XXV. Encounter
CAPTAIN BENNENT LEFT TWO RELIABLE GUARDSMEN POSTED OUTSIDE THE TOWER DOOR. THEY STOOD UNDER ORDERS TO SECURE THE ENTRY, WHILE the king’s entourage filed inside, their progress delayed to a crawling pace as the litters were manoeuvred up the spiral stairwell. Outside, the mists slowly thickened. Droplets splashed down from the eaves overhead, slicking the courtyard cobbles. Sheltered from the cut of the wind, the smothering stillness seemed to diminish the distant shouts of the fire crews, labouring yet to douse the inferno that swept through the royal apartments.
Something scraped across metal, high overhead.
‘You hear that?’ The guardsman who spoke stepped out to investigate. ‘Think it’s a rat?’
‘Up the tower?’ his fellow said, dubious. ‘On the roof, man? How could a blighted rat get up there?’
The faint scratching persisted, the sort of disturbance a rodent might make, gnawing the marrow from an old bone.
The other guard shoved back his helm. ‘No varmint I’ve seen could climb a sheer wall.’ He peered aloft, yet saw nothing through the choking mantle of mist. A fallen droplet splashed his upturned face, ice-cold, followed by a second that was sticky and warm. ‘Mercy!’ The soldier shuddered, then gasped, ‘That’s someone’s fresh blood! Run! Shout up the stairwell and warn Captain Bennent. Tell him we’ve got dire trouble.’
The guardsman’s cry arose from the base of the tower. Though the words were blurred to unintelligible echoes, the note of alarm carried clearly. Two litters borne in single file ascent effectively blocked the tight stairway. Completely cut off by the curve of the walls, Captain Bennent could do little but send the last man in line to investigate. He had to wait while his order was relayed downwards. Just past halfway up the narrow tower, he trailed his advance guard of four Highgate men, bearing swords and cedar-laced torches. Behind him, wheezing in sour complaint, came the seneschal of the realm, assisting Lady Phail’s frail balance. The litters bearing Taskin and the king worked slowly upwards below them.
Bennent swore under his breath. As a tactical trap, this place was a living nightmare. His men were like dominoes poised in a chute, awaiting the first dropped marble.
‘Stand fast,’ he called to the bearers below. ‘Pass word to halt down the line.’
The unwieldy column stalled in its tracks, the magnified scrape of hobnailed boots fit to set teeth and nerves on edge. More noise trailed upward, voices lost in the welter of echoes, as his worried scout addressed the rearguard. Bennent gripped his sword in frustration. He could not decipher the mishmash of words. Worse, the sentry must have left the lower door panel ajar. The updraught flared the guardsmen’s held torches to rippling sheets of fanned flame.
The tangling confusion almost masked the patter of footsteps, descending the stair from above.
‘Ware, forward!’ called his leading guardsman.
‘Report!’ shouted Bennent. ‘What’s coming, above us?’
The front-line torchbearer responded with reassurance. ‘Stand down. There’s no threat. We’re being joined by Prince Kailen.’
The crown prince addressed them a moment later. ‘You guards! Douse those torches, at once! May the powers of the trinity preserve you from harm, didn’t Lord Shaillon inform you? Cedar smoke acts as a beacon for evil. Would you draw in a sorcerer’s spell lines?’
‘There, so I told you!’ the seneschal snapped. He abandoned Lady Phail to the support of her cane, then badgered his way past a sword-bearing guard to reach Captain Bennent’s mailed elbow. ‘We’ve dragged King Isendon through unspeakable hardship, all to no useful purpose!’
‘Quiet!’ cracked Bennent. To his vanguard, he added, ‘Close ranks, douse nothing! I’ll make my way up.’
The crown prince’s startled reply floated down the narrow stairwell. ‘Is that Bennent? Captain, are you seriously ordering the palace guard to stand against royal authority?’
