CHAPTER TWENTY: DEFENDER
Is't foolish to defend oneself from every flea and fly?
To hop one's way across the veld to flee a thousand bites?
Or weather all those little nettles with thy head held high?
Alas, my noble lord, those thousand bites have bled thee dry!
-Aliah el Lassa, 'Two Tempests'
Having taken the city of Nortsair from him, Captain Erodor Westman oddly enthusiastic about helping them. He showed Thea and the others the lay of the city, their local defenses, He showed Thea and the others the lay of the city, their local defenses, and even offered a plan to shore up the damage from their attack. He told them all about Myrdon's plans, his campaign in the north, and his latest sweep to the south to capture Rouentz and a few even smaller hamlets. He was very helpful, indeed – but Thea suspected his loyalties were about as deep as a mirage. He'd flipped masters the moment it became clear which one had his balls in the bigger vise, and he'd do it again.
Thea consolidated their position within the city. It was well and good to have Erodor nominally in charge of the militia – he was a scion, after all, and if Thea couldn't keep him content, then she was better off just having him killed… and maybe she should have, but she didn't have the stomach for that. But unspoken was that she'd place her own people right under him, and she'd have them report to her everything they reported to him, and sometimes more. She'd lost three people in their attack and had another three injured badly enough to be on bedrest for the time, and four of those out of commission had been Soenmen. The remaining eight warriors, she assigned to officer's posts under the captain, and they met with their jarl daily so she could be assured that the captain wasn't trying to plot against her. And, for the time, it appeared that he wasn't doing so.
"I can't believe you actually trust that man," Matthias said.
Thea shrugged and gestured for him to scrub her back. He sloshed through the water and obliged, wringing out a hot cloth and dipping it in soapy salve.
"I don't trust him, obviously," she said. "Not even a little bit. But I'm not about to send him running back to Myrdon, and the only other option is to have him killed, and that seems wrong."
"He was going to have you killed," Matthias observed.
"True," Thea said. She sighed as his hands worked down her back, occasionally peeping around to the other side for mischief around her bobbing breasts. "He was going to execute me in the aftermath of the Hollow Houses' attacks and our storming the Gate Tower... and I'd hope any commander would take desperate measures to keep the enemy from capturing his stronghold. I'll not forgive him, but neither am I one to take petty revenge. So... he lives until he proves too great a liability." She sighed again. "Oh… that's the spot. You're doing such a good job… how do you feel about a scrub for yourself?"
"Try me, and we'll play it by ear," Matthias grinned. "And other body parts."
They were in the manse formerly belonging to Lysander Quill. While Thea hadn't technically claimed it for herself – they should, if they wanted to be proper about being the rulers of Nortsair, claim the former Heron estate. But Thea doubted she'd ever be comfortable there. It was hard to get the image of people getting horribly slaughtered out of her head... and Matthias had even worse memories of the place. His father and brother had died there. And, with Myrdon sure to march back on Nortsair any day now, they were definitely residing within the fortress walls until after he was dealt with.
Quill's manse wasn't the biggest house in Nortsair, but it was several times the size of the Mendic brothers' old house, which was already plenty large. The Quill House had a bathtub that put Matthias's old one to shame – Thea suspected that Lysander Quill had entertained many people at a time in his personal bathhouse... but, having claimed the place, Thea and Matthias enjoyed it by themselves. Well… they enjoyed it at night. During the day, Maddie and Svilga and their rotating cadre of friends had the run of the room. In their time in Rouentz, the girls had accrued a coterie of at least a dozen friends, and now they were picking up a minor following in Nortsair, too. The girls had only been there for two days, but Thea had seen at least three local children bounding about the manse. They mostly looked like urchins, frankly, and Thea hoped they were taking advantage of the house's many amenities.
"I'm going to get them started on tutoring as soon as this all blows over," Matthias said. "Hours and hours of unstructured play is getting dirt tracked everywhere."
