Roger Taylor - Arash-Felloren

A fearful dance began as the crowd became a thing of its own, caught between the advancing Weartans, batons flailing wildly and indiscriminately, the unyielding wall of the Vaskyros, and the murderous points of the pike line. Atlon watched in silence, a numbness creeping over him as he saw the consequences of his remarks to the Tunnellers unfold. Somewhere he heard himself saying that he could not have foreseen these consequences, that Arash-Felloren being what it was, this conflict would have happened somewhere, anyway, but this gave him little consolation.

He could see people trying to flee along the narrower streets that opened into the square, but they were moving against the continuing inflow of new arrivals and there was swirling congestion at the head of each street that allowed too few to escape to ease the increasing press in the square.

He drove his fingernails into his palms as he saw bodies beginning to accumulate in front of the pikes. Looking up, he saw that there were indeed archers on the top of the wall, though they were not shooting yet. Such Tunnellers who were reasoning as Heirn had, and trying to escape underneath the pikes, were being caught by the rear ranks as he had predicted. And had any succeeded in passing through unscathed, the shield guards were reformed and waiting.

Atlon found himself walking towards the fray. He clung desperately to what he had told Heirn. If he did not find out what had happened to Pinnatte, then far more than the people massed in this square were going to die. That was still true and he must not let it slip away in the pain of the moment.

As he moved down the uneven old road, he encountered Tunnellers running up it. Men, women, children – some bleeding, some leaning on their companions, some hysterical, some raging, but all of them with glazed, shocked eyes.

‘Go along the path at the top and down the other side,’ he shouted. None of them gave any sign of hearing him and the sound of the urgent helpfulness in his voice seemed to mock him.

But he had no time for self-reproach. More and more Tunnellers were escaping from the square along the road which narrowed drastically at the bottom where once again houses lined the left-hand side. None of the escapees paid any heed to Atlon, and he was constantly obliged to dodge and weave to avoid being knocked over by their relentless progress.

Then there was a strange, dreamlike lull. The road turned and dipped sharply, taking him out of sight of the square. The terrible clamour faded and, for some reason, there was a halt to the fleeing Tunnellers. In the unnatural silence, Atlon was drawn to look up at the wall of the Vaskyros. Its looming dominance overawed him. He was nothing. This was surely His place. What had possessed him to think that he could storm such a fortress single-handed?

‘Never underestimate the value of the small deed.’

The thought made him start. It was a remark often quoted within the Order, a matter of both commonsense and the sternly tested logic that guided their studies into the nature and use of, amongst many other things, the Power. Consequences rippled outwards, for ever, and to unforeseeable ends. An intuitive corollary – an article of faith held by many in the Order, though by no means universally – was that good deeds generally produced good consequences, while bad ones generally produced bad consequences.

Then the chaos of Arash-Felloren was about him again. Tunnellers were running up the road, forcing him to take shelter in the doorway of a house, and the noise was even louder. It was also different. As the initial rush died away, he left the doorway and battled his way through the crowd until he could see the square again. For a moment he could not understand what had happened, then he saw that the line of pikemen was gone. The pressure from those Tunnellers escaping the advancing Weartans had pushed their compatriots relentlessly into the cruel edges and points and finally overwhelmed them. Now, where the pikemen had stood, there was a melee of screaming people surging through the gateway and into the Vaskyros. It was a fearful sight and Atlon could only watch it in mounting horror.

A swift movement at the edge of his vision made him look up. It was an arrow streaking into the crowd. Another followed it. The archers on top of the wall were shooting at random. He could feel the panic of the Kyrosdyn guards. Whatever discipline they had seemed to have evaporated utterly, but that merely heightened his anger at this senseless act. His anger was as nothing compared with that of the crowd surging through the gate, however, and even as he watched, a high-pitched scream gave him the measure of this as one of the archers crashed on to the rocks at the base of the wall. The sight and the sickening sound reached him through the din and jolted him back to his present needs.

Looking round he saw that the Weartans had reached the square and were fanning out into a ragged line. He could not forebear sneering. ‘I’ve seen cows ridden better,’ he muttered.

‘At least they’ve stopped herding the Tunnellers,’ Dvolci said. ‘Presumably someone’s had the wit to see what they’ve actually achieved.’

With the end of the Weartans’ advance and the clearing of the gateway, the press in the square had eased a little and fewer Tunnellers were now running past Atlon. Indeed, some of them were beginning to do as Atlon was – watch. Then they were running back down the road towards the crowd.

Atlon gritted his teeth. ‘Go back to Heirn,’ he said to Dvolci. ‘I’m going to try to get in.’

High on a narrow balcony, Imorren looked down on the developing conflict in the square. With each movement of the crowd she could sense years of carefully garnered control slipping relentlessly away from her. How could such a thing have come about so suddenly? An actual assault on the Vaskyros was beyond the memory of anyone living, and when one had occurred in the past, it had invariably been preceded by a long period of growing tension between the Kyrosdyn and some other power in the city. But this…! And from Tunnellers! It made no sense.

Yet her anger was tempered by other considerations. That it was the Tunnellers acting thus, indicated that it was not part of some more serious plot she had failed to detect. And too, Tunnellers generally regarded as being less than human, whatever justification they had to offer would not be listened to, and whatever action the Kyrosdyn took against them would go substantially unremarked. Also, in the confusion that must inevitably follow such an event, she, as the injured party and by virtue of her talent for such matters, would be better placed than anyone else to make political gains. She would certainly extract a great deal from the Prefect about the Weartans whose conduct had provoked the breach of the main gate.

For a moment she allowed herself to relax and savour the bloodletting that was going on far below. There was little danger that the Tunnellers would get too far into the Vaskyros. It was a complex building seemingly designed for dealing with such an assault, and she had kept under constant review the plans that the Kyrosdyn had always had for its defence; plans which assumed the attackers would be professional soldiers, not a mindless mob. It was irksome that good guards would be lost in the fray, but Arash-Felloren was never short of such people and it would be a salutary lesson in the virtues of discipline for those who survived.

A crash brought her out of her reverie. She leaned forward to see that a large scaffolding tower had been knocked over by the crowd surging around the outer courtyard. Several people had been hurt. Her anger returned, or rather her irritation – her usual mood when dealing with anything that involved the builders and artisans who were needed to service her plans for the Vaskyros. She would have to intervene before even more damage was done.