33
Shadows on the Walls
“Come, High Magister Viyeki,” said Prince Pratiki. “Stand with me and watch our warriors at their brave work.”
The prince-templar was resplendent in an ancient suit of witchwood armor worth more than everything Viyeki owned put together. His hair was bound into two deliberately hasty war-braids, and his famous sword Moonlight hung at his waist. But Pratiki was no mere Sacrifice officer: the prince-templar was a relative of the queen herself, a rank greater than even the High Martial of all the armies of Nakkiga could hope to achieve. Pratiki had not achieved greatness, it was a part of him, a certainty that informed his every breath and thought. “Please, my lord,” he asked Viyeki again, turning this time to look back. “Come and join me.”
Pratiki, Viyeki had come to learn, was surprisingly generous for a Hamakha noble, courteous with all who served him, even slaves. But as with most born into great power, he did not understand the obligations even his generosity laid on those around him.
Viyeki joined the prince and his troop of personal guards at the edge of the hilltop, though he would rather have stood apart, where he would not need to hide his occasionally untrustworthy thoughts. The moon had dipped behind the hills, but even by starlight it was easy to see General Kikiti’s army swarming silently toward the mortal fortress called Naglimund. Viyeki could not help wondering what it would be like to be a mortal inside those stone walls, to see so poorly after the sun was gone and then to discover such a great force coming out of the night to attack.
The mortals think us demons and monsters. As the war-poet Zinuzo wrote, “The forces of darkness and death are before us, and they hate what we are. They hate our breath, they hate our warm blood.” But he spoke of the enemies we faced when shadows first crept across the Garden. Did he ever dream that others might see his own people the same way?
“Ah,” said Pratiki, with the cheerful interest he might display while watching particularly involving game of shaynat. “Look! Now the Hammer-wielders step out. They are proud, everyone tells me. Like your Builders, Viyeki, it is said they love their tools more than they love their own families. But Hammer-wielders are so few these days!”
A dozen Hammer-wielders ran uphill through a hail of arrows from the walls, gliding like birds despite the heaviness of the tools they carried. Pratiki was right about their sparse numbers, and already one had fallen, pierced through the chest by a defender’s arrow.
“Surely they will never be enough to bring the walls down,” said Viyeki. “Why are there not more of them?”
“Because these days our armies are full of halfbloods,” Pratiki told him. “Little more than children, most of them. They have not had time to learn the old arts. But do not fear, Magister—Kikiti and the other generals have planned carefully.”
The defenders inside the stronghold were swarming onto the walls now, but the weak-eyed mortal archers could scarcely see the Hikeda’ya to aim at them, and though another of the Hammer-wielders fell, the rest of the small company quickly reached the base of the curtain wall. Viyeki knew from other battles that they would swing their great stone-headed mallets with the care of gem-cutters, each striking a single point until the wall quivered like ringing crystal. If enough of them struck, it would set even the thickest stone barrier crumbling. But surely this company of Hammer-wielders was too small!
To Viyeki’s astonishment, the first place the attackers struck was not against the great wall itself but at several places on the ground before it. He watched as they spread out even farther and pounded the ground again with their great mallets, soundlessly and with no visible effect.
“What are they doing?” It was all he could manage to keep the agony and confusion from his voice, to maintain the bloodless, placid tones of a Nakkiga noble. “Do you understand what is happening, Prince-Templar?”
Pratiki sounded almost amused. “I told you not to fear, Magister. The wall will come down soon enough—all the walls will come down. But it will take a while before the rest of our attack begins. It is a long way here from their burrows at Fort Deeping.”
