Sorcha's Revolt
CHAPTER ELEVEN - ONSLAUGHT

Sorcha knew instantly when the battle began.

Sheltering with the other women in the inn at the heart of the Kellion revolution, Sorcha waited tensely. While the other women fretted and worried, Sorcha and Vashta sat together in the main bar room, at first merely drawn together by the Naril tattoos that marked them out from the other women. Even as the Kellion revolutionaries, DeKellia, DeSilva and Sabra with them, marched to join the Silvan army defending the city walls, Sorcha and Vashta instinctively took hold of one another's hands.

"It's starting," Vashta said, and as she spoke the first glimmers of green fire rose on her tattoos. Sorcha felt it too, a split second before she saw it. Then her tattoos glowed and writhed, lifting from her skin in phantasmal life, growing and entwining in answer to the gathering power of sorcerers in preparation for battle.

Sorcha and Vashta both wore the tattoo called the All Seeing Eye; gazing into Vashta's eyes, Sorcha saw not the other woman's face or the room in which they sat, but rather the walls and towers of Silveneir, the defenders ranged upon the ramparts and the Darians drawn up beyond gunshot in battle order ready to advance.

In the centre of the Darian line stood the Warmaster, a giant in silver mail and dark winged helm. As he summoned his power, shadows swirled like fog about him and became a cloak of darkness, transfiguring him from a mere warrior-king to a numinous lord of some otherworldly realm.

On the walls of Silveneir, DeSilva stood with the Kellion revolutionaries. To Sorcha's eyes, he appeared as a beacon of power even before he called forth the demon Stantine Fenn. The men around him, even his father and Kam Daishen, drew back to give him room as the demon appeared, a living pillar of fire that burned within and around DeSilva.

Overhead, the skies darkened, and Sorcha saw, superimposed upon the heavens, the ever-shifting eyes of the Warmistress Eliana. Clouds gathered, black thunderheads closing in from all sides upon the city.

The Warmaster roared and the earth shook, trembling the walls of Silveneir. DeSilva hurled a bolt of fire into the Darian ranks, scattering blackened armoured bodies. The clouds burst in a deluge, flinging rain and hail down upon the battlefield.

Sorcha screamed at the first triune blast of sorcery, her only grounding in reality the firm grip of Vashta's hands on her wrists. The walls of the inn and the frightened, curious faces of the other women now watching Sorcha and Vashta faded away. She was ware only of Vashta's eyes reflecting the battle's vista, the shared fire of their tattoos that echoed the sound and sensations of two armies engaging.

Beneath the onslaught of earth and sky, the walls of Silveneir cracked. The Darians advanced with a roar. They had brought no cannon or siege weapons; from their vanguard advanced the largest of their race, men built like titans who hurled boulders the size of cannon balls as boys might throw oranges.

A hail of Silvan arrows greeted them, followed an instant later by a volley of Kellion gunfire. The Darian infantry charged, racing past the stone-hurling giants who still bombarded the walls of Silveneir, into the teeth of the defensive fusillade. Advancing over the bodies of their comrades, the Darians flung themselves at the walls of Silveneir. Apelike, climbing without ropes or ladders, they launched themselves acrobatically from one handhold to the next, ascending vertically as swiftly as they ran on flat ground.

Arrows and gunfire poured down on them, and then the Darians gained the battlements. Hand-to-hand combat broke out on the ramparts, Silvan sabres and Kellion rapiers against the heavy cleaving falchions of the Darians.

The roar of battle assaulted Sorcha's ears, as loud and disorienting as if she stood in the thick of the fighting. She saw Kam Daishen bestriding the battlements, the red knight hewing down with his great sword at the ascending Darians, claiming upreaching hands and swiping off heads as swiftly as the foe came on.

Then one Darian made a prodigious leap and gained the battlements despite the Daishen's forbidding. Too close for wide swordplay, they fell at once to the clinch, wrestling across locked hilts on the very brink of the wall. Sorcha had known Darian lovers, she had experienced their phenomenal strength, seen them in battle often before. Though she had also seen Kam Daishen in combat perform heroic feats, she trembled in premonition of the red knight's overthrow. It was simply impossible, to her mind, that any normal man could triumph over a Darian in such a contest.

The wider battle seemed to hang in abeyance, a moving tableau of gunfire and flashing swords, while for long moments the two champions grappled on the battlements.

The Darian's limbs swelled, muscles writhing like serpents beneath his skin, threatening to burst his mail. Kam Daishen stood like a tree against the roiling power of his adversary. As the Darian's strength and size redoubled, Sorcha saw with the eyes of sorcery an otherwise invisible force arise within Kam Daishen. As the Darian strove for ever greater physical might, the Daishen seemed to become more solid, more real, until in Sorcha's vision he was the sole real thing, all else faded into abstraction against the physical certitude of Kellia's First Knight.

With a roar that drowned out the battle, Kam Daishen hurled his enemy back, flinging the Darian bodily from the battlements to crash broken at the foot of the wall. A resounding cheer went up from the Kellions ranked behind him on the rampart; even as the Daishen fell back, exhausted, the men behind him surged forward, fighting with new strength.

All along the wall, Kellion and Silvan champions mounted the ramparts to pit their bodies and bravado against the boldest of the Darians to assault the wall. Sorcha saw Silvan Divas, dervishes wreathed in spraying blood and flickering steel as they danced through the foe, here and there Kellion knights in full armour emulating Kam Daishen's valour, lone Kellion swordsmen and Silvan swordswomen who lived and died on the ramparts according to their courage and skill, while all around them the greater mass of combatants shoved, grappled, and stabbed.

Then Vashta's grip tightened on Sorcha's hands, and she saw, through the older woman's attention, the black-clad figure of DeKellia in the thickest of the fighting.

