Corsair

XIII

Yulan rolled onto his front and pushed himself up. Every muscle ached. His sword lay close by. He picked it up. Hamdan was lying unmoving, close to the far wall. Yulan limped across to the archer. His ankle throbbed with the memory of the twist he had given it in the passage up from below.

As he knelt at Hamdan’s side, searching for signs of life, he heard a wet moan and looked round. Lake was impaled upon one of the splayed bars of a cage. The round iron shaft had punched through the shoulder of the Orphanidon’s shield-arm. The ageing warrior was trying to pull himself free. A fatal wound, Yulan guessed, feeling a distant, unexpected kind of regret at the thought.

Hamdan was not dead yet, at least. The archer stirred beneath Yulan’s hand.

‘Get up,’ Yulan said.

‘Easy for you to say,’ Hamdan rasped indistinctly.

Yulan heaved him to his feet and got his shoulder under Hamdan’s arm. He half-dragged him towards the door.

‘Find a way, you lazy bastard,’ he hissed, for want of anything more helpful, and was rewarded with a grudging snort of a laugh.

Together they stumbled their way out into the passage, weaving around chunks of fallen stonework and great cracks laid into the floor. Hamdan’s strength grew bit by bit, and Yulan was grateful as the weight laid across his own shoulders diminished.

When they came to the corner, ready to turn and work their way past the dead bear to the waiting balcony, a sound behind him made Yulan pause and look. Enna was there in the corridor, back by the doors to the menagerie hall. She had one hand pressed to the wall and was leaning against it. Her head was down so that her lank hair hid her face.

‘Where are my brothers and sisters?’ Yulan heard her groan. ‘I want them. Now.’

A rising wind brushed Yulan’s cheeks and he felt hope carried away upon it. He glimpsed a future and felt it pulling him, irresistible.

He shook Hamdan off and pushed the archer inelegantly towards the bear, and the balcony beyond it. He did not know if Hamdan had seen or heard Enna.

‘Make sure the girls are safe,’ he said without taking his eyes off Enna. ‘Get them down to the boats, if they haven’t gone already.’

‘What?’ Hamdan said, sounding still dazed.

‘Now!’ Yulan shouted. ‘Jump. I’ll be a step behind you, that’s all.’

The archer hesitated. Yulan glared at him, gathering up all the command and authority he could.

‘Go!’ he snarled. ‘Ready the boat.’

Hamdan frowned and moistened his lips, licking away the dust of the crumbling castle.

‘I’ll see the girls are safely gone, but I’m not jumping without you,’ he muttered as he moved towards the dead bear. He sounded weary, pained. But firm.

Yulan only nodded, and started back towards Enna. His battered body was rebelling, protesting every step. He forced it on. Do what’s needful, he told himself, and his limbs and his heart.

Enna was not reacting to his approach. Unless the rumbling shivers that passed through the walls and floors were reaction. Somewhere outside, Yulan heard a great crashing and booming. Another tower surrendering out there along the walls, probably. He imagined the whole keep collapsing and spilling back and down into the cove below. Vast slabs of stone raining upon water, boats. He moved more quickly.

Lake came reeling out from the hall between Yulan and Enna. The Orphanidon’s shield was gone. His left arm hung limp at his side, and that whole flank from shoulder to waist was drenched in blood. His tunic was heavy with the stuff.

Yulan knew a dying man when he saw one. Lake’s eyes denied it, refused it. They were as sharp and full of intent as ever, fixed upon Yulan.

‘Leave her be, sellsword,’ Lake hissed.

Yulan grimaced in frustration.

‘You want a Permanence here?’ he snapped. ‘Is that what you want?’

‘You don’t know,’ Lake insisted.

Behind him, Enna was moaning. Trembling.

‘Hold firm, girl,’ Lake said, ‘Just for another moment.’ And he lunged at Yulan.

A man so maimed should not have been a threat. But Yulan was all bruises and pain and weariness, and Lake was, in the end, still an Orphanidon. The Empire of Orphans had crafted him from childhood, and made him a weapon. He had disavowed that history but he remained a weapon.

