Chapter 72
in the end, there is only the blade
and the body that becomes its home
—Bladedrinker’s writ, archaic
A week later, the army of the Crowkisser comes to Thell.
Slickwalker watches them advance across the Barrowlands, his whole body alive with tension. Tries to take a headcount.
He flicks his eyes to the mountain ahead. Thell. The last of the old cities to hold any real threat. Hesper, back down there, clinging to the coast, was an afterthought.
The people of Thell had always been godless – conquerors; Empire-eaters.
They’d weathered the horrors of the south from deep inside the mountain, washed clean of their names by Crowkisser’s ritual, like everyone else, but left free to rebuild afterwards.
Unlike most everyone else, they’d seen worse.
Bringing them to heel would bring peace, at last.
With Thell, Crowkisser would control the land from north to south, from the blackened glass of the Rim to the great mountain glaciers, and everything in between.
What came after that, he didn’t know. He’d heard talk of things beyond the mountains, spires, other cities too, perhaps, off to the west.
Slickwalker shifts numb feet. He didn’t need to worry about the future yet. Seeing tomorrow would be good enough.
His eyes move towards the distant gate, tracing the covered holes he’s bored in at the glacier lines, the shivers sleeping tightly beneath.
He’s been watching the mountain day and night for days now, counting heads and memorising troop movements like lyrics.
Getting a sense of exactly how many they’re up against. That sense is not good.
He feels like a shiver himself, thin brittle skin stretched tight over something explosive. Just waiting for the moment of release. His whole body’s itching with it. The adrenaline’s enough to make him sick, to double his vision into dizzying spells of excitement and terror.
His attention is caught by the glimmer of metal on the battlements; one of the morning patrols.
There are five of them in all, six soldiers in each.
They’ll switch off with the noon patrol once the sun’s high enough.
One of them has a cold, sniffling his way around his shield grip.
Another, older, has a limp, lifting his hip high every time he turns at the end of his quarter mile route.
His counterpart on the western side likes a smoke, arrives early to breathe out a few puffs of something dark against the ice, before her friends join her and she covers her vice with a bluster of orders.
He observes their small vices, small flaws. It’s not much, but it’s all he needs.
He feels like they’ve talked this over a hundred times while looking at sketches of the mountain, of the Barrowlands in front. Shaping the course of the assault in their minds.
The Barrowlands themselves aren’t the problem.
If anything, the swarm of cairns that pocks the landscape gives them more cover than they might have hoped for.
Couple that with the outbuildings, those strange cottages with their cauldrons and pits, and the approach to the mountain isn’t the death trap he’d originally feared.
That’s assuming Thell doesn’t have people in the buildings, or between the cairns.
He doesn’t think so. His forays into and under the Barrowlands have become more frequent since that first tentative exploration of the burial chambers, still more twisting passages opening up beneath the plain like half-dug trenches.
Nothing as wild as that first night, but enough hollow land winding beneath the earth to make for unsteady footing.
The real problem is that the gate is the only way in.
They’d considered other options, sending long men up the side of the mountain, to cut throats and create gaps.
But that’ll only work on the far edges. There are too many eyes on the rest of the mountain, and getting a few blades up on its east and west extremities won’t save them if they can’t roll the rest of the army in through the main door.
Crowkisser was adamant she wanted as little bloodshed as possible.
So, they’d tried to find ways to make the siege as quick and clever as they could.
Part of the problem was the scale of the damn thing.
He’d seen Thell often enough on maps and charts, but mostly as a symbol, a strange half-scratch that looked like a hooded eye.
Nothing to give a sense of its true dimensions.
And for all that Kisser claimed to have flown into and over it on crow wings, it turned out crows were slipshod surveyors.
He looked at it again now.
Two hundred feet tall at least, assuming there wasn’t more below the earth. Maybe a hundred and fifty wide or more. And those battlements looking out at angles, about halfway up, some kind of natural ledge or cut, he’d guess. It was hard to imagine anything on that scale could be man-made.
