Then he saw smoke billowing against the eastern horizon and realised he wouldn’t be making the noon meeting after all – at least, not the one Anastacia intended.

Sixteen

Sixteen

Cracked by cold winters and patched only by the thriftiest of repairs, the north bastion shuddered with the rumbling groan of a dying mountain. Dust and rubble flooded the muddy ditch. The boneless, broken soldiers who’d once manned its ramparts lay stark against white stone-spoil.

“Get out of there, you fools!” Lieutenant Hedragg bellowed. He knew the words would never carry from the central keep to the neighbouring bastion. “It’s coming down!”

Those who escaped the bastion’s ruin did so only through the sacrifice of two kraikons. Uncaring of the danger, the constructs braced palms against the outer wall and steel-shod feet against the courtyard’s flagstones.

Men and women took crumbling stairs three or four at a time, or leapt from the walls to uncertain fates. Then, with a dying groan of mangled rock, the upper storeys plunged. The deluge swept the last of the garrison aside and buried the selfless kraikons beneath rubble. With a yawning, groaning roar, a portion of the eastern wall gave way alongside, leaving a ragged breach as invitation to the besiegers.

Hedragg found no comfort at all in the lack of screams. No cry could have triumphed over the drumbeats. They reverberated in Hedragg’s gut, jarring his bones and setting his teeth on edge. He longed for their ceasing. At the same time hoped they never did, for that meant the assault was coming.

“We can’t hold them!” Even shouting, Hedragg barely heard his own words over the din.

Captain Karmonov rounded on him, teeth bared and eyes blazing. “We do not yield! Death and honour!”

Hedragg stared at her, mindful to conceal his horror from the common soldiers. Half a company lost in a single salvo, and the courtyard open to direct assault. For all that its old stones dominated the mountainside – for all that its ballistae commanded the east–west road that ran beneath its walls – Voldmarr Watch could not be held. Not with twice its three hundred blades. But Karmonov was a soldier of the old school, a veteran of victories won along the Ravonn. Death and honour. And likely both at once.

“Herald!” bellowed Karmonov.

A pasty-faced girl no more than fourteen years old threw a hasty salute. “Captain?”

“Find Sergeant Gellern. Tell him he’s to hold the breach.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The girl bobbed a bow and hurried away across the keep’s rampart. Hedragg wondered what had brought her to Voldmarr in the first place. Likely an empty belly or a thief’s brand. Half his soldiers were running from hunger or the noose.