As Nobul approached, Kilgar waved Bilgot off then held out his hand. Nobul took it, feeling how weak the serjeant’s grip was. He was stripped to the waist, the dressings round his stomach turned red and there was an unmistakable stink of infection.
‘They can’t do nothing for it,’ said Kilgar, seeing that Nobul was looking at his wounded guts. ‘Khurtas cover their weapons in all sorts of shit. If they don’t get you on the battlefield, infection will get you later. This spread bloody quick, though. Must have been some dirty bastard kind of poison.’
‘You comfortable?’ Nobul asked. ‘You need water? Food?’ It seemed only right to ask. He didn’t have anything else to say.
‘No point wasting it on me,’ said Kilgar with a grin. It turned into a grimace and he coughed, spitting a fleck of blood across his cheek. Nobul gripped his hand tighter until the coughing fit had gone.
‘I always knew who you were, you know,’ he said when he’d finally calmed enough to speak. ‘From that first day you were stood in the courtyard of the barracks. I recognised you straight away. The fucking Black Helm. Here to be a Greencoat. I knew you must have been in some kind of shit, or times had gotten bloody hard.’
‘I appreciate you keeping it to yourself,’ said Nobul.
‘Weren’t nobody’s business but yours, I reckoned. I guessed you had your reasons. And why was I gonna argue having the Black Helm as part of my watch? There was no one gonna mess with us. Not with you around.’
Nobul nodded, though he doubted the truth of it. There’d been plenty to mess with him over the past weeks. There’d been a lot of men almost done for him too, but he was still here and they were dead.
‘She came, you know,’ said Kilgar, his one eye drifting to the ceiling.
‘Who?’ asked Nobul.
‘The Red Witch. She stood right where you are now.’
Nobul knew exactly who he was talking about. He’d seen her on the roof of the Chapel of Ghouls a few weeks previous but not known her name then. He’d seen her on the wall too, though he’d given her a wide berth. He wasn’t ashamed to say she frightened the fuck out of him.
‘What did she want with an old warhorse like you?’
Kilgar smiled. ‘Me and her go a long way back. Not many people trust that woman, but for some reason she’s always made me feel safe.’
Nobul had no idea what Kilgar meant by ‘safe’ but he wasn’t about to ask. ‘And what did she say to you?’
Kilgar looked at Nobul then. He fixed him with his one eye and there was some kind of peace in there. ‘She told me I’d done enough.’
Nobul nodded at that. ‘I reckon she’s right.’
For a moment something burned in Kilgar’s eye, something of the old warrior coming back. ‘But you’re not done, Nobul Jacks,’ he said, gripping Nobul’s hand tight. ‘You’re a long way from fucking done.’
Kilgar closed his eye, his hand going slack. Nobul couldn’t say whether the serjeant was dead or passed out, but he placed that hand gently on the bed anyway and took a step back. With nothing left to say he walked out of the makeshift infirmary.
As he made his way back up towards the wall he knew Kilgar was right. The aches and the pains were still there, but Nobul wasn’t done by a damn sight. He’d make sure he didn’t die on no bed either. He was going down in the fight, screaming and roaring and spitting his last breath at the enemy.
When he got back to the wall he saw a crowd had gathered. Archers were congregated in ranks and the nervous silence told him something was wrong. Nobul ran up the steps, hefting his hammer, expecting the worst. The Khurtas hadn’t attacked in the day yet, but he wouldn’t put it past them to change their tactics.
He squeezed past some of the levies till he made it to the front, looking out between the merlons. Over on the plain, just beyond the range of their arrows, were about a thousand Khurtas. They didn’t look ready to attack, they were just standing there waiting.
As they all watched, a single Khurtic voice rose up as it had done that first night. It was a loud call, something long and nasty in their ugly tongue, answered by a choral groan as the Khurtas fell to one knee, all one thousand of them at once. That voice continued to chant, and the thousand with it answered. They punched themselves in the chest all in unison, changing the tone of their cries as they did so, screaming their lungs out. Nobul could see why some of the lads would be terrified of that, but the Khurtas weren’t moving. They were no danger from this distance.
‘It’s a war salute,’ said a voice at Nobul’s shoulder. He turned to see Bannon Logar standing next to him, his armour more dented and bloody than he’d last seen it but the old man’s eyes were more alive than Nobul remembered. ‘It’s a tribute to one of our warriors.’
‘Which one?’ Nobul asked.
‘You know which one, lad. The Black Helm killed one of their war chiefs. You’ve challenged for the tribe. They’ll be sending their best to test you.’
As if the old man had heralded it, the Khurtas split apart, allowing someone to walk through their midst. At first Nobul thought it might be Amon Tugha himself. The prospect of fighting that Elharim bastard filled him with no particular thrill, but when he could finally see their champion he was even less keen to jump straight into the fight.
The Khurta was bigger than the one he’d killed on the roof of the gatehouse. From this distance his features were hard to pick out but Nobul could still tell he wasn’t pretty. He stood at the front of his thousand and bellowed, just standing there with a war maul over his shoulder, shouting his shit in Khurtic like it might make the walls of Steelhaven crumble.
Nobul took his helmet and placed it on his head, then climbed up on the battlements as best he could without looking an old, tired bastard. As he pointed his hammer forward at the giant Khurta all the noise stopped. They looked at each other across three hundred yards until the Khurta hefted his own massive hammer from his shoulder and pointed right back. Then, as one, the Khurtas turned and headed back north.
There were audible sighs of relief as they went. Nobul watched for as long as he could before he climbed back down off the wall. Last thing he wanted was to fall — that would have been a fucking stupid way to go after all his posturing.
Duke Bannon gave him a nod, a wicked grin on his face. ‘You show them, lad,’ he said, before walking off with the rest.
At least Bannon was looking forward to what was coming. And Nobul reckoned it would be pretty humiliating if he couldn’t live up to the old bastard’s expectations. Not that it mattered much.
Humiliation didn’t matter a shit if you were dead.
THIRTY-FOUR
Sleep was threatening to overwhelm him, despite the bright sunlight and the biting cold. River would not succumb, though. He could not. A chance at escape might come from anywhere, and he could not be asleep when it happened.
A chance at escape? You know there will be no escaping this. You will die here, bound to this frame, watching the city burn in front of your eyes. Watching your queen slain by the Elharim.
But Jay had not been slain yet.
When she came to the camp and gave herself to Amon Tugha, River had wanted to cry out, wanted to scream at her to run even though there was nowhere for her to go. Everything had collapsed around him as she had knelt before Amon Tugha. Everything he had fought to protect for so many weeks suddenly shattered. But Jay was brave, he had always known. That she would sacrifice herself for a city of people she hardly knew, because she was their queen, was no surprise. He should have known that no matter what he did to keep her safe he could not protect Jay from herself.
He could only hope her rescue was successful, that the knights who had ridden into the midst of the Khurtas had managed to take her to safety. Surely they were victorious; otherwise Amon Tugha would have paraded her corpse amongst this camp of savages by now.