The King's Assassin (Thief Takers Apprentice 3) (23 page)

Berren’s heart started to beat faster. He thought about how he’d always wanted to learn to fight, how he’d spent every day of his life in Deephaven yearning for it. But this would be no scattered chaos like the battle on the beach where every man had fought for himself; no, here was a real battle, the real thing, where men were crushed together, where it started with a rain of arrows or a charge of horse and all came down to who broke first, and learning swords had nothing to do with it.

Somewhere off through the rain he heard distant shouting. Talon rode along the battle line. Two hundred men lifted their shields and locked them together. The fear started to rise in Berren’s throat. He had nowhere to go, nowhere to run. What use were quick feet and a flashing sword when there were men pressed in all around him?

And then Talon stopped in front of him. ‘You!’ He pointed at Berren. ‘Out of the line! Now!’

Berren couldn’t bring himself to look at the faces of the men around him as he stepped out. A lot of them were going to die. He was no better than them and they knew it –
he
knew it. He ought to be with them, facing what they faced, fighting with them, fighting
for
them, dying perhaps, and yet he was shaking with relief. Talon stopped again a moment later as he rode along the line, and then again, each time picking a man to come with him. The shorter men, Berren realised. The small ones. The ones who might be quick and fast but might not be as strong as the rest. The weak links! He almost gasped. That was him! For all his skill with a sword, in this battle line where everything would come down to strength and grunts, he was weak!

‘Put your shields down,’ Talon said quietly, voice half lost in the wind. ‘You won’t be needing those.’ He handed each of them a crossbow and pointed through the rain. ‘There’s a farm half a mile that way. That’s where Meridian will be. The lancers will come around the right flank towards it and draw out his reserve. You will circle around to the left. Do whatever damage you can. Good luck.’ He saluted. The other men saluted back but Berren just stared. Then Talon rode along the front of the Hawks’ battle line, shouting rousing cries while the soldiers shouted back. In the lashing rain, men banged their spears and swords against their shields. The others Talon had chosen ran off into the sodden haze. Some, perhaps, were simply running away. Was that why Talon had chosen them? Did he know they were the ones who would break? Berren stayed where he was. He watched, creeping forward, keeping pace with the edge of the line. He couldn’t simply leave, could he? Leave the men he’d fought with on the beach, the men he’d lived with through the summer?

Meridian’s army emerged out of the rain like a wall of ghosts, banging their own spears and shields. Shouts went up from both sides:
The Hawks! The Panther! The Black Swords! For Talon! For Meridian!
Talon had three ranks to Meridian’s five. Somewhere in the haze Berren thought he heard galloping hooves, or perhaps he felt them through the earth, for he certainly didn’t see any horsemen.

The Hawks checked their advance – the front rank dropped to a crouch with their spears at the ready, revealing both ranks behind with crossbows. The strings were wet and sloppy, but the range was short, and four hundred bolts slammed into Meridian’s wall of shields. Men fell. In the mud, soldiers tripped and slipped over the bodies of the fallen, but the wall of shields came on, and now they returned a barrage of their own. The Hawks rose to their feet. Another shout tore through the rain. Meridian’s men began to run – not a flat-out charge, but a steady trot, keeping their wall intact. As Berren watched, the back ranks of the Hawks threw their crossbows away, high and over their shoulders. They readied their spears.

But not all of them. Along Talon’s line tiny sparks of flaming light arced through the air towards the advancing soldiers. Even through the rain, light flashed bright enough to make Berren cringe. Fire blossomed along Meridian’s line; men screamed and burned. Their charge faltered. The wall of shields wavered, and now the Hawks launched their own charge. They crashed into Meridian’s line, its soldiers still reeling and screaming, the smell of singed flesh and hair mingling with the smell of rain and earth. The shield wall cracked and broke in a dozen places. Around the edge, soldiers broke away. Berren raced after them. He cut down one man who didn’t even try to fight, just ran and wasn’t quick enough, and then a second who tried to dart past him and slipped in the mud. The next one he let go. By then, everyone was so covered in filth it was almost impossible to tell who was who any more. And they were running – why kill a man who was already running?

