Destiny’s Conflict: Book Two of Sword of the Canon. Janny Wurts

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       IV. Debacle

      The scout runner who carried word of the catastrophe reached the outpost in the Thaldeins, reeling on exhausted feet. Winded beyond speech, he choked on stirred dust, forced to shoulder a path through the chaos that met his arrival.

      Wailing children, foot-sore women seated upon bulky bundles, and dazed-looking elderly men crammed the inner bailey from wall to wall. The messenger cut through their heaving misery, toned in ochre and shade, with the fallow gold of full sunlight stamped against the black loom of the portal to the inner sanctuary. The noisy sprawl of refugee families choked every available cranny: still living, still safe, the heart-core of the ancient clan lineages, though immediate threat to Tysan’s blood heritage was more urgent than anyone realized.

      The messenger dodged a crying toddler, clinging to a tow-headed brother’s grubby hand. The flashed recall resurged: of another child grotesquely gutted, alongside a sister no older than three. Nauseated, the scout runner pushed past, nostrils clogged still by the stench of the recently slaughtered. His anxious survey swept the moil for one angular form.

      Even through turbid haze and the seethe of uprooted humanity, Saroic s’Gannley stood out. Too thin for his height, his gangling form was crowned by flaxen hair the day’s crisis left no time to braid. A young man to be charged with the outpost’s main garrison, his preferred reticence a lost indulgence, he towered, shouting for someone to unsnarl the activity jammed around the supplies.

      Movement shuddered and heaved, shifting the stacked barrels and clearing the jumble of wagons and hand-carts, while another crisp order detailed the caverns to be cleared for communal shelter. Just acceded as caithdein of the realm, and yet unaware of the burden, he turned his head at the runner’s approach.

      “News?” he demanded, one hand raised to defer a healer’s concern for the risk of disease under crowding.

      The scout slid to his knees at Saroic’s feet. He gulped the thin air. Spoke, though his hoarse voice scarcely pierced the racket stewed inside the fortified ravine.

      “My Lord Steward, ill tidings!” which phrase broached the first word of an appalling disaster. “Your grandfather’s fallen. The war band at his back is lost also, killed outright defending Orlan. Both pickets on the banks of the Valendale crumpled under a surprise attack. They failed to mislead a concerted advance, never had the numbers at hand to hold out for reinforcements. A dedicate war host pours up-country, unchecked. The enemy’s on us as never before, guided by diviners and head-hunter trackers. They have swept the deep vale. Our outlying settlements are destroyed without quarter, the food stores for winter put to the torch.”

      “Survivors?” rasped an elder at Saroic’s back.

      The scout bowed his head. “The women, the children, and babes – all were butchered by arrows or ridden down and razed by the sword as they fled. We’re facing a scour by a True Sect mandate, organized for extermination.”

      Like the splash of a stone in a pool spreading ripples, horrified outbursts settled into aghast silence. Shock reigned, and stark disbelief at the vicious speed of the disaster. A furtive advance by Sunwheel troops into free-wilds territory had called the most vulnerable folk into sanctuary. But no one foresaw a merciless cleanse unleashed on a scale such as this.

      Saroic s’Gannley fought shattered composure. Too stressed to question why their seers’ heightened prescience had failed to forecast the ferocity of the assault, he shouted to stem the imminent threat to clanblood survival.

      “Round up every straggler still on the trail to the outpost. Hurry them in. Then shut the front gates. Archers! Break out lint and oil! Station yourselves with torch shafts on the battlements. You’ll fire the forest outside.”

      Someone shouted a panicky protest. “That’s against charter law!”

      “Yes!” Saroic rebutted, bloodlessly pale. “But the flames can’t spread far against a south wind. The blaze will die out at the timberline.” Did no one see? The ruin of Orlan vale was the only tactical choice to wrest a margin for escape. “While the deep ravine burns, no Sunwheel troops can storm these defences. We have that long to lead our people out. To me, the armed garrison! Conscript every adult who’s fit to bear weapons. Assign them in squads. They’ll clump the refugees into groups and funnel them single file through the tunnel connecting the natural grottoes under the stores vaults.”

      Saroic tasked the field scouts to manage the exodus, then hand-picked the best twenty-five from the war band. “You’re to cave in the passage after the last group. Then, if you can, collapse the archway to the galleries before the enemy breaches our gates. Should they break through beforetime, delay their advance. If luck favours, and you fight your way free, harry the dedicate troops at the rear-guard with traps and diversions.”

      A shadow raked over the distraught messenger. Weathered oak, with someone’s strayed infant crooked in one muscled arm, the war captain of the Thaldein outpost reached Saroic’s side. Kin resemblance was unmistakable, hewn into a middle-aged profile hardened by experience.

      “You will leave through the tunnels and stay with the families,” Saroic commanded the uncle displaced from succession. “I charge you to keep them safe! If I don’t live to rejoin you, then serve the s’Gannley lineage and stand shadow for Tysan’s crown after me.”

      “Not the Sorcerer’s will, or a shrewd use of resource.” Ice calm, the scarred campaigner handed the baby off to the anxious mother arrived at his heels.

      “You will do what is best for the realm!” Saroic snapped, strained.

      “Exactly.” Authority spoke. The uncle snapped callused fingers. Five veterans poised for his signal closed in. A moment’s demeaning, adamant scuffle saw Saroic s’Gannley hurled flat on his back in restraint.

      “Truss him!” Tears moistened the stony cheeks of the man who betrayed СКАЧАТЬ