Guardian Last (Lords of Syon Saga Book 2) (28 page)

“These are all that remain of Castle Brannagh, my chief. 
The castle is…fallen.  They seek refuge among us.”  Aidan looked pleadingly at the
chief.  “We have space enough, and food.  They’ve nowhere else to go.”

Brannagh, fallen.  Bakti looked over the expectant faces of
his people and saw there only sympathy and charity for those who had saved Syon
and the tribes of the Kharkara from Kadak, and he loved them for it.  But as
chief, he had to fear for them, to worry for them, to wonder what they would
not think to wonder:  What possible force had been strong enough to destroy
Brannagh?  And more importantly, would it follow these refugees to the Plains,
among the tribes?  But he allowed that these were questions better asked close
at hand about his own fire than shouted across the plain for all to hear,
since, if something evil followed them, it was already on its way.  Besides, he
knew firsthand how quickly the tribe’s excitement could turn into panic.  He
beckoned the Invaders closer with more welcome than trepidation, he hoped, then
returned to his tent to finish his meditations to the god of mercy, trusting to
his people to make them welcome.

*          *          *

The battering against the great doors of Brannagh had
gone from a futile thudding of green wood against the ancient oak of the castle
doors to a dry splintering, and at the prospect of victory, the attackers’ pace
had redoubled.  The outer gates had long since failed, and the heat of the
mages’ attacks combined with the battering ram had finally begun to defeat the
protections set upon the castle so long ago.

“To the crypt, go!”  Nara appeared in the east gallery on
the mezzanine overlooking the main hall of castle Brannagh where the few
remaining members of the household had gathered to defend the castle with
whatever they could find.  The nun, so long no more than a governess in a
childless house, had just come from the east chapel where her rite had driven
out the last of Xorden’s desecration against B’radik, and the force of her
faith and her goddess’s grace shone around her.  Her habit blazed like a star,
and the long, thin veil of her hair writhed and crackled with the goddess’s
power around her wrinkled face.  She was terrifying in her full radiance, so
bright that they could not look directly upon her. “You cannot defeat them. 
For your lives, I charge you in the name of B’radik, run!  I will hold them
here as long as I can.”

Three men, Lwyn, Tero and Dane, were the last survivors
of the plague, and they stood below her on the stairs, still weak, wearing only
the clothing and weaponry they could scavenge along the way, but there was no
mistaking them for any but what they were:  Knights of Brannagh.  Once the
servants and priests had gone, they turned toward the doors, swords ready, to
face the enemy.

“No.  Get you to the crypt, as well,” commanded Nara.  “I
will see to this.  If I fail here, there you will fulfill your final duty to
the House of Brannagh.  But if we, any of us, should survive, we will need your
strength for what comes next.”

The knights looked at each other for only a moment.  How
would Lord Daerwin and Lady Renda react, knowing they had abandoned an elderly
nun to defend the castle alone?  Still…she was clearly no ordinary nun.  Tero,
the most senior of the knights, bowed his head in obedience, and the rest
followed.  “For Brannagh, Damerien and all Syon,” he shouted over the pounding
at the door, “we will trust and obey you, madam.”

“Fear me not,” she said, the glow emanating from her
habit increasing, filling the hall around them as they ran, and her words
echoed in the sudden terrible silence as the pounding stopped. “I follow hard
upon.  Go now!”

All at once, the doors splintered to pieces and shattered
inward under the force of the mages’ volley, blasting over her, around her,
past her, embedding bits of the wood into the walls of the gallery.  Yet the
volley held at the doorway, faltered, withered, and ultimately shrank to nothing,
just as the glow of Nara’s habit faded to an eerie restless glow and slowly,
with an act of incredible will, winked into darkness.

Minutes passed while she stood high in the gallery,
silent, unseen, watching the great gaping maw that had been the castle
entrance, and sweat beaded her brow. Sure these conquerors would not be long in
coming to gloat.  She hoped they would not.  She moved down the stairs quickly
but cautiously, watching the doorway.

She saw the movement in the dawning light beyond and sped
her step.  She looked through the opposite doorway to the hall leading to the
old chapel and to the tunnel leading to the crypt.  Still too far. She could
not possibly reach it from here, and she cursed herself for a feeble old
woman.  Ah well, she told herself, so be it.

