help. Whole families and tradesmen. They aren’t safe until they’re secured inside of the upper citadel!’
Emergency gave them no time to organize. Every war-hardened veteran Mearn could haze must salvage the grit to respond. ‘Halve the numbers who were standing watch on the walls! Draw lots for the duty. The rest will retire at once to the streets! Get the populace out! Brandish arms, threaten bodily harm if you must! Damn your eyes! Rouse yourselves! To Dharkaron, the slackers who falter to stare! Surmount this, or die! Every second we crumble to terror hurts our chances of long-term survival!’
Mearn kicked the prostrate weepers. He slapped men’s slumped shoulders, then snatched up a dropped halberd to prod on the stunned, all the while shouting in vicious language to roust the numbed and immobile. ‘You louses, get up! We cannot mend today’s blast of destruction. All of our safety depends on swift action! You and you! Pick ten others. Commandeer every hand-cart and wagon! Seize any transport to shift the infirm.’
For no grace was given: already the screaming and cries in the streets surged towards riot. Worse, Mearn tripped over a man on his knees. The fellow moaned with inconsolable pain. Both sticky hands were pressed to raw burns, his blistered face utterly ravaged.
‘Ath’s pity,’ Mearn gasped, jolted sick. Hapless men on the walls had been struck blind. Trusty sentries, caught wide-eyed in the breach, in the moment the light burst before them. Already, their scorched sockets and agonized torment gutted the nerves of their fellows.
‘Hold on, man! Bear up! We’ll get you a healer.’ Mearn’s biting grip on the stricken man’s shoulder was no less than brutally desperate. He must restore reason, no matter the cost. Or else terrified confusion was going to claim more than the slain caught outside the defences.
Spurred by necessity, Mearn handed the wounded man off to his comrades. Then he sprinted through the disarray on the battlements, yelling sharp orders to rally. ‘You! Lieutenant! Get the injured together. Have one sighted man keep them calm. Send a sensible sergeant to commandeer someone skilled to treat them! You there, no snivelling! March your squad through the streets. Man, woman, and child, everybody moves out of here! I will have no stragglers. No one gets left behind! The least grandame and elder must not be overlooked in the crush! I want the craft quarter emptied by sundown, with no one’s excuses for failure!’
The task lying ahead was enough to crush dauntless spirits, beforetime: not only were the non-combatants unsafe. Now unbridled fear posed the s’Brydion clan holding a lethal liability. In dread for their lives, or the well-being of their children, what forthright citizen or threatened merchant might not sell out to appease Lysaer’s ruthless ferocity?
Then Talvish arrived, a rock in a storm, in the soot-blackened rags of his surcoat. A rash of blisters disfigured his cheek where the light’s strike had glancingly brushed him. Though his fair hair was singed, and his jade eyes, struck numb by awareness that Vhandon had been caught outside with Keldmar’s slaughtered field troop, he needed no part of Mearn’s hoarse entreaties to grasp the huge scope of disaster.
‘I’ve got teams of men working through house to house.’ Rasped raw, he coughed; swiped let blood from his brow, laid open by fragmented debris. ‘Jeynsa and Fionn Areth were packed off straightaway. They suffered no harm!’ he reassured, fast, before Mearn recoiled to worry. The ghost of a rueful shrug, as he added, ‘Though Daelion Fatemaster’s judgement bear witness! The goatherding idiot wears a bruise on the jaw for the privilege. Nothing would make him stop yammering but my fist.’
Mearn swallowed. He had no stomach left. Only the jagged ache of despair, which found no direction to lean for reassurance. ‘You know the s’Ilessid will strike us again. How we can possibly move to secure the bone and marrow of our skilled tradesmen?’
Talvish shook his head. He could offer nothing beyond the tact he had learned the hard way, serving Arithon. ‘You were never the fool, Mearn,’ he prodded, most gently. ‘As the ambassador sent to Avenor, what do you think from experience?’
And the brutalized, youngest s’Brydion brother shivered, as the pain stared him down. Wreathed in stinking smoke, he allowed, ‘Lysaer will serve justice. You think we were spared to be offered reprieve? Then woe betide us when we turn a blind eye. For as I stand here, I already know. My brother Bransian will be crazed with rage. Family pride will not let him surrender.’
‘Best pray that you’re wrong,’ Talvish stated then, sorrow braced by war-hardened tenacity. ‘But should you be right, I think we’ll be given as much time as we need. If only to set the hook in the fish. Lysaer’s a strategist. He’ll hang back. Allow us to stew, until we’re worn-out by our agony.’
Few could match Mearn for bravado. He nodded once; swiped back his soaked hair. Amid ugly shouts risen from the clogged streets, through the echoes slapped off the stone revetments, he clapped Talvish’s back. ‘You’re cruel as Dharkaron’s Chariot, my friend.’ Reckless causes sparked off his penchant for gambling. ‘We can’t give way, now. Just spike the odds higher. Upset the presumption, that more mouths in the citadel will starve us to submission the faster.’
Talvish rubbed his temples to ease his pounding head, then reset his helm with grim purpose. ‘Nobody’s fooled. But the trust of the populace has to be kept.’
Mearn’s hollowed face tightened. ‘Well at least we won’t be afflicted by troops gripped in the throes of vile practice!’ Since Arithon had raised the grand chord at Etarra, the hideous threat posed by the Kralovir’s meddling had been unequivocally routed.
Yet on that reprieve, Talvish spoke no word of false platitude. Unlike the high-strung intelligence before him, he had witnessed Prince Arithon’s personal torment, just after the Fellowship’s charge was accepted. For the dread future, who but a Sorcerer dared measure the price of the miscast blame that now impelled Lysaer’s Alliance to war?
Alestron might yet bear the terrible cost of that shining victory.
Yet a self-possessed man with Mearn’s sensitive character, who had also just lost a brother, was no spirit to be forced to reckon with future intangibles.
‘Let us do what we can for your people.’ Hard-set, dedicated to practical mercy, Talvish shouldered his captaincy. He was no sorcerer, no musician, no blood-born seer stung by the vista of far-sighted consequence. He accepted that he had naught else to give but the conviction of human resolve.
Autumn 5671
Consequence
Night followed night, while the townsfolk of Alestron held their collective breath. Under confusion and back-breaking labour, the lower citadel accomplished its evacuation. The winds stank of ash. The drays that stripped the emptied homes of their blankets and food stores moved through air clogged like tarnish, with each breath men took made harsh with silted dust and the scorched taint of debris. Keldmar’s distraught widow could not be consoled. At Dame Dawr’s behest, Parrien’s wife shouldered the burden of loss, making rounds to acknowledge the field garrison’s bereft families.
Pitched sleepless by Duke Bransian’s white-heated rage, the elite guard held their posts on the innermost walls, while Mearn’s captains oversaw the chaotic influx of distraught refugees without faltering. The looming spectre of siege was not new. Behind the massive keeps that guarded the Mathiell Gate, amid starlit dark, Alestron’s stalwart companies imposed order. They kept watch, while the inner citadel’s burdened resources became strained, then overwhelmed by the crush of displaced families and craftsfolk. Through the night hours, when torches were doused to sharpen the night-vision of the sentries, the story-tellers spoke in the overcrowded encampments jammed into the open baileys. They recited the course of bygone history, passed down through each generation.
The citadel’s inhabitants were reminded again: they were a proud people, descended from the deeds of high hearts and war heroes …
* * *
The first flame of the uprising remained unforgotten, when insurgent