The King's Hand (37 page)

Then the screaming started.

Eamon did not pause to think. He dug his heels into his horse's flanks and commanded it forward. The horse leapt into action, charging down the streets of Dunthruik as easily as it had moved across the plain. He yelled at those in the streets to clear his way, and they did. Maybe they followed him, maybe they fled – he did not know, for he neither saw nor heard. All he saw was the quarter skyline littered with dust and debris; all he heard were the cries buried in the labyrinthine streets. He followed them both.

Suddenly he broke clear of the narrow roads and raced up a cobbled incline. A small courtyard opened up before him, the air choked with smoke and wails. Pulling back sharply on the reins he halted his horse and stared.

The yard was hemmed with tall buildings, each in various states of disrepair. Timbers showed through threadbare stonework, abandoned beams jutted out through walls to where other rooms had once been, and windows gazed down like eyeless faces, weeping fissures into the walls.

The ring of buildings round the courtyard was broken: one of them lay in a mass of crushing stone and splintered wood, its rocky entrails spilling out into the gorged, broken square. From within and without the screaming came. The building had collapsed and now its dying breaths filled the lungs of those who lived and died about it. Frail figures were caught among the wreckage, some at the edges trying to pull free, others lying still, their faces palled with dust.

“Captain!” Eamon yelled, for he knew that Anderas would be there. He had to shout to be heard over the terrible wails, and the deathly silence between them. “Get as many Gauntlet and militia as you can find. Bring them here.”

Anderas wheeled his steed and careered through the narrow streets. Eamon dismounted, hastily threw the reins about a nearby post, and waded into the sea of dust.

He ran up to the nearest group of people – men and women wretchedly tugging their fellows from the edge. They did not see him at first.

“How many are in there?” he asked.

“We don't know – at least the Turrens,” answered a young man. He turned. Recognizing to whom he spoke, his face grew paler than the ashen dust that covered him. “My lord –”

“You have strong arms?”

Trembling, the young man nodded. “Yes, my lord.”

“Then come with me.” Eamon turned to another man who stood nearby. “Captain Anderas is coming with aid. When he does, tell him to set them to recovering the wounded.”

“Yes, lord.” The man tried to bow, but coughed from the dust.

Eamon swept across to the rubble. Cries for help came from within the writhing beast of stone and its cutting jaws of wood. The man he had called to help hung back.

The voices that called for help were farther in, and Eamon knew that he was going to have to climb over the rubble to reach them. It looked as though the higher floors of the buildings had come down but that the lowest had mostly – and miraculously – withstood the impact.

Eamon laid his foot onto the nearest edge of stone and tested it with his weight: not entirely stable, but it held. He looked back at the young man – who gaped. There was no mistaking that the Hand who had served a two-crown dinner now meant to brave the rubble of a fallen building.

“Will you follow me?”

The young man looked once at the rocking stone, then back at Eamon. Their gazes met. A change came across the dark eyes.

“Yes, my lord.”

Reaching out, Eamon stepped onto the stone, setting first one foot and then another on the treacherous floorway.

Picking a path across it was like choosing between a noose and high water: in places the ruins dropped into seemingly cavernous pits; in others what were once walls now made impassable barriers of stone. The debris shifted. The wooden beams were cracked and torn, jutting from their pools of stone like the snapped trunks of a desecrated forest.

Eamon made his way carefully around them, minding pitfalls and scrabbling over the collapsing paths, struggling with every step not to lose his balance and fall into one of the pits.

The cries grew louder, but as Eamon halted to take his bearings, they stopped. He froze; behind him his companion followed with uncertain steps. Back in the square, he heard slowing hooves. Anderas had returned, and with the captain he heard the crisp sound of Gauntlet officers giving orders. But he could no longer hear the voice that he had been following.

He searched the blasted landscape of stone, feeling its eerie quiet. His heart beat fast. He wiped at his face; his gloves were scuffed from where he had battled with the walls.

“Help is here,” he shouted, “but you must keep calling.” He was met with a disquieting silence. “Can you hear me?”

