Corsair

VII

A grey outcrop of rock a few dozen strides from the castle’s landward entrance gave the three of them shelter. They sat with their backs to it while Hamdan roughly bound Yulan’s arm with a makeshift bandage. The rock was patterned with a hundred white streaks of dried gull-waste.

Every so often, Hamdan would pause in his ministrations to stretch up and check the castle for signs of activity. The gatehouse must once have been quite imposing. Now it was a toothless maw, crumbling and empty of gate or door. Just a dark gullet into the dark body of the stronghold.

Staring out in the other direction, Yulan watched Lake’s boat laboriously zig-zagging its way up the side of the island with Corena’s scow. Both were in the hands of the late Corsair King’s men now. Both had an unforgiving task in hand, working their way against the wind back towards the berthings beyond the castle.

‘We were not told Kottren had taken your husband from you,’ Yulan said as matter-of-factly as he could.

Corena, watching the boats just as he did, said nothing at first and then, ‘Why should you have been?’

‘Because we might have asked for another to bring us here, that’s why,’ grunted Hamdan, pulling the knot of the bandage tight a little less gently than Yulan would have liked.

‘And there’d have been none,’ Corena said. There was more than a hint of anger in her voice. ‘No one else would come out here. You know what Kottren Malak did to those he caught on the sea? Cut their sinews and tendons, then bound them in their own nets. And threw them overboard. That’s what he did to my husband.’

‘So it’s his boat you captain now,’ Yulan said.

‘It was.’

Tears were welling at the corners of her eyes; not falling, but gathering there. They did not reveal themselves in her voice. Yulan could see them. Hamdan did not.

‘We would have done what we said we would do, one way or the other,’ Hamdan muttered as he lifted his head once more to survey the castle. ‘Not sure you’ve made it any easier for us, or for your people.’

‘And I’d do the same again, a thousand times. You’d have done what? Bargained with him? Threatened him? Tricked him into overreaching himself? He never meant you anything but harm, always meant to seize my boat. You play games, because it’s all coins and caution for you. It’s not your love he’s drowned, not your homes he’s burned. I’ve ended it, in the name of my husband, and I care not one fingernail for anything else.’

Yulan held up a placatory hand in the face of her mounting passion.

‘So be it,’ he said gently. ‘So be it. But if there’s more killing needed now, will you let us do it?’

Corena glowered at him. She blinked those unshed tears away.

‘Maybe,’ she said, and Yulan knew that was all he was going to get from her.

‘I’m seeing nothing,’ Hamdan said. ‘Everyone hiding away, you think?’

Yulan shuffled round to get a better view of the castle. It squatted there on the high end of the island in mute, grey immobility. Not a single figure could be seen in the gateway, atop the walls, atop the keep beyond.

‘Only one way to find out,’ Yulan murmured. He glanced back over his shoulder towards the boats butting their way through waves and wind. ‘Best to do it before the odds set themselves properly against us.’

Yulan went first, running in a low stoop for the nearest corner of the gatehouse. He pressed himself against the stonework to one side of the gateway. Hamdan watched from the half-shelter of the rock, arrow notched to bowstring. The archer’s eyes darted between Yulan and the crenellated walls above.

Yulan waited, gathering himself and his memories of what lay within into one clear and purposeful unity. He remembered a doorway on each side of the gatehouse, about halfway in, stairways to the towers and walls. Height was what they needed. Hamdan nodded, and Yulan spun into the castle.

He ran straight for the opening on the right-hand side of the passageway. He could see the empty courtyard beyond the inner gateway but he ignored it. Such places could be made into killing grounds by even the most inept of defenders.

He bounded as fast as the darkness would allow up the spiralling stair. The wound in his arm did not enjoy it, but speed was everything now. Every passing moment was another in which Kottren’s followers might find some courage from somewhere, and another bringing Lake closer – the only one of them who probably had courage to spare. If he chose to apply it to a dead man’s cause.

Pale daylight above told Yulan he was nearing the end of the stair. He slowed, lest he run onto a spear awaiting him. He quietened his tread, and heard Hamdan and Corena below him, beginning their own more cautious ascent.

