A Triple Thriller Fest (131 page)

Niels and Peter were in front, harried from all sides. Miko Talo was there, too, and other men she knew as the best swordsmen of the castle. They were holding their own for now, but Kirkov was there, too, and her friends would soon be overwhelmed by sheer numbers.

“Crossbows,” she ordered. “I need everyone with a crossbow at the arrow loops. Drive them back from the moat.” To the man with the cut above his eye, she said. “I’m going out there. Follow me.”

Tess ran across the bridge with her sword drawn. She pulled back anyone who blocked her path. Within a minute she had fought her way to the side of Niels and Peter. Another dozen men followed her into the fray.

“We’ve got to get back,” she said. “We’ll be slaughtered.”

“What do you think we’re trying to do?” Peter asked. He struggled to hold up his sword arm. A wound opened a bloody gash across his right bicep. “Take this,” he said. He groped for a grenade. “My shoulder, I can’t throw.”

She took the grenade, almost dropped it as someone slammed into Tess from her left. She fought clear, then pulled the pin and reached back to hurl it over the top and just over Kirkov’s head, into the middle of the bunched enemies.

But someone bumped her arm as she threw. The grenade wobbled in the air and didn’t make it more than ten feet before it fell. She just had time to turn her head and squint her eyes shut before it went off.

The explosion threw her from her feet. She was stunned, blind and deaf, with a shocking pain that felt like her head was in a vice, underwater. Men lay on and under her, flailing, holding her down. She’d lost her sword.

Her head had been turned, her body shielded by the men in front of her, and she recovered more quickly than most. She regained her feet, blinked against the spots flashing in her vision, and searched for her sword in the mud. Her ears roared like a giant wave crashing against a seawall.

Two men came at her. They walked over and through men who lay on their bellies or crouched on hands and knees. She ducked back, tripped over someone. There was her sword, pressed into the sleet and mud. She grabbed it, tried to wipe it on her pants.

One of the men was Anton Kirkov. He gave her a toothy, predatory grin from behind his visor as their eyes met. A massive, two-handed sword rested easily in his arms. It was coated with blood and gore. His right sleeve was torn off and blood trickled down his massive bicep. Someone rose to block the path of the two attackers. Peter. He lunged forward from hands and knees with his sword. It slid past the second man’s shield and thrust into his torso.

Kirkov turned toward this new threat with a snarl and a raised sword.

Peter struggled to pull his sword free. He glanced over his shoulder and shouted something to her, but she couldn’t hear the words over the roar in her head. Get back? Help?

Tess stumbled forward with her sword outstretched. Kirkov attacked just as Peter pulled his own weapon clear. His blow glanced off his sword. There were bodies all around, and men struggling to their feet, and Kirkov shoved them aside to try to get to Peter.

Tess recovered, slowly. Muffled, as if from a great distance, came the clank of sword on shield, men shouting. There was Niels, fighting for his life. Someone grabbed at her ankle. She kicked him away before she saw it was one of her own men.

Peter and Kirkov stood clear, now. The only men around them were dead or dying. Tess fought her way toward them. Kirkov brought his sword over his shoulder with a crushing blow. Peter lifted his sword to block. It shattered under the impact.

Tess was almost there, but not in time as Kirkov lifted his sword for the killing stroke.

#

Dmitri heard the cries of people dying below him. He thought at first they came from the walls behind the keep. It had been almost an hour since he’d heard part of the wall collapse and people running through the halls outside his barricaded room, shouting.

No telling what would happen to him now. The doors were barred. If the keep burned, he was a dead man. And he’d had plenty of time to think. Would anyone care if he died?

What a fool he was. It was a nightmare that wouldn’t end, and worst of all, he’d known what he was getting into. He regretted it all now.

The room had a single window, about the height of his forearm and no wider than his outstretched palm. It pointed north. He pressed against it, trying to get the angle that would let him see into the bailey. He could hear shouts and screams, but see nothing. The glass was coated with sleet anyway. The glass vibrated from some explosion. One of Kirkov’s stun grenades, he guessed.