“Uncle?” The quailing voice was young. His heart went out to it.

“My name is Eamon,” he answered, not caring for the panicked look that tore across the face of the young man by him. “I have come to help you. Are you alone?”

“No sir, m-my cousin is here. She's hurt…”

“Are you?”

The voice faltered. “I… I don't know.”

“What's your name?”

“E-e-ellen.”

“Ellen, I need you to keep speaking to me so that I can find you.” Eamon steadied himself as stones slipped away from beneath his feet. “Can you describe where you are?”

“Yes,” the girl answered, pausing now and then to cough. Eamon charted the stones, following her voice. “I'm in a kind of w-w-well, between two very t-t-tall walls. They fell in from the sides –” A touch of panic reached her voice.

“Ellen, are there any tall beams near you?” Eamon had followed her voice to where the stones and walls seemed to have formed a ditch marked by two heavy, jutting timbers. It was dark below and the shifting shafts of light were marred by dust as it struggled to settle.

“Y-y-yes; t-t-two of them.”

“I think I am very near you, Ellen,” Eamon spoke firmly but gently, and stepped carefully up to the ledge of the hollow fall, taking hold of one of the beams to steady himself. “Can you see light from where you are?”

“There's light in a hole above me, sir.”

He leaned out over the hole before him. “Can you see me?”

There was a long pause. Eamon waited.

“Y-y-yes! I can s-s-ee you!”

Eamon looked over his shoulder to where the young man was picking his way across the stones and beams towards him. What seemed like miles away he saw Anderas, Lieutenant Scott, and a large group of Gauntlet and militia clearing away the initial rubble in the search for survivors. Some of the soldiers dealt with the dead while others moved the injured away from the clinging dust.

He looked back down the hole. “Ellen, can you stand where I can see you?”

He heard shuffling, and stones scrabbling and moving, and became painfully aware of how fragile the chamber had to be. It was a miracle that the walls had fallen as they did – it had saved the girl and her cousin, keeping the force of the rest of the collapse from them. “Do it carefully, Ellen!”

At last a figure came into view below. He realized that the hole was probably a little less than twice his height in depth.

“Can your cousin move, Ellen?”

The girl below him looked young, though she was so gaunt and straggly that he could not guess her age. She was plastered with dust and there was a long, deep cut along the side of her face.

“No sir,” the girl stammered. “She isn't m-m-moving –”

“Ellen, I want you to stay there while I come down.” Eamon straightened up, found his balance, and quickly undid the cloak at his shoulders.

“Strong-arm!” he called. The young man struggled to his side.

“M-m-my lord?” he stammered.

“Hold on to this.” Eamon drew the cloak out into a long, thick line and pressed one corner into the youth's hands. The other end he wrapped round his own hand, weaving it about his wrist and fingers.

The young man looked so surprised that it seemed a wonder he did not fall into the hole. “Yes, my lord.”

“Take a firm footing, Strong-arm.”

The young man broadened his stance. Eamon peered once more into the hole, then turned his back towards it and set his feet carefully against the stones. Then, entrusting his weight entirely to the young man, he edged his way into the pit. The stones scrabbled underfoot, darting from him almost as soon as he stepped on them, but he managed to work his way down.

His feet touched the ground. His breathing pounded in his ears. Stones fell in over him, and he sneezed in the dust as they struck his head and shoulders. When his eyes cleared, he turned to the girl. She darted forward and her frail, bleeding hands seized hold of his. She trembled.

“Ellen,” he said, bowing to move beneath the debris, “where is your cousin?”

The girl jerked him towards the murky depths of the shallow cave. Eamon called towards the daylight. “Strong-arm!”

“My lord?” The young man's voice seemed faint, as though from a great distance.

“Stay there. And don't fall in.”

Eamon looked back at the quivering girl. The stones and timbers around them boomed as though under strain.

He pressed her hand. “Show me to your cousin.”