Things would be happening soon enough. As soon as things calmed down in the wake of Nortsair's capture, Cano rode back to Rouentz to taunt Myrdon's forces and inform them that Nortsair was taken – he rode back accompanied by two of Erodor's officers, should there be any doubt that he was telling the truth. Meanwhile, Matthias had ventured back through the tunnels to bring the people of Rouentz to safety in Nortsair. Not everybody came – some stubborn souls had decided to stay on their homesteads or in town, stating that they'd flee into Astorfall or the opposite direction, up into the hills at the first sign of Myrdon's approach. Hopefully, those stubborn souls hadn't all been slaughtered… but there was a good chance they had been. That left Matthias leading four hundred twenty-nine worried and weary townsfolk through the tunnels, along with Heath, Larian, Madeline, and Svilga.
Four hundred-plus was a lot of people for Nortsair to take in. By Thea's estimation (and she was good with numbers), it was a city of some five thousand people, with half that number living out on the homesteads in the countryside, and with a handful of satellite hamlets fringing the landscape beyond that. Even an hour out, most of those people still considering themselves citizens of Nortsair. In any case, the city couldn't accommodate hundreds of extra people for any significant period of time... but, hopefully, they wouldn't have to. In the meanwhile, Matthias's deep pockets might keep them fed and housed for some weeks if need be, until the city's stores started to run low. Hopefully, it would be that long.
"Ooh, there," Thea said with a sigh, sloshing around as she eased back into Matthias.
"Here?" Matthias said, moving his hips against hers. Thea's skin was nearly invisible against the pink marble of the basin, whereas his might as well have been pure black.
"That's not your hand," Thea said.
"It's not," Matthias agreed. Thea was fine with that.
Thea had to admit that life in Nortsair was good, even if they still had the specter of invasion looming over them. More and more with each passing day, really. But they were now in a town that they could reasonably defend, and she felt like they had the advantage, possibly for the first time ever.
+++++
Nortsair had a lot to recommend it, as long as you kept out of the dirtier byways. And even those parts, Thea suspected, could be cleaned and revivified with a little elbow grease. The city had simply been mismanaged for long enough that half the city took their crowded, noisy, squalid conditions as a given while the other half enjoyed the fruits of that half's labors while trying to avoid the people who provided them.
The city had four restaurants to Rouentz's one, had several inns, taverns, and bunkhouses, and a massive fortress beneath it that was literally three quarters empty. It had been engineered to fortify a legion the size of the city's entire populace, and now half of the floors sat deep in the hillside, completely unused and growing more decrepit by the decade. Despite Erodor's objections, Thea set up temporary housing for Rouentz's citizens in the second level of the fortress, telling them to renovate, shore up, and inhabit the fortifications however they saw fit – frankly, she trusted any of them more than the captain in actual charge of the city's defense. Fortunately, they still referred back to her with lots of questions.
"Can we move the purple stuff somewhere else, milady?" Bull asked her.
Everybody was calling Thea 'milady' or 'my jarl' these days... and she didn't particularly have a problem with that. She could do without people occasionally prostrating themselves in worship before her, but she'd earned at least some respect. When she went to the market, all of the merchants knew who she was – they called her 'milady' or 'Lady Thea', and they marked their prices up as befit a woman of her station. Thea didn't mind. Matthias had deep pockets, and she mostly bought weapons and clothes – and price hardly mattered. Anything she bought would end up looking like an item five times as expensive, on account of the inexplicable scion ability to alter clothes and accessories to befit their wearer. That was wonderful. Bathtime in the Quill manse was wonderful. A barrel of 'purple stuff' in the fortress's second level was not wonderful.
"Purple stuff?" she asked him. "Show me."
Bull did so, hauling the ten-gallon barrel down the hallway and sloshing sappy violet stuff onto his shirt. It didn't take Thea long to identify the liquid. She carefully dribbled out a tiny patch of the stuff onto the floor and used some flint and iron to fling a spark at it. The patch immediately went up in a purple flash that left a greenish blot in her vision, the crack of its ignition echoing down the corridor. It was the explosive alchemical that the Hollow Houses had used to cause their 'distraction' (an understatement, if ever there was one), and now it was sitting in the basement of her fortress, waiting for some secret signal to ignite.
