By Heresies Distressed (72 page)

“Edwyrd!”

Sergeant Seahamper turned towards the soprano voice. Empress Sharleyan stood in the guesthouse door, fully dressed, her expression strained, with Carlsyn Raiyz at her side, and he stepped quickly towards her.

“I don't know yet, Your Majesty,” he said, answering the unspoken question in her eyes, and his voice was grim. “We don't know
anything
yet, but I'd just sent Bryndyn off to the main gate to find out if anyone had seen Captain Gairaht when all hell broke loose. From the sound of things, there have to be a lot of them. I think they hit the bivouac first . . . and I don't hear any more sounds of fighting from there.”

The skin around her eyes tightened, but she didn't flinch, and he felt a surge of pride in her.

“I think we must have held at the gates, or they'd already be here,” he continued, offering her the unvarnished truth, “but there's no way we have enough manpower to keep them from getting over the wall somewhere if there are enough of them. I expect to see Lieutenant Hahskyn shortly. In the meantime, please stay inside. And blow out as many of your candles as you can. I don't know for certain that there aren't marksmen already out there on the grounds somewhere, and I'd rather not give them lighted windows to silhouette targets for them.”

Thunder crashed louder, rapidly approaching from the west, and the first, sudden sheets of a Charisian deluge pummeled down from the heavens. Charlz Abylyn heard someone swearing in disgust, but he himself breathed a quiet prayer of thanks as he recognized the divine intervention on their behalf. The rain was bound to soak the priming of the Guard's rifles, and as far as he was concerned, that was one of the best things that could possibly happen.

“Thank Langhorne for the rain!” someone else bawled into his ear over the sudden tumult of rain and wind, as if to confirm his own thoughts. He turned his head and saw Nailys Lahrak.

“Amen,” Abylyn said fervently, then leaned closer to the other man. “Your runner said you took the camp?”

“A clean sweep.” Lahrak showed his teeth. “We've confirmed the body count. And as nearly as I can tell, only three or four of them managed to get inside on the other two gates.”

“And how many did
we
lose?”

“I'm not sure,” Lahrak replied, his voice harsher. “Not counting yours here, more than twenty, less than forty, I think. I'll know better in a few minutes; we're still coming in and getting sorted out.”

Their eyes met. They'd anticipated losses of their own, and they and their men were prepared to pay whatever price was demanded of them, but losses that heavy this early were more than merely painful.

“Mytrahn will be here with his people shortly,” Abylyn said.

“I don't like waiting, giving them time to get set in there,” Lahrak objected.

“I don't, either, but we've already lost almost as many men as they have, and if we're going to have to go over the wall, I want enough people on our side to be damned sure we can spread
them
too thin to stop us when we do. And we're going to need all the swords we can get once we get to the other side, too.”

Lahrak's expression was sour, but he grunted in unhappy agreement.

“In that case,” he said, “let's get our people reorganized while we wait.”

Edwyrd Seahamper completed his nose count as torrents of rain lashed the convent's grounds. He'd sent a runner to the abbess, warning her to take the sisters to the chapel and keep them there, out of harm's way. He wished he could have provided them with better security than that, but he was spread far too thinly to even think about that.

“I make it thirteen, plus the two wounded,” he said to Bryndyn Tyrnyr, who'd returned from the main gate.

“Plus the ten with the Lieutenant,” Tyrnyr agreed.

“So, twenty-six.”

“Twenty-five,” Tyrnyr corrected flatly. “Zhorj isn't going to make it. He's coughing up blood.”

Seahamper swore softly. Sergeant Zhorj Symyn was the Charisian-born guardsman who had commanded the picket on the west gate. He'd not only held it long enough to get his surviving men back to the guesthouse, but he'd managed to bring all of the picket's rifles, as well. Yet Seahamper couldn't afford to dwell on the knowledge that another good man was dying. He couldn't even take the time to go tell a man who'd become his friend goodbye.

“Twenty-five, then,” he said harshly, and the two guardsmen looked at one another grim-faced. That was less than a third of their original strength, and they had no illusions about what had happened to any of their unaccounted for fellows.

“I think we need the Lieutenant here,” Seahamper said. “Why don't you go and—”

“Why don't you stay right where you are, instead?” another voice interrupted, and Seahamper looked up to see Lieutenant Hahskyn. Rain streamed from the rim of the officer's helmet, and the other guardsmen with him were equally sodden-looking, but Seahamper had never seen a more welcome sight.

