Stormrider (30 page)

Then, gathering his men, the Gray Ghost rode back toward Shelding.

12

At first glance Jakon Gallowglass did not look like a soldier. He was thin and round-shouldered and generally moved with a gangling gait, appearing clumsy and lacking in coordination. His uniforms were always ill-fitting, for his right arm was two inches longer than his left. This, along with his concave chest and sloping shoulders, made him entirely unsuited to the needs of fashion. He was also, as his officers would say continually, disgracefully unkempt and with little understanding of discipline. He had been flogged eleven times during his four years of service. In short, all the reports on Gallowglass stated that he was a bad soldier. He had only one redeeming feature: Jakon Gallowglass was a fighter who did not know when to quit.

It was a skill he needed in all its vicious glory now as he ran back through the streets of Shelding. The enemy had broken through on the right, and the fighting had moved into the back streets. Several of the citizens had tried to run for the transient safety of the meadows. They had been shot down by the advancing musketeers.

Jakon Gallowglass ran around a corner and directly into three advancing musketeers. His musket was empty, but he lashed it across the face of the first man, knocking him from his feet. Dragging his knife from its scabbard, he rammed it into the chest of the second man. The third tried to impale him with his bayonet. Letting go of his knife, Jakon slid to his right, dragging the stabbed man with him. The bayonet plunged into the wounded man. Jakon leaped at the musketeer, cracking a head butt against the man’s nose. The man fell back with a cry of pain. Jakon shoulder charged him from his feet and ran on. Several shots came close, one spattering stone chips from the wall beside him.

“You don’t hear the shot that kills you,” he remembered someone saying.

Oh, yes, he thought as he ducked into an alleyway. So how does anyone know that, then?

Weaponless now, he moved swiftly down the alley, then paused at the far end, risking a glance out onto the wider street beyond. Two musketeers came alongside him. Jakon kicked the first in the knee, then grappled with the second, seeking to wrench his musket from his hands. The man was strong. Jakon tried a head butt. The man swayed away. Jakon kneed him in the groin. He grunted with pain but held on to his musket. The second man was climbing to his feet. He swore at Jakon and advanced with his bayonet poised to strike. Jakon dragged the man he was fighting around so that he was between Jakon’s body and the bayonet. A shot rang out. The second musketeer arched backward, then dropped his weapon. The death of his comrade seemed to stun the man Jakon was grappling with. He tried to pull away. Jakon thrust his head forward, this time successfully butting the man on the bridge of his nose. With a strangled cry he fell toward Jakon, who twisted around, hurling him from his feet. Even before his assailant had hit the ground Jakon had run to the dead second musketeer and swept up his weapon. The first man, blood leaking from his smashed nose, feebly brought up his musket. Jakon thrust it aside and lanced the bayonet through the man’s tunic. He fell without a sound.

Spinning on his heel, Jakon saw Taybard Jaekel calmly reloading his Emburley. Bringing it to his shoulder, he took aim. Jakon glanced back along the street. Five enemy musketeers had come into sight some forty paces away. Jaekel’s rifle boomed, and one of the men went down. The others charged. Taybard took off down the alleyway opposite to where Jakon stood. Jakon needed no invitation to sprint across the road and follow him. Shots screamed around him.

He saw Taybard scramble over a low wall and ran to join him. Once more the Eldacre man was reloading. Jakon checked the flash pan of his stolen musket. It was primed.

“Ready?” Taybard asked coolly.

“Why not?” responded Jakon.

Both men reared up together. The four remaining musketeers were running down the alleyway. Jakon’s shot took one of them in the face. Taybard shot another through the heart. The two survivors kept coming. Taybard laid down his rife and drew a pistol from the back of his belt. Cocking it, he fired swiftly, the shot exploding the right eye socket of the closest man.

Jakon clambered over the wall and ran at the last musketeer, shrieking at the top of his voice. The man paused, turned, and ran for his life.

Jakon Gallowglass chuckled and swung back to where Taybard had been standing. Only he was not there anymore. Jakon caught a glimpse of him moving past several wagons at the rear of the old supply depot.

