The Last Bastion (24 page)

Medrin’s expression never changed. He looked down at her and shook his head. ‘Well now, I was expecting the Foxbeard.
He’d
have known better after the last time.’

‘Lhosir! Behold!’ She heard the wizard but her eyes were screwed shut at the pain in her arm. A brilliant light filled the room as she opened them. The forkbeards cried out
and she looked round. The wizard was there, a hand falling from his eyes. He threw the satchel with the salt and the armour inside at her. ‘Take this! Take it to Gallow and our bargain is done!’ He barged her aside, crashed into Medrin and knocked the Lhosir king down. A forkbeard grabbed him, half-blind, and threw him aside. Mirrahj dropped her shield, shrugged the satchel over her shoulder and picked up the red sword. She almost stayed to fight, but with only one good arm it was obvious the forkbeards would win, just a question of how many she could take with her.

‘Go! Now is not your time to die!’

As soon as she had her back to the wizard, another blinding flash of light filled the tomb and for a moment she could see exactly where she was going. She ran and slid through the line of salt and over the edge and down the rungs in the walls and took them three at a time, and when the forkbeards reached the top of the shaft and started to drop things on her, her sword arm was strong enough again to lift the wizard’s satchel like a shield over her head. One last cry from Oribas echoed after her. ‘Tell Truesword to melt it down and forge it again with salt. Fire and salt will kill it!’

She didn’t stop to see if any of the forkbeards came after her but they didn’t, and when she got out of the cave and back onto the mountainside and the bright afternoon sun, she saw why. They were already pouring out of Witches’ Reach and down the slopes, arrowing after her.

Valaric waited a while and then raised the portcullis, and the last few forkbeards trapped behind it turned and ran. The battle-crazed Marroc charged after them, Gallow at the front, waving his blood-drenched spear like a madman, hurling curses like slingshots. He ran on past the turn in the road to the tier below and only then had the sense to finally stop. Sarvic screamed at his soldiers to grab any arrows they
could find. A few hundred in the end, but that was still a few hundred that could be fired again.

Next time the forkbeards would probably take the gates but for now it was a victory and Valaric meant to make the most of it. For the rest of the morning he and Addic limped and hobbled among the forkbeard dead, laughing and joking with each other about who was more crippled while Sarvic’s men stripped the corpses of anything they could use. When they were done with that, they kept on going until the bodies were naked and then took all the clothes back up to the castle and soaked them in pitch to be set alight the next time the forkbeards came. Valaric had the corpses beheaded as Achista had done at Witches’ Reach. The heads went on spikes over the fifth gate, the bodies went over the edge of the cliff, tumbling and bouncing to the tier below, arms and legs spinning; and some of them, he saw, hit the road and slid over the next edge as well. It amused Valaric to imagine a few of them bouncing and falling all the way to the bottom.

In the middle of the day the Lhosir came to take the bodies of their fallen. Valaric spread his best archers along the walls to pick off any they could. Even collecting their dead would be a misery for the forkbeards. Everything. For ever. Until they left.

But they didn’t leave. A few hours passed, that was all.

From the fifth gate Gallow watched the Lhosir march up the castle road for the second time that day. There must have been a thousand of them, snaking up through the tiers, and they had huge wooden shields with them this time, peaked things like the roof of a house and almost as wide as the road itself. Not many but he could see how they’d huddle under them, hidden from the Marroc arrows and stones and even from the fire, not that Valaric had much of the precious fish oil left. Boiling water and rocks then, the two
things they had in abundance, and cloth from the morning’s dead, soaked in pitch and set alight. It would stick, and their wooden shields would burn.

The Lhosir turned the elbow of the road into the fourth tier. As the barrage from above began, the shields moved to the front of the column. The rest of the army stayed where it was and the shields came on like a giant armoured cockroach inching towards the gate, maybe enough to hide a hundred men if they were packed tight together.

‘Is there a ram under there?’ Valaric stood beside him. Gallow looked but there was no way to know. ‘If your Aulian wizard was here, he’d have thought of a way to turn that against them.’

And that might have been true, but Oribas was gone. Gallow picked up a stone and waited as the shield-roof came closer. It reached the gate stuck with arrows like a hedgehog but there wasn’t a single dead man left in its wake. He put the stone down. Wasted. Any minute now the ladders would come and—

‘What are they doing under there?’ There were no sounds, no battle cries, no axes striking the gates.

