28

THE SIEGE OF BARNASHUM

There were three of them this time. Stealthy as midnight mist in the forest. Ravenous.

Mordafey could see Goreth and Jorn growing agitated as they approached Baldridge Hill in the southern Cragavar. They were uncomfortable with this revelation—that their older brother had conspired with others behind their backs. “Others will fear Jorn and Goreth,” he assured them. “Others do what three brothers say. But three brothers take the reward.”

“Only three brothers?” Goreth grumbled. “Where’s Same Brother?”

Without breaking his stride, Mordafey uprooted a pricklebush and thrashed it against the trees until the plump young heads of unborn flowers flew off. “Forget Jordam.” It had always unsettled him, this mysterious closeness between the twins. With Jordam falling away just when he needed him most, Mordafey was tempted to put Goreth on a leash. “If Jordam comes back, three brothers punish him.”

This set Jorn to drooling and laughing. Departing the Core unchallenged, Mordafey had chased his youngest brother down, enraged at how he had nearly turned all of House Cent Regus against them. He wanted to kill him, but he stopped at chewing off one of his ears. Jorn would not turn against him, not with the Abascar slaughter ahead of them. And Mordafey needed the wretched creature’s speed and savagery. “Jorn will do what Mordafey says,” Mordafey had declared, “or next time Mordafey bites off his head.”

As they moved down a dry riverbed, the brothers saw Mordafey’s conspirators skulking among the Cragavar trees. Their isolated, predatory existence had sharpened their edges, curdled any sense of kinship. So they spread apart, suspicious, baring their fangs and flaunting their weapons. Some crept along the ground, some leapt through the treetops. Soon it seemed the trees themselves were scratching and flexing, restless.

Slipping away from his brothers throughout the autumn, Mordafey had sought these hunters. Their instinctive enmity began to slacken as he baited them with the white giant’s promises. If they proved their power against the Abascar survivors and salvaged treasure from the Cliffs of Barnashum, the giant would reward them with new conquests, richer spoils. They’d overpower Skell Wra himself, break his grip on the Essence.

Inspired by such a prospect, the hunters surged into action. But in their simple bloodlust, they failed to consider what would happen after they tore the tyrant from his throne. There, Mordafey saw his advantage. He did not like the white giant or trust him. He did not like waiting to learn what that next conquest would be. But if he could seize enough power to take the chieftain’s throne for himself, he would wield strength that would bend and break the giant’s influence.

Mordafey leapt the riverbank to a rocky jag that jutted from Baldridge Hill like a platform. He barked to silence the others, and the myriad congealed, a clot of craven appetite attentive in the dusk.

He enjoyed their amazement as they looked around, for according to his promise he had mustered a swarm. Reptile-skinned brutes. Shaggy ram-horned men with shoulders strong as bulls. Wildcat creatures with hissing females and strutting males. Small, quick birdmen with talons and eyes like black marbles. Thick-skinned dwarves with long, curved tusks and heavy hooves like tree trunks. Yet he found himself scanning the crowd for Jordam’s face. It was an itch he could not scratch, this sense that Jordam had found something more important than the brothers, been drawn to something more powerful than Essence. He began to feel that Jordam was watching him, listening from the shadows as he detailed the steps of his plan to Goreth and Jorn.

As if they were guarding a king, Goreth and Jorn stood on either side of Mordafey, snarling and beating at their chests, boasting in their priority and privilege.

But the swarm did not cower. “Where is the giant?” one wolfman sneered. “Show us this giant.” Mordafey had gained their attention with a prize of distinction—the skull of a great Bel Amican leader, Deuneroi. But all his overtures involved a mysterious stranger who would lead them to power and reward.

As if in answer, a whirlwind with a walking stick appeared on the barren scalp of Baldridge Hill. A towering specter with bone-white hands and lidless eyes, he swept down the hill to the promontory and stood beside Mordafey. Goreth and Jorn cowered and crawled out of reach, eying the walking stick warily.

Translating from the stranger’s Common speech, Mordafey reassured the swarm of those promises.

“Skell Wra will hear of us and be afraid,” Mordafey declared. “If he tries to break us, we are stronger. We strike back.”

“Who will be chieftain then?” came a snarl from the swarm.

“There will be no chieftain,” Mordafey lied. “We break the throne. Everyone’s the chieftain now. Essence for all.”

Pride swelled within him as they wagged their heads and flung themselves about like string-bound puppets. They wanted to be unleashed at once.

While cold evening wind swept the ground and rattled the bushes between the forest and the Cliffs of Barnashum, Mordafey brought the unruly army to the Cragavar’s edge.

