Brian Ruckley - Corsair

Hamdan slung his bow across his shoulder and drew his short-sword.

‘Arrows won’t serve,’ he said glumly.

‘Put some space between us,’ Yulan said, already drifting sideways himself.

He frowned at the impossible opponent before him. It was all wrong. Nothing like anything the skilled Clevers who served the Free would ever make from their power. To clothe the limitless potential of an entelech in this mockery of the human form was needless. To choose a form so small – the figure barely stood as tall as his chest – was oddly half-hearted.

Yet it was enough to kill both him and Hamdan, of course. More than enough, with its stone hide and cudgel arms. Only if it could catch them, though. There was the glimmer of hope in this darkness. It was – so far – imprecise and heavy in its movements. It would be too much to hope that it would remain so; it could be as fast and strong as the Clever who made it wished, if they were willing to spend enough of their own vitality on its making. But they might be able to occupy it long enough that the others could reach the boats alive.

Hamdan, it seemed, had greater ambitions than mere delay. He darted in and put a savagely precise slash into the seam between two cobblestones, midway along the thing’s outstretched arm. His blade cut through and burst out the other side in a cloud of dirt and loose earth. Parts of that arm fell away. What remained re-formed itself.

The earthen figure twisted and lashed out at the archer, a sudden vigour to its movement. The blow caught him across the back. Glancing, but hard enough to spin him about and stagger him and have him crying out in pain.

Yulan rushed forward. His eyes mapped that rocky skin as he ran. He tracked the shifting and sliding of cobbles across its flank, the flowing of the earth and pebbles beneath them. The moment came, the opening, and he swept his sword through its side, where the ribs would have been were it a living thing. The blade rattled against stones, inside the mass, shook in his hand, but it did not stop. Gouts of earth and rock burst out. The Clever-made monster slumped and sagged.

But it flung out more limbs, thin tendrils sprouting from its torso that engulfed him so suddenly he was powerless to avoid them. It embraced him in fierce dust and stone and squeezed. He was taller than it, and his arms were still free. He hammered down at one of the arms holding him with the hilt of his sword. It did nothing but jar his arm and scrape the skin from the side of his hand.

For an unreal moment as he felt the air rushing out from his lungs, his chest tightening and trembling, he was looking down at the upturned head of the thing that would kill him. And he saw it change. He saw its fabric crumble and become fine dust that gathered and clumped and made of itself a distant image of a face. Lips, and the bump of a nose, and blank, smooth spaces where eyes should lie. It stared blindly up at him, and he stared back. Into the face of a child.

The lips parted and, from out of the dark hollow behind them, dust spoke to him. Just once, but he heard it quite clearly.

‘Stay,’ it said. In the voice of a little girl.

Then the head and face erupted, burst apart sand in a gale, as Hamdan’s sword cut through. Grit blasted at Yulan’s face, almost blinding him, but he spun his sword in his upraised hands. He turned its point downward and plunged it into the roiling mass of earth where the head had been. He sank it down as far as it would go and then twisted and hauled with all his strength, ripping the blade out sideways.

In an instant the crushing coils about him fell away. It all fell away, crashing into a pile of cobblestones and earth. He fell among it, gasping for breath.

Hamdan had his arm at once and hauled him unceremoniously to his feet.

‘Everyone else is out that door, so we’d best be after them, I’d say,’ Hamdan snapped.

Yulan coughed and spat dust.

‘It’s a girl,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘The Clever who’s trying to kill us. It’s one of Kottren’s children.’

The Sorentines had been a strange people in many ways. Their ascent from being just one more people among many to lords of a vast realm had been so rapid that they carried many of their oldest traditions up with them, barely changed. It was the evidence for one of those that told Yulan he had been right about this castle being their handiwork.

The postern gate at the base of the castle’s rearmost corner tower was framed by the gaping maw of a bull. Carved from the same hard stone as the walls themselves, its horns stretched an arm’s length on either side. To open the iron-bound door and walk through was to enter into the great bull’s mouth. Its flared nostrils formed the lintel, its tongue the step. Quite why the Sorentines had been so wedded to the image of the bull, Yulan did not know or care. That this one might give him a way out of the trap sprung by the Corsair King’s death, he did care about.

The sight that greeted them as he and Hamdan passed through the bull’s mouth was not as comforting as he might have hoped, though. They stood upon a precipitous high ledge, suddenly exposed to the buffets of the sea breeze. Down below, what felt dizzyingly far below, was the little cove in which Kottren had kept his humble, motley fleet. And between ledge and cove ran a steep, narrow staircase cut into the very face of the near vertical cliffs that held the castle aloft. The steps were rough-hewn and lacked the width for more than a single file descent.

The prize they sought was there waiting for them, though. Down in the cove at the foot of the stair, where the sea was blue and calm, rested three vessels. They rocked gently at anchor. Corena and the rest – the three children and four others of Kottren’s former subjects – were already halfway down the stair, racing for that prize.

‘Nice of them to wait for us,’ Hamdan grunted as he slammed the door shut behind them.

‘I wouldn’t have wanted them to,’ Yulan said.

He was regarding the steps that waited him uneasily. To his eye, they looked perilously uneven, slippery and generally treacherous. He had never been greatly enamoured of heights.

‘You’re sure it’s a child?’ Hamdan asked him gravely.

‘That wasn’t anyone who really knows what they’re doing, was it? Did you ever see one of our own Clevers do anything so imprecise, so wild?’

‘I suppose not,’ Hamdan conceded.

‘No. That was all instinct. Nothing measured or practised about it.’

Yulan’s mind was back in those moments in the menagerie when he had first seen the children. The girl Kottren had summoned to fetch food, with her pallor and scabs and crooked fingers and eyes that looked diseased. He had thought her appearance a result of hardship and an uncaring father, but of course it could have been the signs of a Clever ravaged by the flowing through her of a power no one had ever taught her how to properly ration or control. It had not even occurred to him at the time.

‘It’s not one of those three we’re trying to save, is it?’ Hamdan asked.

‘No.’ Yulan shook his head. ‘I know who it is. She’s just a little girl.’

They began their cautious descent. The steps were damp, glistening with the spray of the last storm. This face of the island was in deep shadow. No sun could reach it to cook away the moisture. Seagulls and other ocean birds wheeled close in, screeching at these human interlopers. Some had nests along the cliffs – not close, but close enough – and their droppings had stained the steps here and there.

It all made Yulan tense and attentive as he set one foot down after another. He could not help but spread his arms a touch, seeking a balance he did not really need for anything but comfort. The wind was unhelpful. This had not been the kind of danger he had expected joining the Free to bring. The prospect of dying with honour upon the blade of an enemy did not trouble him too greatly; falling off a stairway to be dashed upon rocks or drowned in an uninterested sea was not how he wished to end his days.