The Ships of Merior (44 page)

The pair hit the floor running. Two steps, and Keldmar’s toe struck an object that launched off a stunning, bell-tone clash of steel.

‘Damned helmets.’ Mearn cursed again, much louder, as Captain Tharrick mistook his presence for the spy’s, and barely reneged his order to attack.

The shadows lifted without warning.

Torchlight surged back to flood shelving and stone walls; a limp fringe of signal banners; the jerked sparks of reflection off jumbled up swathes of spilled metal. Soldiers clung to the scaffolding, fish-eyed and blinking, while Bransian waved a fresh cresset toward the cranny that lay dimmest and farthest from the stairshaft. ‘He ran that way.’

Mearn whirled in tandem with Keldmar; and the fleeing spy charged straight into them.

‘Demon!’ Keldmar side-stepped, snatched a quarter-staff from a barrel, and laced into a whistling attack pattern that blocked all escape down the aisle.

Meant drew his belt knife and threw.

The spy dropped, tucked head over heels. He struck the floor rolling, a blur of packaged motion, while the knife flew high and stuck quivering in a ballista. Keldmar spun his stave upright, vengeance-bent as a farm wife harrying a cockroach with a poker. One steel-shod tip rapped a near-miss against flagstone and snagged out a twist of black hair. Shouts and a clatter of running footsteps converged. Tharrick’s least flustered soldiers lined up and fired off arrows. The barrage battered stone and rebounded. A better shot by Bransian snatched a rip in a sleeve already ragged.

Cracked a glancing blow by the stave, the spy shot out both hands and grabbed.

Over a hotly contested length of wood, stance braced to wrench free his quarterstaff, Keldmar caught a wide, green-eyed glance that blistered in joyful irony. Then the torches blinked out again. Caught blind in the instant the miscreant released his grip, the yank he achieved sat him down hard on his buttocks.

Mearn yelled, leaped his brother’s crashed bulk and pounced. His knuckles skinned through the ballista’s crossbrace. The intruder had gone under, but Mearn was as fast, and very nearly as slight. Undaunted, he wormed through the streamered silk of cobwebs in pursuit. His brother Keldmar’s quarterstaff banged his heel with a sting that half-lamed him, and a second blow caromed off a stmt. Deafened by the impact, Mearn yelled, ‘You’ll break the wrong skull, you oaf!’

Keldmar’s disgruntled rejoinder entangled with the tardy arrival of Tharrick’s benighted soldiers. ‘Ath! Why not get out of my way, then?’

Mearn snatched a breath, lost wind to a maniacal burst of laughter, and scrabbled on after his quarry.

He re-emerged at the end of the aisle, panting hard enough to spoil his hearing. A pole racked with war gear tipped up. Mearn caught a faint, hissed scrape and a
dusky whiff of old leather. Reflex turned his head, and sliding, a dozen studded saddles hammered straight into his face. Bowled over backwards and pummelled half-senseless, he heard through the creak of abused leather what he thought was a breathless apology.

Rage turned him berserk. He heaved up, shucking girths. A field lance jabbed his gut, butt first. He sat. Bereft of wind, close to paralysed, he could do nothing but gasp like a trout. The dropped weapon clanged next to him, followed hard by a fusty quilt of barding, which flapped down from above and battened him in wool and old horsehair.

‘Sweet dreams,’ wished a faint, merry voice.

Mearn punched at the fabric, coughed out the salty taste of scurf, and yelled as a running soldier rammed him flat over backwards. A scuffle erupted, and ended, with Tharrick’s man moaning in agony; the stray lance had turned and stuck in his thigh, which to s’Brydion sense of justice served him right.

On his feet spitting venom and blood, Mearn blinked. The torches were burning again; or one was. Past the bare frames of the war chariots, limned in a gush of yellow light, the spy held a filched brand aloft in a scuffed and dirty hand. He was staring at the most dearly held secret in Alestron, the great weapon painstakingly created from the proscribed writings left by Magyre.

The culverin was not much to look upon: a mere tube of cast bronze, strapped to a wooden frame conveyed by a harness of pull ropes. Stacked to one side were its missiles: round spheres of stone at a crude weight of thirty pounds; and slung in a barrel, the accoutrements of its firing, assorted wands and hooks whose use was not obviously apparent. Ramming tools, touch matches, and a half-dozen hundred-weight casks that wore a faint reek of brimstone, lay stacked alongside some sewn canvas bundles the size of a man’s doubled fists.

The spy was too clever not to guess the strange
contrivance held a purpose connected with warfare. ‘Behold, Sethvir, your rare siege weapon,’ he murmured.

