The Ships of Merior (43 page)

‘There’s one from behind, for treachery,’ he chided. The bowstring creaked into another draw. ‘And a second for predictable obsessions.’

The next screamer knifed across the dark, sliced a dry thong, and cut loose a suit of old chain mail. The mass descended, jingling, and snagged Mearn like a cod in a lead-weighted net. Ripped off his perch, he went down. A thump, a grand puff of dust, and a screech of rude words through the bymie marked his landing across the furled canvas of his grandfather’s mouldered field pavilion.

‘Slings, two dozen, for small stoneshot,’ the intruder listed cheerfully. He slithered on and read another label. ‘Leather bracers with brass studs, six score.’ A faint sniff pocked the recitation. ‘Dryrotted, for shame. Someone neglected their goose-grease.’ A box sailed down from the heights, struck another barrel of helmets, and the subsequent grinding avalanche of metal cut Parrien off at the ankles. He staggered, measured his length, and slammed himself dizzy on the strut of a handcart packed with sand-bags.

The racket masked the grind of a bar from the stairhead. Across the fifty foot chamber, the upper level postern crashed back. Light cracked the dark, and soldiers poured through, Keldmar in the lead. Captain Tharrick raced a half-step behind, the spill of his torch a gleam on pale hair like blood on a sheaf of hackled flax.

‘Our enemy’s up in the shelving,’ warned Mearn.

Another box flew and burst, this time against the wall above the stairway. Objects rattled and pinged down the risers. Peppered by ricochet, the soldiers lost impetus, windmilled, and yelled as their boots turned on footing made treacherous by a deluge of small stoneshot. Swords flashed helter-skelter. The scrape of blades and armour struck sparks against the wall as men collided and crashed on their buttocks.

Unscathed on the landing, Keldmar embarked in cold fury to light torches. Cloaking darkness burned away in the blaze. Too dazzled by glare to make use of his bow, the instigator became a backlit target.

Bransian hurled another javelin.

The sheaf of whistle arrows toppled over the shelf rim as Arithon shed the recurve and dropped flat. The weapon skimmed over his head, nicked a ceiling beam, and clattered end over end into the aisle adjacent.

Battered into retreat yet again by the shower of jettisoned signal arrows, Bransian shouted to his brothers. ‘Axes! Hack through the braces to the shelving and let
the whole tier collapse.’ To the soldiers who sorted themselves to rights on the staircase, he ordered, ‘Find bows. Set up a crossfire. I want that spy pinned down.’

Parrien reappeared from a side aisle, his braid leaking blood, and fists locked around the haft of a double-edged war-axe. Mearn, more resourceful, had raided the field pavilion’s gear for the woodcutter’s hatchet in the cooking kit. In paired force, their first crashing strokes hewed at the braces, to a sullen, clanking chime of jarred contents; while in a stirred blaze of cressets by the landing, Keldmar and Tharrick regrouped the soldiers in teams and dispersed them on course to fetch longbows.

That moment all the torches flicked out.

A few ragged shouts, cut off by Tharrick’s order; then no sound beyond the echoing thunder of axe blows, and a low-voiced, insolent remonstration. ‘Mind your feet.’

Keldmar became noosed in a snarl of flung bowstrings. Then a crash of wood and metal set the soldiers into howling disarray. ‘Crossbows, ten dozen, and be careful the cocking latches don’t get bent to perdition by the hobnails you wear in your boots.’

The laughing voice issued from the right, no longer in the swaying mass of shelves. Mearn stopped hewing, too late. A rope had been strung from the top tier. Hemp gave a wasp-thrum in warning; the unstable mass teetered, then cracked and heeled over to bash into the next row of racks. A sandpaper rasp of slipped contents continued, and a spill of boxed, baled, tied and crated contents rocked airborne in a cataract that thudded burst wire and litter across the flooring.

The soldiers sent off to string longbows were blocked or hammered flat by a matchwood bristle of splintered wreckage.

Keldmar gave fast orders to seal the upper doors, while Dakar was kicked and half-trampled by Parrien’s sprint to block return access through the passageway.

Too encumbered to nurse his bruised shin, assured by the blistering fan of heat across his knuckles that the torches in his hands remained alight, if blackened by Arithon’s weave of shadow, Dakar said, ‘I warned you, this spy is a sorcerer. Whatever’s in this armoury to attract the eyes of enemies, he’ll go there before he tries escape.’

The culverin,’ muttered Parrien, and trailed off with a guttural curse.

