flung to the floor in a shower of blood. Another officer’s backswing, she realised.
‘Above us!’ someone screamed.
The savages had somehow got up onto the gallery, were shooting arrows down. An officer just next to Finree slumped over a table with a shaft in his back, dragging one of the hangings down on top of him, his long steel clattering from his dangling hand. She reached out nervously and slid his short steel from the sheath, backed away again towards the wall with it hidden beside her skirts. As though anyone would complain at a theft in the midst of this.
The door burst open and savages spilled into the common hall from the rest of the inn. They must have taken the courtyard, killed the guards. Men desperately trying to keep the attackers out from the windows spun about, their frozen faces pictures of horror.
‘The lord governor!’ someone screamed. ‘Protect his…’ Cut off in a snivelling wail.
The melee had lost all shape. The officers were fighting hard for every inch of ground but they were losing, forced grimly back into a corner, cut down one by one. Finree was shoved against the wall, perhaps by some pointless act of chivalry, more likely by the random movement of the fight. Aliz was next to her, pale and blubbing, Lord Governor Meed on the other side, in a state little better. All three of them jostled by men’s backs as they fought hopelessly for survival.
Finree could hardly see over the armoured shoulder of a guard, then he fell and a savage darted into the gap, a jagged iron sword in his fist. She got one quick, sharp look at his face. Lean, yellow-haired, splinters of bone pushed through the rim of one ear.
Meed held up a hand, breath whooshing in to speak, or scream, or beg. The jagged sword chopped into him between neck and collarbone. He took a wobbling step, eyes rolled up to the ceiling so the whites showed huge, tongue sticking out and his fingers plucking at the ragged wound while blood welled up from between them and down the torn braid on the front of his uniform. Then he crashed over on his face, catching a table on the way and knocking it half in the air, a sheaf of papers spilling across his back.
Aliz let go another piercing shriek.
The thought flashed through Finree’s mind as she stared at Meed’s corpse that this might all have been her fault. That the Fates had despatched this as the method of her vengeance. It seemed disproportionate, to say the least. She would have been happy with something considerably less…
‘Ah!’ Someone grabbed her left arm, twisted it painfully around, and she was staring into a leering face, a mouthful of teeth filed to points, one pitted cheek marked with a blue handprint and speckled red.
She shoved him away, he gave a whooping squeal and she realised she had the short steel in her hand, had rammed it into his ribs. He pressed her against the wall, wrenching her head up. She managed to drag the steel free, slippery now, work it between them, grunting as she pushed the point up into his jaw, blade sliding into his head. She could see the skin on his blue cheek bulge from the metal behind it.
He tottered back, one hand fishing at the bloody hilt under his jaw, left her gasping against the wall, hardly able to stand her knees were shaking so badly. She felt her head suddenly yanked sideways, a stab of pain in her scalp, in her neck. She yelped, cut off as her skull smacked…
Everything was bright for a moment.
The floor thumped her in the side. Boots shuffled and crunched.
‘Fingers around her neck.
She couldn’t breathe, plucked at the hand with her nails, ears throbbing with her own heartbeat.
A knee pressed into her stomach, crushing her against a table. Hot, foul breath blasted at her cheek. It felt as if her head was going to burst. She could hardly see, everything was so bright.
Then there was silence. The hand at her throat released a fraction, enough for her to draw in a shuddering breath. Cough, gag, cough again. She thought she was deaf, then realised the room had gone deathly quiet. Corpses of both sides were tangled up with broken furniture, scattered cutlery, torn papers, piles of fallen plaster. A few weak groans came from dying men. Only three officers appeared to have survived, one holding his bloody arm, the other two sitting with hands up. One was crying softly. The savages stood over them, still as statues. Nervous, almost, as if waiting for something.
Finree heard a creaking footstep in the corridor outside. And then another. As though some great weight was pressing on the boards. Another groaning footstep. Her eyes rolled towards the doorway, straining to see.
