Word spread fast through the cobbled streets, crooked alleyways and leaning buildings of Redstone. Word that the Viscount of Frekifold himself was marching on the town. There might’ve been some cursory grumbling among the locals, some dissatisfied muttering about handing over those longriders that Viscount Marr was after, but the Frekirie had always been a pragmatic people and it was well known who Torsten Gunn was.
As for Fia, word quickly insinuated itself through the taverns, card halls and brothels that the daughter of the Countess Vanora, the one that’d gone missing all those years ago and had been presumed to have killed her older brother before dying in some lonely spot herself, was amongst them. Guttersnipes, drunks and ladies of the line passed the word around, until it was running through the town like the piss in the gutters. Redstone buzzed with an old story that had been dusted off and brought out afresh.
Fia Marr, former Countess and now heir to the High Seat of Fallaros, had ridden back into town, escorted by none other than Torsten Gunn himself. Not only that, but the pair of them had brought a guerilla fighting force with them.
The few presses there were in Fallaros loved it.
“Everyone seems to have taken the news that there’s a gods-damned army heading this way with unusually good grace,” Cleric Vass observed, leaning against the witchlight under which Fia had had a trestle table set up in the street. “There’s hardly been a soul kick up a fuss or question the validity of the word that you sent around, Miss McCrae.”
“You ever think that might have somethin’ to do with who sent the word around, god-talker?” Boni Woe said. “The name of Torsten Gunn don’t invite no argument.”
“I think it might have more to do with the bloody peasant militia that marched in at our backs,” the large, quietly spoken man, Breck said.
Fia continued to pore over the rough map that one of Gunn’s other men, Meiklejohn, had procured from an amiable Redstone cartographer. It was a crude affair, but clearly showed the key areas of the large town; the primary and secondary entrances and exits, the multiple plazas, and the larger thoroughfares.
“I think they’ve accepted the news the way they have because they’re Frekirie, and having their own Count march on one of his own towns ain’t even nearly the most fucked thing that’s happened in this neck of the woods,” she said placidly.
Gunn grunted his assent, his own eyes running over the parchment. “You’re right. If any commoner on the isle of Fallaros ought to have learned one thing, it’s to be realistic. It’s all very well to say how things should be done or could be done, but it’s better by far to batten down the hatches and make it through the storm alive than bitch and moan and get caught in the rain.”
“Which brings about another pertinent point,” Cleric Vass said. “Will they aid us?”
Fia leaned back from the map and stretched her arms over her head. She noticed how Gunn watched her as she did it, and the knowledge that he found her worth watching set spurs into her heart.
“I don’t think they’re going to stand in our way,” she said. “But I wouldn’t put silver on them helping us either.”
“McCrae’s right, I reckon,” said Boni Woe grudgingly. “Folk are too fuckin’ practical around here, bein’ so close to Dreymark. They’ll shut themselves away in their homes, act as if even if they was melted down they couldn’t be poured into a fight.”
“Play it safe until the outcome is all but bloody decided, eh?” croaked Kerr, spitting between his coffee-coloured teeth. The arm that had taken Fia’s ball was in a dirty sling, but the grizzled old bastard looked keen at the prospect of a scrap nonetheless.
“Sounds pretty smart to me,” Lenix Allaway said.
“It ain’t stupid,” Gil said, agreeing with his twin for the first time that Fia could recall.
“How’re we goin’ to play this?” Fergus rumbled, swatting at one of the increasingly numerous moths that were being drawn to the witchlights as the sun went down. “They’ve the numbers and they’ve the better weapons.”
“And they ain’t goin’ to be long in gettin’ here,” Boni said.
“That’s true enough,” said Gunn. “A man who’s willing to use blatant witchcraft to set a grassland ablaze is a man who’s not going to wait a second longer than necessary to see you dead, McCrae. Soon as that fire’s fed and died down, he’ll be comin’ after us. He could be on his way right now.”
Fia looked around at the darkening streets, at the branching avenues with their overhanging houses of stone and wood, at the growing pools of shadow that the glowing witchlights only made deeper as dusk drew on.
“Yeah, a guilty fox will hunt his own hole sure enough,” she said. “All these years he’s prospered off of an injustice he hung around my neck, never knowing whether I still lived. Now, up I’ve popped and he’ll want to crush me as soon as he’s able. Not just to cover his tracks, but because the Imperator is breathing on his shoulder. He’ll come in here with everything he’s got and kill us all, no matter the cost.”
“Sounds promisin’!” Lenix said.
“Maybe not,” Fia replied, “but we might be able to use that impatience of his against him. He’ll be looking for the open spaces,” she pointed at the plazas and marketplaces on the map, “so that his troops can overwhelm us with numbers and their training, and can cut us down quick with flintlock fire.”
