CHAPTER SIX - THREE SUITORS FOR THE MAIDEN ORCINI

Sorcha had left her Silvan clothes in Vari's dressing room. She swore at herself, and hurriedly went through the available clothes for something halfway practical. There was nothing outside the harem style, not even a pair of flat shoes. Sorcha swore again and pulled on a pair of harem pants and the top that looked least likely to malfunction at an inopportune moment.

She glanced out the window just in time to see Vari's retainers racing across the lawn with weapons drawn. Sorcha opened the window and looked out to see the curtain wall and the gatehouse, with a handful of Vari's men already there striving to hold the gate shut. As she watched, the gate gave way and the men fell back. The reinforcements arrived even as armoured men poured in through the gatehouse.

Sorcha took to swearing with every breath, her fingers fluttering at her throat. She had known this was coming, but had thrust it aside, obsessing over sex and the dread return to her homeland without a thought for the tides of war about to engulf the Winter Palace.

Then a new thought occurred: what was the worst that could happen? DeSilva might die. In the highly unlikely event that his entire family perished in the battle, Sorcha would be captured either by Kern or Karvallion's men. That prospect held very little fear for her, terrified as she was of the ineluctable need to return home if her will was given precedent. She had no choice but to return to Loth Kavnor; anything that took that choice from her could only be a lesser terror. But she did not believe that either Kern or Karvallion would win; DeSilva's family had already manoeuvred them into easy striking range.

Sorcha quit the bedroom and dithered in the corridor, then headed for the nearest stairs with only a vague idea of where she was going. The main stairs were close, a grand staircase rising through every floor of the Palace. She was still not thinking clearly; the stairs led down to the main hall and direct to the front doors of the Palace. Even as she comprehended this, the doors opened inwards and Vari's surviving retainers stumbled in, slammed the door, and dropped the bar across it. Within a moment came the sound of blows on the panel from outside, then the shatter of breaking glass nearby.

The retainers scattered, half of them falling back to the foot of the stairs while the others ran to locate the enemy breaking through the windows. A heavy impact struck the door and the bar cracked but did not give way. A clash of arms and a shout rang out from a room nearby.

Sorcha stood frozen like a rabbit on the stairs. She had been in battle before, and every time it was more traumatic. Her dreams were divided between warm harem nights and nightmares of blood and screaming.

As the doors gave way and the attacking force burst in, a bestial snarl echoed from Sorcha's left. She looked and saw Vari's Hrin bodyguard Khyle Tarn crouched upon the bannister overlooking the stairwell. His features and pose were utterly feline; only his party clothes and the long knife in his hand leant him any semblance of humanity. As he sprang, leaping down thirty feet to land in the midst of the attackers, Vari's retainers rushed forward.

The foot of the stairs became a knot of fighting men, Khyle in the thick of it with a knife in each hand now, ferocious as a wild animal.

Sorcha broke the trance of terror and fled up the stairs, heading for the top floor farthest from the fighting. Halfway up, she was almost knocked sprawling by Charn, who came charging down the stairs towards the embattled ground floor.

Charn's sword was drawn, but she still gripped her empty scabbard in her off hand. She did not pause to spare Sorcha even a glance but raced down the stairs three at a time to fling herself into the fight. Sorcha had barely regained her balance and started up again when Kam Daishen ran past her, unable in his heavy armour to quite keep up with Charn.

He thundered past Sorcha, and a few seconds later came the Daishen's roaring war cry above the clash of steel. Sorcha fled up the stairs without pausing to watch. She was certain that Charn or Kam alone were more than a match for a handful of enemy swordsmen, she just wanted to get as far as she could from the violence.

At the final landing of the stairs, she came to the upper floor of the Palace. Sorcha picked a corridor from memory and ran along it, trying doors at random until she stumbled into Vari's wardrobe. She had been looking for a door to the roof, but her eye fell upon the gleam of the Silvan mask discarded among the rest of the uniform amid the other clothes on the floor. She locked the door behind her and quickly got changed. If she could do nothing else useful in the battle, she could at least be dressed practically.