Viyeki had no idea what Pratiki meant, but he was distracted by the Hammer-wielders. The survivors had spread out far along the curtain wall but now hurried back toward the center of the wall, the fort’s main gate. There they gathered, almost shoulder to shoulder, then swung their weapons in unison. This time they did what he had expected all along, slamming their huge mallets into the base of the curtain wall. All of the weapons struck within a few paces of each other, and where they crashed against the mortared stones pale cracks spread across the massive wall like frozen lightning. As the cracks grew longer, Viyeki saw mortals fleeing in panic from the battlements above. The wall beside the gate began to shiver. He felt a little reassured now—this was nearer to what he had expected. Another blow and at least this one narrow section of the curtain wall would collapse. He could already see the pale forms of a few of the warrior-giants as they lumbered up the slope in anticipation.
“See! The mortals cannot stop us, or even slow us greatly,” Pratiki declared. “General Kikiti and his troops, with the help of the Northeastern Host, will have taken the fortress before sunrise. Then you and your people will be called on to do your part, High Magister. I am confident you will find success just as our Sacrifices do.”
Again Viyeki was a bit confused—he could not remember ever hearing of the Northeastern Host before. But the mention of his own task had reminded him of how little he understood of anything happening here.
“I hope you are right, my lord.”
Pratiki gave him a swift glance. “I hear doubt in your voice, noble Viyeki. What troubles you?
Because of the prince-templar’s calm, almost gentle way of speaking, it was sometimes difficult to remember how important Pratiki was, and how powerful. “I would be more confident of my order’s success, Highness, if I knew exactly what it was my Builders and I were expected to do.” As soon as the careless words left his mouth Viyeki regretted them: even the kindest member of the queen’s clan might consider them treasonous.
“Do?” The prince-templar looked over to him again. “What do you mean, Magister?”
“I beg your pardon, Serene Highness. Of course I have faith in the mission with which our queen honored me, to find Ruyan Ve’s ancient tomb and recover his armor. But I confess I do not understand how any of that will help the queen or her people.”
“It is for the Witchwood Crown,” said Pratiki, and now his voice was stern. “You know that, High Magister. Everything we do is bent toward recovering the Witchwood Crown.”
Relieved that the prince-templar had not immediately denounced him for his doubts, Viyeki hurried to reassure him. “Of course, sire, of course. But before these last days I had heard of this crown only in whispers, my prince, and none of them were from sources I trusted—until now. Although I am certain,” he hastened to say, “that my ignorance was necessary.” He hesitated, then decided he had stepped too far into the river to turn back; he must wade on, no matter how high the water might prove. “In fact, I confess that I do not even know whether this crown is a palpable thing—”
“Look, look!” Pratiki was distracted again. “Even with so few Hammer-wielders, we begin to have success! The wall beside the gate is crumbling—see there!—and the giants are pushing their way into the fortress.” The prince paused, still looking down on the battlefield. The faint chaos-sounds of battle wafted to them across the night air. “You do not know what the Witchwood Crown is, you say?”
“I confess my ignorance, Highness.”
A few moments of silence passed before Pratiki spoke again. “It is about the witchwood itself, you see. The last trees are dying.”
“So I have heard.” It would have been almost impossible not to know that—the subject had been whispered about in the councils of the powerful even before the queen had awakened from her long slumber. “But what is this crown, if I may ask? And what will it do?”
“The queen knows,” said Pratiki slowly, as if repeating something he had been taught at a young age and had not considered since. “Our blessed Mother of All knows and, as always, she has decided the proper thing to do. She will find a way to bring back the witchwood. For without it, Lord Viyeki, what are we? We lost the Garden—shall we lose the last and most precious remnant of it in these lands as well? Shall we become no different than the hapless, short-lived mortals?”
“Never, my prince.” About this, at least, he could speak his mind honestly. “We must do whatever we can to preserve our people.”
“Exactly,” said Pratiki. “And we must trust our beloved monarch to know the best way to do that.”
“Of course, Highness. I hear the queen in your voice.”
“Just so.” Pratiki grew excited again. “Look now! See what is coming! They have heard the hammers striking—they have come to the summons!”