Their blades clashed and Yulan could feel that there was strength yet in Lake’s one good arm. He gave ground, feet searching for the safe spaces between rubble and cracks. Even amid desperation, his mind found the distance to see in himself a half-buried reluctance. There was some small part of him that still did not want to commit to this, to the violence and death. He saw no such reluctance in Lake’s steady gaze. And he knew, as only one who had come alive out of past violence could, that commitment was half the fight.

Yulan set his rear foot to the ground, and both hands to the hilt, and hammered a flurry of slashing blows in at Lake. The Orphanidon found the speed from somewhere to block or turn each, angling his own blade to send Yulan’s glancing away.

Lake gave an abrupt, shuffling dance forward of his feet and launched a kick into Yulan’s midriff. Like a thread through the eye of a needle, he found the one instant in which sword’s movement, balance, weight all conspired to hold Yulan there, unable to avoid the blow. It numbed his stomach and sent him staggering back, almost tripping over the debris that littered the passage.

For a moment he was hunched over, struggling for breath and composure. Lake might have killed him then, had he not been just as spent. The Orphanidon swayed unsteadily. For that one moment, he seemed to lack the strength to hold his sword up and its tip touched the floor.

Enna wailed, half-scream, half-fury. From her hand, pressed against the wall, a thousand cracks suddenly webbed out through the stonework. The greatest of them raced straight ahead, ripping itself along the length of the corridor, spitting out fragments of stone. The whole keep shook. Greater convulsions still wracked the walls and ceiling. From Yulan’s left, a tempest of destruction erupted. That whole wall seemed to tear itself apart and an all-consuming hail of rock splinters and shattered masonry and misting mortar filled his world and senses.

He felt the skin of his face being lacerated. He felt the blast punching that whole side of his body. He felt the dust filling his nose and mouth. Some larger, blunter hunk of debris slammed against the side of his head and he fell.

In darkness he lay. Lost. Hearing collapse and thunder as if from very far away. Feeling the flagstones beneath his cheek shivering. Body and mind were empty.

Then: Get up, his own voice whispered within him. Get up.

He blinked. Blood in his eyes. Pain in his temple.

Get up.

He coughed as he levered himself up onto one knee. His vision was blurred, as if water coursed down over the whole world. His ears rang, the ringing laid over the sound of the castle quaking and tumbling. Some huge block of the ceiling crashed down beside him, and he barely noticed it.

Dimly, he saw Lake slumped against the wall to one side of the passageway. He was trying to push himself upright, using his sword like the walking stick of a fallen old man. Further on, Enna was there. Taking one short step after another. And beyond her … what? Yulan blinked again. There was something there, behind Enna. Some shape. Some movement.

The lion came, impossibly, out of the darkness, out of the veiling mists of grit and mortar and took hold of Enna. Feeble, emaciated, the lion came and shook her. She made no sound, and nor did it. Quietly, it simply took her shoulder in its mouth and shook her like a doll.

Yulan stared, barely understanding what he saw. Experiencing it as if it were a waking dream. Lake turned to look and cried out.

‘No!’ the Orphanidon roared, and as if the sound summoned up strength he heaved himself to his feet and lumbered towards the beast and the child.

Lake’s sword came up, and in the same moment the roof came down. Finally broken, all its decades or centuries of resilience defeated, the castle began to fold in on itself. A rain of stone in deep, deafening surrender. It engulfed everything in front of Yulan, snatching away his view of Enna, Lake, lion in an instant. It fell around him, beating at his back.

He turned and stumbled away. As fast as he could, on feet he could hardly feel any more, on a floor that rocked and pitched like the deck of a boat. At the corner, he saw Hamdan ahead, in the midst of climbing over the great back of the corpse-bear.

‘Get out!’ Yulan tried to shout, surprised at how faint and weak his voice sounded. ‘It’s all coming down!’

And it did, in their wake as they struggled and strove to reach the balcony. All the Sorentines’ handiwork fell in on itself. Yulan could not breathe, could not hear. Saw only dimly. Until he was at the door to the balcony and there was sky before him.

Hamdan was there for a moment, and then gone, throwing himself out into the air. Yulan took one hobbling stride, another, and planted his hand on the balustrade and vaulted clumsily over.

‘I can’t swim!’ he cried pointlessly as he fell, because there was nothing else in his head but that one very simple thought.