Ice Forged (The Ascendant Kingdoms Saga) Read online

  The mob scattered but did not yield. Blaine pulled Verran into an alley. Piran followed a moment later, his arms full of rocks and debris.

  “Take some,” Piran said, handing some of the rocks to Blaine. “It’s about to get ugly.”

  Blaine grabbed Verran by the arm. “You can’t help down here. Get back to the homestead. Warn Kestel. Do what you can to put up some defenses. Piran’s right—this is going to get worse before it’s sorted out. If there’s a way to help Dawe, we’ll do it.”

  “You might need these.” Verran dumped out a pouch on his belt, and a variety of keys clanked into his hands.

  “Where did you get those?” Blaine asked, taking them from Verran.

  Verran smiled. “I’ve been pinching them from the soldiers at the Crooked House for a while now. Thought it might come in handy someday. They’re drunk enough to figure they lost the keys somewhere on their patrol. I don’t know what they open, but more than one of them are likely to work at Velant.”

  Blaine grinned. “You’re the best of the worst, Verran.”

  Verran made an exaggerated bow, with a gesture that swept an invisible hat in a wide arc. “At your service.”

  “Keep the looting to a minimum on your way home,” Blaine cautioned.

  “Spoilsport,” Verran groused. “On the other hand, Velant has a warehouse down by the docks. With the storm, there could be a door loose—”

  “Just get home and make sure Kestel’s safe. If this goes badly, we’ll need a place to fall back to.”

  Blaine watched Verran sprint into the distance, and returned his attention to the mob in the street. A chunk of ice whizzed past his head, clattering against the building behind him. Bay colonists had squared off against Prokief’s badly outnumbered troops. Armed with storm debris and hunks of ice, the colonists took shelter in the doorways and alleys, hiding behind refuse and overturned barrels. The soldiers had scattered as well, firing off arrows from cover until driven back by a hail of rock-hard chunks of ice and debris.

  “They can’t have as many arrows as we’ve got pieces of ice,” Blaine said, hefting a chunk in his hand.

  “Uh-oh,” Piran muttered. “Warden-mages.”

  Blaine glanced up long enough to see three men in gray robes appear near the soldiers’ last position. Their robes matched the color of the uniforms of Velant’s soldiers and had their own unusual embroidery to signify rank. One of the men had steel-gray hair and a closely trimmed beard. The man next to him had a gaunt face, and his robes hung on him as if there were no body beneath them. The third mage was short and portly, with brown hair and a shining pate in the middle.

  “Watch out!” Blaine warned, bracing for the attack.

  A noxious cloud formed out of thin air, gradually dispersing in the direction opposite where the soldiers had taken refuge. The streets were suddenly loud with the sounds of coughing and gagging, and the angry townspeople began to fall to their knees, clutching their throats or grasping at their chests.

  Blaine and Piran pulled their scarves around their mouths and noses, but the magicked cloud diffused through the cold air, closing around them until they were gasping and retching, digging at their tearing eyes.

  In the distance, they heard the roar of angry voices and the sound of thuds and crashes.

  “Mages can’t control all of us at once,” Blaine gasped, his throat raw and burning.

  “Hit them in shifts,” Piran choked.

  Blaine was already dragging himself to his feet. In the square, colonists surged forward. Armed with fishing spears and broken boards, they took up barrel tops as shields and wielded nets and ropes from the fishing boats with dangerous accuracy.

  Soldiers in groups of two or three battled gangs of six or eight colonists. Though the soldiers were armed with swords, the colonists were no strangers to street brawls, and in their hands, knives could be equally deadly.

  A hail of rocks and ice flew through the air toward the mages, only to stop as if hitting an invisible wall and dropping to the ground. One of the mages held up his hand, palm out, and a crippling wave of pain felled Blaine, Piran, and the colonists around them. Men cursed as they twisted and writhed with sudden, agonizing muscle cramps. But from behind the mages, a roar of voices shouted curses, growing closer with every second. As quickly as the pain came, it disappeared as the new mob drew the mages’ attention elsewhere.