Viyeki saw the earth bulging in front of the castle’s curtain wall in several different places, like the disruption of the soil above tunneling moles—but only if those moles were the size of houses. But Viyeki could not concentrate on what he was seeing, because an astounding idea had seized him.
By the Garden that birthed us, I believe that even Prince Pratiki does not know what the queen seeks! The idea was breathtaking. Not even a prince of the royal house of Hamakha knows the secret of this Witchwood Crown!
The sudden appearance of Norn troops outside the walls of Naglimund seemed as unreal as a nightmare. Sir Aelin and Captain Fayn scrambled down the tower steps and ran across the common toward the wall of the inner keep, but by the time they had climbed the battlements a wedge-shaped section of the outer wall had already cracked and collapsed. The shapes of the first besiegers clambered over the rubble into the outer keep—huge, hairy shapes.
“Aedon preserve us,” cried Fayn. “Those are giants!”
Aelin watched the monsters pick their way through the ragged hole in the curtain wall and across piles of fallen masonry, but as terrifying as they were, he was most astonished by what they seemed to be carrying.
“Norn soldiers are riding on their shoulders,” he said.
“What are you talking about? I see only those white, shaggy hell-beasts. Your eyes are better than mine.”
“The giants are carrying Norns with hammers!” Aelin insisted. His great-uncle Eolair had told him that the fairies used magic hammers at Naglimund during the Storm King’s War, but he had thought it was the Sithi who had done that, not their Norn cousins.
The sentries on the remaining lengths of the outer wall had regained their feet, and now rushed to either side of the breach and began firing arrows down at the invaders, but although one of the hammer-carriers was hit and knocked off a giant’s back, the rest quickly made their way over the broken stones and started up the slope toward the inner keep. Fayn shouted for the castle’s defenders to hurry to the battlements, and soon archers stood on either side of him along the wall of the inner keep, loosing their shafts down at the approaching Norns and their hulking, two-legged steeds. At Fayn’s next shouted order, a group of pikemen rushed out of the gate to engage with the attackers, but Aelin could see already that the brave defenders were not enough to overcome the giants. Each sweep of a hairy, pale arm sent a mortal soldier flying, and none of them rose after they struck the ground.
“We will need more soldiers!” Aelin called to Captain Fayn.
The cries of defenders and the roars of the shaggy Hunën drifted up from below. The giants had now set down their Norn riders and formed a wide defensive circle around them. Then, as if seized by madness, instead of continuing toward the inner walls, the hammer-wielding Norns began to strike the ground with their long mallets.
“What are they doing?” said Fayn. “Torches! Bring torches here!”
Dozens more of Naglimund’s mortal defenders crowded onto the front of the castle wall to stare down at the dead grass and dark earth covering the common below them. Torchlight only made it clearer that the castle’s defenders were rapidly being slaughtered by the collared, armor-clad giants.
Fayn too could see the sally had been useless. “Fall back,” he shouted to the defenders below. “Men of Naglimund, fall back to protect the keep!”
Even as he said it, the Norns brought their hammers down on the hard ground one more time, then halted. For a moment near-silence fell across the outer keep, and although a few flaming arrows still plummeted to the ground from the castle walls, the Norns and giants seemed not to care.
Aelin could make no sense of it. The hammermen and giants had only created a small breach in the castle’s outer curtain wall, but if the gap was big enough for Hunën, then the nimble Norn soldiers should be scrambling through after them like a swarm of white ants. Instead, most of their army still waited outside the wall. As fearful as he already was, Aelin felt an even greater terror beginning.
Why don’t the rest attack? By the gods, why? What are those damned White Foxes waiting for?
A low noise like an unending clap of thunder shook the ground, making Aelin’s bones shiver and his ears itch. The castle’s curtain wall suddenly began to wobble where the first breach had been made; a heartbeat later, huge chunks of stone began to shake loose, then the ragged edges of the breach fell away and the hole in the wall opened even wider—but still the Norns waiting outside did not rush in.
“Fayn!” Aelin called. “Fayn, something evil is happening at the outer wall!”