The sound of musket fire was coming from all around now. Jakon set off after Taybard, catching up with him at the edge of a building overlooking the town square. Here there was hand-to-hand fighting. Jakon saw the officer Mulgrave and around sixty Eldacre men battling with swords against the bayonets of the enemy. Taybard reloaded the Emburley. Jakon, though not as swiftly, added powder, ball, and paper wadding to his musket.

Mulgrave went down and rolled, coming up like an acrobat to plunge his saber into the chest of a musketeer. A second man ran at the officer. Taybard downed him. Jakon fired into the crowd of enemy musketeers, then charged, screaming at the top of his voice. The noise was shrill.

More shots rang out from the surrounding buildings. Enemy musketeers fell. Jakon stabbed a man. The bayonet broke in the musketeer’s body. Taking the musket by the barrel, Jakon wielded it like a club, smashing left and right. Lanfer Gosten and twenty more Eldacre men charged in, and the town square seethed with fighting men, some grappling, some holding on to their bayonets, some with daggers, and others fighting with fists and feet. It was hard and brutal, and there was no give on either side.

Then came the thunder of hoofbeats on the stone road, and Gaise Macon and his cavalry rode into the town. No more than eighty of the attacking musketeers were still alive and fighting, and at the arrival of a new enemy a lull began. The fifty surviving Eldacre men paused and stood, staring with weary malevolence at the enemy.

“Put up your weapons,” said Gaise Macon. “No harm will come to you. You have my promise on it. Your general is dead, your cavalry in retreat.”

A bearded officer, his face bloody from a saber cut, stepped toward where Gaise Macon sat his horse.

“There will be no escape for traitors, General Macon,” he said.

“I agree with you,” Jakon heard Gaise reply. “The sad truth is that there are no traitors here. You have been lied to, Lieutenant. There was never any intention of joining Luden Macks. You have my word on that, too. There is no victory here. Only defeat for all of us. Good men have died here for no cause that I can understand. You talk of treachery. What must I call it when, while doing my duty for my king, I am attacked by forces in our own army? I tell you this—and I speak from the heart—I wish I was the traitor you think me to be. Then there would at least be some merit in this action of yours. At least these poor dead souls all around us would not have died in vain. Gather your men, Lieutenant. Leave your weapons behind. They will be here when you return.”

“What of my wounded, sir?”

“The townsfolk will tend to them as best they can. My wounded I will take with me, for they would be treated far more harshly, I fear, when Winterbourne sends in his Redeemers.”

“And will you now join Luden Macks?”

“No, Lieutenant. I shall take my men home to the north. I may have been forced to become an outlaw, but I’ll not fight willingly against the king or his men. Lay down your weapons and depart this place.”

“We will do that, General. I thank you for your chivalry.”

Gaise swung his horse. Mulgrave moved across to him. “I’m sorry, sir,” he said, “but there’s something you must see.”

The swordsman moved away across the square. Gaise rode after him, and Jakon Gallowglass, curious now, followed them.

Gaise dismounted and walked alongside Mulgrave to the house beside the supply depot. The two men entered it, and Jakon Gallowglass eased himself up to the doorway. He glanced inside. There were two bodies there, a man and a woman. The man was wearing a bright red tunic, the woman a traveling dress of green wool edged with satin. In her hand was a small pistol.

Gaise Macon knelt by the woman’s body and lifted her hand to his lips. His head bowed. Mulgrave stepped in and placed his hand on the general’s shoulder. “I am so sorry, sir,” he said.

“I asked her to give me an hour, Mulgrave. It cost her life.”

Jakon Gallowglass saw the Gray Ghost begin to weep. Quietly he moved back from the doorway and out into the street. He found Taybard Jaekel sitting on the wall of a well. He was cleaning his Emburley.

“Well, we survived,” said Gallowglass.

“Some of us. Kammel Bard won’t be needing his tunic back. My friend Banny died in a back street. Told him to stick with me. He did, and he died anyway.” Taybard let out a sigh and then went back to polishing the ornate hammer of his Emburley.

All around them were the wounded and the dead of both sides.

“I’m sorry about your friends,” said Jakon.

He could see that Taybard was suffering, and he wanted to put his hand on his shoulder the way Mulgrave had for the Gray Ghost. But he could not.

Instead he stood and walked away.

It was then that he realized the tunic no longer stank.