A low opening gave out onto the footway atop the wall. The stair carried on, coiling its way up to the roof of the gatehouse itself. Yulan stopped and looked out along the battlements. There was a man there, sure enough. He must have been squatting down to hide himself from Hamdan’s view before. Now he was in a half-crouch, waiting for someone to appear just as Yulan was doing. He had an axe – more of a hatchet, really – in one hand, a short knife in the other. And he had fear in his eyes.

‘We’re not here for you,’ Yulan said levelly, staying back within the confines of the staircase. The moment when he had to crouch to pass through the narrow aperture between them would be the other man’s chance, if he had the wit to recognise it.

‘Get out my way,’ the man rasped.

He was not just afraid, Yulan realised. He was terrified. An agitation boiled within him, making his eyes jerk and his hands tremble. It could not just be Yulan’s arrival that made him so, could it?

Yulan stepped quickly out onto the battlements. The man shuffled back a little, but did not yield.

‘Set down your weapons,’ Yulan commanded. ‘I can’t let you pass with them still in hand.’

For a couple of breaths, Yulan saw before him a man who did not know what to do; then that man was gone and replaced by one who did.

‘Your king is dead,’ Yulan snapped, and suspected his words were not even heard.

The axe was raised, the knife withdrawn ready to stab in low. As the man rushed him, Yulan went to meet the axe. Clamping his hand about the upraised wrist and holding it there awoke darts of pain in his upper arm. He blocked the knife easily enough with his sword as it came in. He smashed his forehead against the bridge of his opponent’s nose, putting all the strength and weight into the blow he could. Bone and gristle crunched beneath the impact. It was so hard that Yulan himself was a little dazed.

Kottren’s man was much worse than dazed. He staggered back on legs that had gone loose and soft. Blood bloomed across his face. The knife fell from his hand. Yulan lunged in and ducked under the still high axe-arm. He got his shoulder into the man’s armpit, his free hand onto the back of the man’s belt, and heaved. He could only manage a couple of steps like that, but it was all he needed. He lifted and shoved the man backwards to the battlements and with a last great effort from arm and legs toppled him over. The man howled as he fell, a brief cry that crumpled into a dull thump.

Hamdan led Corena out onto the battlements. He came cautiously, eyes darting this way and that like a wolf approaching bait. Yulan looked down at the man he had flung out of the castle. He had thought he might ask Hamdan to end any misery he saw down there with an arrow, but there was no need. The man was folded and broken in a way that spoke only of death.

Hamdan glanced down at the corpse.

‘I’m surprised you found someone to kill,’ the archer muttered. ‘This place is quiet as quiet gets.’

‘What’s that?’ Corena asked, and the two Massatans turned.

They all three stared across at the keep, not one of them knowing at first what it was that they saw.

A black shape pulled itself out from one of the windows partway up the structure. It was like watching a huge, thick-haired spider with only four legs scale the skin of the keep. The great stone blocks had been eroded and fissured by time, leaving a profusion of handholds and crevices. Though the creature moved slowly, it did so with little apparent effort. Just a measured, gangly ascent in the morning sunshine. Climbing towards the crenellations that surmounted the keep.

‘What is that?’ Corena asked softly again.

‘An ape,’ Yulan and Hamdan said at the same time.

‘It was in the menagerie,’ Yulan said. ‘It must have got loose somehow.’

The animal made its slow way to the battlements and lifted itself almost casually atop them. It sat for a moment, legs folded away out of sight, spindly arms draped across the stone. It looked around, and for a moment it seemed that its gaze met Yulan’s across the wide space between them. He imagined it to be squinting against the light. Nothing hostile in its regard, just a simple momentary observation. Then the ape slipped down behind the stonework.

‘Well, that’s not a thing I expected to see,’ Hamdan said, puffing out his cheeks.

‘There was worse than apes caged in there,’ Yulan said thoughtfully. ‘If they’ve all got out …’

Screams cut him short. Not cries of pain, or anger: terror, from the mouths of children. The shouts of men were mixed in there, but it was the children Yulan heard. The raw sound made him wince. It was coming from within the keep, low down. Perhaps from the menagerie hall, Yulan thought.