  Blaine felt his temper rise. Prokief had never turned his mages loose beyond the Velant walls. In the distance, smoke billowed from the towering flames that rose over Velant. He gripped his hunting knife in one hand and stepped back to send a heavy chunk of ice flying toward a soldier he spotted peering from around a corner. The ice clipped the soldier on the temple and he dropped without a word.

  “Come on,” Blaine shouted, motioning for Piran to follow him as the crowd rushed forward again.

  The mob had reached the icy commons in the middle of the town. The three mages held their position at the northern edge of the commons, but more colonists had taken to the street, and protesters streamed into the narrow alleys. Prokief’s mages, realizing that the crowd was growing beyond their ability to control, sent bursts of magic into the mob, dropping men in their tracks with pain or sudden dysentery, only to shift their magic in another direction a moment later. It was enough to slow the crowd, but not stop their advance, and each wave of magic stoked the mob’s anger.

  Half a dozen protesters ran at the mages with a battle cry, fishing spears raised. The three mages drew together, and thrust out their hands. The attackers screamed and staggered as blood began to stream from their mouths, trickling from their ears and eyes and gushing from their noses.

  Blaine was in the center of the mob. He was tall enough to get a glimpse of what was happening, while Piran was unable to see even when he jumped into the air.

  “What’s going on?” Piran yelled above the cries and curses of the crowd.

  “The mages just killed the men who rushed them.”

  Screams of rage rose from the crowd. Voices carried on the cold night air, cursing Prokief and the mages, damning the king and the guards to Raka.

  “I don’t think they got the effect they wanted,” Piran noted. The entire commons was jammed with people; men stood shoulder to shoulder, pressed so tightly against one another that it was impossible for an individual to leave the center of the mob. Panicked by the deaths of the attackers, the mob began to stampede toward the rear. Shouts and curses filled the air as men were pushed and shoved, and screams echoed from those who stumbled and were trampled beneath the press.

  “Here comes another salvo!” Blaine shouted as the mages prepared to drive off the mob with a blast of magic.

  For a few seconds, magic hummed in the air, crackling overhead like lightning. Blaine felt a searing blast of pain that made his vision swim, and he fell to his knees. And then… nothing.

  In the crowd, men stumbled, shaking their heads with baffled expressions on their faces. “What’s going on?” a frightened voice asked.

  Blaine struggled to his feet, still trying to clear his head. He sought the flicker of magic within him. Always, it had responded to his call. Now it was gone.

  “The magic’s gone!” someone in the crowd shouted. The cry was taken up by others and echoed across the commons.

  “If the magic’s dead, the mages are nothing but men,” Piran shouted. “After them! They can’t hurt us now!”

  The retreating mob made a sudden shift. Footsteps thudded against the icy ground as the crowd converged from every side, running as fast as the press of bodies would permit toward the mages, who stood back to back, hands raised in hapless defense.

  “Get back!” the tall mage shouted, and spread his fingers wide, snapping his hands forward as if to cast his magic against the raging mob.

  “Go to the gods,” shouted one of the men at the front of the mob, a broad-shouldered fisherman who held a well-worn fishing pike in one hand. With a lurch, he thrust the pike forward, catching the tall mag
e just below the ribs, hoisting his writhing body aloft impaled on the pike.

  A cheer rose from the mob, and the other mages turned to run, but the crowd hemmed them in, cutting off their escape.

  Blaine caught a glint of light off the broad blade of a hunting knife before it sang through the air, severing the head from the body of the short mage. The portly warden-mage was the last of the trio left, and he sank to his knees, ashen, hands upraised in supplication.

  “Please, please spare me—”

  Colonists who had endured the tortures of the warden-mages when they were convicts turned a deaf ear to the mage’s plea. Blaine winced at the sound of the wood against flesh and bone as the rioters massed around the mage, striking over and over with their makeshift weapons until the man’s screams were silenced. The crowd hesitated for a moment, as if unsure what to do now that the mages were dead and the soldiers had disappeared.

  Blaine scrambled up onto the low stone wall at the edge of the commons. “Now is our chance to take Velant,” he shouted. “Without the mages, Prokief can’t hold the prison. There are more of us than there are guards. To Velant!”