He had observed how the Abascar harvesters withdrew, ascending ledges to the third tier of cliffs with their harvest carts and vanishing into concealed tunnels like rabbits into burrows. Soldiers patrolled the ledges and ensured that the openings were safely hidden. More soldiers patrolled the threshold through the night, watchful for any approach. These patterns were essential to his plan of attack.

The strike would begin with the combatants lurking in the brush-tangles and the trees at the base of the cliffs. When Jorn’s company reached its position above Barnashum, Mordafey would unleash a wave of swift runners through the brush. They would attack the unsuspecting harvesters. The slaughter would draw Abascar’s soldiers out from the caves.

Any Cent Regus onrush would send the cave-dwellers scrambling for retreat and attempting to wall themselves in. So Mordafey’s plan depended on corrupting the caves, giving those inside no choice but to flee into the open and those outside nowhere to go. So far, Cal-raven’s people had cleverly concealed the tunnels that let them move in and out of that great stone plateau.

But Mordafey’s scouts had learned that no guards were watching the unknown territories to the southeast, beyond Barnashum. If the Cent Regus moved south, climbed to the top of Barnashum, then descended from the heights, they would have their chance to penetrate Abascar’s labyrinth.

Jorn, Mordafey explained, would lead the best Cent Regus climbers. They would scale the cliffs in the near dark and creep back along the top, carrying with them a sting to bring Abascar’s second ruin.

Mordafey’s listeners, disgruntled and doubtful, had barked at him in challenge. How could a small pack of hunters ruin the caves? Mordafey directed their attention to the boughs above the heads of the swarm. Bundled among the branches there, like enormous husk-shelled fruits, were bags made of skin, tightly drawn, and pods made of stretched, seamless bushpig stomachs. “When Abascar’s soldiers run out from hiding,” he explained, “climbers drop down to secret gates. Throw the curses inside.”

“What curses?” the challengers chorused.

“Bags came from the white giant,” Mordafey told them. “Firestingers inside.” He began to unbind one of the bags, and the hunters cried out in dismay. “Wait,” he smiled, and he drew out a fragile glass sphere. The long-tailed bees inside drove themselves against the glass in a fury. “See?” He explained that the clouds of poisonous bees were raging, ready to sting whatever they touched. Firestingers liked caves, nooks, and crannies, and they would drive out anything else that occupied a space. The cave-dwellers would panic. Those not blinded by the quick stings would flee.

“Those who run will breathe this in,” he laughed, drawing out another glass sphere that contained a swirling cloud. “Poison to cloud the tunnels. The white giant’s poison. They fall right into us.”

He reminded Jorn and the climbers that they could not linger to watch the people suffer once they had cast the curses in through the gates. Run away, he insisted. Fast. Hard. Or risk the firestingers’ fury and breathe the poison. The people would spill out onto the ridges and ledges, disoriented and clumsy. Then the third wave of attackers would close in from the forest.

But the prizes, the Cent Regus wanted to know. When would they claim the prizes?

“Cal-raven and his people won’t go back inside,” Mordafey reminded them. “Caves, poisoned. But later, stingers settle. Poisons blow away. Daylight, we take the treasure. Bring it all to the old ranger graveyard west of Baldridge Hill. Show the white giant what we’ve done. Prepare for the next hunt. Better than Abascar.”

As the climbers took to the trees to claim their bundles of trouble, Mordafey turned and seized Jorn by his remaining ear. “You know,” he said, “what happens. Will you fail me again?”

“No, hel hel hel,” Jorn laughed. Mordafey gave him the bag of glass spheres, and Jorn vanished with the crowd of climbers into the cover of brush.

Tabor Jan looked out at the dark spread of brush, and he shuddered. The cold breeze wheezed and moaned through the bushes, but he knew that there was more than wind at work in that darkness.

He and the harvesters had seen only a few brascles soaring in high, lazy circles and nothing more to suggest the closeness of the encroaching attackers. But he knew what he had seen through the farglass, and the people trusted their king’s conviction. The beastmen are coming. Even now that dark line of trees stood like a dam on the verge of breaking, ready to release bloodthirsty enemies across the brushbound plains.

And so, when the Abascar watchers—courageous and more than half crazy—sent their signal from the treetops at the edge of the Cragavar, the harvesters cast dark blankets over their hooded tunics, merging with the shadows of night’s rising tide. Abandoning their harvest carts, which they had loaded with useless tangles of brambles and thistleweed, they crept back, crouching low, to the base of the cliffs.

A new break had opened in the wall, a space just wide enough to accommodate the girth of the largest laborer. Their king had carved this tunnel with his own bare hands, but that did not stop them from grumbling about being run like rats into a burrow. Giving no heed to these complaints, Tabor Jan all but shoved the last worker into the passage.

