Everyone straightened, letting loose. Crossbows thumped, soldiers shouted, tossing javelins. Bendan hurled his, then, without waiting to see whether he’d struck anyone or not, he started down the slope readying his shortsword and shield. What he glimpsed below worried him. Instead of the milling chaos he’d been told to expect the line of warriors had simply knelt behind large shields, taken the initial barrage, and even now was counter-charging up through the rock and brush.
And damn his dead and gone ancestors but there were a lot of them.
No more time to think as his headlong run brought him smack into the first of the raiders. He shield-bashed the man and knocked him backwards off his feet. That shock absorbed almost all his inertia and now he traded blows with two others. His squad was ridiculously outnumbered. Bendan released all the ferocity he’d learned in life or death fights before he’d even grown hair on his chin. He gave himself into the blazing rage completely, whirling, screaming, attacking without let-up. Raiders backpedalled before him, overborne. Blades struck his hauberk of leather hardened with mail and iron lozenges but he ignored the blows in a determination to carry on until dead. Only this complete abandon had seen him walk away from all his fights — bloodied and punished, but upright.
Then in what seemed like an instant all that stood before him wore the black of Malaz and he lowered his arm, weaving, sucking in great ragged breaths, near to vomiting. The other squad had pushed through from the other side. The column of raiders had broken and men were running for their ships. Bendan and his squad mates left them for the others.
Someone offered him a skin of water and he sucked in a small mouthful and splashed one spray over his face. The blows he’d taken were agony and he knew he’d be hardly able to move tomorrow but he’d been lucky: none was serious enough to take him down.
Sergeant Hektar came by and cuffed his shoulder. ‘Damn, Butcher,’ he rumbled. ‘I can see we’re gonna have to rein you in some.’
Nearby Bone had a cloth pressed to his blood-smeared face, still grinning. ‘Lookin’ forward to a full day’s march tomorrow, lad?’ He laughed.
Bendan waved that off.
‘What about these wounded, Hek?’ someone called.
The massive Dal Hon ran a hand over his gleaming nut-brown scalp. ‘These are slavers … give them a taste of it. We sell them.’
‘Can’t do that,’ Bone shouted from where he was rifling the bodies, one-handed. ‘Empire don’t sell slaves.’
‘Indentureship is so much better, is it?’ the Dal Hon muttered, and shrugged. ‘So we give them away to the Coral merchants.’
Bone’s answering laugh was genuine, but it wasn’t pleasant.
Later that night as he was walking back to camp it occurred to Bendan that when Hektar had called him ‘Butcher’ he hadn’t used that tone. The sergeant had seemed to mean it. He felt grateful, but also a little embarrassed. Because for the entire fight he’d been so terrified he’d pissed himself.
Awareness came to Ebbin in brief disconnected instants. Like startling flashes of lightning in an otherwise terrifying pitch-black landscape of lashing, spinning winds. Each illuminated an instant tableau frozen in stark contrast of light and shadow: he huddled among the bones of a hilltop sepulchre, its stone door shattered; he was chiselling layers of barnacles and sea-growths from a stone revealing it white and pure as mountain snow; he was being kicked aside by Aman while the girl Taya danced frenziedly before a cloaked figure with the face of the sun; his hands held before his face cracked and bloodied, sleeves in tatters.
At other times, the worst times, he was called to writhe in abject terror before that cloaked figure. During these times, lost in the eternal storm that now raged in his mind, the being’s face shone silver like the moon. At other times he raged insane against this monster, shook his fists, swore himself hoarse.
All his tormentor ever gave in return was lofty mocking amusement. As if not only his life and ambitions were meaningless, puerile, but the hopes, struggles and dreams of everyone in the city and beyond were nothing more than puffery and self-important vacuousness. This god-like overview of the entire sweep of human civilization on the continent sent Ebbin once more into the eternal raging storm within his mind.
Yet the stones are important. He is worried about the stones. Will there be enough to complete the base?
At other times they shook him from his tortured nightmare trance to perform tasks for them. The girl — though hardly a girl, Taya — always accompanied him. He helped oversee the salvaging of these very stone blocks being taken from the city mole. He hired craftsmen, answered queries. In short, he was the human face before the operations these fiends wished to complete.
And all the while he was powerless to speak of any of it. He tried — gods, how he fought to utter a word of objection or defiance! But the moment he contemplated such rebellion his mouth and throat constricted as if throttled. Not even his hands would cooperate to scrawl a plea for help. And so, like a prisoner within his own skull, he could only watch and speculate.
Whatever these fiends planned, it reached back all the way to their internment. A resurrection of their rule as one of the legendary Tyrants. Yet why the elaborate charade? Why wait to declare their return? Why the mask? Ebbin was frustrated beyond measure by the mystery. He felt that he had almost all the pieces, yet arranging a meaningful pattern defied him.
One strange moment seemed to almost shock him out of his fugue. He was working in the tent on the salvage site near the shore at the base of Majesty Hill when someone stopped before his table and spoke to him. He looked up from the wage lists, blinking, to see a dark muscled fellow with a wide mane of black hair peering down at him; startling honest concern creased the man’s features. ‘Yes …?’
‘Are you sure you are all right?’ the fellow asked.
Something squeezed Ebbin’s chest painfully — and it was no outside coercion from the masked fiend. He fought to find his voice. ‘Yes … yes. Thank you.’ Emboldened, he took another breath.
‘Your name …?’
‘Barathol Mekhar.’
Ebbin searched his mental lists, found the man. Foreigner, skilled, unregistered blacksmith. Something in that sketch moved him to lurch forward, saying, ‘You have to-’ Then came the clenching fist at his throat. He struggled to continue, even to breathe.
The man’s puzzled concern returned. ‘Yes?’
Then Taya was there at his side to wrap an arm about his shoulders, and squeeze, painfully. ‘My uncle has a lot on his mind,’ she explained sweetly. ‘He is ashamed. He gambled, you see. And he lost. He lost everything.’ She squeezed him again, digging in the nails of a hand. ‘Isn’t that so, Uncle?’
Ebbin could only nod his sunken head.
‘Well,’ the man said, his voice gruff but gentle, ‘I understand. I was just saying that I could set up a smithing station here for your needs. Sharpening tools, forging items.’
‘Yes,’ Taya said. ‘That would be excellent. Thank you. I believe we will have need of that.’
After one last warning clasp she watched while the man moved off, then she left Ebbin to pick up his stylus and return to his record-keeping.
Antsy and Corien led the way out of Pearl Town, as Panar had named it. Malakai immediately slipped away without a word. Ashamed to be seen with the likes of us, Antsy grumbled to himself. Progress was slow, as they elected to travel with no light at all. Orchid murmured directions from close behind. Despite the girl’s descriptions of the way ahead Antsy kept crashing into walls in the pitch black. And Corien limped, unsteady, grunting his pain, his breathing wet and laboured.
‘I see them,’ Orchid announced after they’d walked a maze of narrow streets. ‘Stairs, ahead.’