista safe? She was still in Witches’ Reach and he was certain she wouldn’t leave. Sooner or later the Lhosir would get in and then they’d kill her. The ironskin had promised them all clean deaths, but now the devil was gone. And Oribas was here and about to hang, and he’d promised her he wouldn’t die first, and now there was nothing he could do. Nothing.
The reading of his crimes finished with the promise that Oribas would die here and now in front of these witnesses, and with a reminder that the Lhosir god – the Maker-Devourer – didn’t give two hoots what a man did with his life or how terrible his deeds might have been as long as he was honest. Oribas didn’t have too much of a problem with that. Here and now he envied the Lhosir for the simplicity of their belief. His own gods were more fickle.
Hands pulled Oribas towards the noose. They were surprisingly gentle. The Lhosir with the Marroc woman had dragged her to the gates and now he was arguing with the guards holding back the crowd. It was an odd thing to be watching when he was about to die, but it
was
strange. The Lhosir was mad. If the guards let him through, the Marroc outside would surely rip him to pieces!
There was something about the Lhosir though, something familiar. There was something about the Marroc woman too, but then the world went dark as the hangman slipped a hood over his head. Oribas yipped and shouted for it to come off, that he wanted to see – wouldn’t any man want to see for every last second he lived? But the hood stayed. He felt the Lhosir step away to reach for the noose, and then a great roar went up from the Marroc outside the gate. A murmur rumbled around the scaffold and then sharp cries of ‘To arms.’ Hands grabbed him, not so gentle this time, holding him, pulling the rope over his head. Oribas let himself fall limp, slumping in the hangman’s grasp before
the noose could go round his neck. The Lhosir swore. For a moment he hauled Oribas right off his feet, then he grunted and let go, and Oribas fell hard to the wooden scaffold. He lay there, winded for a moment. The sounds around him now were of a battle.
A hand grabbed him by the foot and pulled him across the wood, then jerked. Something heavy – a body by the feel of it – fell across his back. Oribas pulled himself free and wriggled until he was on his knees, head so low that it almost touched his feet. He shook himself as hard as he could until the hood fell off and the first thing he saw was a dead Lhosir sprawled across the scaffold with two arrows sticking out of him. There was mayhem at the gates. The Lhosir with his Marroc woman was gone. The Marroc had surged forward and the . . .
Gallow?
He stared. In the middle of the forkbeards at the gate, breaking their wall of shields from behind, was Gallow. And the Marroc crowd were pushing forward, and the ones at the front suddenly had swords and spears and shields, passed up from the men behind, and . . .
The Lhosir with the Marroc woman –
that
had been Gallow. Oribas scanned the gates, looking for the woman and not finding her; then he saw a figure running up to the battlements where a single Lhosir stood watch. She’d thrown off her cloak and was carrying a bow.
Achista!
She was too far away for Oribas to make out her face but he knew her from the way she ran and how she nocked an arrow to her bow and drew back the string and hesitated a tiny moment before she shot. He knew her from the way she moved as surely as if she was standing right in front of him.
The Marroc on the scaffold had fled, taking their chances with the forkbeards below. Bodies lay around it, more Marroc than Lhosir. The forkbeards from the yard were mostly at the gates now. They might have been old or
crippled but they were still Lhosir, and there wasn’t a man among them who wasn’t armed and ready to fight. But they weren’t enough. From his perch Oribas watched their shield wall buckle and break and the Marroc force their way through. This was no mob – these were soldiers pouring into the yard, followed by the ordinary men and women of Varyxhun. People like the Marroc who’d been waiting to die with Oribas.
A Lhosir climbed the steps to the scaffold with a bloody sword in his hand. He snarled at Oribas and lifted it high. Oribas squealed and dropped to his haunches, ready to hurl himself into the snow below, but an arrow caught the man in the chest before he could move. The forkbeard sank to his knees, blood bubbling out of his mouth. Achista. Other Marroc were on the battlements now, some of them shooting at the forkbeards; still others hammered on doors with their axes, forcing their way into the gatehouse and the towers that overlooked the road below the castle. Oribas looked for Gallow again but the Foxbeard was lost in the seething melee. There must have been a hundred Marroc in the yard now and the Lhosir were falling fast. A last handful ran back to the inner gates, to the windows and halls and buttresses and towers and balconies built into the mountainside that passed for the castle’s keep, but the Marroc were hard on their heels.