‘Highness, I act under direct command of your sire. Every cedar torch in this company stays burning.’ The palace guard’s ranking officer pressed upwards, spurs jingling, to back up his men at the forefront.
Poised above, Prince Kailen leaned on the rail of the landing that fronted the doorway to Dedorth’s quarters. His left arm was raised, half shielding his eyes. Under the sudden, bright spill from the torches, any man’s vision would become dazzled, if he had been using the glass in the darkened observatory upstairs.
‘Who turned the king’s mind?’ Crisp, sounding irritated, the crown prince held his ground. ‘The risk you are taking with Sire’s life is unimaginably dangerous.’ The flow of the draught wafted smoke up the stairwell. Kailen coughed, still protesting. ‘Douse those torches, I say, on pain of treason.’ As the fumes coiled higher, his Highness straightened and clambered several steps upwards. ‘Why aren’t you listening? His Majesty could take harm, even die for your bull-headed negligence!’
Bennent watched, chilled to caution. ‘Stay close!’ he ordered his leading guardsmen. Then he passed word downstairs for the trailing members of the company to close up their position without straggling. He believed himself braced for whatever might come as he faced forward again, and addressed the disgruntled crown prince. ‘Highness, pay heed to your sire’s informed wisdom. Accept my protection and come down.’
‘Madman! Fool!’ Kailen’s voice grated as though he had just inhaled pepper. ‘You’ll see us all slaughtered!’ More smoke winnowed upwards. For a second, the prince’s rich clothes seemed to billow, as though the form of the flesh underneath rippled into convulsion. He folded, gasping, fingers shoved through his hair.
‘Mercy, what’s wrong with him?’ asked the torchbearer, confused. ‘Has his Highness taken ill?’
‘I don’t know,’ Bennent answered. Beyond doubt, the influx of torchlight and fumes seemed to be causing the unnatural affliction. ‘Move up,’ he instructed his uncertain guardsmen. ‘Slowly Carefully. Weapons ready! Hold those lit torches ahead of you.’
‘Stay back!’ The prince gagged through shut teeth, all but crushed to his knees as the smoke roiled over him. His face jerked and spasmed. His eyes seemed to shine, a yellow reflection that might have been tears, or something else that presaged an uncanny danger. ‘On your life, Bennent, I beg you! Don’t touch me!’
‘What’s happening!’ the seneschal shrilled up the stair. ‘Captain! Do something! His Highness appears to be choking.’
The guard captain stayed firm and ignored the plea.
‘This is obstruction!’ The seneschal clawed upwards, tried to shove past the guard, but found himself jerked short from behind. He glanced backwards, annoyed, and discovered Lady Phail standing on the furred hem of his council robe. The move was not oversight. Her insistent expression suggested his protest would fall on politely deaf ears.
‘Trinity save us!’ cried a guard, from above.
Faced forward again, the seneschal recoiled in revolted horror.
Through the billowing smoke, the smooth skin of Prince Kailen’s face darkened as though touched by a blight. The growth spread, glittering like black glass, then sprouted into a stubble of pointed jet scales.
‘Bright powers of daylight,’ the seneschal shrieked. ‘Your Highness, run! You’re under attack by a sorcerer’s catspaw! Captain Bennent is casting a spell on you!’
‘Shut that raving idiot’s mouth!’ Jussoud called out from below.
‘Lord Shaillon, be still!’ snapped the Duchess of Phail. When the seneschal kept shouting, she raised her silver-tipped cane and jabbed the courtier’s back. With his trailing robe still pinned by her jewelled shoe, the old man could not step forward to recoup his balance. He toppled on to his hands and knees, momentarily knocked speechless with outrage.
Before he could whimper, the nomad resumed his frantic instructions. ‘Bennent! Right now! Your guardsmen must use the salt water and ashes!’
A bucket was passed hand to hand up the stair, followed fast by the pillowcase holding the charred remnants of the cedar that Vensic had burned in the warming pan.
‘Hurry!’ cried Bennent, unable to suppress a revolted shudder.