  The crowd took up the chant, and soon the walls of the town rang with the cry. “To Velant! To Velant!”

  Blaine climbed down as the crowd shifted and hundreds of colonists began streaming up the road toward the prison, leaving the bloody bodies of the warden-mages where they lay. Velant’s flames flared in the perpetual twilight of the white night sky. Black smoke billowed upward, temporarily blotting out the stars that never set.

  The wind whipped around them, coming off the ocean with a ferocity that numbed skin and tore at the colonists’ coats. After routing the guards and mages at the commons, the mood of the crowd had turned vengeful. Men brandished their weapons as they headed up the rutted road toward Velant.

  “You sure about this, Mick?” Piran asked, glancing at Blaine as they trudged up the hill toward the prison.

  Blaine shrugged. “Prokief’s vulnerable. The mages can’t help him. We outnumber the guards. Something’s gone wrong up there, or the place wouldn’t be on fire. We won’t get better odds.”

  “Do you think he started it? The fire?”

  Blaine considered the possibility for a moment. “No. If the fire were just starting now, I’d say that Prokief might have started it rather than surrender. But it was burning before the magic failed, before the mages died.” Blaine shook his head. “Prokief would never have thought he could lose as long as he had the mages.”

  Piran squinted, trying to make out Velant’s buildings through the smoky haze that had settled over the snow-covered landscape. “What about Dawe?”

  Blaine ducked his head as a blast of wind swept snow into the air. “I don’t know, Piran. I hope we can find him.”

  Velant sat on a high bluff above the ocean, a commanding enclave with one large stone building and several large wooden structures surrounded by a timber stockade of sharpened pikes and a high stone wall. The stone building and the wall had been quarried by the original convicts under the threat of starvation and the lash. It was a dark, hulking presence, intended to intimidate all who entered beneath Velant’s massive iron gates.

  “Halt! Go back!”

  The voices of the guards at the gate rang out over the ice. As the prison behind them burned, a line of guards stayed at their posts. When the mob drew closer, a hail of arrows flew from behind the crenellations in the wall. Several men in the crowd fell, but many of the attackers had brought makeshift shields, and they raised them overhead, taking the brunt of the attack. The crowd fell back, just out of arrows’ reach.

  “Surrender, and we won’t have to kill you,” Blaine shouted. He had reached the front line of the crowd halfway up the hill, and now found himself among the vanguard of the mob. Piran was beside him, his jaw set and his mouth in a hard, determined line.

  In response, rocks and ice pelted the crowd, hurled by slingshots and small catapults. The crowd scattered but did not disperse. Instead, they turned over the empty wagons outside the prison, wagons that carried convicts to the mines or out to the fields. The guards were helpless as the crowd began to pull the wagons apart to fashion themselves more cover.

  Outside the gates, six gibbets hung from tall posts, each with a rotting corpse inside the iron man-shaped cage. Crows scattered from the carrion as the crowd approached. The sickly sweet smell of death mixed with the smoke.

  “Get out of the way! Let us through!” The crowd parted as several large men came from the rear, carrying a large tree that had been hurriedly cut and stripped of its branches. More men ran from the crowd to help carry the large trunk, while others fell into step, holding the wagon boards to provide as much shelter as possible to the crew of what Blaine realized was to become a battering ram.

  “Give them room!” Blaine shouted, and Piran echoed the call for the crowd to step back.

  The guards at their posts sent arrows and stones down against the invaders, but they bounced uselessly against the improvised shields. Velant had been built to keep its prisoners inside, not with the intent to keep invaders out. The large iron gates relied on mages and guards, not the strength of metal and stone.

  “Heave!”

  The large tree trunk swayed backward, then crashed into the iron gates, borne on the hands of two dozen men.

  “Heave!”

  Again and again, the battering ram smashed against the gates. The crowd had taken to making sport of pelting the guards with balls of ice thrown hard enough to draw blood. Shouts rose from the crowd whenever their volleys scored a hit on any soldier unwary enough to show himself between the crenellations.

  “Heave!”