There was a brief moment of silence in its aftermath and it was then that he identified the screaming that he’d taken to be from the far walls. It sounded like it was coming from one of the interior walls. It took a few minutes to identify the source. There was a hollow part of the wall. Some sort of service tunnel or laundry shoot ran behind there. It was carrying sound from fighting somewhere in the bowels of the keep.

Dmitri went to the bed and tore off the bedding, then bent to unwind the ropes that made up the mattress. In a few minutes he had the wooden bed leg free. He’d identified it as soon as they’d moved him to this room but the door had never opened again, except by three armed men who delivered his foot and took his chamber pot.

He bashed at the wall. Chips of plaster broke away to reveal an inner wooden frame that he pried and broke off with his hands. Inside was an old clay chimney, only about ten centimeters across, which he broke open. No hope of getting in there. He could hear the shouts clearly, now. A woman’s voice that sounded like Yekatarina, though he could pick out none of the words.

And smoke. It whisped up through the chimney and into Dmitri’s room. There was little oxygen down there. Tess must have trapped them in the basement, lit Peter’s stuff on fire to suffocate them all. The fire, too, would be desperate for oxygen. It would be pulling it from the exterior entrance and now Dmitri had opened an outlet.

Too late he realized what he’d done. He stuffed his blankets into the hole, but he’d torn out too much to block it. The smoke, first a trickle, soon rolled into the room. Dmitri covered his mouth and coughed. The shouts turned to screams. The smoke coming from the hole was very hot indeed. The blankets themselves started to smolder. The room filled with smoke.

Dmitri banged on the door. “Is anyone out there? Help, there’s smoke in here, somebody help me, please.”

No answer from the other side. He went to the window and smashed it with the leg of the bed. Ice-cold air rushed into the room. He pressed his face to the window, which was too narrow for his head, and sucked great gulps of fresh air into his burning lungs.

The room at his back cooked with hot air and smoke. Black, oily smoke boiled through the broken window, around Dmitri’s face. A gust of wind blew away the smoke and he gasped at the fresh air, but then it was gone and all smoke. The heat was unbearable. He screamed for help.

Nobody answered or heard. He’d have crawled out of that window if he could, thrown himself to the flagstone below. It was too narrow. The heat and smoke would cook him to death instead.

#

If Tess had fully recovered, she might have stopped him. If she’d arrived a second earlier, maybe. If she’d only killed Kirkov on the tournament field when she’d had a chance, she could have saved Peter, saved Nick’s father.

Peter lifted his sword hilt. He’d fallen to his knees from the force of Kirkov’s blow. He turned his head toward Tess and his mouth opened in a plea for help. In the background—perhaps from the walls above her, or even from a room high in the keep—came a horrifying scream of someone dying.

Kirkov lifted his two-handed sword over Peter’s head.

“No,” Tess managed. The fog cleared from her head second by second. “Captive, you need to take him captive.”

Kirkov smiled from behind the visor of his helmet. “Not today. Not this one.”

Tess made one final lunge. It fell short.

Kirkov slammed his sword into Peter’s head. Peter crumpled without a sound and landed face first in the mud. With sickening horror, Tess watched Kirkov pry his sword loose from Peter’s skull like an axe from a rotten stump.

And then Tess was on him. She slashed and parried, danced and ducked. Kirkov’s sword seemed to be made of lead. She blocked his thrusts and counterattacked with a fury that drove him to his knees.

Two men came to his side. She cut one man down at the legs and finished the other with a blow to the clavicle with such force that his helmet flew off his head.

Kirkov regained his feet and tried to fall back, but Tess caught him before he’d taken two steps. Her sword felt like an extension of her own hand. She pushed aside his sword and then, when he struggled to lift it again, swung from behind her ears and knocked it from his hands. Kirkov yanked off his helmet and lifted his hands. “I surrender!” he screamed.

She felt no pity at the terrified look on his face, only hatred and a bloody thirst. Her voice was grim, almost like it came from outside her body. “Not today, you don’t.”

Tess swung the killing blow. She heard, felt bone crack in Kirkov’s neck. The terrible sound penetrated the roar in her ears, the screams of dying men, and the clash of steel. The stroke nearly severed his head from its body.

