The Long War 01 - The Black Guard (74 page)

Magnus was curious but also eager to experience freedom. If they had allies and a plan, that could only be a good thing.

‘We need to move,’ said Brom, as he slid the steel grating aside.

‘Are you calm?’ asked Magnus.

‘No, not at all… but we still need to move.’

Magnus wasn’t going to patronize the young lord. He had got himself to Ro Canarn and sneaked into the city with only a Kirin scumbag for company. If he could do that, thought Magnus, maybe he wasn’t just a Ro lord playing at being a brigand.

‘Okay, so let’s move,’ he said, as Brom began to climb into the slit trench. ‘And your allies had better be something special.’

They climbed down into a narrow stone tunnel just large enough to accommodate Magnus’s huge shoulders. It was almost pitch-black, with only infrequent shards of moonlight penetrating from above, and Magnus was glad his friend knew the passages around his father’s keep. The trench had numerous side tunnels which snaked round the castle, but they were heading now down a shallow incline that, long ago, had been part of the sewer system of Canarn. Duke Hector had not used the dungeon for many years and the trenches were rotten and grown over with moss.

Brom stopped after a few minutes of uncomfortable crawling and poked his head up out of the trench. Then he ducked back down and waved Magnus forward to join him. As the Ranen priest moved a part of the steel grating out of the way, he straightened and joined Brom in looking out on to Ro Canarn. There was a rope secured to the grating where Brom had climbed up from below, and the town square could be seen between buildings. Magnus quickly gained his bearings and saw the drawbridge to his right and the keep beyond. They had come out on the same level as the courtyard, and low cooking fires were just visible through another stone tunnel.

Brom tugged on the rope and signalled to someone below. Magnus couldn’t see the face of the man standing at the base of the wall, but he was tall and cloaked.

‘Who’s your friend?’ he asked Brom in a whisper.

‘His name’s Tyr Nanon. I’ll introduce you to him if we don’t get killed,’ the Ro lord replied, with gallows humour.

‘What’s the Kirin’s plan?’ Magnus was still whispering and he could see no army to come to their aid.

‘It involves explosions and surprise.’ Brom turned to look at Magnus. ‘Who do we need to worry about?’

‘Rillion and Nathan are the senior knights and Pevain’s in the town somewhere,’ Magnus responded, secretly longing for a chance to kill the mercenary knight.

‘Okay, let’s get into position.’ Brom had a look of extreme concentration on his face and Magnus realized his friend had been waiting for this opportunity for a while.

They climbed out of the slit trench and entered the semicircular drainage tunnel that led to the inner keep and past the drawbridge. On the other side, Magnus gasped as he saw dark shapes moving like shadows through the streets of Ro Canarn. All the figures were tall and they moved with an inhuman grace as they made their way towards the drawbridge. Magnus saw three mercenaries hanging around by the entrance to the keep and all three died silently, pulled into the darkness and despatched by the rapidly moving figures below. Some of Brom’s mysterious allies were carrying sacks slung across their backs, and all wielded large, leaf-shaped blades.

‘Brom, did you enlist a company of ghosts to help you?’ he asked, as he crawled after the young lord towards the cooking fires in the courtyard.

‘They’re friends of Rham Jas… and me as well, I suppose. Risen men, Dokkalfar, forest-dwellers – I’ve heard a few names for them over the last couple of days.’

Magnus was struck by this strange news, but asked pragmatically, ‘Are they trustworthy and honourable?’

‘I believe so. They’ve been fairly straight with us so far,’ answered Brom over his shoulder. ‘And Rham Jas trusts them.’

‘Ha, the trust of a filthy Kirin, I bet that is hard-won,’ Magnus said with as much humour as he could in the circumstances.

Rham Jas was his friend, but their relationship had been based on mutual teasing and the occasional fist fight. Brom knew this and snorted quietly with amusement as he reached the end of the tunnel.