“Now there’s a thing,” he said aloud.

The Pinance was a handsome man, tall and broad-shouldered, his features rugged. He was a fine rider and was enjoying immensely the feeling of power as he rode his favorite black stallion and gazed at his marching army.

He had longed for this moment for some twenty-five years. He and the Moidart had never been friends. Their parents and their ancestors had ruled adjoining lands for centuries, and there were always squabbles and ill feeling. The hatred the Pinance felt for the Moidart was not, however, born of ancestral disputes. It had come to life the day Rayenna Tremain had married the Moidart. Even thinking about it now, on this day of looming triumph, caused his stomach to tighten.

Though he would never admit it to others, Rayenna Tremain had been the love of the Pinance’s life. He had adored her to the point of worship and had come to believe that she felt the same way.

Looking back from the vastness of his fifty years, the Pinance knew now that Rayenna had been a feckless and unreliable woman given to small acts of spite and larger acts of betrayal. But back then she had been a goddess and the center of his life. The Moidart’s lands and tax revenues were far in excess of those enjoyed by the Pinance and his family, and she had chosen her husband on that basis. And so the gorgeous Rayenna had become the mistress of Eldacre Castle.

Two years later she was dead, slain, it was claimed, by assassins seeking to kill the Moidart. What nonsense.

By then many of the northern noblemen had heard of her disgusting affair with a clan chieftain and had wondered why the Moidart did not put her aside. When the news came that she was dead, the Pinance knew in his heart that the Moidart had killed her. He had voiced those feelings to his father, who had dismissed the idea. “The Moidart himself was stabbed and is close to death. No, my son, put the thought from your mind.”

In the years that followed the Pinance had gathered information about the attack. None of the guards had seen the attackers. Not a single servant had glimpsed men running from the manor house. All they had seen was the strangled Rayenna and the stabbed Moidart. One piece of information, from a surgeon who had attended the stricken lord, brought the pieces of the story together. He said there was blood on the right hand of the murdered woman, though there were no cuts to her flesh. The Pinance had guessed the truth then. The Moidart had not been attacked by assailants. He had been stabbed by his wife as he murdered her.

Now, twenty-five years later, he would pay for that sickening crime. He would pay for robbing the Pinance of his one true chance at happiness.

Five thousand musketeers were marching at the head of the column, flanked by outriding scouts seeking signs of enemy defensive lines. There were none. As the Pinance had expected, the Moidart had drawn back into Eldacre Castle, secure in the knowledge that the Pinance had no cannon yet. They were coming, however, and within days he would have the Moidart in chains.

Rarely had the Pinance experienced such sweetness of anticipation.

Twelve thousand men now marched under his command, and soon he would be the most powerful earl in the north. It was a shame they would have to breach the walls of Eldacre, for it was a fine castle and would have made an excellent seat of government. I will have it rebuilt, he thought.

A horseman cantered his mount along the column and drew in alongside the Pinance. The earl felt his good mood begin to evaporate as he glanced at the red-cloaked Redeemer. He did not like the man.

“The Moidart has left Eldacre,” said Sir Sperring Dale.

The Pinance glanced at the man’s thin face. “He is coming to meet us on the field?”

“No, my lord. He is fleeing to the north with five thousand men.”

The Pinance was amazed. “You said he would hold Eldacre. You said that Eldacre was the key to the north and he would not give it up.”

“Indeed I did, my lord,” answered Sir Sperring. “It was the logical course of action. We have been watching him, and we were led to believe this was his plan. However, he has hired a vile and demonic creature who casts evil ward spells which prevent our mystics from seeing within the castle. This creature has obviously witnessed the power of your forces and has prevailed upon the Moidart to withdraw. Our belief is that he intends to seek aid from the Rigante.”

“Then Eldacre Castle is mine without a fight?” The Pinance laughed. “I hate the man, but I have never before seen him as a fool or a coward.”

“He is not a military man, my lord. He is a schemer, skilled in the art of politics and treachery.”

“It seems to me that those two beasts are one and the same,” said the Pinance.

“Perhaps so,” agreed Sir Sperring. “Yet there is some small merit in the retreat. Had he attempted to hold the castle, we ourselves could have sent men north to engage in dialogue with the Rigante.”