“You’re thinkin’ that if we draw his men piecemeal into the warrens of the backstreets, we’ll stand more of a chance?” Gunn said.
“They’re soldiers,” Fia said, “trained to think that killing’s fine so long as you do it with a whole bunch of your mates, under the wolf’s head banner of Frekifold, and to the sound of the war bugles.”
Boni Woe’s smile was wild and wide.”Shit’s a whole lot different when you’re bunched in some stinking alley with arrows coming at you from both ends, eh?”
Fia’s eyebrow twitch. Boni giggled.
“I’m startin’ to like this bitch, chief,” she said to Gunn. “Might be that she’s worth trustin’ after all.”
“We ain’t got long to get things ordered before they arrive,” Gunn said, straightening up from the table and motioning for Boni, Kerr, Breck, Meiklejohn, Rule, Winnie, and the other members of his crew that were standing nearby to gather round. “We’ll need to blockade at least a few of the entrances to Redstone so that we can funnel them in the way we want, without making it too obvious as to what we’re doing.”
Gunn looked questioningly at Fia.
“You sure he’s not just goin’ to rein his arse up outside and wait for the Countess to kick the bucket and this foreign friend of his to ride in, McCrae?” he asked her.
“I could see the desperation banked up and burning behind his eyes,” Fia said. “He’ll force his way into Redstone and raze the place to the ground by any means necessary. Even if he’s heard of the militia you’ve recruited, I doubt that’ll make him pause for long. This Imperator’s put the fear up him. He ain’t going to wait around.”
Gunn clapped his hands once, the sound echoing around the small square in which they had set up their impromptu war cabinet.
“That’s settled then,” the outlaw said, addressing his crew. “We’ve militia spread out all through Redstone, you rotten bastards. Let’s get the word out that we need barricades built here, here and… here,” he stabbed his finger at the map. “When that’s done I want each of you to make it your business to tell as many folk as you can that their primary gods-damned focus is to stay alive. Shoot and move, stab and run. No one’s to play at lionhearts. There ain’t no such thing as a happy hero, they’d be well advised to remember that. Plenty of time to pretend to be heroes down the pub after, if any of us survive.”
“What are the odds, chief?” the one-eyed woman, Rule, asked.
“What’re you, a fuckin’ bookie?” Gil snapped.
Rule bristled, but Gunn cut across her.
“With our new volunteers; three to one, Rule,” he said. “And if you don’t like those odds you’ll just have to shorten them some with that rifle of yours.”
“You heard the chief!” Boni snapped at the others, her face a contorted mess of anger and delight at the coming fray. “Spread the fucking word and let’s get these peasant cunts divided into hunting parties.”
As Gunn’s crew dispersed, the man himself came in close to Fia. For a tingling moment, Fia thought he meant to kiss her. When he didn’t, she thought of kissing him.
Before she could make up her mind though, Gunn said, “That thaumaturgist will be with him, McCrae.”
Fia’s eyes were cold and calm. She heard Cleric Vass shift behind her. The man had said a prayer for Darach Lees when they had got back to Redstone, but he looked less in need of an escort now than he had ever done. She thought that she could sense the latent power in him, as she could smell the power of a storm in the wind.
“Keep your mind on the fight, Gunn,” she said, “and I’ll deal with the thaumaturgist.”
“No heroics, remember,” the outlaw said gruffly.
“I ain’t got any intention of bein’ one of them, Gunn,” she said. “You said that happy heroes don’t exist, yeah? Well I’ll tell you why that is: because all the real heroes die.”
* * *
Waiting in the inky dark of one of Redstone’s shadow-drenched streets, Fia was glad, in a way, that it’d come to this. Fighting in a city street might not have been her preference—but in the dark, with the Raun River all turned to mineral-tasting mist, the eldritch illumination of the witchlights burning on their poles, and the bright first quarter moon looking down, she felt almost peaceful. Frekifold had always been a place of long dawns, lazy dusks, and lingering midnights. She had forgotten how much the countryside here had spoken to her as a child. She let out a little sigh through her nose, shifted her feet and ran her fingers down the fletching of her nocked arrow.
“Are you nervous, Miss McCrae?” Cleric Vass asked softly from behind her.
“No.”
“No?”
“I was just thinking that things could have been worse.”
Fia, the cleric, and a small company of rebel archers were crouched in a fetid alleyway that meandered unenthusiastically along the face of one of the hills over which Redstone had spread like lichen. The air was full of the scent of the river, nervous warriors and the woodsmoke from the wildfire, which had moved in, got caught up in the hills and hung now in the still night air. Below them, just visible through the moisture in the air and between the buildings that they were now level with the roofs of, was Redstone’s main gate and the plaza that it opened into. It was closed and barred.