Before their shocked eyes, the crown prince was losing the semblance of his humanity. Each billow of torch smoke altered his shape. His handsome male features melted away, blond hair transformed to spiked scales, while lips and mouth distended and grew the muzzle and fangs of a predator. His bone structure become cruelly pointed and lean. Neat velvets and lawn shirt strained taut, and then shredded as the upper body enlarged with a grotesque bulge of muscle. The manicured hands curled beneath the remains of the dapper, voile cuffs were no longer a man’s, but a hooked set of ripping, spiked talons.
The two guards bearing torches shrank, sweating and sick, while the swordsmen behind backstepped, dumbstruck.
‘Hold your ground!’ Bennent shouted, shaken to fear, as the thing in the stairwell crouched on its haunches, and clawed boots and breeches to shreds. No man, now, but wholly monster, it shrieked and launched to savage the guards at the forefront.
The demonic apparition charged down upon them, just as the passed bucket reached Bennent’s hand. He doused the sloshing contents over the guards’ heads, then snatched up the pillowcase, shoved in his arm, and lobbed a handful of ashes. The dry, gritted powder sifted out of the air, and clung to the salt-dampened skins of his two exposed point men.
The unmasked minion behind Sessalie’s crown prince emitted a squalling screech. It wrenched its leap short, hissing and snarling with fury. The salt water and ash mix appeared to repel it. Wherever it encountered a dusting of ash, its gleaming jet scales became scalded.
Spared by the grace of Mykkael’s instructions, the panicked lead guardsmen surged to attack with bared swords and live fire. The monstrosity scrabbled ahead of their rush, swiping its cinder-scored flesh. Smoke hazed it. Harried by the torches, it twisted in sinuous fury, lashed its tail, then streaked with a skitter of claws up the stairwell beyond the landing.
‘After it, go!’ Jussoud yelled from below. ‘Wound it from behind, as you can. If you force it at bay, beware! It’s likely to sprout wings. Bennent, if that happens, they’ll need your bowman. Shoot to kill with the copper-tipped bolts.’
‘He’s too far downstairs,’ the captain despaired. His line of march had prepared for assault from behind, with those men protected by talismans positioned as rearguard in the expectation that pursuit would arise from the palace. No one’s ugly forethought had ever imagined Dedorth’s tower might already be primed with an ambush. ‘Call down!’ he appealed to Jussoud. ‘Have the archer’s weapons passed upwards.’
Not all was lost. His lead guardsmen from Highgate had steadied their shocked nerves. They now advanced in well-disciplined step, armed with cedar-laced torches and swords. If ashes and salt served as natural banes, their banishing properties would not grant the men an impenetrably secure defence. Mere simples could not deflect a spell line with the shielding efficacy of a talisman. Yet the surprise incited by Mykkael’s stopgap measures had wrested back room for hope. Given the courage to enact a prompt foray, four armed men might prevail and accomplish a dangerous kill.
‘Stay close, keep together,’ Bennent cautioned the duchess. He held the line, though his anguished frown bespoke his desire to bolster the rush of his guardsmen. ‘Keep all torches lit. We’ll regroup on the landing and take respite in Dedorth’s chamber. Taskin and his Majesty can be settled in bed. We’ll defend our position until we have word the top floor of the observatory is clear.’
‘Lord Shaillon, pull yourself together!’ Though shaken herself, Lady Phail helped the seneschal recover the wits to rise to his feet.
‘Mercy!’ The older man raised palsied fingers, brushed grit from his cloak, then distractedly rubbed his scraped palm, as though the raw sting might be dismissed as an errant fragment of nightmare.
‘You’re not going to wake up,’ Lady Phail said, acerbic. ‘Best face the unpleasant fact quickly’
The seneschal stared upwards, searching the gloom of the upper stairwell. ‘Powers of daylight! What was that monstrosity?’
