‘She does!’ Yilling spread his arms wide, fingers working. ‘Long have I yearned to embrace my mistress, but I have yet to find a warrior skilful enough to introduce us.’ He turned to the blazing ship. ‘You burned my boat?’
‘A gracious host gives guests a place at the fire,’ called Gorm, and a gale of mocking laughter ran along the battlements. Raith forced up a jagged chuckle of his own, even though it took a hero’s effort.
Yilling only shrugged, though. ‘Bit of a waste. It was a fine ship.’
‘We have more ships than we know what to do with since we captured all of yours,’ growled Gorm.
‘And you have so few men to put in them, after all,’ said Yilling, dampening the laughter again. He sighed at the flames. ‘I carved the prow-beast myself. Still, what’s burned is burned, say I, and cannot be unburned.’
Skara clutched at the battlements. ‘You’ve burned half of Throvenland to no purpose!’
‘Ah! You must be the young Skara, queen of the few unburned bits.’ Yilling pushed out his plump lips and squinted up. ‘Make me your villain if you please, my queen, blame me for all your woes, but I have broken no oaths, and have a noble purpose in my burning. To make you kneel before the High King. That … and fire is pretty.’
‘It takes a moment to burn what takes a lifetime to build!’
‘That’s what makes it pretty. You’ll be kneeling to the High King soon enough, either way.’
‘Never,’ she snarled.
Yilling wagged a finger. ‘Everyone says that till the tendons in their legs are cut. Then, believe me, they go down quick enough.’
‘Just words, my queen,’ said Blue Jenner, easing Skara back from the parapet. But if words were weapons, Raith felt Yilling had the best of that bout.
‘Are you just going to stand and blather?’ Gorm stretched his arms wide and gave a showy yawn. ‘Or have a go at our walls? Even little men make a fine loud crash when I knock them down from this height, and I fancy some exercise.’
‘Ooh, that’s a worthy question!’ Yilling peered up at the bruising sky, and then back towards his men, busy surrounding Bail’s Point in an ever-thickening ring of sharpened steel. ‘I find myself in two minds … let’s toss for it and let Death decide, eh, Queen Skara?’
Skara’s pale face twitched, and she gripped tight to Jenner’s arm.
‘Heads we come for you, tails we stay!’ And Yilling flicked a coin high into the air, flickering orange with the light of his burning ship, and let it fall in the grass, hands on hips as he peered down.
‘Well?’ called Gorm. ‘Heads or tails?’
Yilling gave a burst of high laughter. ‘I’m not sure, it rolled away! So it goes sometimes, eh, Breaker of Swords?’
‘Aye,’ grunted Gorm, somewhat annoyed. ‘So it goes.’
‘Let’s leave it till tomorrow. I’ve a feeling you’ll still be here!’
The High King’s champion turned, the smile still on his soft, smooth face, and sauntered back towards his lines. At twice bowshot from the walls they’d started hammering stakes into ground.
A circle of thorns, facing in.
The Forbidden City
No fevered imagining, no night-time foreboding, no madman’s nightmare could have come close to the reality of Strokom.
The South Wind crawled across a vast circle of still water. A secret sea miles across, ringed by islands, some mere splinters of rock, some stretching out of sight, all sprouting with buildings. With torn cubes and broken towers and twisted fingers of crumbling elf-stone and still-shining elf-glass. More jutted half-drowned from the dark waters. Thousands upon thousands upon thousands of empty windows glowered down and Koll tried to reckon up how many elves might have lived and died in this colossal wreck, but could not find the numbers to begin.
‘Quite a sight,’ murmured Father Yarvi in the greatest understatement ever uttered.
All was silent. No birds circled overhead. No fish flickered in their wake. Only the creaking of the rowlocks and the muttered prayers of the crew. Long-tested oarsmen missed their strokes and tangled their oars with each other for gazing about in awestruck horror, and Koll didn’t doubt he was the most awestruck and horrified of the whole crowd.
The gods knew, he’d never laid claim to being a brave man. But it seemed cowardice could land you in more trouble than courage.
‘She Who Sings the Wind is angry,’ murmured Mother Scaer as she peered up at the tortured sky, a giant spiral of bruised purples and wounded reds and midnight blacks where no star would ever show. A weight of cloud to crush the world.
‘Here the wind is just the wind.’ Skifr took off the tangle of holy signs, talismans, blessed medallions and lucky teeth she always wore and tossed them aside. ‘Here there are no gods.’
Koll far preferred the notion of angry gods to the notion of none at all. ‘What do you mean?’
Skifr stood tall by the prow and spread her arms, her ragged cloak flapping as if she was some huge, unnatural bird, some madman’s prow-beast pointing the way to doom.