A furtive scrape, a muffled sneeze, and a muted jink of metal betrayed the forecast’s astuteness: the intruder was one shelf over, and moving fast in the opposite direction from the doorway. Mearn’s lunge to flank his progress down the aisle immediately fouled in a crash, as meshed crossbows dropped minutes earlier to foil soldiers mired his ankles in turn.

‘Entanglements, snares, and misfortune,’ the spy chided in unabashed hilarity; well aware the phrase was borrowed from a ribald ballad about an adulterer’s mistimed assignation, Bransian aligned his gaze to match the sound. A whoosh combed through the air above, knitted through by a soprano clink of curb chain. Caught flat-footed and staring upward, the duke was clobbered by a snaking mess of harness. Half-throttled by the drag of the horsecollar, laced head to foot in oiled strap-goods, he ripped out his dagger and began in frantic bursts to dice leather.

Having clattered through the last of the crossbows, his woodcutter’s hatchet cocked to slash, Mearn poised in the darkness, listening. The armoury threw back a sullen stew of echoes. Bransian’s quick and murderous breaths timed to the chink of dropped buckles, offset by Keldmar’s exhortations to Tharrick’s soldiers, engaged in grumbling effort to regroup and string longbows, to refrains of smacked shins and stubbed toes.

A finger of breeze brushed Mearn’s skin. Then his ears caught a telltale creak of wood. A whispered brush of
cloth chafed over metal; the spy had alighted from the shelving but a half-pace away from his position.

Mearn dropped his arms in a powerful down-swing. The torches burst back to a dazzle of full flame, and a lithe, compact body folded to one knee under the descent of the hatchet. Black-haired, green-eyed, and merrily sardonic, the spy met the stroke, a sword upraised in each hand. Steel screamed as the hatchet sheared and grabbed on crossed blades braced to guard.

‘Bad luck,’ said the spy on a grunt as the shock knocked him breathless. He let go of his weapons.

Mearn’s backstep, and his jerk to clear the helve from his opponent’s entangling parry met no resistance.

The hooked blades obliged and flew airborne. Inherent fine balance lent their trajectory vengeful life as they arced toward shocked and widened grey eyes and a mouth etched with grim determination. Mearn jumped, cat-quick in avoidance, while his quarry tucked, rolled, and disappeared through the space beneath the shelf. Mearn’s thrown weapon hissed a half-beat behind, nailed wood, and bit off an appalling gouge.

Still meshed in looped harness, Bransian lost patience and charged. Helmets pealed, thrashed back to belling life as his progress raked the scattered debris in a snaking wrack of traces and hames. Bit-rings and buckles snagged on bowstocks and flanges, and the racket drowned all hope of tracking.

‘Dharkaron’s Black Spear!’ Parrien screeched. ‘Will you shut those things up?’ Irate enough to abandon his post by the tunnel, he rolled onto his toes, then stopped his rush as the armoury went dark a second time.

Bransian ground to a halt amid a petulant chime of dragged steel. Captain Tharrick and Keldmar had used the brief respite to regroup the soldiers. The intermittent rattle of strayed slingshot betrayed their closing move to quarter the one aisle left untrammelled.

While over the stealthy brush of footsteps, the muted
grate of weapons and mail, a soft voice pattered in monologue: ‘Halberds, four score, admirably polished. Daggers for swordplay, eight dozen, boxed. Longswords, less quillons and pommels, two chests’ worth.’

‘By Ath, he’s taking an
inventory!’
cried Keldmar in hoarse incredulity.

‘Very good,’ the spy remarked. ‘Only a lunatic would come here to count your nice sharp swords for his health.’ A distinctive, ratcheting clank issued from the bowels of the dark.

Always quickest with details, Mearn remarked, That’s the large arbalest he’s cocking!’

Keldmar yelled orders, and Captain Tharrick’s men deployed in a two-pronged assault intended to sweep the third corridor. Running feet slapped stone, punctuated by the ping of a trigger latch, a creak of laminated wood, and a whine of taut-strung wire.

‘“Peppermint, rosemary, thyme, and mace”,’
the spy chanted. ‘
“Beware evil weeds that
grow
apace”!
His weapon clicked and discharged.