Cal-raven’s young apprentices waited at the other end of the tunnel. Although he knew it would happen, he still watched in amazement as the narrow passage sagged shut, the combined powers of the stonemasters’ magic sealing the wall again.

Now, only he and a few of the guards remained outside, exposed. They strolled back across the ground beneath Barnashum’s steps to the harvesters’ carts. They set fire to tiny scraps of oil-soaked leaves, wrapped the smoldering pods in cloth, and set these slow-burning bundles among the kindling in the carts.

One by one the guards moved to stand with backs against the cliffs as if taking their positions for the night. When ropes dropped down from the tunnels on the third tier high above, the guards seized these lifelines and turned, holding tight as strong teams far above drew the ropes back in. Tabor Jan heard them walking right up the icy cliff face alongside him, laughing quietly. But he just clung to the rope, sweat streaming down his face, fiercely ignoring the vast space opening below him as he climbed. He wished he were a stonemaster who could blast his own door into the wall.

As the horizon had faded from deep blue to dark, a widespread scene of harvesting had quieted to a barren stretch of desert. Only tumbleweeds moved about the base of the cliffs now. There would be nothing for the swift tide of beastmen to attack.

Moments later he stood, farglass in hand, at the main entrance and watched a subtle ripple of shadows surge through the bushes far below—the first wave of beastmen rushing in, blades raised, ready to slaughter weary harvesters. When the Cent Regus reached the abandoned carts, they galloped about like hunting hounds whose quarry had disappeared. They leapt away, snarling, as the cargo suddenly flowered with petals of fire and exposed them in the light. The breeze whipped the flames, painting the surroundings in gold, and the beastmen darted in and out of the glow, furious.

Some attackers turned to climb up the ledge paths. But the children, pretending to play on those runs in the afternoon, had gingerly littered them with razor-sharp shards the soldiers had smashed from the field of Red Teeth. Yelps and howls rose as the beastmen stumbled across them. Most scattered or fell. Only a few slipped past, making their way up to the cliff ledges along the higher tiers.

“How did Cal-raven know they’d come tonight?” Brevolo whispered in Tabor Jan’s ear.

“He won’t say.” The captain glanced upward to the highest tiers of the cliffs. “Let’s go. Time to throw fuel on this fire.”

They withdrew through the main gate, and the strong teams of rope-pullers piled heavy boulders to fill the entrance. As the stones settled, Cal-raven pressed his hands against them, his breathing shallow, his face red with exertion, and the mysterious power in his fingers ran into the stones, fusing them into one solid barrier.

Wheezing and stooped, the king nodded to Tabor Jan. He might have been smiling, but the bandages Say-ressa had spread across his stitched face hid any expression. “Can you hear them?” he mumbled through the binding wrap. “They’re here. They’ve dropped from the high cliffs. They’re right outside, and they’re not happy.”

“They’ll get their welcome,” said Tabor Jan. “I’ll signal Jes-hawk and the archers.”

Inside Abascar’s hideaway, music drifted through the tunnels. Cortie, small as a kitten in a palace, wandered along barefoot, chasing zephyrs of colorful notes.

The long grass skirt she had made swished along the floor. She ran her fingers against the great, smooth cave walls, imagining herself deep inside the veins of the earth, moving toward the rhythmic heart. The thought comforted her as she moved deeper into the labyrinth, the shouts and the commotion of Abascar’s defenders growing fainter behind her.

People were fighting outside the Abascar caves tonight. They were fighting the monsters that had killed her mother and father. Cortie had not spoken since that trauma. But Cal-raven had knelt down, eyes level with hers, and taken her shoulders in his firm hands. “Don’t fear, Cortie. The Keeper brought us just what we needed. We’re safe tonight.”

At a crossroads, she waited and listened. The music danced in the air, teasing her. Taking hold of a shimmering melody, she followed where it led, not sure why her pace increased or why her spirits rose.

Around a corner she found a cave with a great wall of orange clay illuminated by lanterns. Hanging between the lanterns, a swirl of color unfurled—paint on the stone, scraps of cloth, glimmering ribbons—alive with hues she had only seen in Auralia’s colors.

Lesyl sat beneath this array, tapping the cords of her string-weave with the rings on her fingers, teasing the melodies out of hiding. Cortie tiptoed around the edge of the room, careful to be silent so as not to break the spell. When she saw the tears on Lesyl’s cheeks, sliding down like the long sustained notes of the song, she sat down at a distance and folded her hands in her lap.