Somewhere down there, Gunn led the contingent of rebels that would try and draw Redmond Marr’s main force through that portal. Beyond the gate, on the far side of the single stretch of wall that ran between two bends of the Raun River, which protected Redstone from every other side, Fia could see the light of many torches approaching.
Redmond and his army were only minutes away.
“How so?” Cleric Vass asked.
“How so what?”
“How could things be worse?”
Fia took her eyes off the gate below and looked at the cleric. In the bleak light, the red tattoos across his cheeks looked like scars.
“Could’ve been a pitched battle,” she said.
“Have you ever experienced such a thing?”
Fia shook her head and turned back to watch the torches of her enemies as they crept through the dark. “I’ve done a lot of dumb shit in my time, cleric, but I’m yet to to do that. Watched a few from afar though—good place to get supplies, battles, when you’re roaming. Nothing I’ve seen of them has made me wish to participate in one.”
The torches came on.
“You reckon they’re going to guess something’s up?” one of the men behind Fia asked a companion. “That it’s a trap?”
“I reckon they’ll guess it’s a trap when they kick the door in and find the streets empty,” Fia said, shutting the two men up. “But Gunn would’ve trimmed their tail feathers a bit by that point and they’ll come on with their drawers all in a knot. Be too late to turn back then.”
When the torches were about an arrow shot away from the gate, Fia heard the start of a commotion. Screams came muted through the thin mist. Lonely sounds to start with, as the first shafts were exchanged and the first fighters died.
The torches came streaming forward. Most headed for the main gate, while a couple of smaller blocks went south and north toward the lesser gates.
“Ready yourselves,” she said to her crew.
There was no rustle of activity behind her. This was good. It meant they were already set. Arrows to bowstrings.
Her half-brother’s soldiers flowed on, discarding torches as they got closer to the gates. Fia peered down through the murk. She thought she could make out rebel soldiers running across the top of the wall, their armour glinting in the light of the moon. Popping up every now and again to send a shaft down into the press of soldiers that were doubtless now up against the gate. They were spread thin, but then the plan hadn’t involved holding the gate indefinitely. Kill as many of the enemy as you can before they breach and then draw them in.
More screams rent the chill air. Fia saw one little figure stagger sideways and tumble off the wall into the courtyard below. Men and women were yelling at one another across the length of the rampart, running crouched. Another figure stumbled, sprawled over the parapet and didn’t move again.
Fia felt someone tap her on the arm. She turned, jaw clenched.
“What?” she said.
The bearded man behind her offered her a small packet. “Take some,” he said.
“What is it?”
“Rabbit’s-foot,” the archer said. “Powdered courage. Gives you luck.”
Fia leaned forward and took a bump of the powder up one nostril, then the other. It burned ice-cold all the way down the back of her throat. Her heart fluttered and then beat strong. She took a deep breath, feeling her blood running hot.
“Better bad luck than the worst kind,” she said.
It didn’t take long for it to happen. The gates of Redstone had been constructed to deter particularly stupid or desperate longriders, not withstand a siege. There was a flash of fire, a dull boom, and flames rose like prayers. Horses––they must’ve been bays or blacks because Fia couldn’t make them out––screamed as they were whipped into a frenzy. There was a dull, sad groan of straining timbers.
And the gates toppled outwards, ripped off their hinges in a shriek of tortured iron hinges and a shower of orange sparks.
There was an answering roar of approval from the attacking soldiers as the gates fell; a single bloody voice that Fia had heard rise above the battlefields she had watched over. It was a sound that set her palms to tingling, turning the skin down her spine to gooseflesh. It was the sound of a few thousand voices roaring out their mortal terror, trying to turn gut-dissolving fear into rage. A crackling flurry of flintlock fire raked the parapet above the gate. The defenders wavered and then broke, some of them cut down as they turned to flee.
Fia swallowed the bitter, earthy taste of the powered rabbit’s-foot root. Sniffed and took another deeper breath. Despite the knowledge of what was most likely to come, she could feel the drug pulling her mouth into a crooked grin. She was acutely aware of the thump and hum of the blood in her veins. That sixth sense of hers was singing that Redmond was still out beyond the gates. The thought of her half-brother, sitting atop his horse somewhere out there, gave her the chills.
“Make ready,” she said to the small group of archers behind her, knowing that other men and women would be giving similar instructions to the other hidden bands of archers stationed in the streets surrounding the plaza below. “Remember, if any of you spots some black-haired bitch wearing green and brown hunting leathers, you let me know about it, understood?”