"I want all of that stuff out of here," Thea said. "Take three or four strong men and scour the fortress."
"But Captain Westman's men..."
"Are my men," Thea said. "They'd better do as I say." She fished around her hair and pulled out a bauble – a seafoam green pearl the size of a fingertip. After finding several behind in her bathwater, Thea discovered that she could produce the things at will. They flaked right out of her hair, however many pearls she wanted. "Show this to anybody who questions you."
Bull took the pearl, his eyes alit with awe. "What... what does it mean?"
Thea shrugged. "Nothing much, but it will look convincing."
Immediately after sending Bull on his mission, Thea made her way to Elias Wren's manse and banged on the door. A low-level 'associate' of the smuggling family greeted her at the entrance and Thea barged right past and into the parlor before he could question her. When the man put his hand upon her shoulder to stop her, Thea stooped and used her center of gravity to throw him right over her body. She'd seen Cano make the move a few times, and it was a lot easier than she'd expected – there was some force involved, but it was mostly muscle that she was already using to move her own body.
"I need to talk to Elias Wren now," she said.
"He's out..." the associate explained as he struggled to his feet.
"He's not," Thea said. She stalked over to the coatrack and shook the silken waistcoat hung upon it. She sniffed at the collar. "This is his, and it still smells of his cologne." She sniffed it again. "And the perfume of two women."
"It's all right, Barro," Elias Wren said, strolling in from a half-hidden side room. "Lady Thea and I need to talk. Please wait in the anteroom."
The associate did so, straightening his coat scowling at Thea as he stalked by. That left Thea alone with Elias Wren. He was about twenty years old, but he looked a lot younger – he was slim of frame and half a head shorter than Thea, with high cheekbones and beguiling violet eyes, not too different from Thea's own crystal blue ones. He was also, Thea realized after a moment, not a he. Nor a regular person at all.
"You're a scion," she said guardedly. "One of Bestel Myrdon's..."
"I'm not his any more than your friends are yours," Elias said. She scuffed an invisible bit of lint from the white silk of her blouse. "Otherwise, what I did those few nights ago was rank betrayal. I do what I do in self-interest... and it wasn't in my self-interest to be his lap dog, nor to be yours." She poured herself some sherry and then offered a glass to Thea.
"And I don't expect you to be," Thea said. She sniffed the sherry – rich and sweet in her nostrils. "But Myrdon is coming back, and he will try to take the city. And when that happens, I'm not going to have barrels upon barrels of alchemical explosive sitting pretty to make that easier for him."
"A safeguard for my personal safety..."
"You'll never be safe under a monster like Myrdon, no matter how many clever safeguards you have in place. But me? Like yourself, I'm a woman of reason."
"Woman," Elias chuckled. "I'm not sure I'll ever get used to that. You know, I'm thirty-five years old..."
"I'm forty," Thea said with a shrug. "We've both changed quite a bit... I'm constantly discovering new things about myself, in fact." She held the sherry up to the light and swished it around. "Another clever safeguard?" She asked. "I'd be foolish to take a drink from the scion of an alchemical god if she didn’t have my best interests at heart... and she would be just as foolish to cross me, as she's no longer the only one in town who can blow her enemies straight up to Avalon."
With that, Thea turned the liquid in her glass to ichorous purple explosive... or at least made it seem to become ichorous purple explosive. So far as she was aware, it was still just sherry tainted with whatever alchemical nastiness Elias had imbued it with.
"I... that's impossible," she said. Though they both knew that ideas about what was possible or not had changed quite a bit of late. "What do you want?"
Thea shrugged. "Like I said, we're women of reason. I have no quarrel with you so long as you have no quarrel with me, and so long as you don't pose an existential threat to this city or its people. I want you to take every barrel of the stuff you've got hidden and either cart it out of the city or keep it in your own manse. Lady's choice. I want it done by sundown..."
