King's Shield (66 page)

The answer came back before Inda had counted nine nines.

Evred said, “How long would you guess they are from the pass?”

Inda shut his eyes, mentally considering the map, and its drawings of the pass and the lakes relative to Ala Larkadhe. He still did not really have a sense of land travel, especially in mountains. “Three days?” He slapped his side and exclaimed, “Another!”

He opened the case, took out a badly crumpled paper. Evred recognized Barend’s large, backhand scrawl, and his breath tightened in his chest.

“Venn outnumbered us too bad, and broke through.” Inda’s voice roughened as he gave Evred the details. “They started killing us to take horses, but Buck pulled our people out. Venn’re on the way to Ala Larkadhe.”

Evred’s heart hammered against his ribs. “Send Buck to harry their back.”

“Later. Not enough of us to make a difference, so let’s protect Lindeth. Venn’re going to want to bring those ships in, soon as they hold Ala Larkadhe. We might have a chance there. Barend knows some good pirate tricks.”

Evred’s throat was tight; he was too angry about the defeat to speak. He turned his thumb up.

Inda wrote and sent the command.

 

 

 

When the last of the Venn invasion reached their advance force outside of Ala Larkadhe’s city gates, the horns moaned and blared, bringing the Hilda’s southern invasion force into squares. They sat in place to eat and drink. Ensigns and their own orderlies passed around water from the stream alongside the road, and then waybread stuffed with dried and salted fish.

As they wolfed down their meal, Acting Battle Chief Vringir’s ensigns walked among them speaking orders.

Signi, Valda, and Durasnir watched from the tower.

Durasnir observed the issuing of small bundles that surely were sticks and leddas oil soaked hemp: torches. Valda watched the commander gesturing toward various parts of the city as he talked to a group of armor chiefs. The way his hand chopped the air, he seemed to be dividing the city.

Signi went cold when she observed the subtle signs of battle-experienced men reacting in surprise, even shock.

Then a long blat brought the men to their feet and into line. War bands were ordered to mount up and trot into position outside the city walls. Others took up a stance blocking the city gates.

The rest formed up into offensive squares—helms on, shields up edge to edge, swords at the ready—and marched inside the city, each to a specific area.

One man per party passed by the armor chief’s fire keeper to light his torch; the rest of fire teams carried the entire army’s supply of leddas oil until the ships could offload the barrels down in the hold.

Valda exclaimed, “They are going to fire the city!”

Signi turned on Durasnir. “There is nothing but women and children and old people in this city.”

From each square’s torch man thin drifts of smoke reaching lazily skyward on the heavy summer air.

“If there is nothing in this city but women and children, it was women and children who killed the scouting parties,” he returned. At the rejection in her face he said quickly, “I hate it as much as you do. But I cannot interfere. This is Talkar’s battle to command. Vringir down there has his orders.”

Valda pressed her hands to her face. “He must think the city is full of warriors.”

“It is,” Durasnir said.

“No it is not,” Signi exclaimed. “I have been here several days. I spent all of yesterday down in the caverns where the water flows from beneath the mountains. They have the baths there for city and castle. I was renewing the spells, and saw everyone who came to bathe. The men are all gone, except for a few wounded, leaving boys ten and under, or men over sixty.” She opened her hands in supplication as she faced Durasnir. “Can you not tell Hilda Commander Talkar?”

“No.” His voice was gentle, but decisive.

“No,” Valda said at the same time. Her eyes were full of tears, her face distraught as she added, “Fulla is not supposed to be here, do you not remember? Or you, or I.”

“It wouldn’t matter even so,” Durasnir said. “In his eyes, the killing of our scouts means the inhabitants are warriors.”

Signi remembered the armed women in the Marlovan royal city. Hadand and Tdor, so quiet and reasonable and kind—and every time they moved, there was the glint of polished hilts inside the gap in their sleeves, the glimpses of knife hilts in their boot tops when their voluminous trousers swung at their long strides.

It was true. The Marlovan women were warriors. Maybe two or three hundred of them, and easily ten times that slowly assembling around the city in a circle, so that no one would escape alive, but the fact was inescapable.