‘I’ve never heard of—’

‘The salt!’ hissed Valaric. ‘They’re clearing the salt. They’ve got another iron devil under there!’

Of course they were. Gallow turned away from the battlements and looked to the rope ladder that ran down from the gatehouse to the road below. If they were clearing the salt then there’d be an ironskin in the vanguard of the Lhosir. He’d face them, and Sarvic and his Crackmarsh men would face them too, and they might die or they might not. ‘Open the gates again, Valaric. The fight comes either way. We broke them once this way and we can break them again.’

‘Wait.’ Valaric put a hand on his shoulder. ‘It’s not too . . . Jonnic!’

A burly Marroc had climbed between the merlons. He
had an axe in each hand and he grinned at Valaric with a mad gleam in his eye. ‘Tell my sister how I died, Mournful. Tell her I went well.’

‘Jonnic!’

The Marroc dropped. He landed on the first of the shield roofs and slid, and then slammed first one axe and then the other into the wood and caught himself, pulled himself up and sat astride the thing. ‘Throw me a rope, Mournful!’ At first Gallow had no idea what Jonnic meant to do. Valaric threw him the end of a rope and the Marroc tied it around one of his axes. The shield bucked and heaved beneath him but he sat fast, grinning like a madman and beckoning for more, and now Gallow understood and so did the Marroc. They tied axes to lengths of rope and threw them down, and Jonnic struck each axe into the wood as deep as it would go. A forkbeard slipped out from underneath and tried to grab him and a dozen arrows took him down. The back of the shield dropped almost to the ground and then tipped sideways as the forkbeards tried to roll him off, but Jonnic just held on to the axes and moved on to the next and the next until the shield was held fast in a dozen places. He gestured to the men on the gatehouse to lift it up.

Valaric threw another rope. ‘Get back here you stupid Marroc!’ Fat Jonnic shook his head and jumped down from the shield-roof and vanished beneath it, a knife in his hand. A shout went up from the Marroc as they heaved at the ropes and the shield lurched and shifted and then suddenly tore free of the Lhosir beneath and swung away. The forkbeards were like ants nested under a rock with their shelter pulled aside. They fell under the storm of stones and arrows, but not quickly enough for Jonnic, who fell, flailing in the midst of a handful of stabbing Lhosir as the second shield roof moved forward over him.

‘Drop it! Drop it on them!’ Valaric was seething, and Gallow half expected him to go over the edge as Jonnic had
done. But he didn’t, and the Marroc pulling on their ropes let go and the first shield-roof crashed onto the front of the second and brought it down, scattering the Lhosir yet again. Yet amid the scrambling chaos Gallow glimpsed the rusted and broken remains of a Fateguard’s armour lying still and empty beside the gate.

‘We were too slow,’ he whispered.

Further down the road the forkbeards were moving again, the first hundred of them coming forward at a run. They had a ram. Quietly Gallow turned away and climbed down the ladder to the road. When the Lhosir smashed the rusted hinges down and were swarming over the stones then he’d be there to meet them again, with Sarvic and the Marroc of the Crackmarsh, sword for sword with nowhere else to go.

The flash blinded the forkbeards a second time. For a moment Oribas was free. He shouted what must be done to Mirrahj and saw her run. Then he scrambled to Achista and lifted her head, terrified by all the blood on her face, but she moaned when he shook her and so he held her tight and cradled her in his arms and by the time he could think again the Lhosir had hauled him up and pulled them apart. Oribas supposed they meant to kill him right there and then but they didn’t, and after a few moments the Lhosir King came away from the shaft and looked at Oribas. A smile pinched his lips. ‘I remember you. The Aulian wizard.’

Oribas dipped his head. ‘I would bow properly if your men did not hold me so tightly.’

‘After we met on the road I did tell them not to kill you if they found you. I said nothing more.’ Behind the smile there was strain in the Lhosir king’s face. He was in pain. He held up the iron hand he wore in place of the one Gallow had taken. ‘What have you done, Aulian?’

‘The creature my people entombed here left behind two
pieces of itself when it escaped. I have encased them in salt. A common enough preservative.’

King Sixfingers pointed. ‘You. Go and see if he lies.’