Then, in stunning ignorance, he tossed his torch in a hard throw over his shoulder. His intent was to divert the guards who secured the aisleway behind him; then he spun, the conflagration as his cover, to bolt and make good his escape.

Fire spat through a long, burning arc. It landed, malicious in accuracy, in the maw of an upset cask, rolled the full length of the armoury and wisped with the loose straw that had bedded the garrison’s spare helmets.

Mearn screamed, snatched the barding from his legs, and plunged to stifle the flames.

The spy ducked from his path with faintly raised eyebrows, and an expression of madcap surprise. He had expected to divide his pursuit to fight the blaze, but the panic that ensued seemed disproportionate as Bransian converged from another aisle, Alestron’s red bull banner ripped from its standard and flapping like an apron at his knees. In single-minded effort, the duke smothered his offering over Mearn’s smouldering horse-cloths, unconcerned if he blistered his flesh.

The air recoiled in smoke and a reek of singed wool and silk. Low and urgent, Tharrick set his soldiers running to converge and cut off access to the underground passage. A barrel of oil upset in their path. The flooded stonework shimmered black and gold in spreading ripples. Their quarry took to the scaffolding, unsullied. While the skirmishers skidded and splashed and collided, and went down in a thrashing tangle, his chin pocked a triangle in the gloom above the leaned shelf where the recurve still swung on a nail. His quick hands snatched the bow. A wisp of lint floated down; the sort a besieger would wind overtop of a broadhead to make fire arrows.

‘No,’ Keldmar croaked. The fumes clogged his voice.
He raised blackened hands and gestured to flag down the brother still posted by the passage doorway.

Parrien saw. Galvanized to instantaneous fear, his flesh prickled by the proximity of a danger unimagined by the fugitive in the bracing, he ripped out a pealing yell. ‘Ath’s grace, man! Don’t be setting off sparks in this place.’

‘For my pains and your trials, a gift,’ said the spy, a catch to his tone that at last revealed his cornered desperation.

A touch match hissed. The first arrow arched down in a sizzling line, traced by a fluffed trailer of smoke. Then the shaft struck, and splashed roiling flame on the upset staves of another barrel. Red, gold, and yellow flowered up in a welling spree of wild light.

The armoury had no ready source of water, little cloth beyond dust-dry canvas, and horse barding too eaten with moth holes to smother the air from greedy flame. Of least concern, now, was the enemy who launched the disaster. To prevent an explosion that would decimate their keep now preoccupied the s’Brydion to the exclusion of everything else.’

‘Get the chariots,’ Bransian shouted. ‘We’ll use them to wheel the powder kegs clear!’

Parrien charged in, still gripping his war axe. A glance showed the duke’s plan would be hampered. The shafts won’t clear the turn around the shelving.’

‘Hack them off.’ Mearn snatched back blistered fingers and yelled over his shoulder. ‘Tharrick, set your men to help!’

But the soldiers, under Keldmar, were already busy throwing field tents, camp stools, and infantry banners in frenzied effort to dam the oil from its downhill trickle toward the stone shot. A wafted bit of fletching snagged in an updraught, flared alight, and disintegrated into a falling rain of sparks. Flame sprouted, stinking of singed hide, and an oil-soaked chest of woollen gambesons
whooshed up in the hellish, crackling tongues of a bonfire.

Charged with innocent intent, Arithon seized his chance and scuttled like a thief from the shelving. ‘You’ll want to leave while the bully boys are busy,’ he said to Dakar, who had jettisoned the spent stubs of three torches, and now laboured to rise, no easy feat for a fat man with his wrists lashed in leather.

The Mad Prophet flopped through another frantic heave. ‘Help me up,’ he gasped.

‘There’s some urgent reason why I should?’ Arithon looked on in staid inquiry over a cheek scuffed with dust and grazed bloody. ‘You seemed cosy enough with the duke just a bit ago.’

Dakar glanced up in piercing focus. ‘This fire you’ve started’s going to kill us. We need to run, very fast, right away. Those casks by the wall will explode.’

Mage-taught to interpret small details, Arithon saw past Dakar’s theatrics, grasped his genuine, sweating terror, and blessedly dropped further questions. ‘Raise your hands.’

He held a knife clenched in skinned knuckles.

Dakar shut his eyes in blind relief. A kiss of chill metal, a swift tug, and the belt was slashed off his pinched wrists. He poised for the arm-wrenching yank that would haul him headlong to his feet, but none came.

The Master of Shadow had left him to fate, in an armoury stockpiled with black powder.