A boy’s shrill voice bounded in from an adjoining tunnel. “Cortie? Cortie? Cortie?”

Lesyl paused, the song unfinished, a note hanging suspended.

“Close it tight, Wynn!” Cortie roared. “I’m here!”

Her brother marched into the cavern, and his momentary surprise at her voice was quickly overcome. “I’ve told you not to run off by yourself! You could get hurt.”

“I’m fine, Wynn. Listen!”

“But there’s a fight, Cortie.” He stood shaking, divided by fear and outrage. “There’s beastmen. You can’t just run away and listen to pretty music. We should be doing something important!”

Lesyl began to quietly pluck the strings again, and the song returned without hesitation. It seemed to open a warm new room in the air and lift her up into the glow.

Wynn’s complaint dissolved. He sat down beside Cortie. “This is important,” she whispered, leaning against him.

Song after song washed over them, and a crowd of children began to assemble, drawn along by the winding threads of notes into the mysterious comfort while the world outside erupted in fear, fire, and frenzy.

Mordafey was silent as the sentries returned from the brush, squawking their reports and thrashing their feathered limbs.

Abascar’s harvesters were gone. Vanished. And the guards had walked up the cliff face as surely as tailtwitchers scrambling up trees, escaping before the runners could reach them. The carts had burst into flame, the fireglow revealing the attackers to anyone watching.

“These Abascars, they can walk on walls,” one of them chattered. “Even through them. Maybe we should run.”

“Wait.” Mordafey stared out at that dark rise of cliffs. “Wait for Jorn. Not too late for Jorn.”

When Jorn’s signal had flared out from the top of Barnashum’s wall, Mordafey had purred, delighted.

But as more signals flared, Mordafey began to feel unsteady. The vanishing harvesters, ascending guards, disappearing gates—nothing made sense. Stranded with their bags of firestingers and bottles of poison, Jorn’s team dashed about on the high ledges, scouring the stone for an entrance. Their signals back to his spies were dismay and fury.

“They knew,” Mordafey muttered. “They made tricks. They were ready.”

“What now, Older Brother?” asked Goreth.

“Must find another way in.”

“What’s that?” Goreth pointed to the top of the cliff. “Rock goats?”

Mordafey cursed. Archers were firing down on Jorn and his hunters as they rushed along the third tier in search of safe ground. Mordafey could hear the faraway screams. His climbers either leapt from the cliffs or tumbled along the ledges, wounded and scattering.

“Firestingers,” Mordafey growled. “Bags broken.”

Worried murmurs spread among what remained of the swarm in the trees as they waited for Mordafey to unleash the final wave.

“Forget the plan.” Mordafey glanced back into the forest, wondering if his mysterious commander had come to watch this miserable display. “Got to be a way in. Or the white giant will be angry.” He barked a command to the scavengers, the hunters, the scourges. He drove them into a run. “Cent Regus are not afraid. Cent Regus are stronger. Prizes are waiting.”

He bounded forward on all fours, a bear in full charge, and heard, to his relief, the horde flooding onto the plains behind him in a fierce tide of teeth and claws.

As he ran, the cliffs loomed above him, higher and higher like a great black wave ready to break over him. He felt suddenly naked. He was as vulnerable to the Cent Regus galloping up beside him as he was exposed to the rain of projectiles from Barnashum. He turned, commanding Goreth to stay close.

But Goreth was not beside him.

As the mountainous rise filled their view, a hundred fires sprang to life at once across the tiers—like stars exploding in gold and red.

The swarm divided into swirling eddies. Some defied the lights, dodged the arrows that needled the air around them, risked the wayward firestingers, and fought their way up the bloodied ledges, intent on those gleaming points of flame where they were sure to find soldiers hunkered down with quivers of arrows. But they slowed when a new sound shattered the din.

In a cacophonous drumming, the gargantuan boulders that had lined the highest tier of the cliffs like a row of crooked teeth began to topple over the edge and crash down the cliffs as if shoved down a stairway. Mordafey ducked as one struck the tier above him and sprayed sharp splinters. The boulder bounced over his head to smash against the ground behind him, obliterating several Cent Regus runners. Islands of stone careened past on both sides, great wheels, massive jags, thunking and thumping and gouging deep holes as they fell.

He looked up again, half-expecting to see an army of giants hurling the slabs. Wedges of crumbling cliff slid down and sent ascending beastmen leaping off the rockslide paths to fall into the Red Teeth or onto flat, merciless ground. The avalanche continued beyond the cliffs, boulders racing each other across the spread of brambles and brush, carving avenues of crackling ruin as they rolled into the deepening dark.