‘Sounds like something worse might have come out to play, sure enough,’ Hamdan said as he drew an arrow and set it to the bowstring. ‘What else did he have in there?’

‘Lion, wolf, corpse-lizard,’ Yulan said. He was already moving towards the nearest tower, and the stairway that would carry him down into the courtyard. ‘Other things I didn’t know or couldn’t see.’

‘We want to go down there?’ Hamdan asked. He sounded doubtful, even though he followed.

The screams were moving, echoing, spilling out from the keep through windows and doorways. There were thumps and crashes, and the sound of running feet.

‘We do,’ Yulan said over his shoulder.

‘I’m not hearing any animals,’ Hamdan observed.

Figures were spilling from the keep’s main door. Men and women came rushing out into the courtyard, one after another. The children – Kottren’s children and a few others – were there, running on bare feet with their ragged clothes flapping about them. Still screaming, some of them.

Yulan flew down the tight spiral of the staircase, smacking his injured arm more than once against the stone. He saw himself as if from outside his body, just for the space of a few heartbeats, and recognised that there was excitement coursing through him. There was, in all this, a terrible kind of urgent aliveness he had seldom known before.

He ran out onto the cobblestones of the courtyard. Some of those who had fled from the keep were already stumbling or running beneath the gatehouse, making for the bleak open ground beyond. Others had paused and turned to look back at the towering stone mass. Three of the children were among them. They stood close to Yulan, their backs to him. Two of them were holding hands.

Yulan put his own, huge, hand on the shoulder of the nearest.

‘What’s happening?’ he asked.

She – it was a girl, beneath the smudges of dirt and the matted, knotted hair – looked up at him in fear.

‘I’m not going to hurt you,’ he said at once. ‘We can help.’

Hamdan and Corena arrived beside him, but the girl paid them no heed. Nor did she reply to Yulan. She only looked once more at the keep, and began to back away from it slowly and with hesitant steps. Yulan let his hand slip from her shoulder, feeling the bones of her shoulder sharp and hard beneath his fingers. She had not eaten well for a long time.

‘I suppose we can kill a lion, if that’s what it takes,’ Hamdan said, though he did not sound enthusiastic about the prospect. And even as he said it, they all saw that it was not a lion they faced.

The walls of the keep came alive. One section of the stonework shrugged, spilling grit and dust. It bulged out, the great rough-hewn blocks grinding against one another. The stones shifted and shaped themselves, swelling like a bubble in a thick soup. Then the movement raced across the face of the keep, a wave in granite, and swept onto and along the curtain wall. In its wake debris fell, the wall swayed, cracks erupted in all directions.

A sound like a rockfall, or of boulders being rolled along in a flood, boomed around the courtyard. Yulan and all the rest stood transfixed, turning their heads slowly to follow the impossible sight. It was as if some mad giant had taken hold of the stone walls and shaken them, sending a ripple rushing through them. That ripple surged through and around a corner tower, shaking it so violently that its top split asunder and collapsed in on itself in a pluming cloud of mortar and dust.

That was when Yulan decided it was time to run.

‘Come!’ he shouted above the rumbling ruin, and pulled at the children who still stood beside him.

In the event, they had all gone no more than a couple of paces before the destruction ended, with all the sudden violence it had begun. The moving contortion of the stonework swayed across the front of the castle until it collided with the gatehouse and there it snapped out of existence, blowing huge chunks of masonry apart. The gatehouse itself shivered and slumped. One half of it groaned and sank into a slide of disarticulated blocks and rubble, spitting out a great choking blast of dirt and pulverised stone which engulfed the courtyard.

Caught in it, just as he had more than once been caught in a desert sandstorm, Yulan covered his nose and mouth with one hand. Beside him, he heard Hamdan hawking and spitting.

‘We’re in trouble now,’ the archer said, and Yulan had never before heard such grim sincerity in his voice.

‘Of the worst kind,’ Yulan coughed. ‘They’ve got a Clever.’