As he watched, the curtain wall suddenly heaved. A large portion of it on either side of the breach simply crumbled into pieces. Shocked, Aelin could only wonder if the Norns’ magic had summoned some invisible giant to join the siege. Then he saw something vast moving toward them, slithering out of the wreckage of the curtain wall.
No, he realized, not something, just the evidence of something—the raised ridge of a vast shape tunneling beneath the ground, impossibly swift and headed toward them. By the immense mass of soil it displaced, tumbling entire houses as it surged toward the inner keep, Aelin knew it must be unimaginably huge.
The giants and the Norn soldiers who had reached the inner keep all scattered as the hidden thing plowed through the spot where their hammers had earlier struck the earth. For a moment its back crested above the roiling earth, a rounded, mud-caked immensity like ship’s hull turned upside down. Aelin, full of horror and surprise, thought he recognized its shape.
A cave-borer? But so big! He had seen signs of the many-legged digging beasts in the Grianspog Mountains, and had heard tales of some growing in the depths to the size of prize bulls, but this thing, whatever it was, must be a dozen times larger—as big as a barn.
Then Aelin had no more time to wonder: the hidden shape swam toward them through the soil with horrifying speed until it struck the foundations of the keep’s inner gate.
The wall shuddered and swayed beneath Aelin and the rest like a sapling in storm winds. He and Captain Fayn tumbled against the battlements, struggling to stay on their feet, but half a dozen of Fayn’s men closer to the impact tumbled screeching off the wall. Then, as those who remained stared down in wide-eyed horror, a shape that seemed possible only in a nightmare burst up through the soil beneath them, its many legs flailing. It was a cave-borer as Aelin had guessed, plated like a woodlouse but impossibly huge. The vast jaws that could crush stone clacked once, then it fell back into its hole and began shoving against the roots of the castle wall again.
“Run!” Aelin shouted. “It is an earth-borer as big as a house. It will eat the walls right from beneath our feet!”
Fayn, to his credit, did not stop to question this impossibility, but bellowed for all his men to follow. They sprinted toward the stairs while the entire battlement rocked beneath them like a ship in a storm. The borer rammed the sunken foundations of the wall over and over. The last thing Aelin saw before he joined the exodus was the rest of the Norn army swarming through the breach in the curtain wall.
Aelin hurried down the steps, certain that they would collapse at any moment. “Hernystiri!” he shouted. “Men of Hernystir, where are you? It is Sir Aelin calling you! Come to me! Come to me!”
As he reached the bottom of the earth of the inner bailey the entire wall began to sway behind him. Dozens more Erkynlandish soldiers were hurrying toward them from different parts of the castle, but he and Captain Fayn shouted at them to stay back. Within moments the part of the battlements where Aelin and Fayn had just stood sagged, then one of the tower tops crumbled, dumping chunks of mortared stone as big as wine barrels into the inner keep.
Once they had led the remaining defenders to a safer distance, Fayn bent to catch his breath, then straightened up, his face almost as pale as a Norn’s. “By the mercy of Elysia, Mother of God. Giants. Digging monsters. Like in the old stories. What can we do against such things? How can we keep them out?”
“We can do little without numbers,” Aelin said, “and I fear it is too late to defend the walls at all. See, they have more of those great, digging earthwicks—the walls are beginning to fall in more places now. The White Foxes are breaking their way in on all sides. We can only retreat to the keep.”
Fayn shouted to those who could hear him to fall back toward the center of the fortress. “But what of you and your men?” he asked Aelin. “This is not your battle.”
“It is now. We could not leave you to fight alone.”
As he spoke, the wall they had just quitted rumbled once more and slumped even farther, disgorging huge chunks of stone that crushed both fleeing soldiers and entire houses with equal ease. As Aelin lunged away from the last few bounding fragments of mortared wall, he saw that the giants who had brought in the first Hammer-wielders were now climbing through the gap in the inner wall, and even as he watched, two of Naglimund’s retreating defenders were obliterated by the swing of a huge war club.