There was a collection of affirmative grunts.
Fia watched as Frekirie soldiers, looking ghostly in the mist because of their grey and navy uniforms, charged through the felled gate. There were a few clashes, as some brave or idiotic lingering rebels engaged with the oncoming infantrymen, but they were brief. Fia watched detachedly as one female warrior lashed out with a sword and took a soldier’s arm off at the elbow, before she was bailed up against the side of a building by men with spears, clubbed down with the butts and then stabbed to death while she writhed on the floor. Even from a distance, Fia heard the terrified disbelief in her screams.
“Draw,” she said, and pulled her own bowstring to her ear.
The clamour of Redmond’s men had died down somewhat, now that they had broken through only to find Redstone seemingly undefended. Down in the plaza, Fia could see men stalking in groups around the open square, peering into the dark alleyways that branched off of it.
“No heroics,” Fia said softly, aligning her arrowhead with a soldier that had paused under one of the witchlights. “Loose!”
Her archers’ arrows flickered out into the night and disappeared. There was a heartbeat’s pause and then the man under the witchlight sprouted a feathered shaft in the centre of his chest. He dropped his sword, clutched at the shaft and then toppled forward.
Suddenly, panicked cries and shouted orders went up from all around the square as more arrows started dropping into the mass of milling soldiery.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
“And again,” Fia said, nocking another arrow and drawing once more. She sighted a female soldier holding a crossbow and staring about her, trying to make out where the shafts were coming from.
“Loose,” Fia commanded.
Arrows rustled softly again as they were freed from strings. Fia’s shaft whispered through the mist, dropped down and hit the woman in the side. She shied sideways and must have pressed the lever on her bow because a man nearby howled and dropped, clawing at a quarrel in his arse cheek.
There was more shouting from below and Fia saw some of the soldiers starting to gesticulate rapidly; men and women trying to get their comrades into order, to form a plan.
“Kill as many as possible,” Fia said. “We need to scatter them if we can.”
Arrows were raining down from all directions into the square now. Hidden groups of rebel archers popped up and fired before disappearing once again. Some of Redmond’s fighters were hammering with fists and shoulders on the heavy barred doors of the buildings that fronted the square, but not a single inhabitant deigned to help. Soldiers fell screaming, but where one went down two fresh warriors would come in through the broken gate. Shields were being raised and pockets of crossbowmen started returning fire.
Fia let fly an arrow and it hissed between a pair of dangling woollen socks hanging on a line stretching between two buildings in front of her. It missed her mark, instead smacking into the spoke of a cartwheel that her target had been standing next to. The man started, looked up towards where Fia and her little crew were crouched behind the crumbling stone wall and pointed.
“Fuck,” Fia said.
There was a crackle of flintlocks and smoke bloomed into the misty air.
Fia dropped down behind the wall as lead balls tore into the stonework, blowing chunks of rock out of it and whining overhead. One of her crew, in the midst of loosing a shaft, took a slug through the face. The side of his head exploded outwards in a spray of teeth and blood that was almost silver in the dim glow of the witchlights permeating the river mist.
Fia looked at the twitching corpse of the dead rebel lying not four feet from her. Easy as that; going from a thing of the present to a thing of the past. Worth remembering.
She looked over the wall and was rewarded with a stinging faceful of stone fragments as another round smacked into it. Soldiers were gathering into a squad below, shields on the outside, moving up the lane that led to where Fia’s squad was.
“Alright, here they come,” she said. “Remember, we’re leading these fuckers on a merry dance through town if we can. Try not to get bogged down. They’ve the numbers, but we can make them count for naught in the streets. Follow me!”
She took off in a dead sprint, Cleric Vass and the others hurrying to keep up. Shots rang out behind them, bullets snapping and ricocheting off the stone around them. Fia batted a wooden bucket aside, as it was punched off the side of the wall by a lead ball and almost spun into her face.
“They’re dividing!” Cleric Vass said breathlessly, from behind Fia as they ran. “Their forces are scattering in pursuit.”
Fia didn’t answer. It was to be expected. The Frekirie infantry could have either waited around to get organized while they were shot at like fish in a pond, or break into smaller units and pursue their ambushers. With an impatient and desperate man leading them, it was no wonder that they had elected to give chase to foes that Redmond Marr believed to be far weaker.
Fia and her rebel archers jinked down the warren of cobbled roads, sticking to the shadows where possible. They saw other groups of rebels running on parallel streets to theirs, drawing other bands of enemy soldiers into the heart of Redstone. Fia’s eyes flicked around her as they jogged through the alleyways, noticing the locals peering down into the street from darkened windows. They were in the part of town where a number of breweries and distilleries were located. Even with the threat of fighting in the street, there were still a number of shady sots passed out in the doorways of some of the buildings.