"It can't be done by sundown," Elias said quickly. It was already late afternoon. "Impossible."
"You are the living embodiment of a goddess," Thea said. "The impossible is your trade." She reached for the bottle of sherry and took a big swig (or, rather, appeared to do so).
"I'll see what I can do," Elias said eventually. "By sundown... or very soon thereafter. I swear on it."
"Good."
Thea would know if they'd done it, too. By induction, if the Wrens didn't stop by all of the barrels that they'd already found, then Thea would know that something was up. She did not want secret explosives in the bowels of Fortress Nortsair (or anywhere else in the city, for that matter) waiting to go off. Not with Myrdon's army coming.
+++++
Two more days passed without without any sign of the enemy. Thea was listless. The whole city was listless. They knew that a battle of existential import was approaching, and people were tightly-wound. There were brawls among the guards, among the populace, and between the two. And each time, Thea wondered whether this was the beginning of the primal madness she knew Bestel Myrdon could induce. Though they thought they had a cure for that... or a partial one, at least.
The extra days had given Larian plenty of time to fetch more reagents, especially those from the underground, and to turn Matthias's old home into her personal workshop, using the tub to brew up huge vats of elixir. Thea helped when she could, but her attentions were mostly devoted to holding the city together.
At Larian's workshop, they prepared a batch to distribute to the guards. There were two elixirs, one to combat murderous madness, and another for the supernatural plague that Myrdon's 'bride' could induce. "It'll work?"
Larian shrugged. "Against magical madness? Who the fuck knows? It should work for most people."
"And if it doesn't?"
She shrugged again. "Then I suspect it will be a very short battle."
Thea went to see Erodor atop the western wall to see to the distribution of the elixir. Even if she didn't trust the man's loyalty to her, she trusted his commitment to the men under his command. They met near the middle of the fortification, overlooking the miles of fertile floodplains beyond the city's gate. Wind whipped through Thea's hair, a decent breeze gusting in from the east. She handed Erodor the pack, its contents clinking with hundreds of glass phials of the milky green stuff.
"You'll see that these get distributed?"
"We've already got enough distributed, but I'll stockpile them," he said. His big beak of a nose sniffed at something in the air.
Thea smelled it, too: woodsmoke, and something more acrid underneath. She glanced back to the warrens of Nortsair behind her and saw no obvious source of the fire. Then she looked out along the countryside, along the rolling hills, the rustic farms and the stately country plantations of the city's well-to-do. It all seemed so peaceful... perhaps too peaceful. Where were the carts? Where were the farmers and tradesmen streaming in from the countryside. Thea sniffed the air again.
"That smell..." she said. "It doesn't smell like a wood fire. It smells like a village put to the torch."
Erodor Westman's dark eyes went wide, for he knew that smell well enough - all soldiers did. He looked out to the horizon, gasping at the same moment Thea did.
The illusion was shattered. The Nortsair countryside wasn't bucolic under sunny skies. The little hamlet on the horizon was destroyed, a trail of black smoke wafting up from its remains, and a huge war camp had been established in its footprint. Even now, hundreds of men were marching out from it as thousands more prepared to march. They'd snuck right up on the city and nobody had noticed. They were minutes away.
"Lower the gate! Ring the bells!" Thea cried out.
"Belay that!" the captain barked.
"You cannot 'belay' me," Thea stated.
"Think about it, Thea. Yes, let's close the gates. But we'll get the word out silently... no need for Myrdon to know we've seen through his trickery. Instead, have your man... Heath? Have Heath make his own... make us appear utterly unprepared until they throw themselves at our completely-ready defenses."
Thea hated to admit it, but it was a good idea. Erodor Westman was, after all, a soldier's soldier. They sent runners throughout the fortress to warn the fighters to ready themselves. To make sure they were armed and ready, that they had elixir, that they'd made peace with whatever god would claim them... and for many of them, that was Astrilla. Thea hoped she wasn't sending many souls Astrilla's way, but she didn't have high hopes. Even behind five yards of concrete and stone, the situation was dire.