He sighed, shook himself down and sheathed his sword. Somewhere out there was King Meridian. Perhaps Kuy too, both of them men Talon wanted him to kill. Quietly he applauded the Prince of War. Meridian had a cohort of men in heavy armour, two cohorts of longbow archers and around fifty cavalrymen. In this mud, in this rain, in this roiling mass of confusion, they were useless. It all came down to men in thick leather and old mail hacking and stabbing at each other with swords and short spears.

There were more of Meridian’s men around him now, lurching through the mud, back towards the general direction of Tethis. Berren slipped in among them, but he’d barely gone a dozen paces when someone was running at him out of the rain, and Berren had no idea whether this was a friend or an enemy or just some irate peasant, letting him know what he thought of what was happening to his turnip field. All he could see was a madman covered with black mud, with wild white eyes and a great big axe.

‘Cowards! Get back and fight or take what’s coming to you!’ The axe swung. Berren ducked and tried to jump away, but the wet earth took his feet out from under him. He landed flat on his back, spattering mud in all directions as the axe split the air where he’d been standing. The axeman almost lost his balance as well. ‘Vermin, all of you! Get back and fight! Afore I cut you all down like this one!’ Berren tried to scrabble to his feet but he kept slipping. The axeman steadied himself. Somewhere underneath the layers of black goo was a skirt of hardened leather strips. He had braided hair and a spindly beard, both caked in mud.

He’s from somewhere in the far south, then
. The thought bubbled up from the storm of panic in his head. Berren pushed with his feet, trying in vain to find some sort of purchase. The mud was like a thick soup.

The man with the axe took a long hard look at him and braced himself. ‘Deserter,’ he hissed. ‘You know what that means.’

Desperate, Berren threw a handful of mud. It caught the axeman squarely in the face. He shuddered, pitched over backwards and didn’t move.

When at last Berren found his feet, the axeman was still lying there. Berren stood, waiting for his heart to stop racing, for his hands to stop shaking, for the urge to run away to fade. He dropped to his knees and threw up. Then he looked down at the axeman again, sprawled flat on his back in the slime. Already mud had started to ooze between the dead man’s fingers. His face was covered in dirt and the tail of a crossbow bolt stuck out of his chest, punched straight through his mail shirt. Berren looked back the way he’d come, but all he could see was a handful of ghostly shapes stumbling through the mud, covered in it and almost lost in the rain.

His sword lay on the ground. He picked it up and wiped it clean. He’d never know who’d saved his life. His crossbow was soaking wet and covered in filth – though at least the rain washed the worst of the mud away. Whether it would still work, he had no idea.
Try not to get them wet
, Talon had said, and they’d still been laughing about that as they’d locked their shields together in the pouring rain with Meridian’s soldiers rushing towards them.

He trudged on for a few minutes and then dropped to his haunches. He couldn’t see any more deserters now. The ground here was firmer, the soaked earth not yet trudged into slime by a thousand marching feet. The turnips hadn’t been crushed. Absently, he pulled a couple out of the ground and peeled them. They were sweet and ready for harvest. He peered through the grey sheeting rain for any sign of a building, a barn perhaps. That’s where Meridian would be. Somewhere with a roof over his head. Somewhere dry where he could see what was happening, if only the rain would let him.

He heard a voice and then another, and then several at once, coming towards him. He dropped flat into the green shoots and the sodden earth. Since he was already covered from head to toe in mud, no one would notice one more body.

‘. . . get out of this mud,’ one voice was saying. ‘This is a disaster!’

‘. . . sound the retreat and get us out of here?’

‘I thought he did!’

Berren wriggled, trying to turn his face toward the voices. The last one sounded strangely familiar. There was a pause. ‘You told me he did!’ said the familiar voice again. It had a shrill tone of outrage this time, one that Berren would have known anywhere, remembered from Silvestre’s sword school in Kalda.

Lucama!

25

THE KING’S ASSASSIN

‘I
said he
should
have,’ said the second voice.

‘That bloody king probably won’t let him,’ said another. Berren wriggled again. There were at least four men now. Last he’d heard, Lucama had been fighting for the Mountain Panther. Made sense that he was here, but why
here
and not in the battle line being butchered with the rest?

‘Even if they didn’t call the retreat, so what? We’ve got what? Fifty men here? Let the Black Swords get themselves slaughtered. One less company to keep an eye on next year, that’s what I say.’