“Hold up,” Fia said, as they approached the mouth of a darkened alleyway, a flaming torch guttering at its entrance. The vicious smell of cheap red-eye wafted out of the ingress. “Turn, and draw arrows.”
She crouched down behind a crate near the mouth of the silent passageway and turned to face the way they had come. The stink of red-eye made her hand itch to reach for her flask, but she pulled her bowstring to her ear instead. Cleric Vass knelt next to her, a gleaming curved dagger in his hand. Fia raised an eyebrow.
“Did I not say,” the robed holy man said, “that I have seen my share of battlefields?”
A few seconds later, the tramp of feet became discernable and a squad of armoured Frekirie warriors came marching quickly around the bend.
As soon as they were all in view, Fia fired, her arrow taking the leader up through the armpit as he saw her, shouted and raised his sword to point. There was the dull thud of crossbow strings being released and quarrels twittered around. One of her archers squawked as she was hit in the shin by a bolt that skipped off the cobbles.
“Run!” Fia yelled.
They took off once more, diving into the mouth of the dark alley, slipping on the wet cobblestones and gagging on the harsh reek of whisky fumes. Fia was halfway down the backstreet just as she heard the despairing wail of the lamed archer get cut off by a meaty smacking sound. She could hear the ragged breath of her surviving band, could hear the sound of pursuing boots echoing off the tight walls of the alley.
“Fuckin’ kill those cunts!” one of the Frekirie soldiers bellowed.
Fia skidded to a halt at the end of the alley, ducked left and pressed herself to the wall. Then she put her fingers to her lips and let out a shrill whistle.
In a third story window, about halfway down the reeking alleyway, a flame bloomed and fell.
“For them as is afeared o’ the dark!” Fergus Allaway’s deep voice boomed gleefully.
The oil lantern shattered on the cobbles that were awash with red-eye. There was a seductive whumpf as the potent spirit ignited and the close passageway became a hell on earth. The punctured casks of rot-gut exploded, scything down the soldiers that were nearest, lacerating and maiming them so that they fell into the liquid fire that burned across the floor, while others were simply set ablaze as the fumes combusted.
A few men made it out of the alleyway’s mouth, one of them burning like a torch, the stink of his crisping flesh oddly delicious in Fia’s nostrils. Cleric Vass dispatched the man with a clean in and out thrust of his dagger through the neck.
Fia caught an axe blow from another man with her broadsword, turned the strike aside and hamstrung the soldier. He grunted as he went down to one knee, but didn’t make a peep as Fia split his head open with her next cut. His skull made a strange creaking sound as she jimmied her sword free, the whitish brown of his still-living brain visible through the awful gash.
The final enemy soldier had pinned one of her archers up against a wall, one meaty hand wrapped around his wrist while the other slowly pushed a dagger into the centre of the man’s chest.
The man’s eyes popped as the Frekirie warrior’s blade crunched through his sternum, before Cleric Vass stepped up behind the attacker and buried his own knife in his liver. The soldier jerked and arched backwards, dark blood pouring from the wound. The cleric twisted his knife, ripped it free and then punched it into the man’s spine so that he collapsed.
“Keep moving,” Fia said, as she slung her bow across her chest and squinted up the burning alley to make sure there were no more survivors.
“But, Haris…” one of Fia’s two remaining archers said, looking down at the man with the knife in his chest.
Fia regarded the slumped man carefully, then lashed out with a foot and drove the blade deeper into him. The man let out a wheeze and lolled sideways.
“Keep moving,” she repeated.
The unmistakable clamour and din of fighting was echoing through Redstone now. Staccato volleys of flintlocks sounded every now again. Screams and curses cut through the mists, while the ceaseless voice of the Raun River rushed endlessly on.
Fia, Cleric Vass and the remaining two rebel fighters moved swiftly through the maze of streets. They observed knots of men and women caught up in the busy task of butchering one another in the middle of the roads, saw other gangs of rebels darting here and there being pursued by dogged Frekirie warriors.
Fia kept her eyes skinned for any sign of the other members of her band––for the Allaway brothers or Hunter. For Gunn.
The familiar spitting snarl of a voice that could only belong to Boniface Woe drew Fia out into a main thoroughfare lined with witchlights on poles. It looked to be one of the more affluent parts of town; the cobbles were clear of horse muck, the shopfronts freshly painted and with glass in their windows.
