Brian Ruckley - Corsair

Pale daylight above told Yulan he was nearing the end of the stair. He slowed, lest he run onto a spear awaiting him. He quietened his tread, and heard Hamdan and Corena below him, beginning their own more cautious ascent.

A low opening gave out onto the footway atop the wall. The stair carried on, coiling its way up to the roof of the gatehouse itself. Yulan stopped and looked out along the battlements. There was a man there, sure enough. He must have been squatting down to hide himself from Hamdan’s view before. Now he was in a half-crouch, waiting for someone to appear just as Yulan was doing. He had an axe – more of a hatchet, really – in one hand, a short knife in the other. And he had fear in his eyes.

‘We’re not here for you,’ Yulan said levelly, staying back within the confines of the staircase. The moment when he had to crouch to pass through the narrow aperture between them would be the other man’s chance, if he had the wit to recognise it.

‘Get out my way,’ the man rasped.

He was not just afraid, Yulan realised. He was terrified. An agitation boiled within him, making his eyes jerk and his hands tremble. It could not just be Yulan’s arrival that made him so, could it?

Yulan stepped quickly out onto the battlements. The man shuffled back a little, but did not yield.

‘Set down your weapons,’ Yulan commanded. ‘I can’t let you pass with them still in hand.’

For a couple of breaths, Yulan saw before him a man who did not know what to do; then that man was gone and replaced by one who did.

‘Your king is dead,’ Yulan snapped, and suspected his words were not even heard.

The axe was raised, the knife withdrawn ready to stab in low. As the man rushed him, Yulan went to meet the axe. Clamping his hand about the upraised wrist and holding it there awoke darts of pain in his upper arm. He blocked the knife easily enough with his sword as it came in. He smashed his forehead against the bridge of his opponent’s nose, putting all the strength and weight into the blow he could. Bone and gristle crunched beneath the impact. It was so hard that Yulan himself was a little dazed.

Kottren’s man was much worse than dazed. He staggered back on legs that had gone loose and soft. Blood bloomed across his face. The knife fell from his hand. Yulan lunged in and ducked under the still high axe-arm. He got his shoulder into the man’s armpit, his free hand onto the back of the man’s belt, and heaved. He could only manage a couple of steps like that, but it was all he needed. He lifted and shoved the man backwards to the battlements and with a last great effort from arm and legs toppled him over. The man howled as he fell, a brief cry that crumpled into a dull thump.

Hamdan led Corena out onto the battlements. He came cautiously, eyes darting this way and that like a wolf approaching bait. Yulan looked down at the man he had flung out of the castle. He had thought he might ask Hamdan to end any misery he saw down there with an arrow, but there was no need. The man was folded and broken in a way that spoke only of death.

Hamdan glanced down at the corpse.

‘I’m surprised you found someone to kill,’ the archer muttered. ‘This place is quiet as quiet gets.’

‘What’s that?’ Corena asked, and the two Massatans turned.

They all three stared across at the keep, not one of them knowing at first what it was that they saw.

A black shape pulled itself out from one of the windows partway up the structure. It was like watching a huge, thick-haired spider with only four legs scale the skin of the keep. The great stone blocks had been eroded and fissured by time, leaving a profusion of handholds and crevices. Though the creature moved slowly, it did so with little apparent effort. Just a measured, gangly ascent in the morning sunshine. Climbing towards the crenellations that surmounted the keep.

‘What is that?’ Corena asked softly again.

‘An ape,’ Yulan and Hamdan said at the same time.

‘It was in the menagerie,’ Yulan said. ‘It must have got loose somehow.’

The animal made its slow way to the battlements and lifted itself almost casually atop them. It sat for a moment, legs folded away out of sight, spindly arms draped across the stone. It looked around, and for a moment it seemed that its gaze met Yulan’s across the wide space between them. He imagined it to be squinting against the light. Nothing hostile in its regard, just a simple momentary observation. Then the ape slipped down behind the stonework.

‘Well, that’s not a thing I expected to see,’ Hamdan said, puffing out his cheeks.

‘There was worse than apes caged in there,’ Yulan said thoughtfully. ‘If they’ve all got out …’

Screams cut him short. Not cries of pain, or anger: terror, from the mouths of children. The shouts of men were mixed in there, but it was the children Yulan heard. The raw sound made him wince. It was coming from within the keep, low down. Perhaps from the menagerie hall, Yulan thought.

‘Sounds like something worse might have come out to play, sure enough,’ Hamdan said as he drew an arrow and set it to the bowstring. ‘What else did he have in there?’

‘Lion, wolf, corpse-lizard,’ Yulan said. He was already moving towards the nearest tower, and the stairway that would carry him down into the courtyard. ‘Other things I didn’t know or couldn’t see.’

‘We want to go down there?’ Hamdan asked. He sounded doubtful, even though he followed.

The screams were moving, echoing, spilling out from the keep through windows and doorways. There were thumps and crashes, and the sound of running feet.

‘We do,’ Yulan said over his shoulder.

‘I’m not hearing any animals,’ Hamdan observed.

Figures were spilling from the keep’s main door. Men and women came rushing out into the courtyard, one after another. The children – Kottren’s children and a few others – were there, running on bare feet with their ragged clothes flapping about them. Still screaming, some of them.

Yulan flew down the tight spiral of the staircase, smacking his injured arm more than once against the stone. He saw himself as if from outside his body, just for the space of a few heartbeats, and recognised that there was excitement coursing through him. There was, in all this, a terrible kind of urgent aliveness he had seldom known before.

He ran out onto the cobblestones of the courtyard. Some of those who had fled from the keep were already stumbling or running beneath the gatehouse, making for the bleak open ground beyond. Others had paused and turned to look back at the towering stone mass. Three of the children were among them. They stood close to Yulan, their backs to him. Two of them were holding hands.

Yulan put his own, huge, hand on the shoulder of the nearest.

‘What’s happening?’ he asked.

She – it was a girl, beneath the smudges of dirt and the matted, knotted hair – looked up at him in fear.

‘I’m not going to hurt you,’ he said at once. ‘We can help.’

Hamdan and Corena arrived beside him, but the girl paid them no heed. Nor did she reply to Yulan. She only looked once more at the keep, and began to back away from it slowly and with hesitant steps. Yulan let his hand slip from her shoulder, feeling the bones of her shoulder sharp and hard beneath his fingers. She had not eaten well for a long time.

‘I suppose we can kill a lion, if that’s what it takes,’ Hamdan said, though he did not sound enthusiastic about the prospect. And even as he said it, they all saw that it was not a lion they faced.

The walls of the keep came alive. One section of the stonework shrugged, spilling grit and dust. It bulged out, the great rough-hewn blocks grinding against one another. The stones shifted and shaped themselves, swelling like a bubble in a thick soup. Then the movement raced across the face of the keep, a wave in granite, and swept onto and along the curtain wall. In its wake debris fell, the wall swayed, cracks erupted in all directions.