Tyrant

XIII

There were four slavers dead on the hilltop, more on the slopes below. Three villagers. A woman and two children knelt beside one of the corpses, weeping. Holding one another.

The fire was ebbing. The heart of it still glowed in the deepening twilight, but it was giving out little smoke now. What it had given before would have to be enough. Or not.

Two of the horses were gone. Brennan was not surprised at that. If anything, he was surprised that one-Lorin’s-had stood firm amid the tumult and confusion and smoke. The other two might have simply bolted or been seized by slavers. There was no way to know.

Lorin himself lay against the stump of the cairn. It was nothing now but a tiny heap of loose stones. An uncomfortable bed. He had taken another wound, somewhere amid the chaos. One that exceeded those he had gathered before. Blood was oozing thick from a puncture wound in his side, high up under his armpit. Marweh was beside him, trying to soak away the blood with the sleeve of her shirt.

‘Killed three,’ Lorin said quietly as Brennan drew near. ‘How many did you get?’

‘Never mind cleaning,’ Brennan told Marweh wearily. ‘Stop up that wound. Plug it.’

She ripped her sleeve off and did what she could.

‘Manadar’s dead,’ Brennan said.

‘Oh.’ Lorin sounded weak. Distant. ‘Bastards.’

‘Bastards,’ agreed Brennan.

‘Will they come back?’ Marweh asked.

She was pressing and pushing hard as she tried to stem the flow of blood. Lorin was not responding-feeling no pain, it seemed-which Brennan thought was probably a bad sign.

‘In a while maybe,’ Lorin said. ‘Once they’ve licked their wounds. Convinced themselves it was just bad luck that we piled up their dead the first time around.’

‘Or they might turn tail,’ Brennan said.

He sat down heavily. He too was bleeding more than he would have liked. He could feel exhaustion creeping through him, claiming him bit by bit.

‘They might,’ Lorin murmured. It did not sound as if he believed it any more than Brennan did. ‘Is it getting dark?’

Brennan looked up. He could see stars, faintly. The plains, far out, were sinking into night. He wondered what Lorin’s eyes were seeing, if he could not tell how far the day had gone.

‘It is.’

‘That’s good. They might not want to be scrambling about up here in the dark.’

‘We’ll find out, I suppose.’

Brennan wanted very much to close his eyes. But he did not.

The hours of darkness crept by at an agonisingly slow pace. Brennan circled the crest of the hill like a restless cat. Not as nimble as a cat though.

Once she had finished with Lorin, Marweh had bound his wounds as best she could. There was heavy strapping around his leg and his stomach. Tight. It helped, but he would have struggled to keep moving if she had not gone with him. She held him up; her and his own stubborn refusal to yield.

‘Will he die?’ she asked him softly, somewhere around the deepest of the night.

‘Lorin? No. He’s strong as a bear.’

He did not know if that was true. Admitting as much to Marweh would be admitting it to himself, so he did not.

‘None of us will go back into bonds,’ she said. ‘We’ve all said that. We’d sooner die here on this hill.’

‘Good for you.’

Brennan was light-headed, feeling detached from the world like a boat that had slipped its moorings. That was not why he could not bring himself to share in Marweh’s strength, or lend her any of his own though. Not the whole reason anyway. There was still some part of him that felt this must all have come to pass, in the way it had, because of her. The chain of events which had brought Manadar to his high dying ground. Brought Lorin to a stony bed under the stars, with his life-perhaps-leaking away. Would any of it have happened if Marweh had not bargained for the lives of her family with the slavers’ tyrant?

He did not know. And he could not bring himself to care too much. The world, this night, was as it was. The path it had followed to get here probably did not matter greatly. In a way, Brennan felt that the path he had followed himself did not matter. He was here, atop a hill in the Empire of Orphans, with a hundred cruel men surrounding him. Two dozen or so more innocent folk at his side. A dead friend. He was here, instead of riding the sea with his childhood friends in some rickety fishing scow. That was all there was to say, or think, of it.

Except that his own personal tyrant of doubt was still there, writhing like a worm beneath his thoughts. If Yulan or Hamdan-any of the truly great warriors of the Free-were here instead of him, Marweh and the rest would have been in better hands. The candle of their lives would have a longer wick. Manadar would most likely still be alive.

Somewhere out in the darkness, someone was moaning. Whimpering like a maimed hound. One of the slavers, no doubt. Broken in the attack; abandoned by his fellows. There were villagers scattered around the heights, told by Brennan to listen for the slightest hint of movement on the slopes. So far, they had heard none. There was nothing to hear, save that unseen moaning man.

Further out, further down, there were torches moving about. Little points of yellowish flame. Fools, Brennan thought. Greedy fools. If they had any sense, they would be on the move. But they wanted their human goods back. Or perhaps just the tyrant did, and there was no one brave enough to tell him it was time to make for the deep Empire.

Lorin was right, of course. There were not many peoples in the world eager to travel, let alone fight, in the darkness. The Free did it. They trained for it as they trained for everything else. For others, the night could conceal too many unpleasant surprises. Their fear made them wait for light. Perhaps that was all that held the slavers here still. Fear of what might await them in the blackness. Perhaps they would depart in the dawn’s first breaking.

Brennan doubted that. He suspected that at dawn he was going to die on this bare summit. They all were. So be it. A lot of slavers were going to die too, if it came to that.

‘Can you move?’ he asked Lorin later, kneeling beside his friend.

Lorin had been sleeping. That had worried Brennan, who thought he might never wake. But those old eyes had flickered open.

‘I can probably stand up when the time comes. Swing a sword if I have to, if that’s what you mean. Don’t think I’ll be leaving this hilltop though.’

Brennan made to protest. To deny that undeniable truth. But it would be pointless. Childish, even.

‘I’d rather have died in either of your places,’ he said instead. ‘You or Manadar.’

‘Well, it’s too late to die for me, son,’ Lorin rasped. ‘You could die for the name of the Free if you want, but you want my advice? Die for them.’

Lorin extended a trembling finger towards the men and women and children huddled together in the darkness.

‘Everyone else chose to be here. Not them. Die for them if you must.’ He coughed. Tiny bubbles of blood marked his lips. ‘If we three hadn’t come here, they’d be gone by now most likely. Carried off into the deep Empire. Slaves of the Orphans. They’d be wishing, begging, for the chance to die free on a barren hilltop in the middle of nowhere. We gave them that much. If you can give them any more, whether it’s by living or dying, you’ll have done well.’

‘Is it enough, you think?’ Brennan wondered.

‘Oh, never ask if it’s enough,’ Lorin grunted. ‘It is what it is. It’s what’s possible.’