A Lhosir crawled into the tunnel to the crypt and a few moments later crawled out again. ‘There’s one piece there. Covered in salt.’ He sounded bemused, as though wondering why anyone would do such a thing. Oribas smiled.

The king cocked his head. ‘And the other piece, Aulian? Where’s the other piece?’

They’d seen Mirrahj go and they were neither stupid nor deaf. Oribas bowed his head. ‘The Vathan women took it. If she does as I asked then she will take it to Gallow Foxbeard who will melt it down and forge it again in salt.’ He shrugged. ‘The Mother of Monsters will be weakened. Perhaps together we can defeat it.’ He looked about the tomb. ‘I had imagined it would still be here. That is why I came. To kill it. Tell me, King of the Lhosir, do you serve the monster, or does the monster serve you?’

Sixfingers laughed and a twitch of a smile lingered on his lips. ‘Come with me, Aulian wizard, and I’ll show you something.’ He turned away and addressed his men. ‘Keep them alive. Strip the woman of her weapons and the Aulian of everything but his clothes but
don’t
throw anything away.’ He took a step back and then stopped and gave Oribas a queer look. ‘I knew you’d come here, Aulian. But I was certain it would be Gallow who brought me the red sword. Then we might have talked some more about what you came here to do. Might even have been the three of us could have reached some accord.’

‘The Edge of Sorrows is not yours, King of the Lhosir.’

Sixfingers laughed again. ‘A Vathan? A woman? Alone in the valley? Shall we make a wager, Aulian, on how long it is before I have her?’

*

The ram smashed down the fifth gate as it had smashed the third and the fourth. Under the shelter of the gatehouse another iron devil spent itself turning the portcullis to rust and the Lhosir poured through the ruins. Gallow met them as they climbed through the debris scattered across the road. Grim-faced Marroc with spears and shields locked together stood either side of him. They’d beaten Medrin’s Lhosir once today so they knew it could be done and the knowing fired their blood. When the soldier beside Gallow fell to an axe buried in his helm, another stepped up to take his place, and when he too fell, a spear stabbed through his foot, another came forward. Gallow and Sarvic held the Marroc line together and close to the rubble in the road, so close that the Lhosir had no space to make a wall of their own to face them. For every Marroc that fell, two Lhosir died.

Gallow’s legs ached, his shield arm had turned to lead, his shoulders ground like broken glass, yet the arm that held his spear lunged and slashed and stabbed with the same strength it ever had. He remembered how the red sword would sing to him when he held it, softly in his head and only he would hear. It sang of the end it brought to suffering and pain and woe, of the sweet nothingness of oblivion that was its gift. He had a dozen cuts and bruises: a slash on his arm from a Lhosir spear, a throbbing in his shoulder from being hit by the Marroc beside him jerking his shield, a twinge in his ankle where he’d trodden on a stone in the fighting and turned it, but they were holding. Barely, but they were.

And then the Lhosir in front of Gallow pulled suddenly back, and out of the stones strode the iron-skinned men – Fateguard, nine of them. For a moment Gallow thought the Marroc would hold, but then the Fateguard closed on the line and spear thrusts sparked off their iron skins, swords skittered aside, axes dented but didn’t slow them and they came as though they didn’t care. One grabbed a Marroc
from the centre of the line by the arm, pulled him out and rammed a sword though his chin before throwing him over the edge of the road to the tier below.

‘Salt!’ Gallow dropped his shield and threw salt from the bag at his hip into a Fateguard’s face. It reeled, and he rammed the iron point of his spear through the slits of its mask. The metal split and the Fateguard fell. When Gallow looked down, he saw its face disintegrate before his eyes. There was no blood. ‘Salt!’ They had it – Sarvic and Gallow and dozens of others. Oribas had seen to that.

Two of the Fateguard turned on him. Around him the Marroc fought on but he felt the fear wash through them like a river in flood and then in a moment they were breaking, screaming at the men behind them to run, to flee back to the castle and safety of the sixth and last gate.

‘And what then?’ Gallow screamed at them. ‘What when they rot that one too and smash it down like all the rest?’ But the Marroc didn’t hear, or couldn’t, or chose not to, and now they were all running and five of the Fateguard were marching up the road, battering aside the missiles thrown at them from above. Three others had him pinned, cutting off his retreat, but they paused for a moment instead of killing him. They seemed to eye him with interest.