‘No power of daylight!’ A quaver shot through the duchess’s vexed tone. ‘Nor was the foul spell cast by one of our own.’ She planted her cane, squared thin shoulders and blinked, eyes damp in the haze of the torch smoke. ‘I think we now know why our princess has fled. Small wonder she took no one into her confidence, with such evil at large within Sessalie.’ Overcome, finally, the old woman blotted her lids with the back of her wrist.
As much in need of solace as she, the seneschal tucked her fingers over his dishevelled arm. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he murmured. ‘You raised that boy. We all did, since the queen’s death.’
‘Such promise, all gone,’ Lady Phail murmured. Assailed all at once by deep loss and regret, her inveterate bravery crumbled. ‘Mercy deliver our poor Kailen!’ Remiss at the last, her seamed cheeks streaming tears, the duchess faced down the stair. She tilted her head in crisp homage to Vensic, who bore up the poles of the commander’s litter.
Their eyes locked through a moment of poignant honesty, and the shared torment of unspeakable tragedy.
Then, as though poised with her usual aplomb, the old woman awarded the son of a pig farmer a noble-born gentleman’s courtesy. ‘Young sir, your captain shall have my sincere apology for rank insult and thoughtless misjudgement.’
The garrison man flushed ruddy pink, then tipped her a heartfelt, grave bow. ‘Then, my lady, for the sake of Mykkael’s maligned honour, my task is made plain. I’ll have to be sure you survive the debacle to address my captain in person.’
The cold blaze of stars did not change, or the wind, or the barren stone, locked in the tranquillity of earth element’s silence. Yet something in Sessalie shifted, unseen. The change ruffled chills down Mykkael’s spine and nipped gooseflesh over his skin.
The princess detected his hitched pause where she stood, watering her sweat-damp black horse at the cleft of the streamlet. ‘What is it? Captain Mykkael?’
He stirred, ignored the sharp pang from his knee, then shoved to his feet all at once. ‘Mount up, Princess.’
Unwilling to say more, he held out to see if she might protest or argue. Met by his braced quiet, she stared at him, nodded, then promptly made her selection. Some of his tension eased into approval, as she bridled and saddled the diminutive chestnut. Anja had gauged her six animals with a clear eye. The little mare seemed the most fit and rested.
Nor did she cavil at giving him royal orders, in turn. ‘You ride the black, Stormfront. He’s strong, never falters, and was probably foaled with the world’s only set of iron nerves. He’ll handle the nasty surprises in his stride. Once when the boys startled a snake in his path, he stomped the poor creature to paper.’
‘Let us hope we won’t need such staunch strength of character,’ Mykkael said, his heightened uneasiness masked under soft-spoken courtesy. The loan of the gelding was a rare honor, he knew. Also a practicality plain as a steel nail tossed into a chest of gold jewellery. Not being Taskin, he could do little else except bow to her Grace’s bidding. He caught up the prized animal’s ornate headstall, prepared to treat with him as his noble breeding deserved.
Mykkael removed the belt from his surcoat and replaced it with a hacked-off rope length, then buckled the leather to the black gelding’s chin ring to use for a rein. He had ridden with nomads often enough not to mind the lack of a bit or a saddle. Since sword and bow made a vaulting mount awkward, and the ache from his punctured thigh hampered his accustomed agility, he used the advantage of a high rock to settle himself astride.
Anja surveyed each move with critical eyes, then nodded to his tacit request that she handle the ropes leading the other two pairs of horses. As they clattered up the swept ridge under starlight, she pursued his reticent silence. ‘Since you’re thinking you might need your sword hand free, I ought to know what we’re facing.’
Mykkael turned his head, a dark silhouette chisel-cut against the clear sky. ‘If I knew that, Princess, I would hope to use foresight, and plan better tactics than running.’
‘I see.’ Her gaze remained on him, fixed by a steel-clad purpose quite charmingly masked under impish determination. ‘Since you have a tongue that could beat a carved statue for reticence, you don’t leave me much opening for nicety. You are wounded, surely, in the leg?’ His irritable glance downwards met her bright, pealing laugh. ‘Yes. Don’t look nettled. Your bandage has seeped. I know a fresh sword cut, don’t bother to lie. The one on your hand is left in plain view, and you move like a man with a backache.’