  Smoke hung heavy in the air, too heavy even for the stiff wind from the ocean to dispel. After the initial resistance, the guards appeared to have abandoned their post, since their arrows and missiles were useless in repelling the attack.

  “Heave!”

  The iron gate gave a final squeal as it yielded under the weight of the heavy battering ram. Shouts of victory rose from the crowd. Blaine chanced a look down the slope and was amazed to see it filled with colonists, both men and women, stretching halfway back toward town.

  “Practically the whole bloody colony turned out for the show,” Piran muttered.

  “Let’s hope Kestel and Verran had the brains to stay home,” Blaine replied.

  The battering-ram crew gave one final swing and the iron gate tore from its hinges in a mangled heap. Men scrambled forward to clear it from the path, and the ramming crew, still beneath their shields, led the entrance into the prison enclosure.

  A crash sounded behind them and Blaine caught a glimpse of teams of men bringing down the hated gibbets, leaving them in a tangle of bent iron, broken wood, and decaying corpse flesh on the trampled snow.

  The crowd streamed forward, shoving their way into the courtyard.

  For the first time, Blaine got a good look at the source of the fire. Two of the dormitory buildings were charred ruins. Another building, where the women convicts were put to work as bakers and laundresses, was ablaze. Blaine turned toward the hulking stone building, the symbol of Velant’s tyranny and Prokief’s power. Flames streamed from the windows, scorching the stone. Parts of the roof were on fire and bits of burning wood fell to the ground, sending up showers of sparks.

  Blaine ran a few steps to the body of a fallen Velant guard and took a sword from the corpse’s hand. He hefted it, satisfied with its grip.

  “We’ll go after the guards,” Piran said, marshaling a few dozen men from the crowd, who fanned out, searching among the buildings for the soldiers who had deserted their posts.

  “We’ll look for survivors,” Blaine replied, gathering a group of his own.

  The smell of burning wood and charred flesh hung heavy in the cold air. It appeared that the fire had started in one of the dormitories and that some kind of effort had been made to put it out, judging from the buckets and tracks in the snow. A similar effort had also
failed at the second dormitory, but little seemed to have been attempted to save the stone building or the laundry.

  Dozens of structures ringed the wall. Some held foodstuffs, while others housed tools, weapons, and gear. The stables appeared untouched by the fire, though even at a distance Blaine could hear the whinnies of terrified horses and the crash of hooves against wood as the frightened animals tried to escape their stalls.

  “Fan out; take the buildings in groups of four,” Blaine said. “Stay sharp—you’re as likely to find guards as convicts.” He held his stolen sword tightly.

  They headed into a barn. It was smaller than the dormitories, but still one of the larger buildings, with a large first floor dedicated to wagons and farming equipment and a loft for storing grain. Blaine paired off with another man while the remaining two colonists headed in the opposite direction.

  A soft thud drew Blaine’s attention and he motioned for his companion to follow him. Carefully, they rounded the corner of a farm wagon, weapons raised.

  “Please, don’t hurt us.” Cowering against the wall were several dozen men and women. They were dressed in the rough, homespun uniforms of new convicts and their faces were soot-covered. Despite the cold, they wore no cloaks and they huddled together against the chill. Blaine searched their faces in vain, but did not see Dawe.

  Blaine nodded to the other searchers, who lowered their weapons. As he drew closer, he could see that many of the survivors had seeping burns on their arms and faces. “What happened?”

  The man who had initially spoken got to his feet. He was in his middle years, with a face lined from a life lived out of doors. While he was missing several teeth and had a wide scar across one cheek, his blue eyes glinted with intelligence. “Fire started in First Hall just after dawn.”

  “Was it an accident, or was it set?”

  The convict shrugged. “Don’t know. It’s been bad here in the last few days. Rumors said the magic wasn’t stable no more, that Prokief’s mages were losing their hold. Maybe it’s true, maybe it isn’t. Rations have been scarce since the last full moon. Friend of mine in the kitchens said that the last supply ship never showed up and he didn’t think there’d be another one, maybe ever. We’ve been eating thin gruel and spoiled meat for weeks.”