The Crimson Shield (37 page)

‘Go!’ Tolvis shouted. ‘Go ahead!’

He waited for a few minutes but Truesword didn’t come and neither did the two men he’d left. He waited longer than he should have. By then he knew they wouldn’t be coming.

The gate opened onto the cliffs. Gallow knew this piece of the castle. A narrow strip of grass between the keep and the sea where the Marroc dukes once flew their sea eagles
for sport. There was just the one gate, some walls, a strip of land a dozen yards wide and then the cliffs and the sea. He ran to the edge and looked down. Fifty feet below him the waves crashed
against the bottom of the cliff.

A strong man, skilled and daring, might have climbed it, and he was all of those things and yet he paused.

Boats were flooding out of the harbour, big and small: Marroc fleeing the Lhosir and now the Vathen. There was a small one at the bottom of the cliff almost beneath him, barely past the breaking
surf. Behind him the Vathen poured out into the sunlight. They fanned out around him, suddenly cautious. Gallow looked from them to the sea. And then he looked back again.

Gulsukh held up his hand, commanding his men to stop. One Lhosir. Wounded by the way he held his shield, but he had Solace the Comforter in his hand, and he’d turned to
face them all. Gulsukh stepped forward. He took a deep breath and bowed his head. This beardless Lhosir would give him the sword in front of all his men.
Give
it, not have it taken, and
then they’d all see that Gulsukh was the heir to the Weeping Giant and everything would change. They could go back to their homes or they could continue their conquest, one or the other, but
it would be his to decide and even the priests of the Weeping God would have to bow to that.

He paused a little longer, letting the Lhosir see how hopeless his situation was. Gulsukh kept his head bowed. The Lhosir seemed to understand: he took off his helm and placed it on the grass by
his feet. Then he sheathed the sword.

‘I honour your courage,’ said the ardshan as quietly as the rush of the wind and the hiss of the waves below would allow. ‘Your skill. Few men could do what you have
done.’

‘Why?’ The ardshan’s eyes twitched as the Lhosir unbuckled his belt but held on to the Comforter, still in its scabbard. ‘Why? What have I done?’

‘You’re the warrior who killed the Weeping Giant.’ Gulsukh frowned at the expression on the man’s face. ‘Are you not?’

‘No. That man was the Screambreaker.’ The Lhosir shook off his gauntlets. ‘He fell beside me. I’m just a man who took up his sword.’

The ardshan raised his head and looked this
just-a-man
in the eye. He felt a quiver in his heart as the Lhosir met his gaze.

T
he old forkbeard knew his way around the city, no doubt about that. Knew it better than Valaric did, as though it was his home. He led Valaric
through the maze of alleys down by the river to a place where a boat lay tied to a post and together they rowed across. There were Vathen already on the other bank but they weren’t rampaging
through the streets, not yet.

‘Keeping the bridge,’ said the forkbeard. He rowed them to the massive tree-trunk piles that rose from the base of the cliff on the western bank of the Isset and supported that end
of the bridge, monstrous pines from far away in the Varyxhun valley, floated down the river. No one lived down at the foot of these cliffs. There were no houses, no roads, no paths. Just sheer
rock.

‘What’s your plan, old man? Cut it down with an axe?’

‘Something like that.’

‘But I don’t have an axe and nor do you.’

The old forkbeard drew the boat up against the cliff and tied it fast to an outcrop of stone. He hauled himself onto a narrow ledge and sat down beside one of the great trunks. The air stank of
fish. The forkbeard produced an axe from among the stones and tossed it to Valaric. ‘Now you do, Marroc.’

Valaric stared at him. He was hurt. You could see that. The way he moved gave him away. Either that or he was even older than he looked. Every movement was pain to him. And yet . . . ‘Who
are you?’

‘Care to cast your eyes upward, Marroc?’ asked the old man. Now he had a flint and tinder. Underneath the western edge of the bridge a dozen kegs had been tied to the piles. Slick
wet stains spread over the wood beneath them, all the way down to the sea. Fish oil. ‘Never could make a keg that sealed properly in this town, you lot.’ The old forkbeard shook his
head, idly striking the flint until the tinder caught and he had a small smouldering pile of grass. Next thing he pulled out from behind the piles was a small stick wrapped in cloth. The stick
stank of fish too. He offered it to Valaric. ‘Yours if you want it.’

‘What?’

‘Seems to me it should be a Marroc who sets the bridge ablaze.’ He tossed the stick to Valaric, who caught it without thinking. ‘Come on, quick now, before this goes
out.’

Valaric scrambled out of the boat. He shuffled past the old man to sit on the ledge. The forkbeard carefully lit the torch.

‘Set it as you like. I’d watch out for bits of blazing wood and oil falling on your head though, so don’t stay to admire your handiwork too long.’

The old forkbeard jumped into the boat. The next thing Valaric knew he’d cast off and was drifting away on the current and Valaric was stuck there on the ledge alone. He looked up. Yes, a
man could climb the cliff easily enough. Maybe not if it was on fire though. ‘Hey! What are you doing?’

‘I have somewhere else to be. You can swim can’t you, Valaric of Witterslet? Don’t wait too long before you use that. It won’t burn for ever.’

‘Who are you? What’s your name?’

The old forkbeard waved. ‘Don’t think I want any of those any more. Take care of your city, Marroc. Look after it. What we’ve left of it.’

Valaric watched him go then yelped and almost dropped the torch as it burned his fingers. He touched the torch to the stream of oil dripping down from above. It lit very nicely, as if it had
been mixed with something else. He stayed for bit and watched the flame climb steadily towards the leaking kegs under the upper beams of the bridge. As it reached the top, the fire began to burn
more brightly.

It occurred to him then that maybe he
should
start swimming.