Mykkael uttered an abrasive phrase in dialect, then added with stung dignity, ‘I don’t lie, Princess. I have in fact told you already. When I left the citadel, the enemy was using political pressure to divide your father’s supporters. Some were incited to stop me. They failed. The scratches I suffer, meanwhile, are mine. The scar on my knee is an old one.’
Her probing regard did not shift, but sharpened to a keener perception. ‘I saw your performance at last summer’s tourney’ Not playful now, but deadly serious, she pressed, ‘I don’t know the man who could make you afraid.’ When that leading statement also failed to draw him, she tried a frontal assault. ‘What set you off, Captain? A moment ago, you looked fit to leap out of your skin.’
He still had no answer. The wardings he carried remained quiescent. Still hounded by the odd, nascent chill, Mykkael glanced over his shoulder. The view at his back made him rein up short. No good news, but now at least he had the means to defer this tenacious intent to expose him. ‘Your Grace? Have a look.’
The valley below lay battened in mist, except for a distant, fuzzed ring that blazed like a brand of carnelian. Mykkael knew what he saw: the palace of Sessalie was set under demonic attack.
If Anja could not discern with his depth of knowledge, she could scarcely miss the uncanny symmetry of the conflagration. She did not break down, or plead reassurance, but sat amid the warm jostle of her horses, her distress wrung to anguished silence. A moment passed; two; she forced shaken speech. ‘That looks like the opened gateway to hell.’
‘A wound on the earth, near enough,’ Mykkael said, and this time, his acid bitterness rang through.
Anja pressed her mount up beside him. ‘A sorcerer’s balefire touched the palace aflame?’
The captain shook off the haunted recall of old ghosts, and the shadows of past apprehension, to give what reassurance he could. ‘Thank the powers of your trinity, the blaze forms a ring. That means the long spell that raised the assault was shed by an active defence. Your sire is still safe.’
She peered at him closely. ‘You suffer from witch thoughts?’
‘Suffer?’ He laughed. No northerner, ever, had phrased his affliction that way. His teeth flashed in a genuine smile. ‘The tribal mother who disowned me at birth would more likely have counted the instinct a gift.’ He tipped his head forward, still richly amused. ‘After you, Princess. We need to keep moving.’
More shudders savaged him as Anja spurred past. In fact, he wanted her safe in a cave, with his warded sword guarding the entrance. Harrowing experience had well taught him not to disown the prompt of such spurious premonition. Nor would he erode his awareness by dwelling on logical doubts. He held his mind quiet as a pool of stilled water, and opened his senses to the bracing tang of the wind.
The next moment, a prickling grue raked his skin, and his anchored perception dissolved…
He was a crown guardsman, sword drawn, his other fist bearing a torch laced with cedar. He raced up a narrow turnpike stair in pursuit of a black scaled monstrosity. Hot breath rasped his throat. His mouth dried with fear. He rounded the last turn and reached the top floor of a tower observatory.
Amid crawling shadows thrown off by the flames, there were details, all wrong, and laced with a shrill sense of danger. The board floor held a spatter of fresh bloodstains. Yet the heedless swordsman pressed on with his rush, without taking time to investigate.
Beyond the bronze bands of the seeing glass, the fell creature he chased clawed on to the sill of the open casement. Through whirling smoke, and the flutter of flame light, its scaled form continued its horrific metamorphosis. A pair of leathery wings extended from its hunched back. Its vaned tail now wore a spiked knot of spines, which it slashed, raking to stab its oncoming adversary.
‘Mercy!’ gasped a second man, breathlessly arrived at the stairhead. He also was clad in a palace guard surcoat, and bearing both torch and bared sword. ‘Take the thing down before it escapes!’
