R. Salvatore - The Ancient

A fourth brother came to the spot, though, grapnel in hand, and with Giavno’s help, they secured it to the third-highest rung. The attached rope strung down to the small courtyard, feeding into a sturdy cranking mechanism the brothers had constructed to haul large rocks up from the lower portions of the island. The team down below went to work immediately, bending their backs against the poles and methodically walking around the base, cranking in the rope.

The ladder creaked and groaned in protest, but even the weight of a second barbarian who had leaped up to join his companion couldn’t suppress the pull. With the wall acting as a fulcrum, the ladder’s top dipped and the bottom, two men and all, raised up and out from the wall base. Their feet soon fully ten feet from the ground, the two barbarians stubbornly held on, with more barbarians rushing over and leaping up to secure them by the legs and feet. The sheer human ballast countered the crank and the ladder held steady, three rungs over the wall top, the rest suspended outside the chapel.

Only momentarily, however, for the ladder snapped apart under the awkward strain, dropping the barbarians in a heap.

“Now!” cried a monk far to Giavno’s right, and he turned to regard the men there on the wall. Using the distraction of the commotion outside, they sprang up as one and hurled a volley of stones down at the piled barbarians, scoring many solid hits. The Alpinadoran attackers at the base of the wall withered under the barrage, their formations breaking apart and many of them retreating. They had just started to reorganize when a bolt of lightning blasted out of a lower window-Father De Guilbe’s work, no doubt.

That proved enough to shatter the attackers’ sensibilities, and they ran off as one, though even under that terrible assault, they did not leave a single barbarian behind, not even the woman Giavno had killed and another felled by De Guilbe’s lightning bolt.

Brother Giavno spun about and slumped down, putting his back against the cool stone of the parapet. They had won the day, he knew, but he understood, too, that this would be only the first of many such days. The brothers did not have near the firepower to break out of their chapel against so large a force, and the barbarians didn’t seem to be going anywhere anytime soon. Indeed, the size of their force had confirmed the monks’ worst fears: that the many barbarian tribes of Mithranidoon had come together in common cause-something that had been unthinkable only a few hours before.

The brothers and their servants were badly outnumbered here, and every rock and every spear they had thrown at the attackers was one less they’d have at their disposal in the next round.

“Father De Guilbe has asked for you,” a monk who appeared at the opening back in the main keep informed Giavno.

The weary brother nodded and hauled himself up from the stone. He glanced back at the distant barbarians to see them setting up large tents down by the beach before the dozens of boats that had brought them here.

From the top of the wall above the main gate to the small chapel compound, Cormack stared out at the bloodstains. Not so far away, he could see the hair and pieces of scalp of one unfortunate Alpinadoran who had caught a rock on the head. A woman, he had been told by one of the other brothers.

He couldn’t see in much detail from this distance, but the small tuft of hair blowing in the gentle wind could well have been Milkeila’s.

The monk resisted the urge to throw up. She could be lost to him forever. She could lie dead at the beach, her head split apart. Because she had been out there, he was certain, standing strong among her kin, standing determined that the imprisonment of the three men would not hold.

Father De Guilbe was wrong, Cormack knew in his heart and soul. To proselytize in the name of Blessed Abelle was a good thing, but not like this, not under penalty of a dungeon cell. Even if the men in captivity agreed to recant their own faith and follow the ways of Abelle, even if they came to do so with all their hearts and souls, it would be a hollow gain for the Church, and certainly not worth this fighting.

Cormack put his arm up on the stone railing and rested his chin in the crook of his elbow, staring helplessly at the distant tuft of hair, hoping and praying that it was not Milkeila’s.

But even if his prayers were answered, it would do little to mitigate the realization that at least one woman, young and strong and full of pride and certainty to match Giavno’s own, had died this day who should not have.

Not over this.

“Brother Cormack!” He knew Giavno’s voice all too well these days. He slowly turned to face the man, trying to keep his agitation off his face.

“The fight has ended,” Giavno said from the keep’s main door, some twenty feet back of the main gate on the surrounding wall. “Be quick to your work. We need water to wash our wounds.”

Cormack motioned toward Giavno’s torn upper arm. “Have you been tended?”

“I go to Father De Guilbe,” the man replied, though his voice softened in response to Cormack’s honest and obvious concern. “He will use a soul stone.”

“Quickly,” Cormack bade him. Giavno nodded and disappeared inside the keep.

He is a good man, Cormack reminded himself. Despite his current anger at Giavno over the barbarian prisoners, despite his rage that it had come to this-a prolonged and lethal battle and siege-Cormack understood that Giavno’s heart was good.

But the man’s thoughts were misplaced. And if “good” men could precipitate this kind of foolish and worthless slaughter, then… The thought made Cormack grimace.

He pulled himself up and noted the commotion inside the courtyard that surrounded the main keep, where brothers ran to and fro to shore up the wall in places where it had been damaged, or where the work on it had never been good enough to begin with. Truly even he had to appreciate the efforts of the Abellican contingent, no matter his feelings regarding their current choices and mission, for the work on this chapel fortress was remarkable to behold. They had built a circular tower keep, easily the tallest structure on the lake at more than thirty feet, and when the battling had begun those two years ago, the brothers had constructed, and so quickly, the surrounding wall, a dozen feet high in places like Cormack’s present position, the front gate, but more than twenty feet high in other areas. A series of bridges had been fashioned to traverse to those higher areas from inside the upper stories of the keep, allowing the brothers to bring in reserves quickly and efficiently wherever they might be needed.

This had been the first true battle where the enemy had come against them in such numbers and with such ferocity, and it seemed to Cormack that the fortress had held up amazingly well.

He scrambled down to the ground and went around to the left side of the tower, to a small and square supplementary building. From there, he opened a bulkhead and headed down a natural tunnel that had been widened by the monks, with stairs carved into the slippery and downward-sloping stone. He passed a side tunnel leading to the prisoners’ dungeon, and grimaced as he heard the shaman of the trio chanting loudly, in open defiance.

They knew of the fighting, Cormack realized. They knew that their people had come for them.

Cormack pulled a torch from its wall sconce and hustled along, past another corridor and down another desent, at last coming to a heavy door barred on his side with three separate iron poles. He opened two smaller hatchways on the door-one for him to peer through and a second that allowed him to thrust his torch into the cave beyond before going in. The flickering of that torchlight amplified many times over once it had passed through the portal, for this cave sat at the base of the island, just above the water level, and the floor of its lower reaches was the lake itself.