Either way, it was more than enough to give anyone on the battlements a clear line down to the Barrowlands below.
He’d seen how cleanly Thell’s spears flew in their practice drills, and he had a hunch there would be a damn sight more than spears raining from the sky, given Skinpainter still called the mountain home.
If they didn’t want to die on their tenth step, they needed a plan.
Now, after three nights of arguing, they have one, but whether Crowkisser likes it or not, a lot of people are still going to die.
Slickwalker tries to picture it in his mind’s eye as he watches the patrols go through the motions.
First, the long men will shin up the mountain on the east and westmost sides, those strong fisherman’s arms put to work.
They’ll be silencing sentries if they can, but more importantly working their way in.
Slickwalker doubts whether any of them will survive the night.
The key to getting out of this alive will be countering Thell’s heavy hitters. For all Crowkisser thought she was invincible, Slickwalker knew better. All it took was a shot at the right moment. A dagger under the ribs or a falling rock. Sorcerers died the same as everyone else.
He expected four magic-wielders on the field tomorrow, and only one of them was on his side.
His skin prickled with cold sweat just thinking about it.
Skinpainter skulked inside the mountain and no one knew what they could do when pushed, but they had led a rebellion that tore down an Empire, marking them as one to watch.
At their back, Belltoller. Slickwalker hadn’t been able to get close to her, though he’d heard stories enough that he didn’t care to.
The tollers working together had drowned cities.
Alone, by herself, who knew what she could muster?
Slickwalker had seen enough cornered dogs in his time to tread carefully.
Worse still, Shroudweaver had run to Thell.
Crowkisser seemed to think she finally had all the pieces in place to shut him down, but all Slickwalker could see was a powerful, ruthless man with his back to the wall.
He knew she wasn’t willing to kill her father, but he doubted that mercy cut both ways.
Which left him, and the gun. At the thought, he feels it stir on his back, flexing lazily against his spine. He was willing to do what needed to be done. Killing Skinpainter or Shroudweaver only needed one finger on the trigger to save thousands; to save her.
His fingertips itch at the thought, and his palm absently reaches back to trace the stock of the gun, which pulses impatiently.
Crowkisser was convinced she could handle them both. After her near-death experience she seemed more certain than ever, a light in her eyes he’d only seen once before, when the south burnt.
Someone needed to plan for the worst though. And so, here he was, watching the mountain and thinking about the best division of death.
The patrols shift again, and he counts the seconds in between, the brief span where their backs are all turned to the plain. His eye flits to the gates, and he scratches nervously under his gloves.
Once the gates are blown, the fighting will be close, and brutal, but they have the numbers, close to four thousand now, Astic’s own bolstered by the Rim villages.
He’s not surprised to see so many. Dryke, Vantage and Fallow had been spare, lean towns before the south burnt.
Now they sat on the edge of desolation. Leaving to fight for something better was a simple choice.
Slickwalker had been surprised that they hadn’t gathered more coming north. The way Crowkisser had talked, the world had been waiting for her. In the end, the world had locked its doors and muttered curses as they’d marched by.
Still, four thousand was enough. From what they’d heard, or bought from the tongues of traders fleeing south, Thell could muster only a couple of thousand at best, and of those, only around half were fit to fight. And of that half, most hadn’t seen war in twenty years.
A few dangerous old bears, and an army of unblooded children. No wonder Crowkisser expected Thell to crack without too much strife.
Slickwalker, as always, was a little more pessimistic. Even so, if they could get into the mountain, they’d have the edge, almost four to one. The only trick was surviving long enough.
He starts at the sound of horns, from the eastern battlement first, then rippling along the length of the Stump, until the Barrowlands are awash with noise.
He watches as the limper hurries back to her post, as the sniffling boy straightens his helmet on his head.
The smoking woman stubs her roll-up ruefully and shrugs her armour tighter across her shoulders.
Slickwalker doesn’t need to look to see the source of their panic. He doesn’t need to, but he turns to the south anyway, for the sheer pleasure of it.