As if someone below had heard her thoughts, an eerie noise whirtled through the air. Heads snapped skyward.

The Marlovan women on the walls knelt on the sentry walks between the battlements, testing bow strings, pulling arrows close. The woman almost directly below Signi had an untidy gray braid. Her gnarled first and second fingers trembled as she expertly nipped the feathers of her arrows between them.

When the war parties had marched within arrow shot of the defenders on the walls, two more screamer arrows arced over the city.

Drilled and smooth, the women jumped up and took aim.
Zzzzip! Sssst!
With smooth, rapid, and deliberate skill they began shooting at the invaders.

Arrows clacked against upraised shields.

The Venn angled their shields high as they walked in cadence down the street toward the old, carving-decorated guild house on the opposite side of a broad square from the western castle entrance. The Venn crossed the square at a run, and spread efficiently out. The ones on the outside shielded the ones who smashed windows with rocks. The next two slung dippers of oil through the jagged gaps, followed by twists of straw touched to torches. On to the next window.

The shields could not ward efficiently against trained archers when the men were in violent motion: arrows hit two men as they reared back to fling the oil. They crumpled, and were promptly replaced.

A short blat from the Venn signal man and the back rows of each square raised bows, took aim at the bobbing figures on the walls. Arrows hissed and clattered in both directions now.

An arrow thunked into the woman directly below Signi, twisting her around like a cloth doll. She fell onto the safety walk, where she writhed at the feet of a young woman loosing arrow after arrow. The shooter glanced down once, face white and blanched, then she bared her teeth and kept shooting as fast as she could.

Presently, the wounded one stopped pawing at the arrow in her chest and lay unmoving, fainted or dead, Signi could not tell. Two younger women emerged onto the sentry walk and ran, bent and low. One lifted the fallen woman under the arms and dragged her off. The other strung her own bow and shot.

Signi sneezed. Smoke! She whirled back to face the guild house square. Now more than half of the windows belched flames and smoke. A flicker from a doorway: a young woman carrying a bundle ducked out and ran.

She made it ten steps before she dropped dead with at least a dozen Venn arrows in her. The bundle fell, and out rolled a baby too young to walk. The child opened its mouth wide, sucking in its breath for a long, agonized moment before the fist-clenching, body-shaking scream. An attack party crossed the court from another direction, their path intersecting the fallen woman and the squalling baby. Most ran past. The man at the end closest cocked his wrist back, sword high, but he faltered midway in his stroke, leaped over the baby and ran on, leaving the child sitting by the dead woman, screaming and screaming.

Signi smeared the blurring of hot tears from her eyes and coughed from the thickening smoke. More figures dotted the smoke-shrouded street, many of them absurdly small—children separated from families in the smoke, most wailing in fright. Some were shot or struck down by the swords of the Venn, others were hidden by the thickening smoke.

“I can’t bear it,” Signi whispered.

“Is it any more right when young men have life and light struck from their eyes?” Valda asked, gripping the stone rail.

“No. But most chose such a calling. Those children did not. My Dag Chief, I cannot stand by as witness.” Yes. Yes. The words hummed through her, diminishing the pain, the screams, the smell of burning. The world below glimmered in a haze of light. “Yes, I will act.”

Valda took hold of Signi’s shoulders. “You
cannot.
” And when Signi did not answer, she shook her hard. “You. Must. Not. Act.”

Signi’s head rocked, but her gaze lifted beyond Valda’s shoulder. She brushed at the fingers dug into her shoulders. “Go, Valda,” she whispered. “Take Fulla. Go.”

“I will not be able to ward you,” Valda warned. A shake. “Do you hear me?”

“I know.” Signi trembled with effort. Valda felt it under her fingers. “The consequence is mine. And if I am discovered, perhaps it is time to let Erkric know that I live. Because I am going to take a stand against him.”

Valda shook Signi a last time in a frustrated attempt to hold her to the now, to her own plans, so desperately important. But Signi was gone, gazing beyond the rim of the world at Ydrasal, the Realm of the Tree; to Valda’s magical vision Signi shimmered in pale fire.