The pair spread out and advanced. Their raised blades gleamed by fire light. Intent on the demonic threat of the shape-changer, they all but tripped over the shed heap of clothing, abandoned to one side of the seeing glass. The left-hand man who had mired his foot was first to recognize the jewelled doublet that belonged to the High Prince of Devall. His Highness’s shirt was there also, along with knit hose and dark breeches; even his boots with their stamped-gold toecaps. The ruby signet of Devall’s heir apparent glinted, abandoned, on top.
The guardsman gasped, scared. ‘Trinity spare us! Why would his Highness take off his clothes and leave his state seal in this place?’ He poked the garments with an inquisitive foot, and laid bare a queer mark on the floorboards…
‘No!’ Mykkael hurled out of witch thought, his wrung senses spun through a hard spiral that left him sweat-drenched and clinging to the black gelding’s neck. ‘That’s a sorcerer’s short curse.’ The cipher’s infused lines formed a minion’s chain. If its configured patterns were not ones he recognized, he still sensed their ominous undertone. A sorcerer’s mark scribed in white river clay and blood was too ugly to be mistaken. ‘Get out of there, now!’ he gasped in distress. ‘The binding connection is active!’
Yet no warning he spoke from the mountains could spare the two victims in Dedorth’s observatory. Only Anja, mounted and riding close by, grasped at his forearm and shook him.
‘What’s wrong? Captain, what’s happening?’
Fully restored to the windy heights, Mykkael bowed his head, tortured speechless. If the wardings about him maintained cool quiescence, his heart found no ease in their calm. He had stood in the path of too much disaster not to recognize the queer, sickly feeling that presaged the unfurling of demonic power. The lurch in the world’s weave as the unnatural flux crossed dimensions ripped his mind into scalding recoil.
He heard Anja’s cry, cranked shrill with distress, ‘Merciful powers, you knew that would happen!’
He nodded, not needing to look as another sheet of balefire bloomed in the valley that cradled the citadel. This time the assault would not be shed by the grace of a standing ring of protection. Where the princess beheld that distant scourge as a flowering star of red light, he experienced the evil impact more fully through the gift of his wild talent…
The explosive eruption of spell-driven flame engulfed the top floor of the tower. Its rage consumed stone, the rare marvel of the seeing glass, and also the flesh of two living men whose tormented screams rang sharpened with the agony of the damned. The influx of the raw element surged forth from the sorcerer’s mark. As though a hole had been torn through the world, it unleashed the fell fury of chaos. Anything in its path not instantly immolated reached flashpoint and ran molten, smelted metal and stone singeing the air into roiling heat. Amid a rain of liquid copper and slagged granite, the shape-changer perched on the flaming sill unfurled leathered wings and launched aloft, trailing a burning wake of shed cinders…
Breathing fast and hard, Mykkael shut stinging eyes, opened them, then took firm hold on his makeshift rein. He jammed down sick nausea, unclamped his scored hand, and soothed the black gelding’s pawing unease. ‘Shelter, now!’ he snapped through scraped nerves. ‘We have to find a cave, or a ledge. Somewhere under cover to stand in defence.’
‘Say what you’ve seen,’ the princess demanded. ‘Let me know what sort of evil we face.’
‘May you live, and never suffer the burden!’ Mykkael faced forward, anguished, and urged the black gelding to a scrambling canter upslope.
The sorcerer’s mark shook the tower observatory while Captain Bennent sought to cram the king’s defenders into the shabby confines of Dedorth’s private quarters. The tiny chamber was already bursting with the elderly scholar’s belongings, its jumble of trestles heaped with unfurled star charts, and teetering stacks of books. The doors of the ambries gaped, stuffed with scrolls, beside candelabra on claw-footed stands, glued in place by old driblets of wax. The stuffed chair cleared off for Lady Phail disgorged a bent pair of spectacles, a squirrel’s cache of mugs, three chewed quill pens, and several dried-up inkwells. On the armillary by the cobwebbed casement hung a mismatched pair of damp socks.
