The Crimson Shield (31 page)

Only a fool would climb the cliffs in the dark wearing mail and gauntlets, but then again, a Lhosir never abandoned his shield or his weapon, not if he could help it, and the Maker-Devourer
preferred fools armed and ready for battle over wise men who came to him old and empty-handed, and Gallow had always been a good climber. It was part of what had started all this in the first
place.

Once he was inside, he set about looking for Valaric.

The Vathan camp wasn’t a big one, only a few dozen soldiers and their horses, and Horsan ran right into the middle of it and roared and swung his sword at the first shape
he saw, and the Vathen panicked and fled. After they were gone he searched the camp, and that was when they found Dvag, or what was left of him, still alive if only barely. Dvag Bloodbeard
they’d call him now, by the looks of him. As names went it wasn’t so bad. Horsan and the others hoisted Dvag between them and limped him home. By the time they got back, the sun was
rising and Medrin was up again. He listened to Dvag’s tale as he broke his fast. To the things Dvag had heard around him while the Vathen had flayed his face. It wasn’t much. Something
about the sword and a Marroc in Andhun.

Medrin’s eyes gleamed.

V
alaric watched the battle from a hill beside the sea. He watched the Vathen break like waves on the wall of forkbeard shields. He watched the wall
waver and almost crumble, and then hold and the last forkbeards surge down the hill, and he watched the Vathen turn and flee. He didn’t stay to see what happened after that but walked quickly
back to the sea cliffs and down a path that ran to the shore and to the little boat that waited there. A tiny thing, hardly big enough to fit the half a dozen men it had carried out of Andhun. The
others looked at him expectantly.

‘Close, but the forkbeards broke them.’

The other Marroc fell to cursing as they pushed the boat out into the waves. Valaric said nothing. What difference did it make whether the invaders were Vathen or forkbeards? Both sides smashed
to pieces, that was the best he could hope for. ‘The Vathen are still out there.’ When the waves were breaking around his chest, he hauled himself aboard. ‘We keep the gates
closed and the forkbeards have nowhere to go. And they can’t do anything about it while the Vathen are still there.’

‘And if the duke keeps his word and opens them?’

Valaric looked away. He’d felt the change in the city as soon as the demon-prince Twelvefingers had gone off looking for the Crimson Shield and the Nightmare of the North had cut down the
gibbets. A few more Marroc had been hung and then the Widowmaker had moved his army out of the city. The killing had stopped. Better for the forkbeards perhaps, not to have their numbers whittled
slowly down, but better for the Marroc too. It had taken Valaric a while to see that. And then the Vathen had come, and the puppet Marroc duke who ruled Andhun with Yurlak’s hand shoved up
his arse had promised, sworn on everything holy, that Andhun would open its gates to the Screambreaker when the battle was done.

It occurred to Valaric, as they sailed their little boat through the twilight sea and back into the harbour of Andhun, that the Nightmare of the North might be kinder to his people than some
Vathan ardshan. Yet he’d take a Vathan anything over the demon-prince. Anything was better than that.

‘We have to make sure he doesn’t,’ he said, after such a long pause that no one knew what he was talking about any more.

‘We make our stand now,’ said Sarvic. ‘Doesn’t matter who won. Never did. We keep them out until they go home.’

It wasn’t a stupid idea either. When the forkbeards had first come across the sea there were good reasons why Andhun had been the last city to fall. ‘Good luck telling that to the
duke.’

Sarvic gave him a look as though he was mad. ‘Me?
You
have to tell him! You have to make him keep them closed!’

‘I’m an old soldier who fought the forkbeards and lost his family to old man winter for his pains.’ Valaric spat into the sea. ‘He’s not going to listen to
me.’

‘If he won’t, others will. People know you! They
will
listen to you.’

‘And what would you have us do, Sarvic? Seize the gates and hold them closed? Fight among ourselves while the forkbeards laugh at us? I’ll not do that. I’ll not lift a blade
against another Marroc. Might as well throw myself in the sea.’

‘So you’re just going to do nothing?’