In silence, the two of them crawled out of the semicircular drainage tunnel and crouched in darkness in the courtyard. Opposite, Magnus could see the tower that led to the great hall and the wooden stairs that snaked their way upwards from the dusty inner keep. Around the edges of the courtyard sat groups of bound soldiers – not true fighting men, but knights of the Red nonetheless, each carrying a longsword and wearing a steel breastplate. Magnus counted some fifty men and wondered how many of the strange forest-dwellers had come to help. The drawbridge was close by, maybe ten paces from their position, and he could just about make out dark figures forming at the top on the wooden ramp.

Brom gave a signal that the nearest figure registered, before moving silently to the winch that controlled the drawbridge. The plan was clearly to cut off reinforcements to the keep while they dealt with the smaller group of knights within, without interference from Pevain’s bastards.

The risen man didn’t raise the wooden ramp right away, but appeared to be waiting for something. Magnus thought that something must be the small figure moving across the battlements high above – whom the longbow in his hands identified as Rham Jas.

‘Stay against the wall and be ready to duck back into the tunnel,’ Brom said in a whisper.

Some of the shadowy figures massing just inside the keep moved slowly forward, taking care to stay out of the light and remain hidden. They held small sacks and, once they had come as close as they dared, they threw them towards the campfires.

Before the sacks landed the risen men had darted swiftly back and Magnus saw confusion on the faces of the Red knights as the parcels flew sedately past them and exploded when they touched the flames. Magnus had seen pitch and Karesian fire used in a similar way before, but never with such explosive results.

Sound, fire and light erupted in the dark courtyard as one after another the campfires exploded and men were torn to pieces. The knights reacted with nothing but panic and half of them had died within moments. In less than a second, the dark, silent keep had exploded into flames. Brom drew his sword as the signal to raise the drawbridge. As it creaked into life, a second, louder explosion could be heard from the town. Magnus glanced back out of the keep and could just see the edges of the marshal’s office burning violently by the docks. Lanry and the people of Canarn had evidently decided that they didn’t want Pevain around any more.

Noise and fire had burst upon the quiet of the evening, and Brom was framed in light as he shouted a defiant challenge at the panicked knights in the courtyard. The risen men were a step behind him and Magnus grinned broadly as he joined them.

The sacks had exploded violently but the fires had quickly burned down. Brom was shouting as he hacked two knights to death with swipes of his longsword. Magnus disliked using a sword, but he was still more than the bound men could handle as he cleaved his way through their ranks, barely taking time to parry as their wild attacks were blunted by a swift death.

It was a bizarre sensation to be free and fighting after so many days of captivity and the Ranen priest was enjoying the feeling of men falling under his immense strength. The bound knights were poor enough opponents and Magnus could allow himself a glance across the courtyard to see the risen men dealing out death from the shadows. There looked to be around twenty of them and they whirled their leaf-blades with grace as they killed the startled men of Ro. The Ranen priest was taken aback by the creatures’ otherworldly might and momentarily wondered why such people would ally themselves with an idiot like Rham Jas.

Magnus deflected a clumsy blow from a badly burned knight and decapitated him with a powerful backward swing of his sword. Nearby, Brom was holding a leaf-blade in his hand as he furiously killed any bound men who came across his path.

‘Is this the best they’ve got?’ he shouted across the melee.

As if in answer to the question, Magnus heard a shout from the wooden stairs that led to the keep and, looking up, saw more knights of the Red emerging from the great hall of Canarn. The churchmen that appeared were not bound men but true knights of the Red and dangerous foes. Magnus recognized them as some of Sir Nathan’s company and guessed that Rillion’s adjutant would be close behind his men.

High above, Magnus saw Rham Jas draw a flaming arrow and shoot across the keep towards the stairs. The arrow had something attached to it which exploded on impact, blowing several of the knights backwards, their broken bodies in flames. Several more fled back inside and Magnus experienced a moment of respect for the Kirin and his planning abilities. Raising the drawbridge had cut off the mercenaries and a well-aimed explosive arrow or two would cut off the true fighting men, leaving Brom and Magnus to finish off those in the courtyard. The old Brown cleric in the town must have killed a huge number of the mercenaries when he detonated the marshal’s office.

