Brian Ruckley - Corsair

Again the nods.

‘Brave girls,’ he said. It sounded foolish, yet it was true and what else was there to say?

They stood, the four of them, and watched Corena clamber onto the balustrade. Yulan lifted Tessunt up to her. The boy did not want to go and whispered, ‘No,’ in Yulan’s ear.

‘It’ll be fine,’ Yulan whispered back. ‘This lady here, she’s the only one of all of us who knows about boats and water and things like that. She’ll keep you safe.’

Corena stood there for a moment, Tessunt wrapped around her, his eyes clamped tight shut. Then she was gone, before even Yulan was quite ready for it. She jumped out and away from the balcony, one arm outstretched, the other holding Tessunt tight.

They all leaned out to watch her plummet down. Her hair streamed in the wind. Tessunt was wailing. Then Corena hit the water with what seemed terrible force. A foaming white fountain rose and she and the child were lost in it. Swallowed. Only to reappear a moment later. Corena was half-swimming, half-wading towards the nearest of the boats. Tessunt was coughing and spluttering.

‘See?’ Yulan turned to Navene and her sister, meticulously concealing the uneasy feeling the sight had woken in the pit of his stomach. ‘It’s easy.’

‘We’ve already agreed we can’t swim, haven’t we?’ Hamdan said.

He was following Yulan around the cooling corpse of the cave bear, clambering over the heaped rubble that had trapped it.

‘That boy’s done it,’ Yulan observed. ‘Those girls are ready for it. I’m sure we can manage.’

‘Merkent does like to say that the Free always finds a way, but there’re ways and then there are ways …’ whispered Hamdan glumly. ‘And don’t you pretend you’re looking forward to it any more than I am.’

‘Oh, I’m not,’ Yulan said with heartfelt conviction.

‘Probably doesn’t matter,’ Hamdan observed, ‘since I reckon you’re about to get us killed, more likely than not.’

‘We’ve got to try,’ Yulan said, peering cautiously around a corner. Finding nothing amiss, he led the way on. Deeper into the keep.

‘The Orphanidon says he’s bound to the girl. Alone, they might each be worse than Kottren Malak ever was. Together … I don’t know. I don’t know how far we get, however fast a boat we’ve got, if they decide they don’t want us to go. And what if she’s not lost yet? What if this Enna’s still there to be saved?’

‘I’ve not got the blood of a leader running through my veins, son,’ Hamdan smiled. ‘Merkent seems to reckon you might have and believe me, I don’t envy you for it. All I know is, we probably don’t get far from here if we leave behind a crazed Clever who doesn’t want us to, and neither do those waifs you’ve adopted. You ready to kill another child to save those three if you have to?’

Yulan shook his head at that, not in denial but to loosen the question’s grip. He did not have to answer it yet, and did not want it tangling up his thoughts like a creeping vine, distracting him.

The building was groaning around them. A wind was blustering back and forth. There were seams of light, Yulan realised, leaking through jagged cracks in the walls. The bear’s fate was on his mind.

‘Being part of the Free, and all of this – it can’t just be about the payment, and feeling alive,’ he muttered. ‘We have to be trying to finish what we start. Doing what’s needful. Always finding a way, like you say.’

‘Spoken like …’ Hamdan almost laughed. ‘… well, spoken like someone who might be about to get himself killed, and me along with him.’

Of the two huge doors that opened onto the menagerie hall, one was hanging at a graceless angle, its metalwork twisted. The other was shattered. Less than half of it remained attached to the hinges. The rest lay in pieces and splinters in the corridor outside, strewn around the mangled hunk of knotted iron that must have exploded out through it. That iron was, Yulan guessed, the remains of one of the doors from the cages within.

He exchanged a glance with Hamdan, and saw in the archer’s eyes the same serious concentration he felt in himself. They kept a fair distance between them as they entered the hall, one drifting left, the other right. There were no torches or lamps here now, as there had been when last Yulan stood in this chamber. There was light, though, for there were holes in the walls. A gap in the ceiling. Rubble was scattered across the floor. A wind ruffled Yulan’s hair. He advanced slowly.

‘Enna?’ he said.

The girl was sitting almost exactly in the centre of the hall. Her knees were drawn up to her chest, her arms wrapped around them. Her head was down, her face hidden, tucked away into that cave made by arm and knee. All around her, the empty cages began to shake. Their open doors swung back and forth. Their bars clattered and trembled as if in the grip of some tremendous tempest. But there was no tempest. Only the same constant swirling of agitated air that pervaded the rest of the keep. And a little girl sitting alone in the midst of it all.

Alone apart from the dead. There were bodies on the floor, men and women alike. Each one with the inimitable loose emptiness of death. And there was the rent corpse of the great lizard that had once resided in one of those cages. The huge reptile had been torn almost in half by some huger, fiercer foe. Its entrails were spread across the flagstones.

Enna slowly lifted her head.

‘Who killed my father?’ she asked.

There was an ominous weight to her tone, even though her voice was strangulated and stretched out and unmistakably that of a young child. The rattling of the cages almost drowned it out. Yulan could see the anguish in her red eyes quite clearly. Those eyes had been veined with red the first time he saw them; now dark crimson was their only colour save the black of the pupil. Blood vessels had ruptured in there.

‘Who killed my father?’ Enna asked again, more forcefully. She seemed to be looking at them, but Yulan could not tell whether she was blind or not.

Out of the side of his eye, he caught the movement of Hamdan raising his bow. Yulan hissed and shook his head.

‘Not yet,’ he said.

One of the cages screeched as it buckled, the bars folding like straw. Its door twisted, tore itself from its hinges and crashed down, ringing like a dull bell on the stone floor.

‘Enna,’ Yulan called. ‘Can you hear me?’

The floor was shaking beneath their feet.

‘Who killed my father?’ the girl cried out, the cry all grief and anger and despair boiling around one another in hopeless bewilderment.

‘Enna, it is …’ Yulan began, and lost the rest of the words when a knot of air, solid as a giant fist, punched him in the centre of his chest and staggered him. The same gust howled on and barrelled into Hamdan, sending the arrow he had got to his bowstring flashing up harmlessly to strike the roof.

Enna was rising unsteadily to her feet. No, not to her feet, Yulan realised. Onto hands and knees. Crawling, in her stained and loose gown, towards them. Or perhaps towards the doors.

‘Give him back,’ she was raging, and the need in her cry was enough to break his heart.

He made to close on her, not even knowing what he would do if he reached her. He could see the image of him embracing her in his inner eye, but he was acutely aware too of the weight of his sword in his hand.

In the event, he did not reach her. The floor bucked beneath his feet, kicking him up. As his feet left the floor so the flailing wind took hold of him and tumbled him. He was swept backwards, helpless as a straw on a storm, and slammed into the wall to one side of the doors. The back of his head smacked against stone. He fell to his knees, his vision blurred. There was a roaring in his ears, blasting at him from within the air itself.