Wolf's Blood (83 page)

As Skea had trained them to do. the Nexans fired their bows, but the majority of their arrows clattered against the closely fit iron bars of the cage. The remainder struck the two within the cage on their armor and helmets. These, too, had been designed with this specific attack in mind, the joints covered, and the helmets coming down to cover the sides of the men’s faces.

“The cage isn’t going to hold!” someone yelled. “Tell Skea!”

Racing forward to see what he could do, Derian felt very strongly the irony that the Nexans had provided the invaders with their best shield.

We only thought about the cages protecting us from what would come in. Since iron weakens the powers of Once Dead, we didn’t think about more prosaic forms of attack—even though those were what we were relying on ourselves.

But he didn’t waste energy on recriminations. Instead. he grabbed a long spear from one of the Nexans.

“Poke them!” he shouted, demonstrating. “If they’re busy with that thing, they can’t fight back.”

The archers dropped their bows and followed his example, but although they succeeded in killing the two with the ram, it was too late to save the integrity of the iron cage, and already. behind it, the gateway was beginning to glow, heralding the imminent arrival of reinforcements.

Derian felt a little sick. He’d never attacked anyone with such calculation before, but at the time it hadn’t seemed calculated at all. He’d felt no more revulsion than if he’d been poking a pitchfork at a rat he found in the feed.

And those two men must have known they were doomed,
he thought
. What incentive would make people go to their deeths like that?

But he didn’t have time to consider. Instead. he rallied the troops assigned to the Hearthome gate.

“They’ve weakened the bars,” he reminded them, “and they’ll break through eventually. That’s certain, but remember. Two at a time. Just two at a time. Those are the odds in our favor.”

The attacks that came through the other gates followed a similar pattern. The Mires proved to be the most coordinated, Tishiolo the least. There were some interesting variations to the ways the attackers sought to disable the iron cage.

Leaving the area near the Pelland gate, where a second or third attempt to break through had been thwarted, Derian heard excited cries from the soldiers stationed at the Azure Towers gate. This gate had shown less activity than some of the others, and they had even dared to hope that no attack would come from there. When it came, it carried surprises with it.

Two people came in through the silver wall. One was a slight woman, clearly marked as a Once Dead by the sigils and ornaments on her leather armor. Her companion was a tall man, also clad in leather armor, probably so he would not add interference of iron on his companion’s abilities.

The soldier interposed a large shield between himself and the Once Dead. She, in turn, could just be glimpsed setting something dripping and amorphous directly on the iron bars.

Derian caught a whiff of blood, then the material hissed and steamed. As if this was a signal of some sort, the soldier wheeled around to interpose his shield between the hissing mass and himself, ignoring the arrows at his back. His companion shrunk back into the circle of his arms. Then, without warning, the hissing stuff exploded.

Despite the intervening shield, the explosion struck the two within the cage and they reeled back. The Once Dead was knocked from the protective circle of her companion’s arms and into the iron bars. She screamed terribly before falling suddenly silent. Her companion had flung himself into the bars, synchronizing his backward thrust with the explosion’s force and thus helping to further wrench the bars loose from their anchors in the stone.

The Nexan defenders had not stood idle during this carefully coordinated display. They fired as Skea had trained them to do, but as elsewhere most of their arrows clattered against the close-set bars of the iron cage.

Several of the Nexans were approaching with spears, ready to use the tactic that had worked so well at the Hearthome gate and elsewhere. They were caught in the blast and flung to the floor. This did not save them from being badly cut by clips of flying stone.

Derian ran forward and pulled the worst wounded back. The gate was glowing again, and he had no doubt that whoever would come through next would be as well prepared as these two had been.

Skea had come from somewhere and was shouting orders. Wolves were howling, the sound of their calls as they coordinated their own part in the defensive action ringing back and forth off the stone walls of the wedge-shaped gate building.

Derian had a headache but he knew he didn’t have time for that. He shook his head to clear it and heard Pishtoolam, the head cook, yelling at the top of her lungs.