She pulled her weapon free and tried to battle to Peter’s side. But the fighting engulfed her and she couldn’t move forward. Peter lay face down, unmoving.

And then Lars was at her side. He swung a huge, two-handed sword and by sheer strength threw back two men, broke through to Peter’s side. He shouted and drove back yet another enemy, then turned his blood-splattered face—the face of a Viking warrior—and waved for her to come.

Peter was alive, but only barely. His eyes rolled back in their sockets and his face was gray. His breath came in short, dying gasps. She pulled off his split helmet and drew back in horror at the broken mess of bone and brains underneath.

“Tess, get up.”

Niels and Lars were by her side, trying to pull her to her feet. She got up and looked around. The enemy still outnumbered them better than two to one, but they were pulling back, retreating toward the gatehouse. Niels shouted at men to pull them together into a defensive wedge.

“Look,” Lars said.

Smoke spewed from a broken window high in the keep. It was Dmitri’s room. She thought about that horrible scream she heard just before Kirkov killed Peter. The open hall of the keep was smoky, too, and men came onto the bridge.

“Did he set it on fire?” Lars asked.

“I don’t know, maybe it’s coming up from the basement. Niels, look.”

Niels stood in front of her where he lifted one of their men to his feet. He glanced back, then shook his head. “We’ll have to make for the manor house. No, the barracks, there’s food in there, and more space. We’ll hole up there.”

“We can’t hold the barracks. There are half a dozen doors to guard.”

“Tess, it’s over, we won,” Niels said. “You cut the head off the snake, and they don’t know what to do. Look at them.”

The enemy scattered in different directions. The majority looked to barricade themselves in the gatehouse. After the keep it was the second strongest point in the castle. Others streamed through the gap in the wall to flee the castle entirely. Where did they think they were going?

Tess took three men with her to evacuate the keep. She went first to Nick’s room. He was in his bed, asleep. A fire smoldered in the hearth. It was so quiet and dry and warm that for a moment the world outside seemed like a nightmare from which she was just waking.

She wrapped him in his blanket and lifted him from bed.

”
Qu-est-ce que tu veux?”
he mumbled. What do you want?

”
C’est moi,”
she said. “Tess. Don’t worry, you’re safe. I’ll take you to another room and you can go back to sleep.”

He opened his eyes and blinked, seemed to notice his surroundings for the first time.
“Ou est papá?”

That earnest look on his face and those eyes made him look just like his father. The boy’s biological mother, suffocated beneath the castle.
What have I done?

“You can see papá later.”

#

They had free reign of the bailey. Together, Niels, Lars, and Tess identified their wounded and ordered them brought into the barracks. Lars hefted Peter’s body over his shoulder. She smoothed his hair to cover his broken skull. His face looked peaceful, beautiful, really and she wondered if she should bring Nick to see his father now, before rigor mortis set in.

Later that night, several men came over from the other side, and an hour later, half a dozen more. Reluctant participants in Kirkov and Yekatarina’s assault, or so they claimed.

The rest of the enemy abandoned the gatehouse before dawn and were soon out of the castle altogether. There was no way to know what the next day would hold, so Tess moved immediately to secure the castle. They hefted stones and moved tables, benches, boxes, anything they could find to plug the hole in the castle walls.

By morning, the keep was burning freely. The moat contained the fire, kept it from spreading to the manor or the barracks. A sooty plume of smoke soared hundreds of feet into the air and ash fell among a few lingering snowflakes.

Tess and Niels mounted the gatehouse to look down at the enemy. They retreated down the road toward the docks. The woods prevented them from seeing what they were doing.

“Do they have a satellite phone?” Tess said. “They must have called for help, someone to get them off the island.”

“It’s officially over, then,” Niels said.

“It’ll be over once we’re off this stupid island, and we find out the world hasn’t come to an end.”

“After what we saw here, I’m guessing it’s all still there. They couldn’t take this castle, there’s no way they can bring civilization to its knees.”

“Doesn’t help us much, though. We’ve got a dozen men who will die if we don’t get them to a hospital. Something must have happened to that guy on the boat, or he didn’t go to the police like he said he would.”