“
Gya cwara!  Cwara!
” a voice called to her from
the doorway, and she drew up short.

“Brymandyan?” she answered in the same tongue, turning to
look.  It was perhaps the last language she might have expected to hear from
these men, these mages, who were now streaming into the entry hall.  The
language was the precursor to Bremondine, and it was the language spoken by
most of those who came over from Byrandia before the Liberation.  She had had
to learn it as a postulant in the convent in order to read and translate the
ancient Byrandian tomes, and the elder nuns had taken great care to preserve
the pronunciation carefully, but even so, the sound was slightly different from
what she’d learned.  Still, she could understand it, and facing this
unforeseeable circumstance, she found herself absurdly grateful for the
sisters’ diligence.

She smiled weakly, letting her aged lips twitch.  “Thy
pardon, child.  My Brymandyan is the Brymandyan of thine ancient fathers, so it
will perchance strike thee wondrous strange, but methinks we may yet be heard,
one to the other.”

“Yield your castle or be destroyed, Old Mother,” the
foremost among them called, apparently unsurprised that she understood, or
perhaps not caring.  To her eye, this arrogant one seemed some sort of captain,
a leader among them.  Good.  Her disdain would likely not be wasted on him,
then.

“This castle is not mine to yield. Truly, thou shouldst
return when the master is at home.”  She watched him, watched the cloud brewing
on his brow.  “Thou couldst wait, an thou wouldst,” she offered, needling him
further, “since he’s only off defeating thy master and shan’t be long away.”

“Defeating my master?”  The mage captain seemed genuinely
concerned.  “How is it he knows whom we serve?  How could he have reached
Byrandia so quickly…?”

Byrandia.  She tried not to let her surprise show on her
face.  Ah, so they did not serve Xorden.  No wonder B’radik was not concerned
with defeating them.  A few more minutes, and she could probably wring from him
the name of his master, but time would not allow, she feared.  The armies
without the castle grew restless.  She watched the men streaming in around him,
stayed from looting the castle by the spectacle of their captain bantering with
this old nun.

She smiled.  It was a pity, she mused to herself as she
pointedly turned her back on them and shuffled away, that no more than a few
hundred of them could fit in the great hall at once, to say nothing of the army
outside.  Still, she supposed it would be enough.  It would have to be.  She
glanced up at the magnificent ancient frescos in the ceiling of the great hall
with a deep pang of regret.

“Old Mother!  Do not turn your back on me!”  The mage
captain screamed with rage.  “Yield now or we will be forced to destroy it
all!”

When she made no answer, he threw steaming daggers of ice
at her back in a fit of pique.  But the thick shards slammed against her
protections.  Suddenly her habit blazed with the light of the sun, and the
attack released all the energy of the mages’ seemingly stymied volley which she
had absorbed into herself and suppressed.  The combined power of a scant
thousand mages burst outward over them, their own attack returned to them,
searing through them and blasting apart what remained of the castle in a flare
of white hot light.

Her last clear sight before she faded into
unconsciousness was of Arnard and the three knights pulling debris and rock
away from her. 

“She is still alive, praise B’radik, though barely,”
Arnard was saying to the knights.  “Come, bring her––

“––into the crypt.  It was a near thing, as she was very
nearly crushed to death,” Arnard finished Nara’s story.  “Had she fallen
elsewhere but in the very doorway, I doubt we could have saved her.”

Aidan translated the story for Chief Bakti at the fire, part
of his mind occupied with finding the words and part horrified by what he’d
heard.

“Comes after all,” added Sir Lwyn in his strange northern
tones, “by Her Ladyship’s bidding, we rest hiding for a few days acrypt, to
survive on what the servants hoard.  We await the sheriff and Lady Renda to
return, but…” he faltered, casting a glance toward  Lady Glynnis, who merely
rocked back and forth where she sat wrapped in her filthy shawl, seemingly
oblivious to the conversation around her.

The shaman followed the young knight’s gaze to Her Ladyship
and frowned.  She was not the powerful, gracious Lady of the Castle he had
known only a few years before, and he wished he could help her.  But she had
found a way to leave, a way not to have to face her loss, and he wondered if he
would do her any favor to take that from her.  He asked finally, “How did you
all breathe for so long, sealed in the crypt?”

