Lady Knight (20 page)

When they reached the crossing with the road to Fort Giantkiller, they halted. The Giantkiller road was a mess of churned and rutted earth bearing the marks of hooves and wagon wheels. The enemy had gone that way.

“Company Eight,” Wyldon called. The captain rode forward as Wyldon added, “Couriers - Northwatch, Mastiff, new Giantkiller and Steadfast.” Once the men surrounded him, Wyldon handed out orders. “Company Eight, follow the Giantkiller road. These tracks are nearly a day old. I see a lot of riders, but the wagons will slow them down. Maybe you’ll catch up. Pursue as far as you can, but be sensible. Return here to report. Couriers, take word to the district forts and Northwatch. Make sure right now you have your protective charms with you.” Each courier reached into his belt-purse. Only when they all showed him their loops of cord with dangling charms did Wyldon nod. “Dismissed.”

The captain waved his flag-bearer up. They turned on to the Giantkiller road, mages, couriers and a hundred mounted troopers in their wake.

Wyldon beckoned to Kel. “It’s your command,” he said. “Lead us in.”

Kel set Hoshi forward, bound for the walled heights. Stormwings circled like carrion birds through the ropes of smoke that rose from inside Haven. Wyldon and his troops followed Kel as she rode to the rough bridge the enemy had thrown across the Greenwoods River. It seemed that the watch commander had used the mage-blasts to blow up the original bridge, for all the good it did. She saw bodies around the bridge’s ruins, Scanran by their clothes. The sour breath of smoke and the red stink of blood drifted down the high ground from the walls.

Kel guided Hoshi up the inclined road, around the bodies of the dead, Scanrans and defenders alike. The mare snorted at the stench and rolled her eyes at the corpses, but pressed on. “Good girl,” whispered Kel, patting her neck. “Good girl.”

Looking at the walls, she saw pale chips cut from darker wood, the marks of killing devices. From the look of things, three had climbed the east wall. One hung partway over the top, snared in one of the nets Kel had ordered made for the purpose. Someone must have cracked the dome while it was entangled, letting out the spirit that made it work.

Kel halted at the ruins of the gate. Here the Scanrans had used a battering ram. One leaf of the gate dangled half off its hinges, the logs dangling from the crosspieces. Two logs were knocked from the other half of the gate. Around the gaping entry lay the dead.

Haven was in ruins. Every building showed signs of attack. Doors were gone or hung crazily from their hinges. Shutters had been chopped off the windows. Smoke streaked every opening: the enemy had tried to burn the place, but Numair’s fire-protections had saved the walls, if not the contents of the buildings. The only place he had not protected, because the traces of his spells would interfere with the healers’ magics, was the infirmary. It was a burnt-out ruin, a mass of charred, smoky wood. If she felt anything at the sight Kel would have prayed for anyone trapped there, but all her emotions were bound into a small, tight knot inside her heart. If she prayed, the knot, and her heart, would go to pieces.

On the ground lay a few dead, sword- or axe-cut animals. Most of them were dogs; some were cats. All had bloody muzzles and, in the case of the cats, bloody claws. Changed by Daine to help the refugees, they’d fought alongside their humans, and they’d paid for it. Some of the other animals lay in heaps: chickens, geese and ducks - animals that hated to be cooped up. They’d been trampled.

Kel dismounted. She fumbled the reins as she looped them around Hoshi’s saddle horn. With Jump at her heels, she climbed one of the stairs to the ramparts.

“Dismount and fan out,” she heard Wyldon order. “Let’s have the wounded and the dead laid out here by the gate. Search every building.”

Kel stopped, halfway up the stair. On one side of the hole where the gate had stood was a maroon and brown pile. There was Oluf s cold, dead face, his eyes wide, appearing to stare right at her. He lay on a stack of dead men, all in army maroon. A massive sword-cut opened his chest, telling Kel how he’d died.

I never liked him, she thought icily, distantly. He beat the convicts until I stopped him. But he fought for us. He fought for us, and they threw him on a pile like trash.

