Yulan rose to his feet and stepped towards the open door. That saved him, for a spear spiralled in and passed across the back of his head, so close he felt it in his hair. It hit the wall and rebounded, quivering. Yulan thanked his luck and ran.
The Sorentines had cut a long and wide sloping passageway with a vaulted roof up from that subterranean harbour. Yulan sprinted up it into darkness, for there were no torches or oil lamps here. He almost turned his ankle over in a groove running down the length of the ramp. Cursing he ran on, ignoring the twinge of protest in that joint. Long, long ago, there must have been carts hauled up and down, their wheels riding in the grooves. Not now. Now there was only damp and the dark and silence.
A silence broken by a strange, trilling whistle from up ahead. It sounded vaguely familiar to Yulan, but he could not place it. Hamdan, he supposed, but what it meant he had no idea. An alarm? His stride faltered, skipped a beat.
And out of the gloom came a splinter of movement that sighed past his eyes. An arrow. He lurched to the side and pressed himself to the arching wall in time to avoid the second, and then the third that went straight and true as stooping falcons down the long slope towards the figures at the foot of the passageway. He heard at least once the distinctive thud of arrow meeting flesh, and a startled cry. After that, there was no more movement. No pursuit.
Yulan trotted on and up. His ankle ached, but not too much. The knife wound in his upper arm was throbbing, but distantly. He was alive when he could as easily – more easily – not have been. On another day, Lake would have had him. There was a unique kind of exhilaration to be had in knowing that this was not that other day. But then, it was still early.
XI
Hamdan was waiting in the doorway of an old storage cellar. As Yulan passed through, the archer heaved the great oaken door closed behind him and hammered a wedge in beneath it with his foot.
The chamber was a mess. There was only the light of a couple of lanterns to see by, but it was enough to know this was where Kottren Malak had hoarded much of his loot. Barrels were stacked along half of one wall, rolls of cloth and heaps of fishing net strewn over and between them. There were tall clay jars with cork stoppers; oars leaning in one corner, boathooks and spears and pitchforks in another. A chest here and there, long loops of chain and boat tackle hanging on the walls. A neglected heap of clothes that smelled of rot and mould. A sorry and meagre treasury, all in all. Hardly worth a single death, let alone the many that had followed upon the Corsair King’s heels.
Corena was at the far end of the cellar with the children, peering through another doorway into a rising stairwell.
Yulan gave Hamdan a grateful pat on the shoulder.
‘I’m glad you waited.’
Hamdan shrugged.
‘What else would I do? We’re the Free, you and I. Unless we’re different from just about everyone else riding under that banner, it means we’re all we’ve got. We always wait. Until we can’t.’
Yulan nodded.
‘I’m impressed,’ Hamdan was saying. ‘Not many can say they’ve faced an Orphanidon and lived.’
‘Once an Orphanidon. He is good, but old. Probably not as sharp a blade as once he was.’
‘Oh, I know,’ Hamdan grunted. ‘I was just trying to be encouraging. If it’d been a young one, still in the Empire’s service, I might not have bothered waiting.’
They walked the length of the cellar. Yulan heard the skittering of rats behind some of the barrels. He thought – though this might be imagining – that he could hear the whispery scuttling of beetles in there too.
‘See anything?’ he asked Corena as he peered over her shoulder up the shadowy spiral of the stairway. ‘Hear anything?’
She did not have to answer. The castle above them provided its own response. A low howl of wind, then the crash and groan of something falling or moving. The cracking and creaking of stone that made Yulan think of fissures opening. None of it promising. None of it certain of provenance, but to Yulan’s ear it had the ominous sound of a young Clever, half-maddened by grief and anger. Raging, searching, wailing. Hurting.
‘It’s not easy shooting along a sloping passage, you know,’ Hamdan observed, as if they were taking their ease in an alehouse. ‘You’re supposed to get down when I give a grass-shrike whistle.’
‘That second whistle? I didn’t know what that meant.’
‘Did you never go hunting before you left the drylands?’ asked Hamdan incredulously.
‘Of course I did. Often. We used our hands for quiet talking, and if we needed calls it was a black plover to stay down and still.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, really. A black plover’ll sit on its nest so stubborn you can pick it up.’
‘Well, I know that.’ Hamdan looked thoughtful. ‘Makes sense. Don’t know why we used a grass-shrike.’
‘Are you two forgetting where we are?’ muttered Corena. ‘On a sinking ship is where, and I don’t hear anyone saying which way we should swim.’
‘Not forgetting it, no,’ said Hamdan.
‘So which way are we swimming?’ Corena demanded.
‘I’ve got half an idea about that,’ Yulan said.
And he did have an idea. He did not like it, and he did not think anyone else was going to like it much, but it was all he had.
‘We need to get up and out of here before we can do anything else,’ he said. ‘No other choice.’
‘Always wanted to meet an angry child-Clever,’ Hamdan sighed. ‘Help me block up that other door a little better first. At least we may be able to delay your Orphanidon long enough that we only need to have one nightmare at a time.’
Yulan led the way up the spiral that would carry them once more into the castle, sword in one hand, lantern taken from the wall of the cellar in the other. He was beginning to feel cold. His clothes were sodden and heavy, sucking all the warmth from his limbs. The children, he knew, were shivering behind him. They had not been well dressed in the first place, and certainly not for thrashing about in the sea. He could hear someone’s teeth rattling.
It was not helped by the fact that the higher they rose, the closer they came to whatever awaited them above, the more restless the air grew. It shifted and gusted, blowing cold across the face. Where it should have been still, here in this tight stair deep in rock, it had life and movement.
Yulan could think of two possible reasons for that. Either the fabric of the fortress above them was so rent, so damaged, that the winds coming off the sea flowed through it without let or hindrance; or it was Enna, giving form and intent directly to the air. Neither was a comforting notion.
They emerged into a short corridor that ran off to both left and right. Yulan looked this way and that before stepping out from the stairwell. He struggled for a moment to orientate himself. The only windows were tiny slits high at each end of the corridor, each showing only a thin bar of featureless sky. The dim sound of waves told him which way the sea, and the back of the keep, lay. That was what he wanted.
He led the others to a corner and held them just short of it with a silent spreading of his fingers. From around that corner, the shifting air was bringing an unsettling sound: heavy, rasping breathing.
He edged forward and looked into the new stretch of passageway, into the glare of unexpected daylight. A hole had been torn open, right through the keep from top to bottom, admitting the glare of a sun now high in the sky. Yulan could hear the cries of seabirds, and beneath that harsh surface the rumbling, faltering breath of the beast that lay in the corridor. A great bear, a cave-dweller, was sprawled there, half crushed beneath great slabs of masonry that had plunged down from the roof and walls above.
Its hindquarters were pinned – and surely broken – by massive stonework. Its jowls were bloody and trailing strings of thick saliva. Its mangled tongue sprawled limply from its jaws. But it was not dead, and its eyes went to Yulan as soon as he emerged before it.