From the corner of the backstreet that joined the main street, Fia saw that Boni, Meiklejohn, Kerr and a bunch of other outlaws had been caught and hemmed in by a squad of soldiers and were fighting for their lives. They’d managed to erect a crude barricade using barrels and an overturned cart, but they were outnumbered, and the soldiers had the luxury of two men with flintlock rifles covering the Frekirie warrior’s attack. They had already picked off two of the longriders and, even as Fia analysed the situation from cover, one of the men fired and clipped another one.
Without stopping to think, Fia sprinted out into the street with Cleric Vass at her side. The rifleman, who’d just finished reloading his weapon from behind the cover of a keg, whirled at the approach of her boots sounding on the cobbles. He squeezed the trigger, his flintlock barking in his hands.
The bullet hissed over Fia’s shoulder and hit the rebel following on behind her, blowing a hole in her chest and sending her rag-dolling over.
With a wordless war-cry, Fia slashed down with her broadsword. The soldier blocked with his spent rifle, using both hands. Fia stepped in and punched her dirk twice into his chest. Before he’d hit the ground, Fia spun and pulled free one of her pistols. She levelled it at the rifleman on the other side of the street, who was frantically reloading, and pulled the trigger. Gun smoke blossomed as the pistol kicked in her hand, but the shot went wide, shattering a window behind the soldier.
The man grinned nastily, levelled his rifle, and was tackled unexpectedly around the middle by the last surviving rebel in Fia’s crew. Both men crashed through a cloth merchant’s window and out of sight.
Seeing that the two riflemen were down, the outlaws rallied and leapt over their barricade to engage with the remaining soldiers. Boni’s howls of delight filled the street as she laid about her with a spear, slicing the razor tip through the bridge of one woman’s nose and cutting into her face before flinging the weapon through the ribs of another soldier who was grappling with Meiklejohn.
“McCrae, behind you!” Cleric Vass called, pointing down the far end of the thoroughfare.
Fia saw more soldiers charging up the road, wielding crossbows, swords and pistols.
“Don’t get bogged down, don’t get bogged down,” she muttered to herself.
Fia got her toe under the flintlock that the rifleman she’d killed had dropped and flicked it up into her hands. She stepped into the doorway of a house as gun smoke billowed out from the crowd of onrushing soldiers. Lead bullets ricocheted off the solid ironbark lintel above her head, striking splintering sparks from the wood. With steady hands, she poured powder, rammed in wadding and ball, tossed aside the ramrod, and then added a little more powder to the pan. As the noise of the soldier’s approach got nearer, she stepped out and fired.
The ball ripped into the groin of one of the lead men when he was only a couple of dozen yards away, sending him flopping into the road in a spray of arterial blood. That was all well and good, but there were still about ten others coming on and only Cleric Vass to back her up.
“Come on!” she screamed at her oncoming adversaries. “Come on and I’ll leave you cooling on these cobbles!”
The leader roared a challenge back, and then crashed over with an arrow through his mouth.
Fia glanced sideways and saw Kerr tossing aside a spent crossbow. His sling was still around his neck like a kerchief, but his injured arm was free of it. Blood seeped through the sleeve of his shirt. He, Boni and the rest had dealt with the soldiers that had had them pinned and were hastening over to face the oncoming body of Frekirie warriors.
“I still owe you, bitch,” Kerr growled, “but one thing at a time!”
Fia didn’t have time to answer, even if she’d known what to say. The Frekirie soldiers charged into them, faces screwed up with battle lust and anxiety.
Fia flipped the rifle round, dodged a sword cut and clubbed a soldier across the face so hard that the woman’s jaw twisted around her dial. Beside her, she heard Cleric Vass chanting something in a tongue she didn’t know as he slashed out with his curved dagger.
Fia stopped noticing much of anything after that, as the world dissolved into a space about two meters square. She could hear the grunt and hiss of people killing one another around her, the silky grate of metal on metal, but her eyes were glued on each of her opponents as they swam into her ken.
She used the rifle to break the skull of the woman whose jaw she’d dislocated, dropped the flintlock and whipped out her sword, parrying aside a spear thrust in the same movement. The spearman lumbered towards her, pulled off balance and Fia dragged him past her and into the path of Cleric Vass. With indifferent efficiency, the god-talker rammed his knife up into the taller spearman’s bottom jaw, the curved blade crunching out through his eye socket and spattering the holy man’s silvery topknot with gore.
Fia slid her sword into the side of another man, tried to yank it loose and, when she couldn’t, let it go and pulled free her only loaded pistol. She gasped as someone barged into her, sidestepped a wayward knife thrust and pressed the barrel of her flintlock into the chest of the man who’d tried to stick her. The shot blew out his back, the burning powder setting the front of his tunic alight as he fell face down in the street.
