The Heroes

amplified and rendered meaningless by the enclosed space, the walls of the room ringing with mindless echoes of pain, and fury, and violence. If hell had a noise, it sounded like this. No one could have heard orders, but it hardly mattered.
    Orders could have made no difference now.
    The shutters of another window were bludgeoned open, a gilded cupboard that had been blocking them flattening an unfortunate lieutenant and spewing an avalanche of shattering dress crockery across the floor. Men swarmed through the square of brightness, ragged black outlines at first, gaining awful detail as they burst into the inn. Snarling faces smeared with paint, and dirt, and fury. Wild hair tangled with bones, with rough-carved wooden rings and rough-cast metal. They brandished jagged axes and clubs toothed with dull iron. They wept and gurgled a mad clamour, eyes bulging with battle-madness.
    Aliz screamed again, but Finree felt oddly cold-headed. Perhaps it was some kind of beginner’s luck at bravery. Or perhaps it had yet to really dawn on her how bad things were. They were very, very bad. Her eyes darted around as she struggled to take it all in, not daring to blink in case she missed something.
    In the middle of the room an old sergeant was wrestling with a grey-haired primitive, each holding the other’s wrist with weapons waggling at the ceiling, dragging each other this way and that as though through the steps of some drunken dance, unable to agree on who should be leading. Nearby one of the violinists was beating at someone with his shattered instrument, reduced now to a tangle of strings and splinters. Outside in the courtyard the gates were shuddering, splinters flying from their inside faces while guardsmen tried desperately to prop them shut with their halberds.
    She found herself rather wishing that Bremer dan Gorst was beside her. Probably she should have wished for Hal instead, but she had a feelingcourage, and duty, and honour would do no good here. Brute strength and rage were what was needed.
    She saw a plump captain with a scratch down his face, who was rumoured to be the bastard son of someone-or-other important, stabbing at a man wearing a necklace of bones, both of them slick with red. She saw a pleasant major who used to tell her bad jokes when she was a girl clubbed on the back of the head. He tottered sideways, knees buckling like a clown’s, one hand fishing at his empty scabbard. He was caught with a sword and flung to the floor in a shower of blood. Another officer’s backswing, she realised.
    ‘Above us!’ someone screamed.
    The savages had somehow got up onto the gallery, were shooting arrows down. An officer just next to Finree slumped over a table with a shaft in his back, dragging one of the hangings down on top of him, his long steel clattering from his dangling hand. She reached out nervously and slid his short steel from the sheath, backed away again towards the wall with it hidden beside her skirts. As though anyone would complain at a theft in the midst of this.
    The door burst open and savages spilled into the common hall from the rest of the inn. They must have taken the courtyard, killed the guards. Men desperately trying to keep the attackers out from the windows spun about, their frozen faces pictures of horror.
    ‘The lord governor!’ someone screamed. ‘Protect his—’ Cut off in a snivelling wail.
    The melee had lost all shape. The officers were fighting hard for every inch of ground but they were losing, forced grimly back into a corner, cut down one by one. Finree was shoved against the wall, perhaps by some pointless act of chivalry, more likely by the random movement of the fight. Aliz was next to her, pale and blubbing, Lord Governor Meed on the other side, in a state little better. All three of them jostled by men’s backs as they fought hopelessly for survival.
    Finree could hardly see over the armoured shoulder of a guard, then he fell and a savage darted into the gap, a jagged iron sword in his fist. She got one quick, sharp look at his face. Lean, yellow-haired, splinters of bone pushed through the rim of one ear.
    Meed held up a hand, breath whooshing in to speak, or scream, or beg. The jagged sword chopped into him between neck and collarbone. He took a wobbling step, eyes rolled up to the ceiling so the whites showed huge, tongue sticking out and his fingers plucking at the ragged wound while blood welled up from between them and down the torn braid on the