Finally he caught sight of them, walking slowly out of the haze of rain.

‘It’s a shambles,’ said the first voice. ‘They had some sort of fire-throwers.
Our
cohorts managed to rally. Buggered if I know what happened to the Panthers. I think they broke. Then those traitor lancers came at us from the other flank. By the time we get back to the king, chances are we’ll find the whole place overrun. Only thing that makes sense is we get back to the castle as fast as we can. What’s left of us. Don’t know why we left it.’

‘Huh.’ Lucama snorted. ‘With archers and armoured swords, we don’t need the rest. We could hold the walls on our own. And don’t ask
me
why we came out here!’ Which made Lucama a Black Sword now? Berren clenched his fists. Almost the first friend he’d made since escaping off that bloody ship, and now they were to be enemies across a battlefield?

‘And what if the Prince of War has another trick up his sleeve?’ asked the second voice. ‘What if he’s got some way to shake down the walls and make them topple back onto us?’

The feet trudged past where Berren lay. He watched them go.

‘Don’t be an oaf,’ snapped Lucama.

‘That fire seemed a pretty good trick to
me
!’ snapped the other voice. ‘And don’t forget that the Prince of War grew up in that castle. If it has secrets then he knows them. They already did that to us once, don’t forget.’

‘And we were ready for them . . .’

‘And then there’s the people in the town. What if they decide they want their old kings back?’ The voices began to fade as the men walked away, but the last words caught Berren’s ear: ‘. . . go tell that mouse-dick Meridian about that . . . probably doesn’t know.’

Right then
. He picked himself up and sat on his haunches, watching the soldiers fade into the rain. When they were nothing more than hazy shapes, he wiped the mud from his hands and face and followed. More men passed him in dribs and drabs, coming the other way. Some of them were limping, some running. They slowly appeared out of the grey haze of rain, and slowly faded again, heads bowed between fearful looks over their shoulders. They were all headed the same way. Away. Anywhere but the battlefield.

Lucama and his friends led him to a hollow where half a dozen houses nestled together with maybe twice as many barns. Soldiers milled aimlessly to and fro, scores of them, or else propped themselves up under whatever shelter they could find. They looked bored and dejected and afraid. Covered in mud just like the rest of them, Berren walked into their midst without a single challenge. Lucama stopped at the largest house and exchanged words with two soldiers in long leather skirts who slouched by the door, then he vanished inside. Berren scratched his head. From here, in this weather, you wouldn’t have the first idea what was happening on the battlefield. What sort of general was this, sat with his feet up, drying his cloak by someone’s fire while his men were put to the sword in a sea of mud and rain? In his mind’s eye he’d seen Meridian sitting on a horse atop a hill somewhere, watching the battle in horror. He’d seen himself creep through the mud, shoot him in the head, and that was the end of that.

Now what?

Another soldier hurried out of the house. Berren followed him with his eyes into a barn and then out again, a wine bottle in each hand, then back to the house. When he was inside again, Berren peeked into the barn. It was packed full of soldiers sheltering from the rain, but in among them were horses and mules. One of the horses wore an elegant harness in fine rich colours. The king’s colours. He slipped out again and found himself a place to stand without being seen, between the barn and the house, out in the rain and away from the sheltering soldiers. He took the crossbow off his back, cleaned it up as best he could and settled to waiting along the path the king must take to his horse. Water ran in steady rivers over his face, trickles of it creeping down his spine, into his breeches, filling up his boots. He was soaked through to his skin and the cold had settled into his bones. Yet he waited, still and silent.

He almost missed them. Out of nowhere, three soldiers in gaudy cloaks and crested helmets walked swiftly towards the barn. They weren’t muddy at all. An older man was with them, dressed in fine metal plates. He was carrying his helm under his arm, and he’d already walked past when Berren saw the golden crown set into it.

Meridian. It had to be. He didn’t know what the king even looked like, but the crown was enough. As they passed, barely a dozen paces from where he stood, Berren lifted the crossbow. He took a moment to aim. Blood pounded inside him, urging him to hurry, but he it fought back, picking his spot with deliberate care. The string was wet, the crossbow would be weak, the man wore metal plate, but from this range none of that would matter.