When she stuck her head back out into the corridor, she immediately saw someone coming up the stairs and ducked back out of sight. Looking out again more cautiously, she saw that the newcomer was DeKellia. He spotted her too and waved, then limped towards her, favouring one leg.

Sorcha started towards him with the thought that he was wounded, but he waved her concerns away.

“The blood's not mine, nothing to worry about.”

“But your leg...”

“Old wound.” DeKellia grinned and stuck his pipe between his teeth before lighting a match. “Charn and Kam made a right mess in the hall; bodies everywhere.”

“What's happening?” Sorcha asked, looking past him towards the stairs.

“Oh, Vari organised a little contest, I won, Kalidor went off in a huff and blew up Karvallion's gunpowder store. Karvallion's men chased him back to the Palace and stormed the gate, Kern's lads were climbing the west wall last I saw. I was on my way back to the roof.”

“The roof?” Sorcha blinked, wondering why DeKellia was headed away from the fighting in the grounds. “Where's Monte?”

“No idea, weren't you with him? Come on.” DeKellia started limping again, trying doors at random until they found a passage leading to stairs up.

“Why the roof?” Sorcha asked.

“Oh, there's a fleet of airships attacking from the northwest,” DeKellia said casually as he started up the stairs.

“I saw woodsmoke coming from the trees in that direction,” Sorcha blurted out, and DeKellia glanced back to nod at her.

“Aye, that would have been them camped out. No idea what they're doing here, but here they are.”

Sorcha had seen airships before. Specifically, she had seen one airship, once, during her journey back from Heimjaro. The vessel had come sweeping overhead and crashed on a hillside. There had been surprisingly few casualties, but many injuries; the captain had walked on a crutch and carried his arm in a sling as if such things were the norm. Far more gentlemanly than a common pirate, he had given Sorcha a water-skin and sent her on her way, telling her there was little food and his men were a gang of rape-minded buccaneers.

That encounter did not prepare her for the view from the Palace roof; a crashed airship looked much like any other wrecked vessel, except that it was rare to find a ship halfway up a mountain.

Now, on the horizon, something was rising that Sorcha could not at first comprehend. They looked like chunks of cloud, if cloud were solid enough to wear a harness and lift the weight of a galleon. The view shifted subtly as Sorcha understood; the strange clouds were huge balloons in place of sails.

What she saw were airships, half a dozen of them, rising up slowly from some unseen clearing within the woodlands a few miles to the northwest. They rose languidly but covered the miles rapidly without seeming to move at all; by the time all six were fully aloft, the first of them was already bearing down on the Winter Palace.

Sorcha forced herself to look away, breaking the trance of terror long enough to check for any more immediate danger.

On the snowy lawn, two bands of men were fighting. Sorcha guessed that the troops in armour were Karvallion's men, battling against the rough-clad and less well-armed outlaws under Major Kern. Vari's retainers were in the house, fending off any enemy incursion to the Palace interior.

Karvallion himself stood on the battlements beside Vari and Kern, along with about half the guests from the party. Karvallion was apoplectic, his fists braced on the battlements while he screamed in futility at his men to desist.

Kern had apparently given up any attempt to halt the battle. His thoughts were as clear as if he spoke them aloud, but only Sorcha was paying him any attention. As she watched, the huge Darian leant over the ramparts and looked down, glanced once from Vari to Karvallion, then again at the drop to the palace lawns. Then he shoved Karvallion over the battlements.

The Kellion lord's scream ended abruptly with a wet thump, but the battle went on regardless of Karvallion's death.

Still regaining his breath from the run up the stairs, DeKellia applauded Kern's pragmatism.

“Oh, good show!”

The Darian grunted what might have been a laugh, but if he had a ready response, it never came; Sorcha pointed suddenly to the horizon beyond the Palace walls and Vashta uttered a tight scream that turned every head back to the northwest and the onrushing fleet.

“It's the Kellion Navy," DeKellia said. "You have a third suitor, Vari; Admiral DeJiar has come to fight us."