Sedrik shifted on the rock where he sat.  “The crypt itself
is sealed against the elements, my Lord Aidan, but the tunnel leading to it is
vented, as you might expect.  While we would seal away the honored dead, it
would not do at all to have funeral parties suffocate during the rites.  So as
the doors ‘twixt the tunnel and the crypt stood open, air flowed, albeit with
less verve than one might wish.  It were better to leave the stairway open into
the chapel, but we could not do that, of course.”

Greta nodded.  “Many’s the meal of bread, wine and cheese we
served right over the Lord Borowain’s bones,” she said with a nervous laugh. 
“Lord Borowain, a ready eater, he was, so I hear.  Sure he’d not mind.  That
is, I hope he’d not mind…”

“No,” murmured Glynnis with a faint smile, “he did not.”

Aidan looked at her quizzically, but it seemed she was once
again lost to her own thoughts.

“We are scant a tenday in the crypt ere we take our leave.” 
Lwyn continued.  “What remains of the army is leery to approach the ruins for a
while comes after the explosion, which waiting-for tries our nerves because we
know they are near and want to pillage. But they do not and do not!  Comes
after, their greed defeats their caution, and they come taking all.  We only
wait for quiet to know they depart.”

Aidan translated for Bakti, who had a question.  “How many
of this army fell?”

He looked at the other two knights for a moment.  “Me, I
guess at numbers only.  From where I stand, the hall looks to hold about four
hundred or five, comes before it falls, mostly magen but a few of knight and
farmer besides: those who cannot abide to miss glory.  My guess is that none of
those within gets out alive.  But of their number without, I cannot see.”

“The whole army was about two thousand strong, is all,”
added Sir Dane.  “I watched from the tower before the gates collapsed.  A lot
of men, to be sure, but surprisingly small force to take down a castle,
especially as protected as Brannagh was.  But I know little of such things.  Of
their number, a bit more than half were farmers and townspeople and Wirthing
knights––”

“Forgive me,” Aidan interrupted, “but Wirthing knights?  Are
you sure? Wirthing was our ally in the wars.”

“Wirthing.”  The Chief spat into the fire angrily.

“Wirthing, aye,” said Lwyn.  “Himself is among them, I see,
comes before the castle falls.  Not inside when it comes down, more’s the pity,
but near.”

Glynnis nodded.  Her bitterness toward Wirthing seemed to cut
through the clouding of her wits.  “He would not miss Brannagh’s fall for all
the gold in the Hodrache.”  She recounted the story of how Wirthing knights had
kidnapped her granddaughter and sold her to Bishop Cilder for a foul sacrifice
and the resentment the kidnappers had expressed to Renda before their deaths. 
Her normally crystal blue eyes shone almost black with rage.  “It was this foul
rite that bound B’radik, and Wirthing is to blame.”

“Do not forget,” spoke Nara gently, “that this same rite,
desecrated and rendered false as it was by Damerien blood, created Pegrine
undead and allowed the goddess to act through her.  Otherwise…”

Lady Glynnis’s voice was cold.  “This does not excuse
Wirthing.”

“No, it does not, Lady,” the ancient nun agreed, “and there
will be a reckoning.  I only say this because, while I deeply grieve the loss
of my dearest charge and every single death since, I give thanks to my goddess
that, because it was her blood spilled and not another’s, we discovered this
wretchedness and defeated it.”

Defeated it.  Aidan looked between the old nun and the
sheriff’s wife.  Nara sounded so certain, as if she’d seen the battle herself,
and yet the sheriff and his daughter had not returned.  He hoped she spoke from
knowledge and not from hope as was the wont of healers. 

The shaman looked over to see Lwyn scowling into the fire. 
Lwyn had been raised by the Anatayans, with their distrust of gods and magic
and those who put too much store in such things.  No doubt Nara and even Aidan
himself made Lwyn nervous.  He was very much a man of what he could see and
touch, here and now. 

“The other thousand,” Lwyn continued a bit awkwardly in the
silence between the two women, “these are magen.  It pleases me that these are
the most of those inside the castle as it falls.  We still have a guess of six
hundred magen alive, but they move in caution now, comes after the sting of
losing not only their captain but a scant four hundred of their number at a
stroke.”