+++++
It was almost amusing, watching Bestel Myrdon's vanguard arrive, a hundred or so men creeping toward the well-secured Lord's Gate. To them, it looked wide open, the city within ripe for the taking. Meanwhile, a dozen siege engines, ballistas and catapults, were being erected on the front lines. Behind that, thousands of men formed ranks… Thea counted and counted… there were close to five thousand of them, nearly as many as the entire populace hunkered behind Nortsair's walls. And, somewhere out there, were 'Lord Myrdon' and his scions.
The vanguard crept right up to the gate, realizing that it was closed only when they bumped right into it and Heath's illusion couldn't be maintained. Then, at the captain's signal, Nortsair's archers opened fire. A dozen invaders went down in the first volley, and Myrdon's men panicked, the front lines surging back into the rear and miring them in a mass of increasingly terrified soldiers. It had been Thea's suggestion that they try to capture as many of the men alive as possible, but Captain Westman assured her that this was bad siege protocol - never open your gate unless you're sure you can close it securely again.
"I feel for those men… but the safest thing for us to do is to pick them off until they're retreated or dead. Unfortunately, our own siege bows aren't likely to do much to those catapults… they'll start hurling at us, and we'll have to hunker down."
"I've got a better idea," Thea said.
Their siege bows weren't as powerful as ballistas, but they had close to the same range… more, since they were firing from the top of a wall. And they had plenty of Elias Wren's alchemical explosive. A container of that lashed to a siege arrow with a bit of flint and iron to spark it made a pretty good projectile. As soon as the archers opened fire on the vanguard, and just as Myrdon's siege machines geared up to fire, Nortsair's siege bows zipped out a dozen or more explosive arrows, destroying most of the siege engines and their crews and then taking aim at any of the troops who'd been unfortunate enough to form ranks within range. It was a good start to the battle - they'd annihilated Myron's first wave and had yet to take a single casualty. But they'd soon run out of explosive arrows.
Thea turned to Cano. "Get more of the purple stuff and bring it up here. I want to be able to take pot shots all day long if we have to."
Cano nodded and jogged along the wall, scrambling down the ladder. A moment later, between siege volleys, a brown-cloaked man rode through the smoldering ruins of the catapults and toward Nortsair, completely unaccompanied. He pointed at the fortress wall and raised his hand.
"What's he doing?" Heath asked, raising his bow.
"I don't know, and I'm not about to find out," Thea said. "An explosive bolt right down the middle, please."
The bow crew took careful aim and loosed the bolt. Not quickly enough, though. A wall of earth rose up in front of the man and intercepted the bow, exploding into thousands of little dirt clods and leaving the rider behind it completely unharmed. He raised his arm again, made a fist, and brought it down…
Thea felt the thump deep within the ground, felt the fortress wall shudder with stones knocking loose and bits starting to crack. The man raised his arm again…
Thea gesticulated wildly. "Shit! He's going to bring the wall down! Another explosive bolt!"
"Um… we're all out…" the bow crew only had a handful of bolts left, all of them the regular sort.
Thea looked around for Cano - he was still gone, fetching more explosive heads for the bolts. But Heath was there, and his bow's range was a lot better than most and his aim was even better. He took aim with three shots in rapid succession, each of them hitting the man, two in the heart and one in the face… the face shot glanced off harmlessly while those aimed at his chest shattered as if they'd been fired against solid stone. The man brought his fist down, and the earth beneath them thumped again, this time collapsing part of the fortress wall ten yards to their right. A wedge five yards wide and half-way to the ground cracked and crumbled to the ground, taking a few archers with it. The wall was still intact at its base, but now sported a host of small cracks. He raised his fist again…
"Shoot him!" Thea shouted.
"You saw what just happened," Heath said. "My arrows didn't do a damn bit of good…"
"But did you notice him shielding his eyes?"
