52
~ AKELLA ~
“The bloody Brotherhood,” a guard said in answer to Linna’s question. “Half of ’em went mad all at once, started appearing out of thin air, slittin’ throats, stabbin’ folks in the back, pushing soldiers off battlements. The other half are more or less…”
Akella didn’t stay to hear the rest. Linna would ensure the Empress was saved in time, and the guards at the barricade would ensure no one got inside who shouldn’t be there. The Empress was as safe as she could be, but there was someone else in this castle who might not be. Someone who might need Akella’s help.
Megs.
Carried by the elixir in her veins, Akella flew from the Empress’s chambers in the direction of the stables. If Megs’s squad hadn’t had an overnight shift, they would’ve been asleep when the sorcerers began their coup. Their massacre.
She’s strong,Akella told herself as she ran, skirting a group of guards running in the opposite direction. She’ll be alright.
Castle Pellon was really two fortresses in one. There was an inner keep, where, amongst other rooms, Akella, the Empress, and others deemed particularly important had their quarters, and then there was an outer keep, where the larger kitchens, storerooms, stables, kennels, barracks, smithy, and so forth were located. The inner keep, it seemed, was relatively free of enemies at the moment, and the soldiers guarding it were intent upon it staying that way. Which was why, of course, the heavy wooden doors that led from the inner keep to the outer keep had been closed and barred. No doubt the iron portcullis on the doors’ other side had been dropped, too. It had been open twenty minutes earlier, when Akella and Linna had raced inside unopposed.
Akella cursed loudly in Adessian, drawing suspicious glares from the knot of soldiers clustered around the gate. She had to get to the outer keep if she was going to find Megs, but they’d never open the doors for her.
“Eagle Battalion?” she asked the nearest soldiers. “Are they still in the outer keep?”
A man shrugged. “Everyone’s a-jumble since the soldiers in the city retreated to the castle. I’m Elk Battalion, he’s Wolf Battalion, an’ the officer over there’s Bear Battalion.”
Akella grunted in frustration. “How many soldiers in the inner keep?”
The soldier barked out a bitter laugh. “Alive? Or corpses?”
“How many?” Akella repeated.
“We didn’t exactly do a head count when we closed the gate,” another soldier said gruffly. “Enough t’ keep out the Cult o’ Culo, we hope.”
“Is there another way to the outer keep?”
The first soldier shook his head. “Only if ye got wings. Or if ye can fall thirty feet an’ not break yer legs.”
Akella ran her gaze along the inner keep’s gatehouse and the two towers in either corner. The inner keep was an odd, trapezoidal shape, with the narrow end facing the outer keep and the fat end facing the mountains. She could climb up to the walkways above, and aided by the elixir, she bet that if she had a running start, she could jump the distance between the walkway above the inner keep to the walkway above the outer keep. She glanced up to the inner keep’s battlements, where archers were spaced out between the crenellations. The only problem with her plan, besides its general foolhardiness, was the fact that the outer keep’s walls were close to thirty feet lower than the inner keep’s walls.
So be it.
Akella took the stairs to the battlements two at a time. Three worried-looking archers stood not far from where the stairs ended, watching a skirmish between a knot of mountain men and Imperial soldiers play out in the courtyard below. The fighters were too intertwined to safely fire an arrow.
Akella did a double-take. Mountain men? She thought the problem had been sorcerers. Since when had tribesmen gotten inside the castle?
But there was no time to find out the answer.
Akella ran eastward down the battlement, towards the fat end of the trapezoid of the inner keep, where the walls of the two keeps were closest together.
Good thing she’d never been afraid of heights.
Before she could talk herself out of it, Akella focused her eyes on a merlon, sprinted towards it, and launched herself off of its top. For a few seconds, she was a bird, soaring through the air towards the outer keep’s wall. But her jump was going to fall short – she was going to miss the outer wall by at least a foot, and she doubted any amount of elixir was going to prevent half the bones in her body from breaking if she hit the cobblestones below. At the last moment, she pinwheeled her arms forward, managing to grab hold of the outer edge of the walkway with her fingertips. Her body slammed against the stone wall, and she was fairly certain she felt a rib break. It didn’t hurt, though, and she managed to keep hold of the wall. Reassured that she was still alive, Akella hauled herself up, dusted off her breeches, and sprinted along the battlement towards the outer keep’s entrance.
Thick smoke and the sounds of clashing weapons grew as she ran. The wooden roofs of the barracks, located closest to the gatehouse, were burning. And in the cobblestone courtyard below, scores of mountain men struggled to break through the Imperial Army’s line, who in turn fought desperately to keep the tribesmen from progressing any closer to the inner keep.
If Megs was down there…
Akella jumped again – this time merely a ten-foot drop from the battlement walkway to the roof of the banquet hall, which butted against the outer keep’s wall. Shingles broke and slid beneath her feet as she landed, but somehow she kept her balance, letting momentum and the slope of the roof carry her to its edge. Another jump and she was on the ground, yanking a mountain man’s spear out of the chest of a dead soldier before charging into the thick of the fighting.
The elixir was like magic. As if spear-fishing in a barrel, Akella skewered one mountain man, then the one who took his place, then a third within seconds. Screaming in delight and fury like she was one of Preyla’s avenging angels, Akella turned the spear sideways and used it to push back four mountain men rushing towards her. They flew backwards, knocking into their compatriots behind them and scattering them like billiard balls. The soldiers around Akella yelled in triumph and ran into the gap she’d created, quickly finishing the tangle of mountain men.
