The Vacant Throne - Ed Greenwood [50]
These were not the tactics of men used to war, expecting attack, or even… possessed of prudence. They hadn't even drawn their swords, though high-polished, silvered blades glittered at their hips. The doomed courtiers took several tentative steps outside and called again. Moonlight caught the gleam of earrings amid perfumed and shaped side-whiskers, and breastplates sculpted like birds with wings upswept in flight.
"Is anyone there?"
"Haroo?"
The courtiers exchanged glances, and then walked a little apart from each other, peering more carefully at their surroundings.
On all sides of the man who called himself Bloodblade, warriors trembled with eagerness, only their eyes moving as they looked to him for a signal.
The ground trembled. Stone knights were treading nearer.
"Strike!" Duthjack barked, thrusting himself bolt upright and waving his sword so it flashed in the moonlight. Courtiers gawked at him, lifting their lanterns a little higher.
For two of them, as dark shadows boiled up from the ground and thrust blades right through them, it was the last thing they ever did.
The third courtier, a little behind the others, gave a little shriek, like a terrified mouse, and whirled into flight. A warrior sprang after him, racing right at his back, overtaking swiftly, blade raised to strike at the throat.
The courtier threw his lantern back behind him; it burst full in the warrior's face. Gloun Ummertyde fell screaming, his hair afire, flames streaming between his fingers as he clawed desperately at his eyes. Dark shadows raced past him, sprinting to reach the howling courtier as the man ran, half-cloak flapping behind him and stumbling in his gibbering haste, for the open door.
Gauntleted hands reached, and notched, blackened blades stabbed desperately, biting only empty air. They were not going to reach him in time.
"What befalls-?" a grand voice rolled out into the night, as fresh faces appeared at the door. The speaker got no further, his words ending in a startled grunt as the terrified courtier smashed into him and sent him flying, both men rolling on a tiled floor within and upsetting something that fell with a crash and a clatter.
"Get in there!" Bloodblade roared. "Before someone can close it! In, horns to you!"
Mararr reached the door first. He flung it wide and darted within; the converging warriors saw him slip on something, and then thrust viciously with the shortsword in his left hand-once low, and once high. Someone tried to scream, but ended up choking wetly instead.
And then they were all streaming through the doorway, blades held straight up to avoid swording each other as they jostled through the portal.
Bloodblade cast a swift look back at the moonlit wood and saw blank stone faces regarding him-five, at least, plodding forward patiently. He cursed and swung the door shut with a crash.
Naor already had the door-bar ready; he dropped it into its cradles and gave Duthjack a nod of reassurance as the man who sought to slay a king this night spun away from the door to glare around the room they'd stormed.
Three men of the palace-one wasn't much more than a boy, and wore servants' livery-lay sprawled and dead on the floor, and his warriors were already darting in all directions, flinging open doors and peering here and there. Bloodblade swallowed a curse-gods, had they all forgotten to keep together and heed orders?-as he saw faces turn his way.
"That way," he snarled, waving at a door that led in the right direction, "and keep together, bebolt you!"
They streamed through the doorway, moving quickly but more quietly now, and along a lamplit passage of closed doors that opened into a cross-way in one direction and an archway into a grand chamber in the other. Startled faces regarded them across an empty realm of polished marble floor.
"In at them! Let no alarm be raised!" Bloodblade bellowed, and then caught at a sword arm and snarled, "Mararr-take two sideblades and find stairs up-wizards