As men died around them, it occurred to Magnus that if they were to kill the senior knights and retake Canarn, someone would have to fight Rillion – and he was not keen to see Brom take a foolish step towards his own death by challenging the knight commander. Hacking apart bound men was one thing, defeating a company of true fighting men was something else. Rham Jas was a killer without equal, Brom was a skilled swordsman and, from what he’d seen, the forest-dwellers were formidable, but Magnus doubted they had the strength to win against overwhelming odds. Also, it would be only a matter of time before Pevain found a way of lowering the drawbridge, or a path through the secret tunnels, and joined them in the courtyard with his men – although judging by the explosions still sounding in the town below, Brother Lanry was proving more than a minor inconvenience to the mercenaries.

He looked up and wiped blood from his face. Around him were slaughtered bound men and, at a quick glance, he could see none dead on his own side. Brom was conserving his energy and expending minimum effort in despatching the frantic knights, while high above Rham Jas was fighting several men who had emerged from the guard towers. The Kirin was every bit as dangerous as Magnus remembered, and his katana dealt out death with chilling precision, quickly clearing the battlements of bound men.

Magnus paused. The number of knights remaining was negligible and they were cowering and dropping to their knees in surrender.

‘Kill them all,’ shouted Brom coldly, and Magnus turned sharply to face his friend.

‘No,’ he responded, more loudly than the young lord. ‘They’ve surrendered.’

Brom was doubled over and sweat was streaming down his face. He kicked a pleading knight out of the way and quickly sheathed his sword, before straightening up and breathing deeply.

‘Your priest is wise, Bromvy,’ said one of the risen men, a being shorter than his fellows but still tall and dangerous-looking. The risen men assembled the remaining knights into a group and Magnus could see that no more than six had survived the initial assault.

‘Yes,’ was all Magnus said in response before he turned back to the young lord of Canarn. ‘Brom, you need to calm down. The plan is working thus far. What’s next?’

‘Magnus, this is Tyr Nanon,’ Brom said quietly by way of introduction. The risen man’s skin was grey and his ears were pointed, but Magnus was a Fjorlander and less startled by non-humans than the Ro, having grown up around trolls.

‘Well met, Ranen man,’ Nanon said, with a strange, thin expression which somehow resembled a smile.

Around them, the courtyard ran with blood – less than had been spilt a month before, when the Red knights first took the keep – but still a grisly scene of slaughter. The risen men had taken cover by a line of barrels at the base of the wooden stairs and Rham Jas was making his way across the battlements towards the great hall.

‘The other Dokkalfar are in the secret tunnels. I gave them directions to get to the great hall,’ said Brom, as he moved towards the line of barrels.

They all ducked down at the base of the stairs and paused. Rham Jas had disappeared again and the fire from his explosive arrows was just dying down.

‘How many more are there?’ Magnus asked, cleaning blood from Castus’s longsword.

‘Another twenty. They’ll have started clearing the tunnels of knights by now,’ his friend replied. ‘Let’s go and see Rillion, shall we?’ Brom had calmed himself down, but Magnus decided to remain at his side for as long as he could.

More explosions sounded beyond the keep and Magnus guessed that Brother Lanry and the common folk of Canarn were taking back their town with Dokkalfar explosives. The Ranen priest smiled at the thought of Pevain’s bastards being killed, but he regretted being unable to fight Pevain himself, and he was resigned to the idea that he would have to sift through the rubble to find Skeld.

Brom took the lead, with Magnus and Nanon close behind, and ascended the wooden stairs towards his father’s great hall. The bodies of dead knights were strewn across the first landing and they had to step over bloodied chunks of flesh to reach the main door. The king’s men who had been stationed at the door had gone north with the army and Nathan had not posted another guard – not that another man or two would have made any difference.

Brom reached the door and crouched down at the side with his hand on the handle. He motioned for Magnus and Nanon to join him, and the other risen men gracefully adopted combat poses either side of the landing. Brom looked behind him and Magnus saw Rham Jas was in position behind a turret, with another flaming arrow drawn on his bowstring. He had taken up a position where he would be able to fire down through the doorway and, having confirmed that the Kirin was ready, Brom flung the door open.

Instantly a flaming arrow flew past them. Shot with skill, it flew through the door, just under the frame, and travelled a short way into the hall before it thudded into the carpeted floor and exploded violently.