As the barrage subsided and Mordafey’s swarm lost all momentum and coherence, he found himself climbing alone. Rage boiled within him. Word would spread across the Expanse that Mordafey was a fool and could not be trusted.

As he explored the shadows, details deepened his rage. The lights that flickered closest to him were unattended. They were not torches but stones, framed by pieces of glass—light and reflection. He seized these pieces and dashed them against the rocks. The apparent scale of Abascar’s defense was—he now understood—an illusion.

A horn sounded from high above. Sonorous replies rang out from every tier across the wide Barnashum span. Mordafey crouched in the rocks, awestruck, for the sound seemed to come from miles around.

The horn calls increased, populating Barnashum’s layers with clear, golden reports. More answered them, blasting like beacons from the forest.

As he looked back at the trees, a volley of flaming arrows fanned out through the air over his head. “Wasting arrows,” he grumbled, moving further along the ledge. But then another array of fiery projectiles flew from the top of Barnashum. These bright missiles did not arc gracefully and fall like arrows. They blazed straight paths across the sky and kept on soaring all the way across the brambled plains to the edge of the Cragavar—an impossible distance—descending only then into the trees where his swarm was retreating.

“Birds,” he sneered. The defenders had tied bundles to the long-feathered tails of precipice birds. They had set the bundles alight and turned those hulking scavengers loose, knowing they would fly with all their might back home to their nests in the trees, trying to outrun the flames behind them. The fire burnt through the ties that bound the bundles to the carriers’ feet, and sparks showered down on the woods like falling stars.

The fleeing horde did not yet see through this charade. Mordafey cast fistfuls of stone at the birds, then turned when he heard a frantic creature vaulting down the rockslide. He leapt and caught the animal in midjump and slammed him against the earth, ready to spill blood to satisfy his temper.

But it was Jorn sniveling in his clutches. “Birds,” he howled. “Birds fly for Abascar!”

“Quiet or I’ll rip out your tongue!” Mordafey shouted into his brother’s face. “Tricks! Mordafey’s not scared of tricks!”

Jorn struggled, trying to pry Mordafey’s claws from his sides. “Where’s Goreth?”

Mordafey scanned the cliffs. Soldiers rushed along the ledges, making sure to pass before the lights to increase the illusion that a militant multitude were readying to descend and finish any Cent Regus who were foolish enough to remain. Mordafey wanted to stay. He wanted to surprise one Abascar soldier. Just one.

He broke away from Jorn and launched himself at the second tier of the cliffs. On all fours, he scrambled over debris and carcasses. Pausing only once, he came to a struggling Cent Regus wildcat whose paws had been slashed by the razor stones. He lifted the creature by the throat and snapped the bones like twigs, watching the runner’s eyes expand in recognition as the body went limp in his hands. Then he rounded a corner and lunged down into a clay hollow, the scent of soldiers sharp in his nostrils.

He stumbled to his knees, his breath stopped short by the sight of a familiar shape looming in his path. Its wings were outlined by the glimmering moonlight. A great sweep of neck supported a massive head that hovered over him. Dust roiled about it, and the eyes shone crimson as embers. Smoke curled from its nostrils, and its front feet clutched the ground on both sides of Mordafey.

The sound that seared Mordafey’s throat was one he had never uttered before, not even in the dreams where he had run from just such a colossus. But his pride fought back, stronger than his fear, and his jaws snapped off snarls of challenge. Now he saw that the eyes were red, round crystals and that burning bundles were stuffed in the nostrils. The wings were sculpted from stone.

Another trick. Mordafey carved up a handful of rubble and flung it at the statue.

A groan rose from the statue. The ground trembled. Its tail lashed high over its back like a scorpion’s sting, then fell like a massive marrowwood tree to smash a rut in the stony ground. Mordafey saw that the tail did not belong to the statue at all but to something awakening behind it—a shadow with the same sweeping wings, legs like mighty stone columns, and flames in its eyes and its jaws, a creature many times larger and very much alive.

Mordafey screamed and bolted back the way he had come.

He found Jorn still gripping the rockslide, skin blackening to hide him in the night. He lifted him by the scruff of his neck and dragged him down the rubble-strewn path. As he did, a rhythmic rumble began in the forest—battle-drums.

“Run now?” Jorn’s question was desperate. “Finished?”

Mordafey tore at his own mane, exasperated. “Cal-raven thinks he’s beaten Mordafey. But Mordafey is not finished. Mordafey will remember.”

As they made their way back through the brush, arrows clattered into the brambles around them. Mordafey pressed on, unmoved. He wanted to knock the forest down.

This was not a defeat, he told himself. This was only an interruption.