“There must be a good two hundred of their soldiers trapped downstairs,” one of the officers was saying to a man whose narrow build gave him away as a wytch even though he wore armor and a sword. “It’ll hold for maybe fifteen minutes, meister.”
“And the nobles in the garden?” the wytch demanded.
His answer was lost in the tramp of the highlanders’ feet as they wound past Kylar and into the distance.
So the nobles were trapped in the garden. Kylar had never been to the garden before—indeed had avoided the castle as much as possible—but he’d seen paintings of the garden, and if the artists hadn’t taken too much license, Kylar supposed he could find it. He guessed that was as good of a place as any to look for Logan and Durzo.
As he wound deeper into the castle toward the garden, dead men began to clutter the halls, their blood slickening the floors. Kylar didn’t even slow as he ran past. The dead were mostly nobles’ guards.
Poor bastards. Kylar didn’t have much sympathy for men who took up the profession of arms and then didn’t train themselves, but these men had been massacred. Well over forty guards were dead and dying, kicking and frothing in pain. Kylar only saw eight highlanders dead.
Following the blood and the corpses led Kylar to double doors of walnut, barred from the outside. He lifted the bar and eased the door open.
“What in the hell?” a gruff voice with a Khalidoran accent said.
Retreating from the crack to stand behind yet another picture of Niner standing in a heroic pose, Kylar saw several highlanders guarding a room full of nobles. There were men, women, and even a few children in the group. They were disheveled and frightened. Some were crying. Some were throwing up, poisoned.
Footsteps tapped across the floor from beyond Kylar’s line of sight, and the highlanders he could see readied their weapons. The point of a halberd hooked the corner of the door and pulled it open, revealing a squat Khalidoran officer as thick as he was tall.
The officer pulled the other door open with the halberd, then he beckoned and two men jumped into the hall, back to back, swords raised. They looked right at the statue, right at Kylar, who’d pressed himself against the statue’s back, putting his arms behind its arms, his legs behind its legs.
“Nothing, sir,” one said.
Inside the garden, which wasn’t nearly as grand as it looked in the paintings, were ten guards and forty or fifty nobles—none of them armed. Mercifully, the highlanders had no wytches with them. Kylar assumed wytches were too valuable to be wasted guarding prisoners.
The nobles included some of the highest in the land. Kylar recognized more than a few of the king’s ministers. That they were all here meant that Roth believed he would take over the castle quickly, and he wanted to be able to personally decide whom to kill and whom to add to his own government.
The men and women looked dazed. They didn’t seem to believe what had happened to them. It was beyond their comprehension that their world could turn so completely upside down so quickly. Many were obviously ill. Some were torn and bloodied, but others were absolutely untouched. Some ladies whose hair was still perfectly coifed wept while others bearing gashes and torn skirts seemed poised and calm.
Behind Kylar a soldier said, “Bleeding mercy, Cap! It didn’t just unbar itself!”
“We’re here to guard this room, and we stay here.”
“But we don’t know what’s out there . . . sir.”
“We stay,” the squat captain said in a voice that brooked no argument.
Kylar almost felt bad for the young highlander. The young man’s instincts were right. One day he’d have been a good officer.
But that didn’t stop Kylar from dropping the shadows a pace away from him.
He told himself he wasn’t becoming visible to be fair. He’d need his strength later.
The young Khalidoran’s sword had barely cleared its scabbard when Kylar disemboweled him. Then he danced past the man, throwing a knife with his left hand, parting hardened leather armor and ribs with an upward cut, and guiding a sword hand past his side and the sword into another soldier’s body in a smooth motion. Kylar jerked his head forward into a highlander’s face and spun with the man quickly. The man’s back absorbed the captain’s halberd with a meaty crunch.
Kylar dropped under a slash and stabbed up into a highlander’s groin with his wakizashi. On his back, he knocked the man backward with a kick, and used the force of the kick to spring to his feet.
Six men were dead or down. Four remained. The first was impetuous. He charged with a yell, something about Kylar killing his brother. A parry and riposte, and brother joined brother. The last three moved forward together.
A quick cut deprived one of sword and sword hand, and the next crossed swords with Kylar five times before he didn’t dodge back far enough and fell eyeless from the slash across his face. Kylar jumped over the sweeping halberd and turned to face the officer. He reversed his grip on his sword and stabbed behind him, impaling the one-armed soldier.
The officer dropped the halberd and drew a rapier. Kylar smiled at the extremes of the man’s weapon choices and then looked over the officer’s shoulder. The man started to turn, frowned, and didn’t look back.
A pretty noblewoman smashed the back of his head in with a planter. Flowers and soil flew everywhere, but the planter itself didn’t so much as crack.
“Thank you for saving us,” she panted, “but damn you for looking at me. You could have gotten me killed.” She was one of the women whose hair and makeup hadn’t been the least disturbed by whatever violence had brought her here. She looked completely unruffled by having just crushed a man’s skull. She merely brushed dirt from her dress and checked to see if she’d dragged it through any blood. Kylar was surprised that she hadn’t spilled out of her low-cut dress when she’d run. He recognized her.
“He didn’t look back, did he?” Kylar asked Terah Graesin, glad for the black silk kerchief over his face. He’d worn the mask out of habit, but if he hadn’t, some of these nobles would have recognized him.
“Well, I never—”
There was a knock on the door, and she and everyone else froze. Three knocks, two knocks, three, two. A voice called out, “New orders, Cap! His Majesty says to kill ’em all. We need your soldiers to help quell resisters in the courtyard.”
“You need to leave immediately,” Kylar said loudly enough that all the nobles could hear him. “There’s at least two hundred more highlanders coming over West Kingsbridge. They’re probably the ones fighting in the courtyard right now. If you want to live, collect whatever weapons you can and free the soldiers who are trapped downstairs. Others are already heading there. With them, you can make it out of the castle. You can start a resistance. You’ve already lost the castle; you’ve lost the city. If you don’t move fast, you’ll lose your lives.”
The news hit the nobles crowding around Kylar like cold water. Some of them shrank even more, but a few of them seemed to find their backbones as he spoke.
“We’ll fight, sir,” Terah Graesin said. “But some of us have been poisoned—”
“I know those poisons. If you’ve lived this long, you’ve taken a small enough dose that you’ll recover within a half hour. Where’s Logan Gyre?”