The world distilled down into the blissfully simple chaos of trying to stay alive in a place and time that wants you dead.
Gunn’s man, Meiklejohn, a hard-looking bastard with a scar running through both lips, fell screeching to his knees, his hands scrabbling at his shirt front as the glistening coils of his own guts slid through his fingers. A Frekirie soldier slipped on the blubbering man’s innards and fell down, landing on something that might’ve been Meiklejohn’s stomach. It burst.
Fia’s feet didn’t slip in the blood pooling in the gaps of the cobbles. Blood didn’t make the cobbles slippery. She didn’t slip, but she was aware.
Cleric Vass moved in a close circle with a man holding a hatchet, neither wanting to commit. The glorious stink of gun smoke filled the air and Fia’s head. She was streaked with blood and more blood, her hands sticky with gore.
She was born unexpectedly to the ground by a large man, felt his fingers tighten around her throat. Her vision was filled with a forest of staggering legs, as the man’s strong grip tightened and pushed her head around. He stank, and the stink of him pissed Fia off somehow, offended her. The cobbles were cold under her cheek. Her pulse thudded thick and sluggish in her ears.
Blood sprayed over Fia’s face as she slid her black dagger into the side of the stinking brute’s neck and tore it out towards her. The man’s hands flew to his throat and Fia stuck him in the side and ripped the blade up his ribs, scoring deep through his flesh and feeling the blade judder on bone. With an effort, she kicked the dying man off of her and sucked in a lungful of air.
“You alive, woman?” someone asked, hauling Fia to her feet.
Fia blinked. Her vision focused on the big man, Breck. His thick thatch of black hair was matted with blood. She nodded.
“Good,” Breck said, thrusting the pistol she’d dropped into her chest. “Let’s go. Ain’t no time for standing about.”
Fia shook her head and looked around at the mess. Bodies everywhere. Meiklejohn was still kneeling in the middle of a pile of intestines, though he was about as dead as anyone Fia had ever seen.
They hurried away, heading towards the sound of fighting, Fia reloading her pistols as they trotted along. They continued to move through the streets, stopping every now and again to engage with knots of soldiers. There was no rhyme or reason to the fighting now. It had simply become a case of trying to kill as many of the enemy as possible before they themselves were slain. Separate groups of fighters flowed together like beads of mercury to form bigger melees, before breaking apart again, or petering out altogether as one side slaughtered all the combatants of the other.
Fia was bloody to the shoulders and beyond. Her muscles ached, the backs of her hands were blackened and burned from firing her pistols.
In a street right by the river, which stank like only a street of butcher’s shops could, she was abruptly reunited with the Allaway brothers. The fighting was fierce and close and ruthless, made more so by the bridge that spanned the river and joined the street of butchers to the street of smithies on the other side. Even amongst the press of struggling rebels and soldiers, Fia was able to make out the hulking shape of Fergus Allaway standing in the middle of the bridge. His club rose and fell and soldiers were smashed to the floor under it; helmets caved in, breastplates crushed into shattered ribs.
Fia fought her way around the edge of the brawl until she was able to see that Fergus was accompanied by the twins, Lenix and Gil. The three brothers stood back to back and held the centre of the bridge, killing any Frekirie infantrymen that strayed too near. As Fia watched, Gil peeled a knife from his bandolier and threw it smoothly overhand so that it struck a soldier in the back. The man staggered in the tight crush of warriors, vainly trying to reach the blade between his shoulders, before he was shoved unceremoniously over the bridge railing and swallowed by the churning river below.
Fia raised a pistol, catching movement above street level, and fired at a blue and grey clad man creeping along a roof with a longbow in his hand. He was obviously looking for a clear line of sight on the bridge, and had almost found it. It was a long shot, but luck was with her on this occasion and the man tumbled off the roof with a cry and crashed on top of a couple of women fighting underneath.
The sound of the pistol shot made Fergus look up. He caught sight of Fia, even as he grabbed an overbalancing man from the throng, yanked him forward and stabbed him in the spine, and grinned through his bushy beard.
“Stab and smack work in here!” he roared. “Just my thing!”
As Fia and Cleric Vass fought their way towards the Allaways, Fergus backhanded a soldier so hard with his club that he was propelled straight over the rail and into the hungry torrent of the Raun.
“I thought we agreed not to get caught up in a fray?” Fia shouted, cutting a woman across the face and then slicing her foot from under her so that she fell and disappeared under the multitude of fighters.
“C’mon now,” Fergus yelled, “it ain’t my fault that I’m not made for all this runnin’ around guerilla warfare type shit. Besides, these sons of bitches look like they’re enjoyin’ a little light lambastin’, don’t you think? Look how everyone’s gettin’ all close and chummy.”