She finished the climb to the ramparts. The sparrows met her there, perching on the sharpened logs. Dead soldiers and civilians were on the walkway. Many sprouted arrows as porcupines sprouted quills. She and Jump walked the entire circuit of the camp over the walkway they’d fixed after Numair had dropped logs on it. She could name everyone she saw. This fellow mashed all of the food on his plate into a single mound, then ate it as if it might be snatched away. His throat was slashed. This woman often sang counterpoint with Tobe, her mellow alto voice intertwined with his pure soprano. She had been cut in two at the waist, probably by the ensnared killing device beside her. It had got one dagger-hand free of the net that trapped it, enough to kill the singer before someone opened its head with a pickaxe. This man had been handsome before summer’s heat bloated his dead face. He’d been much sought by the girls, but Kel had seen him with a lover, a man, hiding in the shadows one night as she walked the camp. He at least had been shot, not cut up by killing devices. Others on the walkway had lost their heads, or an arm, or both legs. Blood had dried everywhere on the wall and the planks under Kel’s feet. Stormwings had left their unmistakable mark on all of the dead, here and on the ground. The stench coated her tongue, throat and nostrils.

She finished her circuit of the camp and descended the stairs near headquarters and the ruin of the infirmary. She had counted over fifty dead on the walkway, soldiers and civilians, shot or cut apart by killing devices. The pile on which Oluf lay looked to hold about ten bodies. Sixty or so dead, most of them soldiers, out of nearly five hundred people, Kel figured. Where were the rest?

Sunlight on steel lanced into her eyes. A Stormwing glided down until she landed in front of Kel.

She locked her hands behind her back. The last thing she wanted right now was a conversation with a Stormwing. This one had bronze skin a little darker than that of the Yamanis, with similar, wide, almond-shaped brown eyes. Had she been human she might have been attractive in a cold way, Kel thought, noting the creature’s cap of glossy black hair, roughly cropped around a small, well-shaped head. Her mouth was plush, her face marked by high cheekbones and a small, rounded chin. It was the rest of her that Kel loathed, the steel and human flesh streaked with reeking fluids.

“We are sorry about this, a little,” she said, spreading metal wings to indicate the ruin around them. “We were not certain if the rules applied, this being a refugee camp, not exactly a fort.” The creature frowned. “But then the enemy came with their weapons, and their giant metal insects, and their shamans. Your people included soldiers, they carried weapons…” The Stormwing shrugged. “We did what we live to do. It is the first proper feast that we’ve had in this place, without you to run us off.”

A dagger of something white hot pierced the ice that had enfolded Kel since she had woken that morning. She took a step towards the creature. “And it meant nothing to you, that my people took up weapons, and fought for their lives, and their families, and their home, when otherwise they’d never fight at all.”

The Stormwing shrugged again, light rippling over her feathers. “I said we were sorry. If only you were not stingy, perhaps we might have held off. Practically everyone else lets us have the enemy dead, at least.”

“The enemy dead,” Kel repeated with numb lips. “They let you have the enemy dead.”

“Who cares about the enemy?” the Stormwing wanted to know. “Probably just you.” She smiled cruelly. “We are done now. You may bury what is left.” She took off, half blinding onlookers with the sunlight shed by her wings.

While Kel had circled Haven on the walls, Lord Wyldon’s men had searched the buildings for survivors. No one had entered headquarters yet. Jump whined as he and Kel approached the building.

“I must,” she told him gently. The sparrows fluttered down, some landing on the headquarters hitching posts, some on Kel. “Where are the others?” she asked the birds. “Merric and his soldiers? Find them. They would have been on patrol.”

Nari, dinging to Kel’s tunic, peeped. The birds took to the air.

Kel walked into headquarters. She found Zamiel fallen on top of his desk in the clerks’ office, a pile of reports under him, a sword in one hand. He was the worst swordsman I’ve ever seen, Kel thought, her heart locked in ice. And he made sure Tobe got out, but he didn’t run himself.

She went into her bedroom and dragged her blanket from her cot. With it she covered Zamiel, tucking it gently around his body. At least the Stormwings hadn’t found him.

Except for Zamiel, the clerks’ office was empty. The room where the staff held their nightly meetings was deserted. She climbed the stairs to inspect the guest quarters and storeroom. They were empty, the storeroom cleared of supplies. She found no other bodies. Where were Zamiel’s apprentice Gragur, Hildurra and the other clerks? Where were the children who carried their messages in the camp?

She went out the back, to be confronted by the smoking heap of the infirmary. One of the Goatstrack midwives Neal had once called a “crabby old besom” lay across what had been the door. Three dead Scanrans were sprawled in front of her with no wounds but those inflicted by Stormwings after their hearts had ceased to beat. Kel had known the woman had a magical Gift for healing, but not that she could wield death as well. She was cut nearly in two from behind. Apparently a killing device had ended her life, not another human.