“Haste!” Fayn shouted, voice raw with anger and grief. “Fall back to the keep, all of you! We cannot stop them here!”
As the captain and Aelin hurried the surviving defenders toward the center of the fortress, one of the pursuing giants howled at them in what sounded like mocking triumph, waving the limp corpse of a mortal soldier above its head like a banner. Aelin felt a flush of shame. He knew he should run, but the sight of a murdered man being waved like a dirty rag filled him with sudden rage. He picked up a piece of the wall as big as two fists and hurled it at the giant. Any stone he could throw was far too small to do any serious damage, but the missile struck the giant’s shaggy leg and the creature barked in pain. It flung away the guardsman’s body, then lurched after Aelin and Fayn.
“By the head of Aedon, now you’re done it!” Captain Fayn cried. “Run, man!”
They were far behind the other survivors, and within a few moments Aelin could hear the giant growling and panting behind them. He grabbed Fayn’s elbow and yanked him to one side just before a club the size of a tree trunk smashed down, but he was too late to save the guard captain from a second blow that came a moment later. It hit with a dreadful muffled smack and flung the captain two dozen paces or more through the air. Fayn was dead before he landed, half his head gone and his limbs bent in all wrong directions, like a shriveled spider in a dusty corner.
Aelin ached to avenge him, but knew that with no weapon but his sword, he stood no chance against the hairy creature. And as long as his men were alive and needed him, he also had no right to toss his own life away.
The giant had almost caught up with him. Aelin dodged into a deserted building and pulled and bolted the door behind him, then realized he had taken refuge in one of the castle’s chapels—a place where his own gods might not even see him.
I have been a fool. Aelin cursed himself as he shoved benches in front of the door. His moment of weakness had cost Fayn his life, and lost Naglimund one of its staunchest defenders. If you can hear me, great gods, I beg your forgiveness.
The roaring giant outside the chapel seemed to have entirely forgotten the rest of the battle in its furious search for Sir Aelin. As it battered its way through the heavy door, he climbed onto a reliquary and from there to the sill of a side window, then scrambled out and dropped gracelessly to the ground.
As Aelin ran toward the heart of the castle he could see that the inner keep’s walls were collapsing on all sides, uprooted by the tunneling of more borers. White-faced Norns seemed to be everywhere, dragging screaming mortals from their hasty hiding places and killing many of them on the spot. They had surrounded the main buildings of the keep as well, and hooting, bellowing giants were busily smashing in the doors.
It is too late, he realized. We have already lost. Naglimund is doomed.
Everywhere Cuff looked, manlike, white-faced creatures swarmed through the outer keep, like what happened when he disturbed a rats’ nest on his way across the rooftops. The pale things were killing everyone; even as he watched from shadows of a narrow alley, one of them stabbed a priest with a spear then hurried on, uninterested in the holy man’s dying moments.
Cuff the Scaler did not always understand what was happening around him, but this time he did understand, and it terrified him more than anything ever had: demons were climbing out of Hell to destroy the living. Only demons would hurt priests! Priests were the ones God had sent to care for His people, to keep the bad things away. But now even the priests were helpless. Hell had opened and all the devils were here in Naglimund’s keep.
Cuff ran into an alley to hide and crouched shivering behind a pile of stinking rubbish. The terrified shrieks of women and children being slaughtered panicked him into tears. No! Mustn’t cry, he told himself. Father Siward said not to! Only little children cried—Father had told him that many times.
A trio of soldiers backed into the alley. Cuff could tell by the swans on their coats that they were Naglimund-men and he almost called to them, but a moment later a tall demon on horseback rode into view, the horse’s hooves clacking on stone. Half a dozen more white-skinned demons followed their mounted leader, blocking the end of the alley. The devils carried axes and long, strange spears and their ghostly faces grinned as if at some terrible joke, but their eyes were black and empty. Cuff wept silently in helpless terror as the demons sprang at the soldiers and swiftly cut them down, hacking them even after they were dead.