Directly at the gates, the Darians flung their strongest force. Four battering rams, carried on Darian shoulders and swung by their raw strength, pounded upon the gates of Silveneir. At the same time, Darian Commandos swarmed up the towers of the gatehouse. On the ramparted roof, the tide of battle swayed back and forth, fresh waves of attackers met and thrown back time and again by successive ranks of Silvan soldiers pouring up from the gatehouse interior.

But always commanding the fight was DeKellia, gliding through the combat as if dancing from one partner to the next, leaving all who met him dead upon the flagstones. His sword did not cut or thrust, but merely travelled, a fine red spray ever in its wake and its master laughing to damnation every foe to cross his path.

Then the power of the Warmaster rolled again like silent thunder. The heavens wheeled and day became for a moment night before the sun shone again. The embattled walls shuddered again, and in the wake of the tremor, a second wave of Darian warriors rushed forward from the drawn-up ranks.

They were led by a man in a green surcoat and black chainmail, distinct against the silver mail and white tabards of the men who followed him.

Sorcha knew him at once; Lorac DanSorroway, the knight who had come through the enemy lines to deliver some secret message to DeKellia. Now Lorac raced upon the gatehouse, outpacing the men with him to join the remnant of the first assault.

He did not scale the wall as his comrades before had done; as he approached at the run, he drew and flung in quick succession the four swords holstered at his back. Whirling, they struck and shivered in the city gate itself. Lorac sprang and launched himself from one embedded swordhilt to the next, a supreme feat of agility culminating in a vaulting somersault to gain the roof of the gatehouse.

Lorac's remaining two swords were already in his hands and he met DeKellia without fear. Sorcha tensed, again convinced by her inculcated fear of the Darian race that even De Kellia, vaunted as the greatest swordsman in the world, could not hope to stand against the immortal skill of this Darian knight who fought with a sword in either hand.

But from Vashta she sensed, just as clearly as she saw and heard the battle by the sympathetic magic of her Naril tattoos, only grim amusement and calm certainty of the outcome. At the first clash of steel, Sorcha knew that Vashta's faith was not misplaced; Lorac was a master swordsman, his every movement of body and blade a sublime demonstration of grace and agility. His twin blades whirled an infinitely complex web of death, beautiful and terrifying. DeKellia simply danced through the flashing blades, evading them with contemptuous ease though Lorac cut at him a dozen times in the space of three paces. DeKellia's sword trailed behind him, flowed up by the momentum of his whole body and claimed both the Darian's blades from his hands with one sweeping disarm. Suddenly weaponless, Lorac gave ground. DeKellia pursued him bodily, rushing forward until the towering knight wavered on the brink of the ramparts, only the battlement between him and the drop from the gatehouse roof.

DeKellia seized Lorac by the tabard, restraining him from the fall but threatening yet to precipitate the knight to his doom.

As clear as if she stood beside them, the greater noise of the battle fading away, Sorcha heard Lorac snarl, "Now is the time! The Warmaster has other weapons yet; summon your allies now, DeKellia, whoever they may be!"

His message delivered, Lorac hurled himself bodily from the wall, tearing free of DeKellia's grip. The fall would have killed a normal man, but Lorac pirouetted as he dropped, struck the ground, and rolled to his feet unharmed, staring back up at the gatehouse and DeKellia standing atop it.

Sorcha was dragged back suddenly from the vision when Vashta dug her nails into her wrists, hard.

"Quick," Vashta said, hauling Sorcha to her feet by the mere intensity of her voice and gaze. "This is our only chance; we must move against him now."

"How?" Sorcha staggered after Vashta towards the door of the inn, dizzy and disoriented, the sights and sounds of the battle still echoing in her mind.

"I know his allies," Vashta said, as they quit the inn and hurried towards the deserted barricade. "He will strike at the Darian Warmaster and the Warmistress of Silveneir, first by sorcery and then by his own hand. His power will rise but he will resort at the end to the sword, and in the interstice between, we may intercept him."

Sorcha did not understand Vashta's cryptic explanation and did not like the gleam in the older woman's eyes. Vashta's entire demeanour was changed; always Sorcha had known her as a withdrawn, bitter-eyed woman who waited upon DeKellia whether in the wilds or in civilisation.

There was a light in Vashta's eyes now, a set to her shoulders and a sway to her stride that Sorcha had never seen in a harem girl. Then she noticed again the sword at Vashta's side.

DeKellia had approved but seemed to put little store by Vashta going armed. Now, as they passed through the open barricade and onto the street where the police pickets had once burned, Sorcha saw not a broken harem girl, but the warrior Diva that Vashta had once been.

"You mean to fight him," Sorcha said, shocked into immobility.

Vashta turned, revealing that she had donned a steel Silvan mask to hide her face.

"He'll kill you."

"He will not. He cannot. He swore himself to my protection, a vow he cannot break."

"You don't know him." Sorcha backed away from Vashta slowly. "I'm not going up against him if that's your plan. I'll use the witch-marks, just this once, just to stop him, but I won't fight in any battle ever again. That's my vow. While you've got your sword, you don't need me."

"Coward," Vashta spat, but Sorcha merely shrugged.

"Fine, if you say so. Go. Find DeKellia. I'm going to find Monte and get us both out of this madness. We should have left immediately, but we didn't. Now I'm going to search the battlefield for my man and drag him out of here by his balls if that's what it takes."

"He'll be dead before you find him!" Vashta's fist clenched and she ground her teeth in frustration, visibly torn between marching on at once alone and enjoining Sorcha by any means to come with her. "I've got the All Seeing Eye," Sorcha said. "I'll find him."