Heath had noticed it, too. Conceivably, it was a weak spot for an otherwise and literally rock-solid man. Heath took a shot, but the man's attention was turned away from them, focused on the wall. Heath's arrow glanced off his head again, perturbing him enough that he shielded his eyes with his hand. They'd need to distract him to get a good shot.
"That guy looks like bad news," Cano said, popping back atop the wall.
He hefted an explosive bolt like a javelin and tossed it, sending the thing streaking toward the brown-clad rider. The man perhaps sensed it coming, because he paused in his assault on the wall to erect another personal earthenworks. Only Cano's javelin throw was at a much higher angle than a siege bolt, and so it sailed right over the barrier, cracking at the foot of the man's steed. The horse exploded and the scion was sent tumbling over his own earth barrier. He rolled to his feet and cast a rage-filled glance toward them.
Zip… zip. That instant of angry attention was all Heath needed. He shot off two arrows, one for each eye, and both hit home, and they hit deep. The man stumbled forward, stumbled for a good six or seven paces, and for a horrified instant, Thea feared that he'd still somehow survived that. But he hadn't. He fell dead a mere twenty yards from the Nortsair fortress walls, and that wall was intact.
"Hurrah!" the cry went up from the defenders.
They'd killed one of Myrdon's scions and, while they could no longer claim to be without casualties, the losses had been light. For all their numbers, for all his disregard for human life, Bestel Myrdon wouldn't risk a bald-faced assault on an intact fortress. And, if they were lucky, he didn't have any other scions who might bring the wall down.
"Um…" Cano said.
It took a moment to see what Cano was pointing at: the earth had just swallowed the brown rider. It had claimed his body in a rapidly-expanding sinkhole. The whole earth rumbled, little chips of rock and concrete skittering down the gash in the wall, the whole earth near where the man lay sinking, as if getting sucked in by some great and ravenous being. The sinkhole's growth slowed… slowed… but still, it reached the fortress wall. That added assault was too much for the overtaxed wall to take, and it started to crumble in earnest, a twenty-yard section of wall breaking away with a great ear-splitting crack and dissolving into an avalanche of rubble. The wall beneath them shuddered, and Heath dove for safety. Thea and Cano found themselves scrambling from the collapse, and then the floor gave out and Thea felt herself falling.
She tumbled head-over-heels, catching herself against a little ledge five yards from the wall's top. Fifteen yards further down was a great gash of rubble at the top of the great sinkhole, and beyond that was the city of Nortsair. It wouldn't be easy passage, but a determined force might absorb the casualties and storm into the breach. And it didn't take a seasoned general to know that this was exactly what the enemy was going to do. Thea positioned herself and skittered down the steep incline, nearly tumbling down into the sinkhole beyond.
She looked out to Myrdon's forces beyond. Sure enough, they were now advancing in earnest, four thousand massed soldiers advancing on the wall under the cover of fire arrows aimed at the Nortsair archers up atop the wall. Thea hefted her axe and planted her feet.
"You'll…" a hoarse voice said. He coughed. "You'll get yourself killed, Thea."
"Cano!" Thea pulled him out of the rubble and hugged him. "I thought you'd been buried."
"I was buried. Just rocks… nothing I can't handle…" He nudged a boulder the size of Thea to the side and recovered his sword. "But you can't handle this many attackers."
"Neither can you," Thea said.
"No, probably not," Cano agreed. Twenty men he could deal with. Fifty was fifty-fifty. Four thousand… that was a tall order. "Why don't we even the odds? There's a barrel of that purple stuff near the gatehouse."
"You want to toss it into the sinkhole?"
"When it really counts," he nodded. "Look… backup's already arriving. Get that barrel to me and I'll heave it."
Thea nodded and made way for the squad of Soenmen jogging in to assist Cano. She turned back to the fortress wall and shouted up at the remaining Nortsair archers. "The enemy's at hand, my friends! Defend that breach! For, not only do your lives depend on it, I'm taking a cupra from your bonus for every man that gets through that gap!"