The mounted leader peered down the alley; for a moment Cuff was certain the Hell-demon could see him. His heart was beating so hard and so fast he feared it would shake him to pieces. Then the demon rider twitched his reins and turned his horse away. The others followed after him, silent as hunting wolves.
When the screams and other noises of slaughter began to sound farther away, Cuff the Scaler found some of his courage again. He crept out from behind the midden-heap and scurried down the alley between the close-set houses. The streets of the inner keep were full of flickering red and orange light, and fires burned in several of the tall castle buildings as well, hungry tongues of flame licking up from the windows. For Cuff, Naglimund had always seemed as unchanging and immortal as the rocky hills of the Wealdhelm or the great forest itself. Now it was ablaze and bodies lay everywhere. He knew it must be the Day of Weighing Out, the end of all things that the priests had warned him would come to a world full of sinners.
As he stared across the courtyard toward the keep he saw something burst upward through the ground and shake its great, blunt head in the air, scattering stones and dirt. Cuff knew that anything so huge and so terrible must be the Adversary himself, come to take them all. He turned and ran whimpering toward the long wall of the bake house, the closest structure that he could climb. He heard no pursuit, but even as he sank his fingers into the cracks in the plastered wall and began to scramble toward the roof, three or four shapes appeared from the shadows and closed in behind him. He tried to scramble out of their reach, but a moment later a hand closed around his ankle with a grip he could not break. The demons could climb as fast as he could! He looked down and saw a ring of bone-white faces looking up at him, black eyes staring. Cuff the Scaler had time only to let out a wordless, despairing cry before he was yanked from the wall.
Sir Aelin’s only duty now was to find any Hernystiri who still lived and get them out of Naglimund, to lead them south to the Hayholt and tell King Simon and Queen Miriamele and his uncle Eolair what had happened here. And all that would happen only if he managed to escape the monster outside and survive the next hour.
This is all your doing, Hugh, he thought as he ran from the chapel, and if the king of Hernystir had stood before him at that moment Aelin would have killed him without hesitation, despite his oath of loyalty. All tonight’s blood is on your hands. Aelin, who thought so often about what a nobleman should do, tried so hard to live up to his great-uncle’s example, was almost in tears at the magnitude of the King Hugh’s betrayal, not just of his own subjects, but of all mortal men. I will see you brought to account for this. I swear on the hazel rod of Brynioch himself!
The giant had realized he was gone: he could hear it roaring in frustration as it lurched back out of the chapel where he had been hiding, wood splintering and religious treasures being smashed underfoot. Aelin needed to find his men, but it was growing harder every moment to believe that any of them still lived. Darkness has returned. Nothing left but to fight and die.
As he neared the residence a silhouette suddenly appeared in front of him, outlined against the climbing fires. To his astonishment, as he raised his sword to defend himself the shadowy figure cried, “No, my lord! It’s me!”
“Jarreth? Is that truly you?”
“It is, sir.”
“Then hurry. A giant is behind me.”
Jarreth fell in beside him, and pointed him toward the stables. “Over there, sir. Maccus and the Aedonite are at the stables getting our horses—if they still live.” Aelin heard the raggedness in his squire’s voice but could not fault the young man: it was a testament to his bravery that he was able to make sense at all in the midst of so many terrors.
So many of the walls had collapsed that nearly all the torches that had ringed the inner keep were gone. White Foxes seemed to be all around, but Aelin was grateful to see fewer of them than he had first feared. Still, there were hundreds inside Naglimund now, and it took him and Jarreth no little time to make their way past the keep, moving from shadow to shadow. The Norns were already leading prisoners out of the innermost buildings, but they were also killing male prisoners on the spot; it was all Aelin could manage to keep moving. We can save none of them, he told himself. We would simply die ourselves, and then nobody would carry the word away. But knowing that did not ease the terrible ache. The High Throne must be told what happened here! These deaths must be avenged.