Neal leaned against headquarters, weeping silently. Kel gave him a handkerchief. Shock still gripped her.

From the infirmary she walked the camp, building by building, eyes and nose burning from smoke. Inside, the barracks floors and outer walls were only scorched, tribute to the power in Numair’s spells against fire. The refugees’ belongings lay in black and ashy heaps.

She found one more lifeless killing device behind the latrine. It lay wrapped in the metal and hemp net the defenders had tossed over it. Its arms were free: Kel wondered how anyone had got close enough to crack the dome. She crouched to inspect it and found that a sparrow had wedged himself into one of the device’s eyepits. On that side the thing’s dome was smashed in to free the captive spirit. Kel guessed the weapon had been an axe. The impact had crushed the bird. He’d given his life so a human could attack the device on its blind side and kill it.

Kel gently extracted the sparrow from its metal tomb. “Daine was right,” she whispered softly. “We do you no favours, teaching you to think like us.” She wrapped the bird in one of her spare handkerchiefs and used her dagger to dig a grave for him.

Wyldon, his men, Sergeant Connac and his squad, and Owen found the dead. They placed them in double lines on one side of the ruined gate. Kel tried not to watch. Some of the dead were in pieces when the grim-faced soldiers laid them out. She would have to look at them soon, but not now, surely, when some had to be reassembled like puzzle toys. Despite the men’s care, a head or foot sometimes thumped the ground as those lowering a corpse slipped. Coming out from behind the looted storage sheds, Kel noticed that someone had found the head of the carpenter Snalren, and was placing it in its proper position atop his neck. Snalren had once told Kel that Dom had informed him she was a disaster as a carpenter, so she need not work those chores. Kel shuddered. Was this how she would always remember him, as a corpse in pieces?

Wyldon came up beside Kel and laid a hand on Kel’s shoulder. “You couldn’t have known that this was coming, Mindelan. It’s not your fault.”

“Yessir,” Kel replied softly. She wasn’t going to point out that in her shoes, he would feel it was his fault. He’d know that already.

Sparrows darted over the wall, cheeping urgently. They swirled around Kel. Wyldon frowned. “Mindelan, what is the problem with those birds?” he demanded.

Kel looked at the sparrows. Since Daine’s work with the birds her original flock had doubled. The new additions were far more upset over their news than the veterans, Nari, Arrow, Quicksilver and the rest. The newer birds swooped and fluttered, chattering in panic.

“Nari, calm them down,” Kel ordered. “I can’t think with all this noise.”

The queen of the sparrow flock peeped once, loudly. The frightened birds landed on the backs and heads of the camp dogs that had returned to Haven, or on the shoulders of the nearest men. Wyldon’s captain jumped as five selected him as a perch, two on each shoulder, one clinging to his beard.

“Nari, Arrow, report,” Kel told the sparrows who had settled on Wyldon. The two immediately took to the air and flew in a small, tight circle, the sign for “friend”. Then both dropped to the ground and hopped around, one wing dragging. “Hurt friend,” Kel interpreted. Nari and Arrow rose in the air and came together in mock battle, tiny claws extended. Arrow fled, while Nari fluttered, dipped and swerved around Kel. “Some of our people are alive, but hurt,” Kel told Wyldon. “They’re due south of us. The birds will lead.”

“Captain Toilet, take five squads,” ordered Wyldon. “Proceed with caution. I believe whatever took place here, we missed it, but there’s no point in being careless.”

“Very good, milord,” the captain replied. He glanced at his shoulders. “Uh…”

Kel raised her hands. The birds who had chosen the captain as a perch took off. Toilet saluted Wyldon properly, then turned and bellowed five sergeants’ names.

Kel walked down the rows of the dead. Here was Uttana, who spun the finest thread in camp. If Kel kept her eyes on Corporal Grembalt’s face, and didn’t look at the ruined flesh below his belt, he appeared to be sleeping. A redheaded toddler had been struck by a crossbow bolt. Ilbart won all the horse races against his fellow soldiers. Oswel brewed illegal mead and started fights when drunk. Waehild, a hedgewitch, told off-colour jokes to see if Kel would blush. Sergeant Kortus was slashed crosswise from collarbone to hip. Here lay Aufrec, another sergeant. Neum won any wrestling match, against his fellow soldiers or against civilians who fancied that all that marching meant that soldiers had weak arms.