A bugle’s high-pitched note pierced the air.
“Brace the gate!” a voice called above the din, then repeated the cry twice more. Akella and the soldiers ran towards the outer keep’s gatehouse. The outer portcullis was only halfway down – had the mechanism jammed? – and the great wooden doors on its other side hung ajar crookedly. A battering ram – a crude, primitive thing that had to have been mountain man-made, lay abandoned inside the gate passage. One group of soldiers picked it up as another wrestled with the damaged doors. Soon they had the doors more or less closed.
“Brace it, brace it!” an officer yelled, and the soldiers lifted the very ram that had broken the doors in the first place to brace the damaged doors.
Killing mountain men, helping to brace the gate – none of this was what Akella had come to do. She’d come to find Megs. She’d get Megs out of here through the sewers if she could, and if Megs wouldn’t leave, then she’d fight by her side and make sure she survived this battle.
Akella turned to the nearest soldier. “Blue muster, Eagle Battalion. Do you know where they are?”
The soldier, his face smeared with soot and sweat beneath his helm, looked at her like she’d spoken in Adessian instead of the common tongue.
“They sleep in the stables,” Akella said impatiently.
The man shrugged and turned away.
Akella cursed, scanning the faces of the hundreds of standing and fallen soldiers scattered about the outer keep’s courtyard. On the ground, she saw a soldier lying on their side in a pool of blood and the dirty slush of melted snow. Long dark hair hung limply from the back of the soldier’s helm.
Akella rushed to the fallen fighter, turning the dead woman over. But the blank face that gazed up at her didn’t belong to Megs.
Pounding on the gate drew her gaze back up. The crooked wooden doors shivered while an officer screamed at soldiers to brace, brace, brace! A throng of soldiers pressed against the door, slipping in the wet muck covering the cobblestones while they pushed back against whoever or whatever smashed against the doors from the other side.
This was madness. She was never going to find Megs in this crowd. All Akella could see was a bobbing sea of heads covered by identical helms.
Curse the mountain men. Curse the Empire. Preyla could take them all as far as Akella was concerned, so long as she spared Megs.
Akella turned away from the chaos at the gate and followed a squad of soldiers carrying longbows as they ran up the stairs to the outer keep’s battlements. Maybe if she was higher up, she’d spot Megs.
If the scene in the courtyard was chaotic, the scene on the other side of the outer keep’s wall was worse by tenfold.
Pellon burned. Akella didn’t even know how it burned, because it had already been rubble and ruins when the Imperial Army marched into it weeks earlier. Yet apparently whatever was still flammable was now on fire once. Beyond the dry moat surrounding the castle, she could see dead soldiers littering smoldering city streets, all of them with their heads towards Castle Pellon as though they’d been running for it when they’d fallen. A trebuchet sat in the center of the stone bridge that led across to the moat and up to the castle’s gatehouse, and two more trebuchets were currently rumbling up two side streets to get into range. Mountain men swarmed right behind the siege machines, screaming warcries in their guttural native tongue, brandishing axes and spears, many of their chests bare and painted with blue runes. Most worrying were the mountain men who carried long ladders between them. The air was thick with unnaturally black, oily smoke, practically blotting out the sun. She recognized the pungent smell – burning pitch. Imperial naval vessels were fond of flinging cauldrons filled with burning pitch at pirate vessels from the small catapults upon their ships.
As she watched, the trebuchet on the stone bridge flung a burning missile towards the castle wall.
But that couldn’t be right. Mountain men? Using siege weapons? They’d fought the Empire for twelve years but had never, at least to Akella’s knowledge, used anything more than the crude battering ram that was now inside the gatehouse.
She heard a massive CRACK, and the walkway shivered beneath her feet. One of the conical wooden roofs that topped the gatehouse towers exploded as the trebuchet’s pitch-coated burning log slammed into it. Burning timbers flew in all directions as the roof split apart, and Akella watched in horror as one of the archers at the top of the tower fell to his death in the dry moat below.
On the stone bridge, the trebuchet was already reloading.
The Imperial Army was going to be overrun. Castle Pellon was an impressive fortress, and it would hold out for another hour, maybe two, but sooner or later, it would fall, and everyone left inside would die.
Faces flashed through Akella’s mind – the Empress, bleeding on the floor. The little seagull, eyes wild as she ran to her. The somber palace guards in their black armor. Megs. Her squad of nine boys barely old enough to shave.
Every one of them would die if they didn’t get out of here.
Then someone was shoving a bow in her hand, shouting orders at her she hardly heard.
She didn’t want a bow. She wanted to find Megs. She wasn’t even a very good shot.
But somehow she found herself drawing the bowstring anyway, firing arrow after arrow at the mountain men as an Imperial officer told them to focus on the tribesmen trying to get one of those long ladders across the dry moat. The mountain men were knotted tightly enough that, despite being a poor archer, even Akella couldn’t miss.
But the archer next to her, a woman with a long braid that hung to the small of her back, was phenomenal. Arrow after arrow hit their targets with a speed not even Akella’s elixir-fueled shots could match.
But then the barrel of arrows beside them was empty.