With the attention of the Norns on the center of the keep, Aelin and Jarreth managed to reach the stables without having to fight, although several times it was a near thing; once they had to crouch in shadow and watch the corpse-skinned Norns behead several captured Naglimunders, one of them a weeping, struggling woman, and it felt to Aelin as though he had swallowed slow poison.
Inside the stable, Maccus Blackbeard and Evan the Aedonite were saddling and harnessing the horses as fast as they could without giving themselves away to the white-faced warriors ranging the courtyard outside.
“Is this all of us who are left?” Aelin asked. He had brought eight men to Naglimund.
“We saw none of the others,” said Maccus. “It’s mad out there. Mad!”
“I know. We can only try to escape into the forest. Anywhere else and they’ll see us and shoot us down. The White Foxes are fierce bowmen.”
“I saddled your horse, Sir Aelin,” said Evan.
“You have my thanks.” Aelin patted Connach on the withers and the stallion stepped anxiously in place. The smell of smoke and the noises outside had all the animals badly frightened, and Aelin hoped they would be able to control them once they left the stables.
“Lead the horses out and stay away from the main keep,” he said. “We don’t know what we’ll find out there, so don’t mount up until I say.”
As the only one of noble birth, Aelin insisted on being the first through the door in case the Norns were waiting. Connach balked in the doorway but Aelin gave a firm pull on the reins and leaned in to whisper words of encouragement; after a moment, Connach gave in and followed him.
The borers’ attack had collapsed many of the walls around the central keep. Most of the huge beasts seemed to have withdrawn back into the ground afterward, but the gaps in the stonework had been filled with Norn soldiers, so Aelin and the other Hernystiri kept to the shadows as best they could. There were far too many White Foxes to fight against, but Aelin was still surprised he didn’t see more.
Still, he thought, they do not need such numbers as we do—they have their fairy magicks, their great wall-smashing hammers and their digging monsters. But even as he thought it, he finally understood something that had puzzled him. There had been so few of the hammer-wielding Norns attacking the castle that he hadn’t been able to imagine how they would bring the walls down without being shot down by the castle’s defenders.
Those hammer-fairies were never meant to bring down all Naglimund’s walls, he realized—only a few, enough to get inside the keep. Then they used the hammers to summon the great digging monsters that could do the task in a few moments.
Satisfied that there were no Norns immediately outside the stables, he told his men, “Mount up, but pull your hoods down low and perhaps we will pass for Norns. We must head for the eastern wall against the hillside, then find one of the breaches and make our way out. After that it’s up the hill and over into the Oldheart Forest on the other side. Now ride!”
They burst out onto the uneven ground of the courtyard and sped past the back of the residence. Capering shadows surrounded it, wildly magnified by the uneven firelight, and he saw Norns in many other places around the inner keep, but for these first few moments at least, Aelin and his men went unnoticed.
They managed to escape the inner keep through a shattered wall, and as they approached the outer wall Aelin saw that it had been breached between the postern and the guard tower at the corner, but that no White Foxes seemed be guarding the gap. A moment later he saw the great cave-borer that had burrowed under the wall and brought it down had collapsed so much of the stone that the massive creature had trapped itself; its blunt upper body swung helplessly from side to side in the middle of the gap, and its legs scratched at the night sky as though it tried to climb to Heaven itself, but the pile of fallen stones held the monster tight. It was a way out, but Aelin could not imagine how to get past the struggling borer without being snatched up in those dark jaws and crushed.
Then Aelin saw a long pike one of the castle’s defenders had dropped, and had a sudden idea. “Jarreth,” he cried, “hand me that pike. The rest of you—behind me!”
Jarreth clearly did not understand what Aelin planned, but slid out of his saddle and snatched up the pike, twice as long as he was, and carried it to Aelin.
