The gods knew he was no lover of fighting, but he could understand why bards sung of battles. The matching of warrior against warrior. Of skill against skill and courage against courage. There was no skill or courage here. Nothing noble in this blind destruction.
But Skifr wasn’t interested in nobility, only vengeance. She slapped the side of her weapon and the drum dropped out, tumbling down the outside of the wall to bounce in the ditch. She held out her hand.
‘More.’
Everywhere elf-relics clattered, stuttered, stabbed, battering Koll’s hearing so he could hardly think.
‘I …’ he stammered, ‘I …’
‘Pfft.’ Skifr dug her hand into his bag and pulled out another drum. ‘You told me once you wanted to see magic!’ She locked it into the smoking slot where the first had been.
‘I changed my mind.’ Wasn’t that what he did best, after all? But over the noise of screaming weapons, screaming men, screaming beasts, no one could have heard him, let alone taken the slightest notice.
He blinked out over the parapet, nose almost on the stone, trying to make sense of the chaos. Over to the north there seemed to be fighting. Steel glinting through drifting smoke. Signs of bone and hide bobbing over a seething throng.
Koll’s eyes widened even further. ‘The Shends have turned on the High King!’
‘Just as Father Yarvi told them to,’ said Skifr.
Koll stared at her. ‘He never told me.’
‘If you have not learned that Father Yarvi is a man who says as little as possible, there is no help for you.’
To the east the High King’s men were struggling to form a shield-wall. Koll saw a warrior running forward, holding up his sword. Great bravery, but it was a wall of cobwebs. There was a barking clatter from the little knot of shields around the South Wind’s prow-beast and the would-be hero fell, shields knocked from the line beyond him like coins flicked over.
‘That won’t do,’ said Skifr, pressing the elf-weapon to her cheek. Koll wanted to weep as he pushed his fingers into his ears. Another thud. Another trail of fog. One more earth-shaking boom, a vast hole ripped from the line. How many men gone in an instant? Burned away as though they had never been or flung ruined like sparks whirling from Rin’s forge?
They crumbled, of course. How could men fight the power that broke God? Swords and bows were useless. Mail and shields were useless. Courage and fame were useless. The High King’s invincible army streamed down the road and across the fields in a mad confusion, not caring where they ran as long as it was away from Bail’s Point, trampling through their camps and flinging away their gear, driven by the screaming Shends and the merciless elf-weapons, turned from men with one purpose to animals with none in their panic.
Squinting into the dawn haze, Koll saw moremovement beyond them – horses spilling from the trees near the abandoned village.
‘Riders,’ he said, pointing.
Skifr lowered the elf-weapon and snapped out a laugh. ‘Hah! Unless my eye for portents deceives me, that is my finest pupil at work. Thorn never was one to miss out on a fight.’
‘It’s not a fight,’ murmured Koll. ‘It’s a slaughter.’
‘Thorn never was one to miss out on a slaughter either.’
Skifr stood tall, burns creasing on her neck as she stretched up to look about her. Everywhere, Grandmother Wexen’s mighty host was being scattered like chaff on the wind, Thorn’s horsemen moving among them, steel flashing as they cut them down, harrying them through the blackened ruins of the village and off to the north.
‘Huh.’ She pulled the drum from her elf-weapon and tossed it back to Koll, made him juggle it in a panic before he clutched it desperately to his chest. ‘It seems the day is ours.’
Slowly, weakly, hesitantly as a moth breaking from its cocoon, Skara pushed Raith’s limp arm away and, using the rim of his shield like a crutch, wobbled to her feet.
The sounds all seemed strange. Screaming, and shouts, and the calls of birds. Now and again the stuttering bark of elf-weapons. But all far away, as though it happened in another time and place.
Mother Scaer stood rubbing her bruised shoulder. With a grimace of disgust she tossed her still-smoking relic to the ground.
‘Are you hurt, my queen?’ Blue Jenner’s voice. It took Skara a moment to realize he was talking to her. She looked stupidly down at herself. Her mailshirt was all twisted and she tried to drag it straight, brushed mud from her side.
‘Dirty,’ she mumbled, as though that mattered, her tongue clumsy in her dry mouth as she blinked across the battlefield. If it could be called a battle.
The line of stakes was buckled and torn, great pits dug from it and broken earth and broken gear and broken bodies flung into smouldering heaps. The High King’s army, so terrible a few moments before, was burned away like the morning fog before Mother Sun.
Father Yarvi gazed down at the shattered bodies of Yilling’s Companions, his elf-staff, his elf-weapon, tucked under one arm. Not frowning or smiling. Not weeping, or laughing. A studied calmness on his face. A craftsman well-satisfied with his morning’s work.