By Heresies Distressed (73 page)

During the respite while the other side was obviously reorganizing, Hahskyn and Seahamper did their best to improve their positions. Saint Agtha's offered little to work with, but the sisters' three farm wagons and pair of carts had been dragged out of the stables and turned upside down to form a rude strong point covering the guesthouse's single door, and the walls of an outbuilding near the stableyard had been quickly demolished. The loose stone provided far too little building material for any sort of breastwork, but Seahamper had seen to it that the individual rocks were scattered all around their position. It wasn't as good as caltrops would have been, but in the darkness, those unexpected, all but invisible lumps of rock were guaranteed to come as unpleasant surprises to charging men.

Now the surviving guardsmen waited. All of them were veterans who could compute the odds against them just as well as Hahskyn or Seahamper. They knew what was going to happen in the end, if there were enough attackers out there to continue the assault, and their faces were grim as they thought about the life of the young woman behind them.

Empress Sharleyan looked up quickly as Edwyrd Seahamper stepped into the plainly furnished, dimly lit guesthouse bedchamber. Water dripped from her personal armsman's cuirass and helmet, droplets pattering on the stone floor, and she recognized the stark desperation restrained by discipline in his eyes.

“How bad is it, Edwyrd?” she asked quietly.

“About as bad as it could be, Your Majesty.” His expression was grim. “I'm pretty sure Captain Gairaht must be dead.” Sharleyan winced in pain, but not in surprise, and he continued unflinchingly. “Lieutenant Hahskyn's in command now, but we're down to twenty-five men, and we don't know how many we're up against or how badly we may have hurt them. It's obvious they knew how many of
us
there were, though. If they keep coming, it'll be because they believe they've got the strength to win.”

She nodded, her face tight with fear, and he reached out to take her hand in both of his.

“I don't know if we can stop them.” His voice was harsh, sawtoothed with intensely personal worry, as he made himself admit the thing he feared most in all the world. “If we can't—”

He broke off, jaw clenching, and she squeezed his hand.

“If you can't,” she told him, “it will only be because no mortal man could have. I know that, Edwyrd. I've never doubted it.”

His mouth tightened further, and he drew a deep breath.

“We don't know what it is they want, Your Majesty—not for certain. Oh, we know they want
you
, but they may well want you alive, not dead.”

“Do you really think that, Edwyrd?” she asked gently. “Or are you just trying to reassure me?”

“I think it really is possible,” he told her levelly, letting her see the truth in his eyes. “Even likely. They haven't tried talking to us yet, so there's no way to
know
what they want, but I can think of a lot of ways you'd be most valuable to someone alive.”

“Ways they could use me against Cayleb or Charis or Chisholm, you mean.”

“Maybe, but even if they could, you'd still be
alive
, Your Majesty.”

“At that high a cost?” She shook her head. “I've known since the day I took the throne that a queen—or an empress—is as mortal as anyone else, Edwyrd. I've tried to live
as
a queen, and as someone who had no need to fear when the time came to face God. And a queen—or an empress—has a final duty to her subjects. I won't let myself be used against all that I love or the people I'm responsible for.”

“Your Majesty—” he began, his voice starkly appealing, but she shook her head again.

“No, Edwyrd. How long have you known me? Do you truly think I would want to live at the cost of the sort of damage someone could use me to inflict on all the people who have trusted Cayleb and me?”

He gazed deep into her eyes and saw the truth, the determination. And the fear. There was no fatalism, no eagerness to embrace death, but neither was there panic. She wanted to live as desperately as
he
wanted her to, yet she meant exactly what she'd just said, and in that moment, despite his raw anguish over what was about to happen, he felt more pride in her than he'd ever felt before.

He reached up and touched the side of her face with one hand. He hadn't touched her that way since she'd been a child, weeping with pain after a tumble from her horse had dislocated her shoulder, and she smiled in memory, despite her fear, as she pressed her cheek against his palm.

“Your Majesty—” He had to pause and clear his throat. “Sharleyan, if I don't have the chance to tell you this later, it's been the greatest honor of my life to serve as your armsman. And . . . your father would be very proud of you.”

She squeezed his other hand more tightly, eyes bright with tears, and he drew a deep breath.

“It's raining too hard for anyone to fire a rifle or a pistol out there, Your Majesty,” he said more briskly. “It's going to be bayonets and cold steel, but we've got nine extra rifles and an entire stack of pistols.” He didn't have to explain why the rifles were “extra,” and she nodded in grim understanding. “They may not fire outside,” he continued, stepping over to the bedchamber's single window and using his mailed elbow to sweep every pane of expensive glass out of its frame, “but they'll fire just fine
inside
.”

