Brian Ruckley - Corsair

A sound like a rockfall, or of boulders being rolled along in a flood, boomed around the courtyard. Yulan and all the rest stood transfixed, turning their heads slowly to follow the impossible sight. It was as if some mad giant had taken hold of the stone walls and shaken them, sending a ripple rushing through them. That ripple surged through and around a corner tower, shaking it so violently that its top split asunder and collapsed in on itself in a pluming cloud of mortar and dust.

That was when Yulan decided it was time to run.

‘Come!’ he shouted above the rumbling ruin, and pulled at the children who still stood beside him.

In the event, they had all gone no more than a couple of paces before the destruction ended, with all the sudden violence it had begun. The moving contortion of the stonework swayed across the front of the castle until it collided with the gatehouse and there it snapped out of existence, blowing huge chunks of masonry apart. The gatehouse itself shivered and slumped. One half of it groaned and sank into a slide of disarticulated blocks and rubble, spitting out a great choking blast of dirt and pulverised stone which engulfed the courtyard.

Caught in it, just as he had more than once been caught in a desert sandstorm, Yulan covered his nose and mouth with one hand. Beside him, he heard Hamdan hawking and spitting.

‘We’re in trouble now,’ the archer said, and Yulan had never before heard such grim sincerity in his voice.

‘Of the worst kind,’ Yulan coughed. ‘They’ve got a Clever.’

Corena had asked them what an Orphanidon was. She did not need to ask about a Clever, of course. Even the most isolated, most far-flung of folk knew about Clevers: the few people who could tap the raw stuff of the four entelechs, the pure and inchoate essences that made up the world and all its contents. Bearers of great power, and of great burdens since the exercise of that power leeched away their own strength and life.

In all likelihood, Corena had never seen a Clever, unless it was some untrained hedge-witch wandering the land in defiance of the strictures of the School. Yulan had, though. The Free counted several among its ranks, and upon that simple fact was built much of its great reputation and might. He had seen them do things beyond imagination, channelling the pure, formless essence of the entelechs and giving it shape and power in the physical world. And he had seen them pay the price for those deeds in fevers and slumbers, frailties and withering.

So Corena knew what the word meant. But as Yulan watched her, he suspected that it was possible to know without really understanding. She did not look frightened enough for full understanding.

They were huddled – Yulan and Hamdan and Corena and the three children, with half a dozen others – in what had once been a stable. It leaned up against an undamaged stretch of the castle’s wall, off to one side of the keep. Its timbers were so rotted by worm and rain that it would probably have collapsed without that support. Certainly it had not served as a stable for many, many years. There was nothing there but a midden piled up in one corner that stank of decay and human excrement.

The whole courtyard had a fine layer of dust spread over it now. So too did Yulan’s face and clothes. He tried to brush it away, but it was stubbornly persistent stuff.

From where they crouched, they could see the doors to the keep. They could see as well the half-wrecked gatehouse. It might be possible to climb out over or through the mound of rubble there, but it would not be easy or fast.

At Yulan’s side, Hamdan was shouting questions. It sounded like anger, though Yulan knew it was as much alarm. Perhaps even fear.

‘Who’s the Clever?’ Hamdan shouted at the men and women cowering in the furthest corner of the stables. ‘Who is it? Are they an Aestival? A Vernal? What?’

He was asking what kind of Clever they faced. Which of the four entelechs – Vernal, Aestival, Autumnal, Hibernal – he or she was most in tune with, most capable of calling forth. It was obvious from the faces of those Hamdan addressed that they did not know the answer, perhaps did not even understand the import of the question. In truth, it hardly mattered. A Clever was a Clever.

‘Hush,’ Yulan murmured.

Hamdan looked at him.

‘I’d say we’ve got roughly no time at all to come up with a way out,’ Yulan said. ‘Lake’s close, if he’s not already here.’

‘Time’s not favouring us, right enough,’ Hamdan conceded.

‘Maybe Corena was right,’ Yulan said. ‘She said it’s all coins and caution for us, and she’s not wrong. Maybe I should have taken Kottren’s head the first moment I set eyes on him.’

‘No, you shouldn’t,’ Hamdan hissed. ‘You didn’t take his head because we didn’t know what would happen next if you did. Doing something without knowing what’ll follow is the last arrow in your quiver, not the first. Everyone’s got their own reasons for fighting, but people give us the coin because we’re supposed to be good at it and caution’s a part of that.

‘Look around you. Doesn’t this look like a bad idea from top to bottom? The mad bastard’s dead and he’s still managed to trap us in one of his cages, sure as any of his beasts.’

‘All of us,’ Yulan agreed with a brief backward glance.

‘You want to try and get them all out,’ Hamdan said. Not challenging this time.

‘Don’t you?’

‘The children. Yes.’

Hamdan had left a son behind in Massatan lands, Yulan knew. He had never asked why the archer had left, for it was not in his nature – or Massatan habit – to delve into another man’s history or heart. He had the sense, though, that it had not been a hard choice or a source of much regret save for that one thing: the child.

‘We have to get down to the boats, and do it before Lake reaches them, to have much of a chance,’ Yulan said.

He turned about and said to no one in particular, to everyone, ‘Is there a way down to the harbour without going through the keep?’

Several of those who had lived within these shabby walls nodded. One of the children – the oldest perhaps, though Yulan still found age hard to read amid the grime and ill health – quietly and cautiously said, ‘There’s a door at the …’

But she fell silent as if a knife had cut her voice, staring with wide eyes over Yulan’s shoulder. He turned to see what had so alarmed her, even as he heard Hamdan cursing and felt the archer surging to his feet.

In the midst of the courtyard, the ground was heaving. A section of cobblestones the width of a man’s outstretched arms was lumping up as if alive. Yulan stood beside Hamdan. Behind them, people were crying out in fear.

‘That’ll be us out of time, then,’ said Hamdan.

What arose before them, what shaped itself from the stone and dirt and dust of the ground, was horrible. A memory gone awry of the human form. Stunted and contorted, blunt-limbed. A cankerous outgrowth of the earth itself, clad in the yard’s cobbles like plated skin.

‘Run for that door, wherever it is,’ Yulan shouted over his shoulder.

He heard them doing as he commanded, vaguely aware of the direction of their flight, but he reserved his attention for the monstrous apparition that lurched towards him and Hamdan. The thing’s short legs never parted from the ground. They merged with it – they were of it – so that it should not have been able to move. Could not have, were it not a manifestation of the entelechs given shape by a Clever and thus unmoored from the laws of the possible.

Hamdan launched an arrow at the unnatural form, and the shaft shivered and rebounded from its stone armour. Dust shook loose at the figure’s every stride, wreathing it. Its bones of earth and rock sighed and scraped as it moved.