The bolt hissed through the darkness and struck, its target a packed store of breastplates. Their shelf disgorged them in thunderous, skull-splitting noise. The three leading soldiers were scythed down outright, while plate armour spun and clattered on to unmercifully whack heads and batter elbows. The disarrayed ranks carried forward undaunted. The arbalest ripped out a second shot. Stacks of targes swayed and upended; their leather covered frames were spiked and studded with bronze, a punishing hindrance as they rolled every which way, and pared the soldiers’ ranks even further. Survivors dispatched to complete the advance tripped a pace later and crashed flat. The spy, while he counted, had strategically jammed halberd poles in the bracing. Spurred on by white fury and Keldmar’s imprecations, the soldiers scrambled upright, charged three steps, and blundered through a musty string of signal flags. Mould
dust billowed up. The assailants staggered on, folded in virulent sneezes, while the spy clambered up a pike rack and slung himself sideways into the farthest tier of shelving.

Bolstered by Bransian and Mearn, his pursuers recovered their impetus and converged like a wolf pack down the aisles on either side. The frustration scalded, that sixteen men could be quartering the finest collection of weaponry in East Halla, and still find no target to skewer.

‘“Cailcallow tea, for easing the cough”,’
the spy resumed in mad recitation.
‘“Groundsel and willow, for fever”!

A flurried agitation in darkness, the soldiers manoeuvred to flank his lofty perch.

The recipes for herb potions and tisanes suffered a jagged break in metre. ‘For threats, we’ll just have to improvise.’ Unseen hands heaved something. A hamper of buckles upset; then a cask of tempered steel broadheads hissed down and burst, followed fast by two crates of crossbow bolts. Men swore and leaped and pussyfooted through another jangling impediment, while their luckless lieutenant howled and fell to his knees to find an arrowhead jammed through his sole. His wounding was unlikely to be received as an accident.

Dakar alone guessed differently as a coffer of loose rivets showered earthward: Arithon seeded the floor with anything at hand to contrive noise. Master of Shadow he might be; but with his mage-sight blinded, the dark of his own making must slow him. He strove to compensate through his masterbard’s ear, to wrest every nuance he could wring out of sound and to map the proximity of his enemies.

Dakar’s thwarted spite allowed no admiration, that despite an unpardonable betrayal and a rude disadvantage in numbers, the Prince of Rathain seemed determined to finish the review asked by the Fellowship sorcerers.

‘Spears, maces, morningstars.’ A heavy something plummeted and struck off a burst of red sparks. The soldier poised halfway up the shelving grunted and dropped, a fist-sized dent in his helm. His demise ripped down two companions while darkness flowed back, and Keldmar, poised like an owl on a bracing, flexed his knife-wielding forearm and stabbed.

His blade met a belling parry. His next stroke gutted a field hammock. He lunged again, nicked flesh that bled, and snatched. His knuckles barked into a tossed sack of flints. ‘Curse you! Your accent’s not townbred. Who sent you?’

A rattle of seasoned yew issued from the blackness in reply.

‘He’s into the new stock for longbows!’ Keldmar shouted. ‘Close in from the west. We’ll have him boxed against the stairs.’ A stealthy touch at his shoulder made him flinch and curse: his younger brother had joined him on the scaffolding.

‘Better kill before you ask questions,’ Mearn advised. ‘Another blunder, and Parrien’s sure to lose his reason and abandon his guard by the passages.’

Keldmar gave a noncommittal grunt. The boards beneath his knees began to shake; Captain Tharrick had set more men to climbing.

Someone more agile dropped, slithered, swung onto the lower tier, and doubled back. ‘He’s under us,’ Mearn whispered.

Keldmar peered outward, knife cocked above his head. A sour reek of leather flared his nostrils, then a piquant bouquet, chokingly laced with ammonia.

‘Rats have been nesting in your hide stores,’ the ruffian remarked.

Keldmar curled his lip and threw. His dagger smacked into something soft; leather, or maybe, human flesh; the angle was awkward to be certain. He leaned out to check. A supply net lashed up, caught, and whipped around his
waist. Laced like a whore in a corset, he struggled and clawed at twining hemp, thumped an elbow into Mearn, and got himself tackled from behind by an overzealous soldier just arrived.

‘He’s ours, you fool!’ Enraged as a singed cat, Mearn seized a mace and clubbed the blunderer unconscious.

Keldmar sat back up in a slither of slackened mesh. Dazed and rubbing a skinned shoulder, he chuckled. That was a bit harsh, brother.’

‘Don’t go soft on me just because you feel faint.’ Mearn gave his brother’s wrist an insistent jerk. ‘If that spy breaks through Tharrick’s cordon, he’s going to run over our culverin.’

‘You think we should drop at the north end and cut him off?’ Keldmar was a large man who hated to move in a hurry. Opponents tended to forget that he could, which made for lucrative bets on his wrestling; and Mearn disliked being still.