So Valda let her go, and backed away a step as Signi began the deep breathing of a mage gathering all her inner resources. Valda gripped Durasnir’s thick, bony wrist and without leave transferred him back to his ship. Then she left herself.

Signi did not see them go. Her ears rushed and thundered, closing out the screams of the baby far below, the shouts and cries and hissing arrows, the sickening thuds of falling bodies as she reached down and down, to the strong flow of water below the ground.

She began to whisper a chain of spells held together by strength of will.

If you knew it was there, and you were strong enough to form the conduit, then the water would drive itself upward. First a trickle, then a stream, moving in and out of space so that every pot, every bucket, every pond and pool and fountain in the city bubbled up to the brim, quivered, spilled over in a thin trickle that rapidly swelled to overflowing.

Small animals put ears up, twitched whiskers and noses, then scrambled, skittered, swarmed for higher ground. Water spilled onto shelves, tables, puddled onto floors, rilling out of doorways. Water rushed down stairs, through broken windows, seeping, dripping, gouting down into flames that sent up hisses of steam.

Thin sheets of overflow strengthened to cascades, the fountains jetted huge sprays that arced high enough in the air to glimmer with rainbows between roiling columns of smoke.

Spouts and falls lifted charred furnishings, papers, books, clothing, carrying them out of windows and doors to wash down streets in ever-widening rivers. Black ash streaked the whitewashed walls of buildings as the jumble of furniture, curtains, pots, cups, plates, and corpses bobbed and spun in eddies across the courts.

Warriors and defenders alike ran from the deluge, or tried to run until they found themselves caught waist-deep in the swirling waters. Though no one signaled, the women on the walls began in ones and twos, and then in a mass, to run down to the aid of the old and the small, all struggling not to get swept away in the terrifying flood; Venn warriors dropped shields and weapons as they slogged heavily, weighted by their armor, through the climbing torrent. There would be no fires set now. They had to get out with their lives alongside city dwellers, some clutching bits of belongings gathered up witlessly. A Venn sloshed out of nowhere, thrust a squalling baby into the arms of an old woman guiding a frail old man, and surged on. Nightingale Toraca appeared with a string of the horses recaptured earlier, his arm in a sling. His wounds had reopened, and he half leaned on the lead mare. If the Venn even noticed his blue coat, they paid no attention to him or to the horses—who snapped at anyone unfamiliar who tried to touch them.

Screamer arrows and blats repeated frantically; everyone headed toward the gates, thrust forward by surging water.

When all living things had cleared the city’s central square directly above the underground caverns, a rumbling boom punched through. A geyser shot skyward, tossing up massive flagstones like leaves in the wind. Water and stone rained down, dousing all the fires, the white-foaming crest near the height of the ancient tower where, unseen from below, a small woman stood, arms upraised, fingers trembling, until her spells collapsed around her and she fell to the white stone in a faint.

The geyser bumped lower. Then again. Gradually it subsided. Water roared through the southern gate, carrying most of the city’s first-floor furnishings out into a spreading tangle of wreckage. The torrent diminished into running gutters, and then even those lessened to a thin trickle, leaving the city tinkling unmusically with drips.

The amazed defenders gradually perceived that they were surrounded by uncountable enemies. The amazed enemies took in the defenders standing in small clumps within easy reach. They looked around for weapons, shields—most of them gone—and then sought out their captains, their faces expressing variations of “What now?”

Nightingale was the first to recover. He knew the Venn wanted horses; he hoped if he got the animals out of sight they’d stay out of mind.

The last of the horses vanished inside when Hilda Acting Battle Chief Vringir broke through his dazed ensigns and slogged toward the gates, eyeing the defenders in the fading light. The army he’d envisioned did not exist. What did were a few nine-nines of Marlovan women defenders, most of them now as unarmed as his men. No one looked ready to carry on a fight, and though he’d been ready to slaughter them all at noon, he had no stomach for cutting them down in cold blood now.