The yard quietened as most of the fighting moved inside to the old Aulian halls and galleries. Some Marroc rushed in, hungry for blood and plunder, others remained outside, surrounding the Lhosir who hadn’t yet been killed, finishing them off and looting the corpses. Marroc soldiers moved through the castle towers, dragging out any Lhosir they found inside, dead or alive. It probably hadn’t taken ten minutes from start to finish and the castle of Varyxhun had fallen. Varyxhun, which had once held at bay ten thousand forkbeards led by the Screambreaker himself, lost to a rabble of angry Marroc.
‘Oribas!’ Achista had her bow across her back and a knife in one hand. She ran straight at him and almost knocked him flat as she crushed him in her arms. Then she was behind him, cutting at the ropes around his wrists. ‘Stupid Aulian! Do you understand what you did to me when I heard you were taken? Do you?’
He tried to laugh. ‘It was quite deliberate. You should have seen the precision with which I threw my head against the edge of a Lhosir’s shield. It was exquisite.’ He tapped the lump on his head and the scar, still raw. ‘I saw Gallow. Where’s Addic? Did your brother escape too?’
‘He did and he’s here. Inside now, I expect.’
Oribas stretched his arms and rubbed his wrists. He looked at the noose behind him. ‘It would have been worth it,’ he said, almost in awe of his own words.
‘What would?’
‘To have died for you.’
Achista took a step away and slapped him. ‘Don’t ever say anything so stupid again!’ And then before Oribas could think of what to say next, a gang of Marroc hauled a snarling Lhosir up onto the scaffold, all of them kicking and punching him. Down in the yard other Marroc turned to watch, shouting and cheering.
‘Hang him! Hang him!’
More Marroc were trickling through the gates, the hungry-looking ones, the scared, the weak and the slow. The mob was after any Lhosir, alive or dead, and the Marroc soldiers who’d led the assault were letting it happen, turning away and heading inside the castle. The men on the scaffold hauled the Lhosir to his feet and slipped the noose around his neck. Oribas barged into them. ‘What did he do?’ They pushed him away. Even Achista had a hand on his arm, pulling him back. ‘But what did he do?’
The Marroc who’d put the noose over the Lhosir’s head shoved Oribas hard, knocking him down. ‘He’s a
forkbeard
!’
‘But you can’t . . .’
The words died in his throat. Behind the scaffold someone pulled a rope. A trapdoor opened, the Lhosir dropped, the rope snapped taut around his neck, and that was that. Oribas thought he even heard the bones snap. The Marroc on the scaffold raised a fist and whooped and the crowd cheered. ‘One less forkbeard! Got any more? Yes? Which one next?’
The soldiers on the walls watched and joined in with the cheers. Those Lhosir still alive were beaten down, a few simply murdered, others dragged toward the scaffold. Oribas pulled himself angrily to his feet. ‘This isn’t justice and this isn’t right!’ He made for the Marroc hangman again but this time Achista blocked him.
‘This is war, Oribas.’
‘No, this is murder.’ Though was it any worse than fifty men burned alive under the ground? Hard to say, and maybe it was the guilt that drove him now. ‘You’re better than this!’
There was pain in her eyes, and Oribas realised with a sickening feeling that it wasn’t guilt or shame, but sadness that he didn’t understand why this killing had to be done. He faltered, and then another Marroc grabbed hold of him and was shoving him out of the way. ‘They were going to kill you, darkskin.’
‘For what I did, Marroc, not for what I am! It may seem small to you but on that difference the Aulian Empire was forged!’
‘And now it’s gone.’ The rest of the Marroc ignored him.
‘At least the forkbeards had a reason.’ Although they hadn’t had any real reason when they’d set out to kill him for the first time, when they’d carted him off to the Devil’s Caves with a gang of ragged Marroc simply for knowing the name of Gallow Foxbeard. And, really, what was he doing here, defending the men who’d been about to kill him?
