The Crimson Shield (36 page)

Gallow stood. ‘It’s not for me to decide, nor for you either. I mean to give him to the Marroc. Let them choose what to do with him.’

Tolvis shook his head. He tried to smile but the ruined side of his face was too swollen. ‘Truesword, you know perfectly well what the Marroc will do. Hanging him won’t be enough.
They’ll rip him to pieces and feed his parts to their dogs, and when word of that comes back across the sea to Yurlak, he’ll shout for every man who can so much as hold a stick.
He’ll rouse them out of their homes and into a ship within a week. They’ll sweep across this land in a tide of blood and slaughter that’ll make the Screambreaker’s campaigns
look like a wedding feast. It won’t be conquest and plunder this time. He’ll be coming to wipe away the stain of the Marroc who’d killed his son. Is that what you want?’

Gallow shrugged. ‘We stand on Marroc stone. They should be the ones to choose.’

Loudmouth turned away. A Lhosir came with a torch. ‘Put his sword in his lap, Gallow. Finish it here. He died in battle after his first great victory against the Vathen. Give that to
Yurlak. The Maker-Devourer will know the truth. Let that be enough.’

Gallow ignored his words but took the torch and held the blade of the red sword in the flame. Fire from burning wood should never have been enough to make a piece of iron even start to change
its colour, but the sword seemed to glow with an an inner light in the flames.

‘You might kill him doing that,’ said Tolvis.

‘I might. Hold him down and put some leather in his mouth.’

The Lhosir held Medrin down. Gallow gripped the prince’s arm between his knees and pressed the hot steel into the wound. Blood sizzled and flesh cooked. Medrin’s eyes flew wide open,
his back arched. He screamed and bucked but the Lhosir held him fast, and after a moment he fell still again. His eyes rolled back into his head. Gallow took the sword away and loosened the belt
around Medrin’s arm. The bleeding had stopped.

‘Is he alive?’

Gallow pressed his ear against Medrin’s chest. ‘His heart is faint but it still beats.’

‘You’ll not give him to the Marroc, Gallow,’ said Tolvis.

‘Do I have to fight you too?’

‘No.’ Tolvis pulled his axe from his belt – Gallow’s axe – and handed it back, haft first. ‘Not if you just let it go. Best you have this back, I
think.’

Gallow took the axe. He looked at the Lhosir around him, a dozen and then some. They were with Tolvis, all of them, and he couldn’t fight that many even if he hadn’t been stabbed in
the shoulder. And he didn’t want to.

‘Do what you want.’ He turned his back on them and walked away.

‘Run! Run for the ships!’ Valaric waved the rest of the Marroc away from the barricade. ‘You too, Sarvic.’ He stood and jabbed his sword at the
forkbeards climbing the barricade. ‘No reason to stay now. Let them fight among themselves. Leave them to it.’

Still alive. Well that’s a surprise.
He ran down the street, left into an alley and across to the Riverway. People streamed past him, running, screaming, heading helter-skelter
for the docks. He looked up the river towards the bridge. There had been another barricade there but it was smashed now, bodies littered around it. His eyes hunted for forkbeards to kill, but he
didn’t see any.

Why are you all screaming?

A Vathan jumped his horse over the disintegrating barricade and hurled a javelot into the back of a fleeing Marroc. A dozen more followed him.

Oh. That’s why. Modris!
He gripped his shield and stepped out into the street.

Gulsukh Ardshan slowed as he reached the square outside the castle.
No one to greet us?
Just a lot of bodies and open gates with no one guarding them. He urged his
horsemen on, riding with them, seizing this second set of gates before anyone could close them. There were more bodies in the yard beyond. And in the middle of it two handfuls of forkbeards,
standing and staring at him as though he was the Weeping Giant himself risen back from the dead.

One carried the Crimson Shield of the Marroc. Another had the red sword, Solace.

Mine!

He pointed his spear at them and screamed.

V
alaric took the first Vathan rider down, rising out of the crowd of fleeing Marroc with his sword and sticking it straight through the
rider’s leather jerkin and between the ribs underneath. The rider tipped back. First thing Valaric did was grab his spear. Against a man on a horse a spear did a lot better than a sword.