“Now get back on your horse.” Aelin did his best to couch the pike in his right arm like a proper jousting lance. Without waiting to see if Jarreth and the others were following him, he spurred Connach forward toward the massive shape of the thrashing, trapped borer.
He could see no eyes—and why would there be on a creature that lived in the blind earth?—so the hooked jaws seemed the most likely place to aim as he spurred up the pile of rubble. He struck, and for an instant he held onto the pike so tightly that the long wooden shaft began to bow, then the iron spearhead popped free and the pike itself snapped back straight and leaped out of his arms. Aelin himself was sprung sideways out of the saddle; he flew a short distance before a painfully hard landing that knocked out his breath.
For a moment the flames and the red-splashed light on the walls seemed to teeter from side to side around him, as though some even greater borer was undermining the entirety of Naglimund. Then Jarreth helped him to sit up and Aelin realized it was only his dizzied brain making everything sway. The great earthwick was still wriggling in the rubble; Aelin’s attack had not budged it a hand’s breadth.
“It chews through stone,” he said out loud.
“What, lord?” asked his squire. “We have to do something—some of the White Foxes have seen us!”
He was right: a group of shapes near the residence had detached themselves from the larger crowd and were hurrying toward them, but Aelin only noted them and turned back toward the borer. “I’m a fool! It chews through stone with that mouth!” he said. “Why did I think I could harm it there?” He scrambled to his feet and went to retrieve the long pike. He was grateful to see that its shaft had not broken. “Tell the others to be ready!” he shouted to Jarreth.
Aelin did not mount his horse again, but climbed up the unsteady pile of stones toward the eyeless monster. This time he did not attack it from the front, but got behind it and shoved the head of his pike in beneath the overlapping armor plates that covered its body, pushing the iron point in until he felt resistance. A moment later the borer felt the attack and heaved its front end upward, jaws clacking. The sudden jerk yanked Aelin from his feet, but he immediately got up and grabbed the pikeshaft, then shoved the point in even deeper. Jarreth and the rest had seen what he was doing now and made their way up the shattered wall as far away from the beast and Aelin as they could manage, Jarreth back on his own horse and leading Aelin’s Connach by the bridle.
Aelin began swiveling the shaft from side to side, trying to cut as deeply as he could and inflict as much pain as possible to distract the many-legged monster while his men climbed past. A dozen Norns were running toward them—Aelin knew he had mere moments before he and his men would be caught and killed.
Just as he dug the pike head in again, the great borer made a last effort and heaved itself halfway out of the pile, sending chunks of rubble as big as hand-barrows wheeling past him. He heard a cry behind him, but had no time to look because he had shoved the pike in deeper than ever before and the borer was desperately trying to shake it free. The creature reared upward and half a dozen more of its limbs waggled free in the air, each leg a jointed horror nearly as long as Aelin was tall.
Then the whole of the shelled beast swung to one side and tugged the pike shaft from Aelin’s hands as easily as a man might snatch a twig from an infant, but in its fierce thrashing the borer struck the postern gatehouse. The stone structure shuddered all the way to its roof, then fell to pieces and collapsed. The borer, still held by its lower half, vanished beneath the stones of the falling structure.
Aelin had no time to gloat: the onrushing Norns had all but closed the distance. Maccus and Evan were already on the other side of the ruined wall, so he turned to take Connach back from Jarreth and saw that only his horse now stood there, eyes wide and legs trembling. A great chunk of postern wall had fallen and Jarreth was gone, nothing left to mark where he had been but one bloody, bootless foot showing beneath the broken stones.
Blinking away tears, Aelin put his foot in the stirrup and swung up into Connach’s saddle.
You have stolen from me once again, Hugh Gwythinn’s-son, he thought as he rode down off the shattered remains of the wall, then spurred his horse up into the dark hillside. You have taken a man close to my heart.
I will see you pay for this. Unless the gods themselves make me a liar, I swear I will take your life for these crimes.