A croaked order brings all her good lads and lasses, all of them not hauling with gristle and gut on the ratlines, rising up the side of the barrows and throwing the shoal nets.
Dark things, thick and heavy as a wet wool cloak, weighted with sharp shore rock. Back home, they used them to trap creelbreakers, but they’ve got a different catch today. The nets settle over upraised spears, heads and arms, tangling everything, pulling inexorably down. Spears can’t swing, shields can’t raise, all snared up like sprats in a jar. As they realise their predicament, some of the Thell boys start to scream.
Sandsinger steels her heart and gives the order. ‘Clubs out, my brave ones.’
Astic’s troops swarm the trapped soldiers, covered and camouflaged bodies rising up from the hillside like cormorants. Blackwood clubs smash through the tangled mess of net and rope, crushing bones and snapping fingers. Boathooks come inunder the mess, taking out calves and tendons in ragged, howling strokes. Sandsinger swings again and again, dodging blades that flash by her eyes. They’re not all so lucky. Overconfident, some of them, eager for payback. A few get caught on spear-points, pulled back into the whole screaming mess. She grits her teeth, spits the blood of strangers out of her mouth and keeps swinging. Slowly, each trapped phalanx is battered to the ground, collapsing in on itself. Deaths by the score, and the punch of broken bone echoing over the Barrowlands.
All along the line, Sandsinger watches the people of Astic take their revenge, Thell’s charge foundering in a mess of snares. A full third of the gate guard are down in the mud, dragging themselves helplessly from clubs that fall like wet rocks. The storm doesn’t tell friend from foe either. Lightning hammers into the middle of each struggling clot, sending bodies sprawling, filling the air with the stench of cooked meat.
On the battlements, and at the gate, Kinghammer and his generals see what’s happening to their army. There’s only one way it can go after this. A low, sonorous bell tolls out, and the hail of spears from above stops.
High on his perch, Slickwalker mutters a curse, and darts for the gates. On the ground below, Sandsinger wipes off her club, and turns wearily towards the mountain. ‘Shit.’
From outside the gates of Thell, the remaining guards charge. Another two hundred warriors fanning out into a precise line, shields locked, spears levelled. No rash moves this time. They’ve learnt their lesson. A steady advance, and Sandsinger sees only death at the end of it.
She looks for Crowkisser, spying her for a moment, standing tall atop a barrow, staring fixedly at something on the battlements high above – that ragged, ribboned bastard from before. Then she’s not got time for anything but meeting the charge. Dragging her lads and lasses back into formation, straightening shields and propping them up as best she can.
Between her group and the others, they form as solid a wall as half a hundred tired fisherfolk can manage, blocking the lowground between the barrows, keeping the raised mounds of the buried dead to their left and right, plugging the gaps in their line.
Sandsinger counts in her head as Thell’s soldiers charge closer. Maybe a hundred of them headed her way, and she makes just fifty of her greycloaks. A few bright slashes as the reserves from Sedge and Fallow come up, and what’s left of their second line comes forwards, but that’s it. They’re near enough evenly matched, which is bad.
Slickwalker’s stopped firing, so he must be getting ready to blow the gate, but there’s a lot of murderous bastards between them and the mountain.
Fifty feet. The drum of their steps against the plain. She can feel it in her chest.
Forty feet. Their war cries high and bright as eagles. She wants to be anywhere but here.
Thirty feet. She can see their faces. The eyes behind their shields, their tattooed skin.
She calls out, ‘Steady!’ and she’s amazed there’s still strength in her voice.
Thell’s warriors break into a run, and Sandsinger falls quiet, except for a low murmur she keeps at the back of her lips. ‘Not today.’ She grips her club tight, hanging in a moment of wood-sweat breath, before the lines meet with a crash that echoes over the mountain.
Bodies are driven into the grass. A shudder goes through their shield wall like a wounded animal. A fisherboy with barely seventeen summers under his belt finds himself staggering backwards, pinned to the mossy side of a barrow. He doesn’t even know why until he looks down and sees the spear shining red in his chest.
In Thell’s ranks, a veteran eyes the lad opposite her, as a swung club skitters off her shield. Her bones ache from the impact of the charge. She’s been a soldier since the fall of the Empire, but she hasn’t seen a war for as long, and she’d forgotten the shape of it, forgotten what it feels like when the bones in your arm near break because your shield’s braced wrong. The panic is harsh in her stomach, lit like old coals, rattling out her ribs in panicked gasps.She can barely breathe, and she has to kill this boy in front of her, who could be her son, if his hair were blonde.
She’s not alone. All down the line, the two armies lock, heaving. Grace and tactics gone, nothing but a mess of bodies pushing against one another, sweating, screaming and bleeding into the mud.
Crowkisser’s distantly aware of the dying at her back, but her mind’s elsewhere, up in the storm, watching Skinpainter’s fingers dance as he pulls red-lit death down on her people.
She’s trying to sense the shape of their magic, to find her moment to strike back. They’re all relying on her. She’s the only one in this army that can match Skinpainter, Belltoller, or Shroudweaver. And she will. She won’t let them down. She’s going to show them all why the south burnt.
That storm’s the problem. Mountain magic, but on a scale she’s never seen. This is no weather witching, calling a squall down over the fields, or twisting rain towards the brave crops that grow on the rock-side. She has no idea where Skinpainter found the power for something like this, but there’s a taste to it that’s familiar. Slick as burnt sugar, like honey on the back of the throat. God magic. And she knows how to deal with the dregs of the gods.
Her people need cover, need shelter from that red murder tearing down out of the sky. And there’s nobody to protect them but her. She swerves to avoid another lightning strike. The earth near her toes chars, rocks and grass fountaining up. That bastard’s after her. She canfeelthem in the storm, directing the lightning like a whip. Wearily, she turns to the long men that are left.
‘Cover me!’
They nod wordlessly, moving to defensive positions around the barrow-top. The body of Thell’s army is still snarled up on her front line. She has time.
Crowkisser balances on the peak of the barrow, her hands wrapped around the cairn flag, its wet wood rough against her fingers. She lets her mind follow its path, speared down into the soil, reaches for the sorcery lingering on her skin, and calls out. Itfeels like nothing at first, a shiver across her shoulders, like a door left open to a cold room.
She stretches deeper, further down, seeking the power she needs, the shadow that lurks under the earth.
She pulls it to her, an electric blossoming on her bones, her skin alive with feathers, and something darker, coiling and smoking against the storm.
Crowkisser throws back her head and coats her tongue with rain, calling out into the teeth of the gale. Barely heard above the lashing wind, but loud enough to carry a vibration of counter-magic, sliding like a dagger up into the heart of the storm.