He snatched it in time to turn it round and skewer the next Vathan. The spear flew up out of his hands, gone as quickly as it had come. The next rider slashed with a sword. Valaric leaped out of
the way then turned the tip of a spear with his shield. The riders were simply hacking at him as they passed, moving straight on through the screaming Marroc beyond. There were more and more of
them, a trickle turning to a flood. And here he was, standing around waiting to be trampled. Useless. He darted into an alley. At least the horsemen wouldn’t trouble him there –
wouldn’t even fit.

‘Why are there so many of them by the river?’ he hissed into the air.

‘The bridge, Marroc,’ said the shadows behind him. Valaric almost jumped out of his mail. He spun round, lunging with his sword, and the steel skittered off a shield. He’d had
a forkbeard standing right there, still and quiet in the shadows of a doorway, and he hadn’t even seen him.

‘We can fight if you want, Marroc,’ said the forkbeard.

‘Do I know you?’ Valaric peered. Behind their helms it was hard to tell one forkbeard from another. This one’s beard was grey. He looked a bit like the Widowmaker, except
Gallow had said the Widowmaker was dead.

‘Not that I know, Marroc. So is it to be fighting or not?’

‘Five fingers of the sun ago I’d have said yes.’

‘I know you would. So would I. But the Vathen have the day now. Andhun will be theirs by sunset.’

The forkbeard had no sword. Slowly Valaric put his own back in his belt. ‘Who are you?’

‘The bridge, Marroc. Take down the bridge and the Vathen can’t cross the Isset. Nowhere else for a hundred miles and then you’re at the Crackmarsh. I’m told they could
cross the Crackmarsh if someone showed them the way, but then again a clever man might make a whole army vanish in that swamp. Take down that bridge and by the time the Vathen have built it again,
Yurlak himself will be here with the whole horde of the sea.’

Or I’ll have time to raise an army of Marroc to fight both of you.
Valaric looked the forkbeard up and down. ‘And how would you take down the bridge, old man?’

The forkbeard laughed. ‘Was always a chance it would come to this.’

‘I can’t trust you.’ Valaric shook his head.

‘And I can’t trust
you
, Marroc.’ The forkbeard pulled a knife from his belt and made a shallow cut on the flesh of his forearm. ‘May the Maker-Devourer spit me
into the Marches if I raise a hand against you while that bridge still stands. And take a look, Marroc. I have no sword. No spear. No axe.’

Valaric looked him over. He was old and battered. His mail was ripped in places and there was dried blood all over it. Some of it, he was sure, was the forkbeard’s own.

‘Well?’ The forkbeard offered Valaric his knife.

‘While that bridge still stands.’ Valaric took the knife and cut himself. They clasped arms, blood to blood, and it felt the strangest thing in the world to Valaric in the burning
ruin of a town that this forkbeard’s kinsmen had set out to destroy.

Tolvis gave Medrin to the three Lhosir who’d stood with their prince. Let him be carried by his own soldiers. Gallow picked up one of their shields. He looked at it and
his lip curled. Medrin’s men. The Legion of the Crimson Shield. They’d had them painted so they all looked the same, like Medrin’s god-borne shield itself.

‘And what are
you
going to do with him?’ he asked Tolvis, since Loudmouth hadn’t yet stuck a sword in Medrin’s hand and then finished him as he’d said.

‘Wait for him to wake up, if he does. If he doesn’t I’ll build him a pyre and one of these three can speak him out and Yurlak can at least know that his son died well enough,
even if he didn’t live as he should.’

‘And if he lives?’

Tolvis shrugged. ‘Go home, Gallow. Go back to that Marroc woman of yours.’ They trailed down the spiral stairs and into the Marroc duke’s hall. Gallow’s fingers felt for
the locket under his mail.
Go home.
He could do that now. He’d only stayed to try and save the Marroc of Andhun from Medrin, and he’d largely failed at that.

‘What
are
you going to do with Medrin?’

Tolvis shrugged. He opened the doors to the castle yard and strode out towards the open gates. ‘I don’t know, Truesword, I simply don’t. Lost at sea, perhaps. We’ll have
to talk, all of us.’ In the middle of the yard he stopped and turned. ‘Truesword, before you and I part, the Screambreaker gave—’

A column of riders trotted through the castle gates. Vathen. Dozens of them. They paused, as surprised as the Lhosir, and then one of them lowered his spear and pointed it straight at Gallow and
howled.

‘Feyrk’s balls! Back to the keep!’ Tolvis bolted back the way they’d come and the other Lhosir scrambled after him. Didn’t matter how fierce a man was; caught in
the open and surrounded by horsemen he died and died quickly. The last of the Lhosir fell across the threshold with a javelot in his back.