A man came through. The shape of a man, at least, if not the size. He had to duck under the lintel and then stayed suspiciously stooped, as if he was below decks in a small ship, scared of catching his head on low beams. Black hair streaked with grey stuck to his knobbly face with wet, black beard jutting, tangled black fur across his great shoulders. He surveyed the scene of wreckage with an expression strangely disappointed. Hurt even. As if he had been invited to attend a tea party and found instead a slaughter-yard at the venue.
‘Why is everything broken?’ he said in a voice oddly soft. He stooped to pick up one of the fallen plates, no more than a saucer in his immense hand, licked a fingertip and rubbed a few specks of blood from the maker’s mark on the back, frowning at it like a cautious shopper. His eyes lighted on Meed’s corpse, and his frown grew deeper. ‘Did I not ask for trophies? Who killed this old man?’
The savages stared at each other, eyes bulging in their painted faces. They were terrified, Finree realised. One raised a trembling arm to point at the man who was holding her down. ‘Saluc did it!’
The giant’s eyes slid across to Finree, then the man with his knee in her stomach, then narrowed. He put the plate on a gouged table, so gently it made no sound. ‘What are you doing with my woman, Saluc?’
‘Nothing!’ The hand around Finree’s neck released and she dragged herself back across the table, struggling to get a proper breath. ‘She killed Bregga, I was just…’
‘You were robbing me.’ The giant took a step forwards, his head on one side.
Saluc stared desperately around but his friends were all scrambling away from him as if he was infected with the plague. ‘But … I only wanted to…’
‘I know.’ The giant nodded sadly. ‘But rules are rules.’ He was across the space between them in an instant. With one great hand he caught the man’s wrist while the other closed around his neck, fingers almost meeting thumb behind his head, lifting him squirming off his feet, smashing his skull crunching into the wall, once, twice, three times, blood spattering across the cracked plaster. It was over so quickly Finree did not have time to cower.
‘You try to show them a better way …’ The giant carefully set the dead man down in a sitting position against the wall, arranging his hands in his lap, resting his flattened head in a comfortable position, like a mother putting a child to sleep. ‘But some men will never be civilised. Take my women away. And do not tamper with them. Alive they are worth something. Dead they are …’ He rolled Meed’s corpse over with one huge boot. The lord governor flopped onto his back, eyes goggling at the ceiling. ‘Dirt.’
Aliz screamed yet again. Finree wondered how she could still produce so high and true a note after all that screaming. She did not make a sound herself as they dragged her out. Partly that blow to her head seemed to have knocked all the voice out of her. Partly she was still having trouble getting a good breath after being throttled. But mostly she was occupied trying desperately to think of a way to live through this nightmare.
The battle was still going outside, Beck could hear it. But it was quiet downstairs. Maybe the Union men reckoned they’d got everyone killed. Maybe they’d missed the little stairway somehow. By the dead, he hoped they’d missed the…
One of the steps creaked and the breath stopped in Beck’s throat. Maybe one creak sounds like another, but somehow he knew this was made by the foot of a man aiming to keep quiet. Sweat sprang out of his skin. Trickling, tickling down his neck. Didn’t dare move to scratch it. He strained with every muscle to make no sound, wincing at every smallest wheeze in his throat, not daring even to swallow. His fruits, and his arse, and his guts all felt like they were a huge, cold weight he could hardly stop from dropping out of him.
Another stealthy, creaking step. Beck thought he could hear the bastard hissing something. Taunting him. Knew he was there, then. Couldn’t make out the words, his heart was thumping so loud in his ears, so hard it felt like it might pop his eyes right out. Beck tried to shrink back into the cupboard, one eye fixed on the ragged slit between two planks of the door, the slice of attic beyond. The point of the man’s sword slid into view, glinting murder, then the blade, dotted with red. Colving’s blood, or Brait’s, or Reft’s. And Beck’s too, soon enough. A Union