No. Couldn’t do that either, but what else was there but to take the gates and hold them shut? Words, maybe? A silver tongue might caress the duke around to his way of thinking, but
Valaric was never that. Hard rusty old iron, more like, and besides, he’d never get close enough to even try.

He didn’t sleep well that night. Every time he closed his eyes the shadows filled with old faces. Men he’d fought beside in the early days. Friends, killed, one after the other by
the faceless forkbeard terror. And then forkbeards too, the ones he’d killed in the later days when he’d turned from battlefields and taken to hunting them in ones and twos, any who
strayed from the pack and Wolf of the Wild Woods had been his name for a time. And when he finally pushed all the faces away, what he saw was the slight hump of broken earth, already covered with
grass, where his family had been buried. All of them together, because the savagery of that winter hadn’t left those who’d survived with enough strength to dig separate graves for so
many dead.

Forkbeard bastards.

Snow and starvation and the curse of an Aulian shadewalker, but he could have done something about any and all of those things if he’d been there. Could have hunted for them. Could have
found more food. Could have taken them away to another place. Somehow. Something. He didn’t know what but he would never have let them die.

The forkbeards hadn’t killed them though. It was his fault and his alone. His choice. No getting away from it.

Sarvic was right. The gates should stay closed. The duke was right too. He’d made a promise to open them and promises should be honoured. Who was wrong then? Who’d be wrong when the
forkbeards came back inside the walls and wreaked their revenge for what he’d done when the demon-prince had come with the Crimson Shield in his hand? Him, that was who. He’d tried to
take the shield and he’d failed, and now it didn’t matter who led the forkbeards when they came, they’d want blood for that.

Stupid. Stupid to fail. Stupid to even try, and Gallow’s words chased him like hounds after a fox.
If you’d had even one man like him in this city, Medrin would be dead and
you’d be standing in front of me holding your precious shield. You know you’ve just brought doom on the whole of Andhun, don’t you?
And he had, and Gallow was right, and all
the other forkbeards too, and the Marroc were just frightened sheep and you couldn’t rouse a sheep to be a wolf, whatever you said to him.

He gave up on sleeping and wandered the streets for a while in the dark, until he came to the city gates and stopped where the rows of gibbets had been.

Maybe there was a way after all.

And Tolvis Loudmouth watched the battle at its end too, when the Vathen had finally hurled themselves in one last madness at the Screambreaker’s line. The fighting was
over for him by then. Of the dozen men he’d taken into the woods, four were dead. Too few to stand in a wall of shields and spears against the Vathan horsemen who tried to come around the
edge of the battle, they’d strung ropes between trees, dug trenches and set spikes in the ground. They’d thrown javelins and led the horsemen into one trap or another and then fallen
upon them. A tiny skirmish when set against the battle as a whole, a hundred or so Vathen held and turned away, maybe a dozen killed and as many again wounded. A small victory. Perhaps it played
some part in the greater one or perhaps not, but it would be quickly forgotten either way. But then the Screambreaker hadn’t sent them to that wood to turn the battle, he’d sent them
there for what would come after and they all knew that too. In the darkness of the Lhosir victory they slipped back into the camp, in among the tents, looking for the men they knew, faces they
called friends. The old soldiers who’d fought at the Screambreaker’s side long ago. The Screambreaker’s men. They took the words he’d whispered to them and passed them along
to any who would listen and quietly they gathered themselves. In the morning they spoke out his deeds, one after the other for the wind and the sun to carry away across the land and his name passed
among the Lhosir like fire across a stubble field. A thousand men had seen him fell the Vathan giant. They’d seen the Screambreaker take the unholy sword and hold it high, and when they
couldn’t find his body in the breaking dawn light it was because the Maker-Devourer himself had come to take it, and so they made another pyre, a dozen men at once, all brothers-in-arms since
that first crossing of the sea. The Screambreaker was gone but he’d left them his legend, and they took their time to honour him, even Twelvefingers. When they were done, the
Screambreaker’s men turned their faces to Andhun.