It took him a moment to translate as in her shock she had reverted to the oddly accented Liglimosh that was her first language.

“By all the elements! Where did they come from? It’s an entire army!”

TINIEL’S ANTICIPATION GREW when the gates began to come alive in the Pelland complex, followed shortly by those in the complex that held the Tavetchian gate. The gate to u-Chival, however, remained—other than a testing glow sometime earlier—ominously dark.

Have they lost their nerve? Was there some omen against their coming through? No matter what promises they made, if these u-Chivalum are anything like the Liglimom, they aren’t going to go against the omens.

Repeatedly, Tiniel darted back and forth between the interior of the building holding the gate, and the door in the narrow end of the wedge. The fighting over at the Pelland complex must be fairly intense if the number of wounded he saw being borne away was any indication. Not all the faces of those he saw on the stretchers were familiar, so the Nexans must be holding their own.

Up on his high watch stand, Farborn was fluttering his wings with excitement. Tiniel had been told that merlins were relatively silent as hawks went, but Farborn was so distracted he was making shrill peeping sounds. It didn’t take much imagination to hear these as “Let me come help! Let me!”

Part of Tiniel’s job was to make periodic checks of the other buildings in this particular complex, just to assure that none of the supposedly “dead” gates had come live. The Nexans hadn’t had the resources to cage all the gates, so they had settled on those they knew were active. The others had been booby-trapped and alarmed in a variety of clever ways, but these wouldn’t stop anyone from coming through.

Tiniel returned to the building containing the live gate just as the wall between the intricately carved sigils began to glow silver. His heart gave a funny skipping beat, and for a moment he almost gave in to the impulse to call alert as he had been told. Then his resolution returned.

He’d done his best to learn how the other attacks had begun, and so he knew that the first pair through would probably concentrate on defending themselves and weakening the cage. Making sure his helmet was snug and that his armor didn’t show any gaps—after all, the u-Chivalum wouldn’t know he was a friend until he told them—Tiniel moved up next to the cage.

He stayed a spear’s length back, but didn’t dare go any farther. He had to count on the new arrivals needing a moment to adjust to the relatively dim light in the building to give him the time he needed.

The silver glow grew so intense that Tiniel feared it would shine right out through the door he hadn’t dared shut lest that draw attention. Of course, it was only shortly passed noon and the summer sun was high, bright, and hot, even on this accursed island, so he needn’t worry, but fear made one a little crazy.

The u-Chivalum proved to be a heavily armored pair of men. One was so broad in the shoulder that he hardly fit into the cage. The ornamentation on the other’s armor suggested that he was Once Dead, but Tiniel wasn’t going to address him by that title. The disdum also often wore elaborate attire, and not all the disdum were Once Dead. Indeed, in u-Chival, where magical talents were still highly distrusted, they were more likely not to be. Calling a disdu “Once Dead” might be a grave insult.

Not certain which of the two was in charge, Tiniel addressed himself to both.

“I’m a friend. I have a plan for how you can win this battle where your allies are failing.”

The man in the less ornamented armor had raised his hands to grasp the iron bars of the cage as if he planned to rip them free with nothing but the strength of his massive shoulders. He paused in midmotion, as if noticing for the first time that the building was empty but for Tiniel.

The man Tiniel presumed was the Once Dead spoke in heavily accented Liglimosh, his tone controlled yet somehow mincing, “What do you mean, you are a friend? Why should we trust you?”

Tiniel moved a step closer. “Because I’m giving you this.”

He reached up and worked loose a few of the shims and wedges he had inserted to keep the bars of the cage in place along one side. For over a moonspan, he had been using part of his watch on the gateway hillside to unsecure the bars, hiding his work with considerable care. The Nexans’ few stonemasons and ironworkers were too busy to repeatedly check their past work, and Tiniel’s sabotage had gone undetected.

It had helped that everyone had been far more worried about the Pelland gates.

“I’ve loosened the cage all along one side,” he said. “It won’t be hard at all to squeeze by.”

The Once Dead didn’t look as if he trusted Tiniel, but he was also not one to pass up an omen of good fortune. He turned to his companion.