‘Go!’ shouted Tolvis. ‘Take the cave path. I’ll hold the door.’

‘No, you won’t.’ Gallow helped him close it and then shoved his shoulder against it. ‘You go.
I’ll
hold them.’

Tolvis snorted. ‘You can hardly hold your own shield.’ They pressed themselves against the door.

‘Half your face is missing.’

‘Don’t need a face to fight!’

The door jerked ajar as the Vathen threw themselves against it. Gallow shoved back, forcing it closed. ‘You’d think there’d be a bar or something.’

The door shuddered again. Tolvis hissed. ‘Well then, Truesword, shall we stand and face them like men?’

Gallow tossed him his axe – the one he’d given to Tolvis on the road away from Andhun and Tolvis had just returned. ‘You’ll be needing this.’

The door shuddered again. ‘Is that it?’ Tolvis yelled. ‘My dead grandmother could push harder.’

Gallow blinked. Looked at him hard. Even with both of them putting their whole weight against it, the Vathen were coming through the door at any moment. ‘One stays, one runs.’ Gallow
gritted his teeth. ‘They’re your men. You go.’ When Tolvis didn’t move, Gallow laughed. ‘If you like, Loudmouth, I’ll fight you for it. Besides, it’s my
turn.’

‘What?’ Loudmouth stared at him as though he was mad but he must have seen the certainty in Gallow’s face, the simple resolve not to move.

‘In the Temple of Fates. We had the ironskins on us, on the other side of a door just like this. One of us could run but not both. Almost came to blows about who got to hold them. That
time it was Beyard. This time it’s me. Now take the bloody axe and run before I hit you with it!’

As the door shook again Tolvis turned and looked at Gallow one last time. ‘A hundred men will speak you out, Truesword,’ he cried, and was gone.

No
, Gallow thought,
they probably won’t.
For a moment as he held fast, he touched a finger to the amulet around his neck. ‘Sorry, but that’s a debt I carried
before you ever knew me.’

Tolvis sprinted after his men and caught them down in the kitchens, wrestling their way into the pantries, hurling kegs and crates out of the way. He tipped a huge barrel of
pickles on its side, spilling salted water all over the floor. The trapdoor was still there, same door as had been there years ago when the Screambreaker had made this castle his and they’d
all been waiting for Yurlak to die. He pulled it open.

‘Come on then!’ He sent two of his own men first and then the three of Medrin’s, still carrying their prince. With a bit of luck they’d get to the bottom and find
Twelvefingers was dead. Would save a lot of trouble.

‘You two!’ He picked men with good legs. ‘You stay up here. You hold the path for Truesword if he gets this far! You understand?’

The door flew open. Gallow bolted across the hall as the first Vathen tumbled in behind him, stumbling over one another. Voices sang in his head, calling him, telling him to
turn and face them and cut them down, as many as he could. Telling him to die in the middle of a mound of Vathan corpses as the Screambreaker had done, to be sent on his way to the Maker-Devourer
covered in the blood of his enemies, cup filled with glory. But there were other voices now, ones that hadn’t been born in those long years of war at the Screambreaker’s side. Arda. His
sons and his daughter calling him to come home. And so he raced after Loudmouth and his Lhosir, across the hall and down the stairs behind it which would take him to the kitchens and the secret
pathway through the caves and the tunnels to the beach. To run across the stones and the debris fallen from the cliffs and to the harbour and to the Marroc and Valaric and be rid of the red sword.
Give it to some Marroc hero and jump into a boat and sail away up the coast and finally go home.

The stairs spat him out into a hall lined with doors, with an iron gate at the end through which streamed light. Sunlight. He’d gone the wrong way.

Back in the day he’d been in this castle long enough not to make that sort of stupid mistake, and so he wondered how he could have been so cursed until he realised that the old Lhosir
songs were still singing in his head while those of the Marroc he’d come to love had fallen quiet. And for some daft reason he could hear the Screambreaker talking to him too:
So,
Truesword. Does that answer your question? Do you know who you are now?

Tolvis ran as best he could through the tunnels and passages to the shore, hustling Medrin’s men as fast as they could go. The tide was high, waves breaking into the
throat of the caves, and the beach path was drowned so they’d have to make their way over the rocks with the sea crashing around their knees, but it was that or stay and fight the Vathen, and
the Vathen were far too many for that. Find a way back to the rest of the army, that was the thing.