‘Clean, at least,’ pronounced the Fane Street physician, in enterprising search of a place to deposit the trunk of medicinal remedies. Jussoud laboured at speed to make space for Taskin and the king, since the tray left amid the unmade bed held the remains of the astronomer’s supper.
With the floor space choked full, the men bearing the litters had been forced to hold back on the landing, the crates of food and sacks of assembled supplies dumped in disorder around them.
First warning of trouble, a vast, rushing wind screamed up the stairwell and hurled the king’s blankets helter-skelter.
‘Inside!’ screamed Bennent, the flagged cloth of his surcoat clutched in one hand, and his unsheathed sword raised in the other. ‘Move! Now!’
The unbearable screams of men burning, upstairs, entangled with his shouted orders. Within Dedorth’s chamber, the candles snuffed out. Queer light blazed outside, raging orange, as the roaring fires of hell rampaged down, licking the darkness beyond the shut casement.
‘Don’t touch the walls!’ yelled the Fane Street physician.
His saving cry came too late. Caught working the window latch to let in fresh air, one of the Highgate men-at-arms dropped dead on the floorboards.
‘Get back!’ the physician urged, frantic. ‘Move away from all grounded stonework! A sorcerer’s lines draw their current through air and earth. There must be a live craft mark, above us!’
‘Pull together!’ Jussoud called through erupting chaos, as maps and books flapped in the fierce updraught, and guardsmen blundered blindly into furnishings. ‘Everyone! Move into a bunch!’
The panic-stricken rush to comply all but collided with Bennent’s frantic efforts to harry the litters and bearers in from the stairwell. Vensic bundled the duchess out of her chair. Moved on trained instinct, he dragged the half-paralysed seneschal by the crushed pleats of his collar and pelted between tables, scattering books. He reached Jussoud and the physician by the doorway, which move brought the nine talismans fashioned by Perincar’s lore into effective proximity.
The shield locked and sang. Blue light pealed out with a lightning-sharp crack, widening into a sphere. The arcane defence touched the spelled conduit drawn through the tower’s stonework and unleashed a burst of actinic static. Forces from the unseen collided with the vizier’s geometry, and entangled with a booming, concussive report. The massive tower shook. Loose stonework rained down, hammering against the beamed ceiling. Molten stone and melted copper rained after, searing holes through the planking above.
The railing on the landing cracked and gave, with one man yanked back, saved from falling by Bennent’s snatched grip on his mail shirt.
‘Hold firm!’ yelled Jussoud, while the world seemed to rock, and flaming cinders splashed against the glass casement. One of the roundels burst in a flying spray of smashed fragments.
Another deafening blast shook the tower. Then suddenly, all fell silent.
Eleven survivors stood in shaken, pale shock, with two more on braced litters, still breathing.
‘Both the king and Commander Taskin are unharmed,’ the Fane Street physician announced in a tremulous voice.
As Bennent stirred and surged towards the stair, Jussoud yanked him short. ‘Stay here, Captain!’ Distressed as no man had ever seen him, the nomad gathered the duchess’s palsied hand and propped up the sagging seneschal. To snap Bennent out of brash shock, he said, bluntly, ‘Your sentries downstairs are already dead, and the four men upstairs, consumed also. The whole top of the tower is probably gone. All that kept us alive was the closed proximity of Perincar’s geometry. Lacking that grace, the structure that holds us would have gone up like a candle dropped into a forge flame.’
The Fane Street physician backed the nomad’s disastrous assessment. ‘Break the resonance of the copper talismans we carry, and believe it! Your king, and every last one of us, are going to die very horribly’
‘I hear you.’ Bennent sheathed the sword he had drawn on blind reflex, then regarded the party left under his care to defend. ‘Guardsmen!’ he commanded, ‘Clear Dedorth’s quarters. We’ll have to lie in for a siege, and hold out on the hope Captain Mykkael can win through with the princess.’