It certainly was tight on the bridge. Fia could see soldiers and rebels alike having the breath squeezed from their bodies, saw more than a couple of dead men being propped up by the sheer impetus of the crowd around them, crushed in the mangle of battle.
“Just get them on the floor!” she cried. “Let the press do the rest!”
The crowd thickened as more warriors squeezed onto the bridge from both sides. Fia could actually feel her feet slipping in the blood and viscera and shit of the dead carpeting the ground. Distantly, she was scared and horrified––but distantly.
Fergus bellowed like an angry bullock as a mace raked slowly across his already injured cheek. He snatched the mace from the air and threw it into the crowd, lashed out this way and that with his club in an attempt to make some room.
“Gods-damn, but I bet this is the closest you’ve gotten to beddin’ anything in quite some time, ain’t it, Lenix?” Fia heard Gil shout.
“Go fuck yourself, brother!” Lenix retorted, striking out with a blacksmith’s hammer he’d picked up from somewhere and collapsing a man’s face in a burst of blood and bone fragments.
“Don’t be like that, Lenix!” Gil called back, drawing out another knife and stabbing with a remorseless lack of technique at some poor fucker that’d just been shoved into him. “You know I only say these things ‘cause I worry about you!”
“You just worry about yours—”
Lenix heaved and blood spewed from his mouth.
From where she was in the crush, Fia could see the slick point of a sword blade protruding from out the back of Lenix’s weathered coat.
Gil screamed in anguish, as if himself had been run through. Like a mad thing, he tried to swim through the mob of fighting, dying warriors.
Lenix vomited more blood as the sword was driven deeper into him, though who wielded it Fia could not say in the sweating mess of tangled, steaming bodies. His head lolled back, eyes staring outwards at the foggy foothills of the mountains that were invisible in the dark. Before Fergus could reach out and stop him, Lenix was pressed up, unresisting, against the low parapet off the bridge and fell back into the ravenous, frothing maw of the river. And was gone.
Gil’s scream, as his twin vanished into the churning meltwater, was a thing of raw pain and undiluted disbelief. It was the tearing of a thing; a tearing of something that had been joined so tight there’d been no knowledge of the joining until it was torn. A knife flashed from his hand, dropping a soldier, as he tried to claw his way vainly to the spot where his brother had gone over.
“Lenix!” he shrieked. “Lenix!”
Fia could only look on as she and Cleric Vass were swirled away by the tide of the fighting. The cleric kept an iron grip on Fia’s upper arm as they were buffeted this way and that, suddenly finding themselves on the blacksmith’s side of the street.
“Come,” Cleric Vass said, pulling Fia forcibly into a surprisingly deserted side-street. There were no witchlights on this particular road so the only light came from the half-moon. The two of them slipped into the deep shadows of a piss-smelling doorway and took a moment to catch their breath.
Vomit splashed the ground as Fia heaved up acrid bile. She tasted blood, but couldn’t tell whether it was hers, or someone else’s that she’d gotten in her mouth in the run of things. She spewed once more and then stood with her hands on her knees panting.
“Pardon me,” she said to the cleric’s boots.
“Do not ask my pardon for that, not after what we just passed through,” Cleric Vass said, as he retied his long silver hair into a tight knot.
With an effort Fia stood up straight and wiped her hand across her mouth, becoming aware, as she did so, that there was something flapping against her back; her bow, broken at some point in the night’s struggle. She pulled the broken halves held together by the bow string over her head and dropped them on the floor.
“I don’t know how the tides of battle are flowing,” the cleric said, his coffee-coloured face wrinkled with a deep frown, “but I cannot help but doubt as to whether we will prevail, Fia McCrae.”
Fia looked up at the sky. She noticed that the stars were fading in the east. They had passed that dead point of the night.
“Might yet live to see at least one more new day,” she said, reaching for her much-lightened powder horn so that she could reload her pistols.
“Perhaps,” Cleric Vass said non-committally, “but the dawn is not here yet.”
“Well, if we see it, I mean to pay this one special attention. Chances are it’ll be our last.”
“What are your thoughts on how we should proceed?”
Fia let her fingers do the work of reloading, as she relaxed her mind and closed her eyes. Almost immediately, as she forced the tension out of herself and quieted her heart, she felt the insistent tugging of that sixth sense, of her intuition. Sharp. Fish-hooking her insides.
Fia opened her eyes. She tucked her pistols back into her belt and wiped the blood and sweat from her face.
“Redmond,” she said.
“Your half-brother?”
“The very same. This all started with him. It’ll end with him too.”