“Get this cage down entirely. Do it, quietly, if you can. If you can’t, leave it up. but bend it back so the rest of the army can get through.”

The other man grunted, and began tugging at the bars to test their hold. Satisfied, he pulled out a lever and got to work. He was amazingly quiet, but then Tiniel thought he might have had practice.

The Once Dead slipped outside the cage into the open area and studied Tiniel. He was armed with a crossbow, sword, and a long, curve-bladed knife, but he didn’t draw any of these.

“You have something of the look of my people, yet not. Nor do I remember seeing you before. Are you of the New World?”

“I am.”

The man nodded as if some previous consideration had been confirmed. “And why do you betray your fellows?”

Tiniel answered promptly, “Because I believe they are the ones who have betrayed, not I. They have broken the trade agreement by which these islands were made independent. I only want to set things right.”

The Once Dead twitched his lips in something between a sneer and a smile. “I see. An idealist. Perhaps I even believe you. What I most certainly believe is the evidence of my eyes. This building is unoccupied by defenders, therefore you are the watch and have not called them. How long do we have?”

“Possibly quite a while,” Tiniel said. He hadn’t expected this cool reaction. He’d envisioned being called an answer to their prayers or an omen of victory. This cool contempt wasn’t at all to his taste, but he couldn’t retreat now. “The Pelland cluster is very busy now. Most of the Nexan forces are there. If I don’t call, they’re probably going to be grateful for the reprieve”

“Then they must see you from time to time, I think,” the Once Dead said, and Tiniel realized with shock that he’d been very close to dying right then. “Very well. Let them see you.”

He dismissed Tiniel with a motion of his hand, and turned to his companion.

“Hahrahma, do you have the cage down?”

Hahrahma, who must have had a talent for strength to do what he was doing, replied by setting the entirety of the iron-barred cage gently down on the stone floor just to one side of the gate. He nodded jubilantly, and when he opened and shut his mouth as if replying, Tiniel saw to his horror that the man lacked a tongue.

Did they cut it out?

He didn’t ask, but instead scampered toward the door in the narrow end of the building. He was nearly there when the Once Dead called after him, his tones low but penetrating.

“Oh, Idealist. Remember your ideals, or I will be forced to remember them for you.”

He raised his crossbow, now fully loaded, and aimed it at Tiniel. Then he began to close the distance between them, so that even when Tiniel reached the doorway he would not be out of the line of fire.

“The quarrel will go through light armor such as that you are wearing, in case you wondered.”

Tiniel didn’t wonder. He also didn’t doubt that if he were to go outside and start screaming for help, the Once Dead would punish his treachery either right then or when the battle was won; the u-Chivalum would win now. The heart of the gate was glowing silver again, and pairs of armed and armored soldiers were striding through. They seemed a bit surprised to find no immediate battle awaiting them, but not as surprised as Tiniel thought they should have been.

The first pair of soldiers to come through were assigned to finish moving the bars of the cage aside. Hahrahma was set to guard Tiniel, freeing “his” Once Dead, who he now learned was called Prarayan, to coordinate the troops as they filed out of the gate.

Watching and listening from his post by the main door, Tiniel learned why the u-Chivalum were so calm. In the fourth or fifth pair through the gate there came a woman whom Prarayan immediately greeted with hand gestures indicating profound respect.

“Your auguries were perfect, Aridisdu Valdala,” Prarayan said. “By waiting until the appointed time had gone by but a little, we found a perfect situation waiting for us. This young man,” his tone dripped contempt, for all the words were polite, “favors our cause. Battle rages throughout the Pelland gate cluster, so that no one is likely to wonder what is happening here, especially as they can see their faithful guard going about his tasks, and looking with longing to join the fight.”

“The Divine Five favor our action,” Aridisdu Valdala said, “as the auguries told us they did. Shall we gather our force in strength, then strike?”

“That is what I would advise,” Prarayan said. “However, we should not wait too long. Our allies will need us to provide a diversion so that they can make good the breaches they have doubtless established.”