The Vathan with the crested helm held out his hand. ‘The sword, Lhosir. The Sword of the Weeping God. Give it to me. No need for more to die. Give it to me and go in
peace. This battle is lost to you.’

Gallow levelled the sword at the Vathan. ‘Come and take it.’

The Vathan took a pace towards him. For one long moment Gallow thought he might even do it, that he might just hand this cursed sword over if the Vathan had the courage to lower his weapons and
come close enough to simply take it from his hand. Maybe that was the sign of someone who’d earned it. What had
he
done, after all? Taken it from a dead man.

The Vathan took his step but then stopped. ‘I am the ardshan of my people. Give me the sword!’

‘Not if you can’t take it. If you can’t take it then you haven’t earned it.’

The ardshan turned his back. ‘Kill him. But do
not
touch the sword.’

The other Vathen hesitated. Gallow had seen it enough times before. The mustering of courage to charge enemy shields, knowing that some of you must die but that if you don’t then death
would come for all. The red sword held them at bay but they’d find their courage in a moment.

‘
Arda!
’

He turned and flung the sword over the cliff, as far out to sea as he could. The ardshan watched the Sword of the Weeping God arc out into the sky, eyes wide in horror. Before he could speak,
Gallow was already running along the edge of the cliff – one step, two, three – and then the Vathen launched themselves towards him. Before they could reach him, he turned and leaped as
mightily as he could, following the sword out over the cliffs and past the breaking waves to the sea.

‘Arda!’ Tolvis heard the shout above the crash of the waves. From the top of the cliff men were suddenly peering down at him. Vathen, and the way they looked and
pointed was quite enough. By the time they were firing their arrows and throwing their javelots he was already running.

‘This way. There’s a ship.’ Medrin’s ship. The one he’d used to sail out of Andhun, assuming it hadn’t been washed away or found and burned, or taken already
by some other band of fleeing Lhosir. But a couple of miles of running along beaches and climbing cliffs and racing through woods and climbing down to the sea again later, the ship was still there.
There were even a few dozen Lhosir standing around it. Keeping guard for some reason. Tolvis couldn’t imagine what they were doing there but now wasn’t the time to be thinking about
that. As he and the others approached they waved and shouted and he waved and shouted back, ‘Get the ship in the sea! Get the ship in the sea! The Vathen are coming!’

By the time he got to the bottom of the cliff the ship was already out in the surf, the sail rising. That was when he realised these Lhosir were more of Medrin’s men, quite sharp enough to
see what was coming towards them. Next thing Tolvis knew there were a dozen men on his side and twice that on the other, all with swords drawn and facing each other, with the Vathen coming over the
hill in about one minute and the barely living body of Medrin Twelvefingers on the beach between them.

The Lhosir glared at each other. Tolvis closed his eyes. ‘Really? Do we have to? I mean, right here and right now?’ Medrin Twelvefingers? He’d be Medrin Sixfingers now.

No one moved.

‘Well I don’t know about you lot, but I’ve got an errand to run before we all kill each other. Let me know how it ends.’ He turned his back on the lot of them and walked
away. Then he remembered the Vathen and ran instead. He didn’t look back.

A
rda’s hand still smarted from where she’d slapped Fenaric. She’d slapped him two days ago. Quite a slap then.

She sighed. More of a punch really.

He wasn’t going to come back. Not this time. He’d still got half the money she’d made from selling the horses.
Her
money but she couldn’t quite make herself get
worked up about it the way she ought to.
Scheming little thief.
But Fenaric was only trying to do what he thought was right for her. Just couldn’t get it into his thick head that she
didn’t want what anyone else thought was right for her. She wanted . . .

She wanted
him.
Stupid pig-headed bloody-minded selfish forkbeard Gallow. She wanted him. And she was slowly realising that she wasn’t going to get him.

Word of the battle of Andhun made its way up the river in bits and fragments: the Lhosir had been wiped out. They’d beaten the Vathen. Sometimes both, sometimes neither, and all said with
gleeful joy. Andhun had fallen and then it hadn’t. Stories were like that. Rubbish mostly, but if she was putting all the stories together right, whatever had happened had been bloody.

Stupid man hadn’t been supposed to do anything except take his stupid vicious bastard Widowmaker half-friend or whatever he was back to his own kind. Half-friend? Hadn’t even looked
like
that
most of the time.

Stupid man. Stupid.

She had to stop for a moment to wipe her eyes. Stupid smoke from the stupid forge that Nadric could barely use any more making her eyes water all the time. At least he had that set up now. Maybe
they had some chance of making a little money again and not starving when it came to winter.

Stupid men. Both of them. Leaving her with their children to look after and not coming back again. Something in the air up here near the mountains. Must be. Eyes seemed to water a lot since
they’d come here.

‘Arda Smithswife?’

She jumped and looked up at the ugliest forkbeard she’d ever seen. One side of his face was a mass of scarring, red and fresh.

‘Who wants her?’ He wasn’t the first to have made his way this far south.

The forkbeard held out a purse. ‘My name is Tolvis.’

The name meant nothing but the purse had her eyes. ‘And what do you want, Tolvis from across the sea?’

He tossed the purse to her. ‘I came here to give you this. A debt owed to Gallow Truesword.’ He might have turned and gone after that and she might have let him too, since if Gallow
had been alive he’d have delivered the purse himself; and then she could have beaten him around the head and cursed him roundly for taking so long and leaving her in the hands of that
miserable carter who’d turned out to be far less of a man than she’d thought. But there was a hesitation to him, and to her too, as if there was more to this story than a bag of
silver.

So she brought him inside and offered him goat’s milk and cheese, both of which he took with unusual grace for a forkbeard. In his turn he gave her an axe. Gallow’s axe, and she knew
for sure then that Gallow wasn’t coming back.