She tugged him on into the hole. Though it was early morning it seemed some strange and unnatural night within the building's entrails. Eamon made out the shapes of objects – perhaps a table, or what remained of one – under the dust. He had to duck to follow the girl.

At last she stopped and dropped down to her knees beside a figure in the dust. Eamon crouched down beside her.

The girl's cousin was a young woman. Her eyes were still. She was not moving.

The little girl pressed against Eamon's side. “Will she be –?”

“I don't know.” It was too dark and he knew too little of the surgeon's trade to answer her.

He laid his face by the still woman's. The faintest trace of breath touched his cheek. He did not know what could be done, but knew that the little girl could not stay there.

“Ellen,” he said, “you're going to go up.” The child glanced nervously at her cousin and gripped his hand. “I'm going to see if I can help your cousin. Will you go?”

At last, the girl nodded silently.

Eamon took her back to the opening. She spluttered as they came to a stop at the dusty bottom.

“Strong-arm!”

“My lord?”

“Keep good hold of the cloak.” Eamon turned to the girl. “You need to keep good hold, too.”

“Why did he call you ‘lord'?” the girl whispered. Eamon was grieved to hear new fear creep into her voice.

“Because he doesn't know my name,” he answered gently. “Have courage, and hold on.”

The girl nodded again and fixed the cloak in her hand. Eamon lifted her high above him, as though she were a feather, and supported her as she sought a foothold in the wall.

“Can you manage, Ellen?”

“Yes, sir.”

He held her up as long as he could, stretching out his arms and fingers while the young man, his feet dug firmly into the broken walls, pulled hard on the cloak. Step by scrabbled step, the girl reached the lip of the hole and staggered against the young man's leg. He seemed to know her; he gathered her to him with words of encouragement.

“Tell Captain Anderas to send some men,” Eamon called up. “There is another survivor, but she may be incapacitated. I will try to bring her to safety.”

“Yes, my lord.”

“See this girl safely back to the others.”

The young man bound the cloak to a beam and then drew the girl up to her feet. As he led her away across the tumbled building, Eamon turned and worked his way back into the tunnel.

He reached the young woman's side and wondered just how he could help her. The girl's cousin was laid out as though she had been knocked to the ground, maybe by one of the beams that crossed the hole, and there was an ugly wound across the far side of her head. Eamon was grateful that Ellen had not seen it. The woman still drew breath faintly, but Eamon wondered if, as time passed, it grew fainter still. His eyes grew more and more accustomed to the dark and he saw that there was blood clogged in the dust about her. He took her hand, saw no reaction, and tried calling her. But the pale lids remained closed.

Overhead the beams boomed ominously. He heard the Gauntlet working their way through the debris. How many others were there, trapped or dead, in grottoes of mildewed stone? Looking back at the face before him, he decided that this woman would not remain among that number.

You are a Hand: the dead mean nothing to you.
The voice was fierce but Eamon laughed when it reached him.

“I am the First Knight,” he answered, “and I am the King's Hand; I tell you that this woman will live.”

You cannot command it, son of Eben.

Eamon took the woman's hand and pressed the cold fingers in his.

“In the King's name I ask it,” he said, “that this woman may live to see him walk these streets in triumph.”

The flare of light was so great that he had to close his eyes. There was no burning in hand or brow as when the throned's mark spoke – just light, light, light, filling his hands and fingers and obliterating the grimy shadows of the fallen walls. It moved around the young woman. He watched it with amazement as it washed about her, and marvelled at the sense of peace that it brought with it.

The light slowly faded and the air hung still. Eamon was silent. Then he leaned down.

“Wake up,” he said quietly.

He watched as she drew a deep breath and her eyes slowly opened. Like her cousin's, they were a deep, dark brown, and they searched the air before turning and seeing him.

“I'm alive?” she whispered.

“Yes,” Eamon answered, “and you are going to live, and live long.”

She gazed at him in wonder. “Who are you?”

“My name is Eamon. I was passing when the building collapsed. I came to help.” The woman nodded, and then suddenly she looked to her side. Seeing nothing there she sat up suddenly.