‘I
’m not a fool.’ Medrin stared at the little statue of the Maker-Devourer he’d brought with him from across the sea.
Outside his tent the sun was rising. ‘I am
not
a fool,’ he said again. ‘We both know there can be no turning away from this. The Screambreaker would have known though,
somehow he would have known which way to face. The Vathen or the Marroc? Which is it to be? I need a sign.’ And for a moment he felt himself missing the old man who just might have been
planning to steal his birthright. Missing his certainty, his presence, his assurance.

And then, waiting for him outside his tent, were Horsan and the others to tell him how the Vathen were fleeing in terror, witless and lost without their precious sword, and what was that if it
wasn’t a sign? ‘Which isn’t to say they’ll stay that way,’ he said to the statue of the god, ‘but when they turn, we’ll be ready. We’ll destroy them
for a second time.’

There were a few Vathan wounded who weren’t dead yet. He saw to it that they were kept alive and set men to cutting wood for gibbets. Scouts rode off through the hills to keep an eye on
the Vathan retreat. While they were away the Lhosir stopped what they were doing and honoured the Screambreaker and the dead who’d fallen beside him. He let the old ones do that, Tolvis
Loudmouth and the rest. Let them start the pyre and, when the pyre was built, put the bodies of those they most wanted to honour on top and set it alight. He said a few words himself, because he
was their prince after all, then let the old ones who’d fought with the Screambreaker against the Marroc finish speaking him out. The pyre was huge and there probably wasn’t a single
Lhosir who hadn’t put a piece of something on it. It troubled him a little that they actually couldn’t find the Screambreaker’s body and the foolish whispers that spread like fire
when that got out. More than likely the Screambreaker hadn’t been quite dead, had crawled off to breathe his last alone in the night and didn’t want to be spoken out because no one had
spoken out his brother the Moontongue down at the bottom of the sea and he’d be damned if he didn’t find his way to the Maker-Devourer’s cauldron on his own too. But Medrin let it
pass, let the old ones who’d known him stay staring at the flames until his scouts came back to tell him what he already knew: camps abandoned, Vathen flooding away, a disordered rabble,
thousands and thousands of them. Oh, they’d come together again in time – they were too many to be truly broken – but not today. Today he could let them go.

He turned his army to Andhun then, to the city the Screambreaker had abandoned. The Marroc would keep their gates closed but he was ready for that. He would array his men outside, build his
gibbets, hang Vathan after Vathan outside the walls to remind the Marroc who they were dealing with until they finally cracked and let him in. And then . . .

And then? He wasn’t sure. Burn the city down for trying to take the shield from him? Or let them live? What would the Screambreaker do? Both. Somehow he’d find a way to do both.

He’d barely even started, though, when the gates creaked open and a dozen Marroc soldiers carrying the shield of their puppet duke lined the entrance to honour him. A herald cried out from
the walls, ‘Duke Zardic of Andhun welcomes Prince Medrin, son of Yurlak, king of the Marroc!’

They weren’t going to keep him out after all.

Fools.

Valaric stood in an alley, hidden in its shadows from the afternoon sun, watching the gates as they opened to let in the demon from over the sea. He wore his sword and his mail
and carried a spear in his hand. His shield was propped against the wall beside him. The gates hung open, and for a while Medrin waited where he was, outside the walls, more and more men gathering
around him.

Close the gates! Modris, let them see him for what he is! Don’t let him in!

But the gates stayed as they were, and when Medrin at last advanced across the cobbles it was with a hundred men around him and more behind to keep the gateway clear. He entered the city slowly,
the Crimson Shield carried close in his hand, tense, held high for all to see. No stones fell from above, no javelins, no arrows. Not yet.

Pity.

Valaric had thought about that. Thought about what one well aimed spear or arrow could do. But if a lone killer struck down the forkbeards’ prince, the reprisals would be terrible. Andhun
would burn.

Medrin stopped. He stood in the middle of the square. Marroc watched from the edges, from windows and alleys and side streets. Scores of them. Watching and waiting to see what would happen and
doing nothing.
And what do I expect of them?
They were ordinary folk with no swords, no mail, no weapons to speak of. The only soldiers here were the ones who’d honoured
Medrin’s entrance and the duke’s herald who stood on the walls above, head bowed.
So where are the rest of you? Kept in your barracks to keep the demon at his ease? Or waiting
around the first corner?