He leaned out to close the shutters, drew his dagger and cut a loophole in them, then turned back to her.

“It won't stop a bullet or an arbalest bolt, Your Majesty, but it'll give you at least some concealment, and Daishyn Tayso's taken a leg wound. He's too unsteady to be much use outside, so I'm sending him in here to give you someone to reload.”

“Someone to reload for
me
, instead of the other way around?” she asked with a faint gleam of humor, despite her fear, and he snorted.

“Your Majesty, your uncle may not think it's a fitting hobby for a queen, but every man in your detachment knows you're a better shot than almost any of
them
are. And, frankly, just now, I don't really care what your uncle may think about it.”

“Edwyrd is right about that, Your Majesty,” Father Carlsyn said. “And I wish now that
I'd
learned to shoot one of these things. Unfortunately, I didn't, but if Daishyn shows me how, I'm sure I can at least learn how to help him load them for you.”

Raiyz's expression was strained, but he managed a crooked smile when she looked at him. Seahamper smiled back at him in approval, then looked around the bedchamber one last time before he stepped back.

“I'll get Daishyn in here with the rifles and pistols, Your Majesty.”

“Thank you, Edwyrd.” She followed him to the door, then leaned close, rising on her toes, and kissed his bearded cheek. “I love you,” she said softly.

“I know, Your Majesty.” He touched her face once more. “I know.”

“All right,” Mytrahn Daivys said to Nailys Lahrak and Charlz Abylyn. “We're all ready?”

The other two team leaders nodded. It had taken longer to get their men reorganized than they'd expected. On the other hand, the convent's isolation meant they had all night, and they might as well take the time to do it right. No doubt the guardsmen on the other side of the convent wall had been doing the same thing, and none of them were particularly happy about that thought, but there was only a limited amount Sharleyan's bodyguards
could
do.

Lahrak and Abylyn had redistributed their remaining men to give each of them slightly less than half the strength with which they'd begun the night. Daivys' so far unscathed team was still at full strength, which gave the Temple Loyalists a total of just over a hundred and fifty men.

“They've had time to recover from the surprise and get themselves organized again,” Daivys continued. “They aren't going to go down easy. Be sure your men understand that.”

Lahrak and Abylyn nodded again, although Abylyn's eyes flickered with a touch of what might have been resentment. He didn't need Daivys telling him what his own men had already discovered the hard way.

Daivys saw the other man's expression and started to say something else, then changed his mind. After all, if that was what Abylyn was thinking, he had a point.

“All right,” he said again, instead, and smiled grimly as he pointed at the oilskin-wrapped powder charge fastened to the locked main gates. “I'm pretty sure you'll both hear the signal to attack.”

Ahndrai Hahskyn's head came up as a sudden thunder crack and blinding flash that owed nothing to the thunderstorm exploded in the darkness.

“
Stand to!
” he shouted, and his remaining men tightened in readiness.

Daivys' men charged through the shattered gates with a snarl. They streamed through the rain towards the guesthouse, making no effort to approach stealthily. The entire reason he'd used gunpowder to open the gate instead of simply clambering over the wall had been to fix the guardsmen's attention as firmly on
his
attack as he could. He wanted Sharleyan's protectors looking his way when Lahrak and Abylyn—who
had
climbed over the wall—hit them unexpectedly from the sides.

Daivys himself was one of the first through the gate. A quarter of his eighty-five men carried arbalests, although the chance of their actually getting to use them in a fight like this one was going to be was remote. All of the Temple Loyalists carried swords, as well, but the truth was—as Daivys was well aware—that the majority of the attackers were only mediocre swordsmen, at best. Some of them, like Daivys himself, were probably as good as any Imperial Guardsman; most had only limited military experience, and he found himself wishing he'd armed the lot of them with halberds or pikes—even lizard spears!

Getting this many men into position to attack the convent without anyone noticing had been difficult enough, even using weapons which could be easily hidden in the sort of agricultural wagons that wouldn't raise too many eyebrows in such a lightly inhabited area. Trying to do the same thing with ten- or twelve-foot pikes would have been far more difficult. He'd known and accepted that from the very beginning, but he hadn't counted on how great an advantage the length of the Guard's rifles was going to give them. Whatever Lahrak and Abylyn might think, he knew they were going to take more casualties—probably heavy ones—before this night was over.