Smoke rolled in billows off the burning oil. The lowest tiers of shelving straddled spread lakes of fire and flung off a confused weave of shadows. Running silhouettes flitted across the glow. Tharrick’s soldiers dragged off their wounded without any pause to fashion litters. Every other hale man bolted toward the stair, while the s’Brydion brothers in heart-wrung desperation gave ground before necessity. Engulfed in flaming wreckage and debris, they charged headlong toward the tunnel.

Before them fled the flittering forms of the dungeon’s resident rats.

Dakar heaved stumbling to his feet. He lumbered to chase after Arithon, until hands snatched his collar and snagged him short.

‘You’re ours,’ said Parrien, soot-blackened and furious.

The doorway darkened as Duke Bransian plunged through, closely followed by Keldmar and Mearn, the latter one limping. One of them ripped out the wedge from the windlass. Chain squealed. A rat blundered over Dakar’s foot, and another one collided with his ankle. Then Parrien slammed him in the small of the back, and he pitched forward, running for his life.

The steel portal clashed down behind. The brothers sprinted, hazing Dakar ahead like a bear at a baiting. Another door slammed. The Mad Prophet stubbed his toes in a crack, caromed off a wall, and staggered down a flight of shallow steps.

Beyond this, a crook in the corridor; wheezing fit to burst, he pounded up some steep, uneven stairs.

Then an awesome, booming roar shook the earth.

Flying debris of splinters and steel showered and clanged and scattered against the corner wall as if raked by the thrust of a tornado.

A fist of hot air struck Dakar’s back from behind and flattened his escort like ninepins.

Deafened, blistered, coughing bitter smoke and gritted cinders, the Mad Prophet snatched an instant to wander if Bransian’s huge frame had him pinned belly-down on any rats. Wits failed him. His head ached in reverberated pain like the stew of a mallet-struck pudding.

Too undone to finesse the spells he might have tried as a restorative, Dakar offered up a muzzy prayer to Ath for a speedy, smooth pass beneath the Wheel.

The alternatives did not amuse. Rat bites made ghastly infections; the s’Brydion would slowly disembowel him; and by far worst of all, Arithon was away, scot-free.

Cringing in mortified failure for the stunning misdirection of his plot, the spellbinder knew death itself might not save him. His irate Fellowship master would commandeer Dharkaron’s own Chariot for first crack at his disembodied spirit.

When the brothers s’Brydion resolved to interrogate a miscreant, niceties fell by the wayside. Since the deepest and dimmest of Alestron’s dungeons lay explosively gutted, the work crews who extinguished the fires now laboured to shovel away wet ashes and wipe the carbon from salvageable steel. The only other keep not jammed to capacity with weapons held a ring of glass traders incarcerated for fraud. Rather than suffer the delay while they were moved, Lord Bransian chose to weigh the blame for his ruined armoury in the sanctum of his private study.

Collared and dragged by the mailed fists of guardsmen back up the same tiresome tower staircases, then heaved with humourless force through the doorway, Dakar staggered into candlelight. The chamber where he had shown Rathain’s emeralds was lit now by massive candelabra on stands at the four points of the compass. Grazed with patched blood and bruises, whooping in starved gulps of air, he sagged to his knees against the wall chest, left open since morning, when Keldmar had snatched his paired swords. The brothers were nothing if not thorough. Dakar’s hands were trussed afresh in
stout cord, beyond liberty to grope to see if other weapons remained swaddled in the oiled rags that lined the bottom.

If the Mad Prophet held out hopes to ease his plight through fast talk, the speed of events soured his opening. When Guard-captain Tharrick had no ready explanation for a spy who had slipped through his posted watch, the brothers s’Brydion lost patience. They ordered him stripped and flogged with supreme unconcern for bloodstains on their rich carpets.

Quaking and sick, Dakar shut his eyes against the poor wretch’s screams as the lash fell. Tharrick was innocent of accepting any bribe, and zealous as any man might be in adherence to loyal duty; against the wily Master of Shadow, no sentry in Alestron had a chance.

Unaware he had spoken his opinion out loud, Dakar started as a bandaged hand clamped his nape.

‘What was that you just said?’ Mearn’s unquiet pacing had carried him within earshot. Changed out of his dandy’s velvets, he now wore scarlet riding leathers scaled across the shoulders with brass plates. His lovelock had singed to a frizzle. He had a marked cheek, a heel too tender to bear weight, and both hands poulticed for bums. The sting inflamed his already volatile temperament like the inexorable blaze of a slow match.