“Good to see you, Lieutenant,” he said with commendable understatement, and Hahskyn smiled grimly.

“Sergeant, if you think
anything
about this situation is ‘good,' you and I need to have a little talk,” the Charisian said.

“I meant
relatively
good, Sir.”

“Well, that's a relief.” Hahskyn's smile broadened fleetingly, then vanished. “The Empress?”

“Inside.” Seahamper twitched his head at the small guesthouse.

“She knows what's happening?”

“As well as any of us do, Sir.”

“It isn't good, Edwyrd,” Hahskyn said more quietly, his voice barely carrying to the sergeant through the sound of wind and rain. “I don't think they've given up just because we managed to bloody their nose at the gates. I think they're reorganizing, maybe rethinking, but they aren't going to just turn around and walk away. Not unless we managed to hurt them one hell of a lot worse than I think we did.”

“No, Sir,” Seahamper agreed harshly.

“I thought about sending a runner to Captain Hywyt,” the lieutenant said even more quietly. His eyes met Seahamper's. “I didn't.”

Seahamper nodded, his face bleak. The odds would have been against any runner's making it through the attackers who'd undoubtedly surrounded the convent. And even if someone could have accomplished that miracle, whatever was going to happen would undoubtedly be over and done before he could cover the eleven miles to the galleon anchored in the small port which served Saint Agtha's and bring back a relief force.

“All right, Sergeant.” Hahskyn inhaled deeply. “I'll take charge of the outer perimeter. You've got the inner perimeter. And watch yourself, Edwyrd. If it all comes apart on us, you're the one she's going to be looking for, the one she's most likely to listen to.”

He looked deep into Seahamper's eyes, his own eyes bleak.

“Keep her alive,” he said. “Whatever you have to do, keep her alive.”

“It's a good thing you insisted on more men, My Lord,” Mytrahn Daivys told Bishop Mylz grimly.

The bishop and Father Ahlvyn had arrived some minutes after Daivys himself, and they were as thoroughly soaked as any of the others. The bishop's teeth chattered lightly as the rain and wind chilled him, and his expression was strained as the gateway lanterns and occasional lightning flashes showed him the bodies of Abylyn's dead sprawled motionless in the rain. The sight chilled his heart far more thoroughly than the storm chilled his flesh.

Stop that, Mylz!
he told himself.
You knew what it was going to be like before you ever set your hand to it. And no one promised you that doing God's will would be easy or cheap
.

“What happens next?” he asked out loud.

“Nailys and Charlz are about done sorting out their men,” Daivys told him. “They're down to only about seventy between them, but my people are still intact. We'll take the lead.”

Mylz Halcom nodded, but his face was tight. If Lahrak and Abylyn had only seventy men left, then their attack teams had already lost well over half their original strength.

“All right, Mytrahn,” he agreed. “God knows you're better equipped to manage this sort of thing than I am.”

“You just concentrate on putting in a good word with Him for us, My Lord,” Daivys said. “We'll take care of the rest.”

Ahndrai Hahskyn had positioned his remaining men as carefully as he could.

He couldn't disperse them too widely, especially not in the middle of a booming thunderstorm where visibility was measured in feet, not yards. Unit cohesion could vanish effortlessly under those conditions, and the one thing he was certain of was that he and his men were badly outnumbered. He couldn't afford to let this disintegrate into an uncoordinated melee. Nor could he count on their rifles and pistols to fire in the midst of such a downpour, even assuming they'd been able to see well enough to pick out targets. It was going to come down to cold steel, and that meant making his stand around the guesthouse itself.

He'd considered moving the empress into the main chapter house, but he'd quickly rejected that possibility. First, the chapter house's apparent defensibility was deceptive. Its walls were relatively thin, it had too many windows and doors, its internal architecture would have divided his guardsmen into isolated detachments, and he didn't have enough men to cover all the potential access points. Second, he was positive the empress would have refused to endanger the nuns. If not for the first set of considerations, he would have been quite prepared to haul Sharleyan bodily to the safest possible place and take his chances on her displeasure in the event of his own survival. Unfortunately, the guesthouse
was
the safest possible place . . . such as it was, and what there was of it.

On the limited plus side, the guesthouse stood well away from any of the convent's walls. Anyone who wanted to attack it would have to cross the manicured grounds, which would provide them with no concealment or cover, although the poor visibility tended to cancel that particular defensive advantage.