hangovers and hay fever. This morning, with the heat a feverish blanket around him, his tight skull was played like hammer and tongs by tortuous fits of sneezing.
The easy living left Fionn Areth too much time for his badgering questions. ‘I thought you said East Halla raised mercenaries, not crops,’ the young man ran on. ‘I’ve seen no army. Only cud-chewing cattle, defended by nothing but grasshoppers.’
‘So you’re meant to think.’ Dakar pressed a handkerchief to his livid nose. ‘Look again. That’s not a byre, and those aren’t windmills, and for the sweet tits Ath puts on a virgin, keep your hat on your head, and your foolish hand off your sword-hilt!’
Fionn Areth grinned, his brown cheek flecked with the light that scattered through his straw hat’s brim. ‘We’ll be spitted like geese at a field shoot?’ He had noticed the arrow-slits; the looped apertures for cross-bows; then the sinister fact that, beneath timber sheathing, the croft buildings were stone, built two spans thick and recessed with galleries for arbalists.
‘The s’Brydion have a dagger set into their fists when the midwife cuts the cord at their birthing. They get dandled by fathers who wear mail shirts to bed, and are blood-suckled on the arts of warfare.’ Dakar rolled red eyes sidewards. ‘You’ll see soon enough. There’s the citadel.’
‘Where?’ Fionn Areth craned over the shoulder-high corn, tasselled and droning with insects.
‘There.’ Dakar pointed. ‘Don’t act cocky. The look-out’s seen you. He’ll have counted that blade at your belt, first of all. At the gate, they’ll already know the coin worth of your buckles and buttons.’
A winkle of light flared through the sea haze, banked above the horizon.
Fionn Areth stared, enchanted. A moment’s search, and he made out the outline, grey overlaid on a palette of slate: the high teeth of stone battlements, seemingly cast adrift above the shimmering scarf of the barley-fields. ‘The watch surveys the road, do you say? Just how, in that steam-bath of mist?’
‘Are you simple?’ Dakar honked noisily, veiled in the dust thrown up by couriers and drays returning unladen from market. ‘We’ve been under their eye from those windmills, since dawn. The signals are passed on with mirrors.’
Foot-sore from the iron-hard ruts, Fionn Areth pressed on toward the stronghold of the Duke of Alestron, whose clan family, Arithon s’Ffalenn had once said, were “warmongering lions who judge a man first by his armament.”
They reached the walled citadel in the slatted shadows of late afternoon. Perched on its promontory above the sea, the massive, tiered bastion of Alestron reared up like a cliff-face, its flint stone notched with arrow-slits, and its mortar glittering with embedded glass. From the soot shade under the outer gate, beneath the teeth of its massive twin portcullis, a man would be flattened by the inbound traffic before he could count even half of the murder holes.
‘I feel like a seamstress’s pincushion, already,’ Fionn Areth murmured in awe. Shown what the duke’s men considered a guard’s standard issue of weaponry, he added, chilled, ‘Or I should have said, collops and mince. Do these folk have any enemies left alive with the warm bollocks to breed offspring?’
‘If they didn’t, they’d thrash up some more in a heart-beat,’ Dakar said. ‘They’re wont to pick fights like starved wolves dumped fighting mad into a cur pack.’
For him, the steep, switched-back road past the gate carried too many damnable memories. The last time he had called on the lord of Alestron, he had come on an errand for Sethvir, with Arithon of Rathain made the butt of a personal plot laid as a double cross. Even after twenty-six years, Dakar winced at the outcome. S’Ffalenn cunning had defanged his set trap. Without intervention from a Fellowship Sorcerer, Dakar would have seen himself spitted on the venom of s’Brydion vindictiveness.
Today, escorting Arithon’s shapechanged double, he sweated by turns, clammy dread superseded by his eagerness to see Fionn Areth receive his long-overdue comeuppance.
‘They don’t like besiegers, I see that much,’ the young man allowed. Just as anxious to give the spellbinder his brisk quittance, he turned his admiring regard to the gate barracks, and the brick bailey just visible through the portal, where the guard checked arms for the watch change at sundown. ‘Where should I go to sign with the field troops who fight for the Alliance of Light?’
‘A trained swordsman like you? March with the foot ranks?’ Dakar’s sidelong glance showed contempt.
Fionn Areth drew himself up, his pleased surprise at the compliment stifled behind a thick scowl. ‘The day sergeant could have told me,’ he insisted, dodging a wine tun rolled by a boy in a stained-leather brigandine, ‘where I should go to sign on the rolls as an officer.’
Dakar tucked a strategic cough behind his fist. ‘They would not,’ he said, eyes watering from stifled laughter. ‘This is Alestron. Charter law rules here, and promotions to rank go by merit. However,’ he said, snatching his companion’s sleeve, before he ducked back toward the barracks, ‘if you wish to be seen as more than a green recruit, you could come along to the upper citadel. I might present you in person to the reigning s’Brydion duke.’
Fionn Areth stopped short, almost run down by a wagon filled with crates of squabbling chickens. Oblivious to the carter’s oaths and the blizzard of down dusting over his hat, he said, ‘No! You’re damned to the dark as a minion of Shadow! In such company as yours, I’d likely be lopped into mincemeat the moment you opened your mouth!’
‘You think so?’ Dakar’s grin widened. ‘More likely, my friend, I’d be cut dead for standing next to your face. You’re so blissed at the prospect of killing for glory, you’ve forgotten whose features you’re wearing?’
Fionn Areth flushed. ‘Well, maybe I’m thinking I’d be better off if somebody else introduced me. Your name’s too well known, for a certainty’
‘By all means,’ the Mad Prophet mocked. ‘You can try. But without my credentials, I’ll tell you now, you won’t pass the gate to the inner citadel.’
‘And you can?’ Fionn Areth marched onwards. ‘Show me a marvel I can believe, like a chick from an egg-hatching donkey!’
‘I’m the apprentice spellbinder to a Sorcerer. Charter law answers to crown justice, and, grass-lands idiot, no offence to your ignorance, crown justice upholds the compact as granted by the grace of the Fellowship of Seven.’ Smug as a swindler, Dakar sidled into an alley with a steep, twisting stair, without pause to see if his mark followed. ‘The s’Brydion will not only receive me, they’ll provide board and bed, and a bath with a willing maidservant.’
Fionn Areth raised his eyebrows, prepared to retort. But Dakar’s wheezing seemed cruelty enough, as the ascent robbed him of breath for dignified speech.
At the top, disgorged on a road like a cliff-rim, they passed through another wall, and another gate, this one more heavily guarded. Here, a plank-bridge spanned a vertical ditch, with keep towers on either side. The streets beyond snaked up the promontory, overhung by slotted-wood hidings. These had murder holes also. The unwary traffic moved underneath, drowned in a blue gulf of shade. Footmen and carriages, horsemen and drays breasted the seething press. Squeezed into the slot of another close, Fionn Areth realized the craft shops and houses were built chock-a-block, their fortified facings pierced with notches for bowmen.
‘S’Brydion don’t