Within the tempest blowing off the icy wastes to the northwest, balloons and rigging splayed out from the flying galleons, bearing them forward on the wind. Heading straight for the Winter Palace, they passed over Karvallion's camp on the hilltop. As the shadows of the airships swept over Karvallion's tents, the bombardment began.

Musket-fire and cannon balls began to fall like rain. Pikemen and knights on the ground brandished their weapons at the skies while the Kellion Navy poured down fire. Then barrels began falling over the ships' sides.

Sorcha flinched at the first explosion, a barrel-munition air bursting over the Kellion encampment. She looked again to see another barrel go off, then another, some exploding in mid-air in splashes of fire while others struck and shattered.

DeSilva leaned across the battlements to peer closer, shading his eyes from the glare off the snow.

“Are those duds?”

Sorcha joined him at the rampart and saw the snowy ground around Karvallion's camp seem to ripple. Then the ripple caught fire and a scream arose, a multitudinous shriek that Sorcha had heard before, the awful night that DeKellia burned the city of Narrillion.

“Rat War.” DeKellia said, watching with everyone else as Karvallion's camp was consumed in fire, barrel-loads of oil-soaked rats spreading the fire of the incendiary airbursts within seconds to every tent.

As they watched, three of the airships changed course, bearing south towards Kern's outlaw encampment just within the forest. Sorcha shot a glance at Kern and saw the usually stern Darian features stricken with distress. He mastered himself in a moment and roared in fury.

Vari silenced him with a gesture, turning her attention to DeKellia. “Do you know this Admiral?”

DeKellia nodded gravely.

“My suitors have until now refrained from using artillery,” Vari informed him. “Will this one do the same?”

“He'll bomb this place flat.”

Vari cocked an eyebrow and turned her gaze again towards the approaching airships. A rushing wind preceded them, carrying on it the heat and stench of hellfire. Sorcha clasped DeSilva's sleeve and did not know she had done so until her put his hands on her shoulders, holding her close.

As the airship nosed alongside the rooftop battlements of the Winter Palace, the captain limped from the wheel and stood upon the prow. A patch covered one eye and his right sleeve hung half empty, the cuff fastened discretely inside his coat. He stood upon a wooden peg in place of one leg, leaning his left hand on a polished crutch. His body was a broken ruin, but his remaining eye gleamed and his moustaches bristled with pride. Even at distance, febrile strength radiated from him, the inner force that drove the man revealed in the maiming of his body. All eyes locked on him, but none so intensely as the Lady Vari.

“Who is this warrior?” She breathed.

“Admiral Guillemot DeJiar,” DeKellia informed her, his tone blank of expression.

“He rides upon the very storm...”

Before DeKellia could stop her, she gained the ramparts at a bound and stood waiting as the airship came in. Vari stood breathless on the rampart, her eyes fixed on the ruined body of the man who now came to court her. Sorcha, who had seen the warlord Odacon in his power and DeKellia in his wrath, trembled to behold the one-eyed gaze of Guillemot DeJiar that held such force of will as to defy the maiming of his flesh and learn to fly. He did not even have to speak; as soon as he was within earshot above the roaring of the wind, Vari thrust out her hand and cried, “Take me with you!”

The first mate was there in his captain's stead, hauling Vari aboard even as the airship crested the ramparts of the Palace. A resounding cheer arose from the crew of the airship before the voice of Guillemot DeJiar cut above the gale and the roar of battle:

"Mister Neto, take us up!” His arm was already around Vari's waist, she leaning against him with her eyes fixed upon his scared face. He glanced down at her, a full head taller than she, and said, “A moment of your indulgence ma'am...” then his voice became again strident with command, his eye fixing on the Darian Major Kern. “Ready grapeshot, Mister Etcetera and blow that Darian beggar back to buggery!"

Damnation was delivered on the echoes of Guillemot's command as the forward guns of the airship opened fire. Time slowed. Sorcha screamed and dove for cover, felt herself caught and carried to safety in DeSilva's arms. Looking past his shoulder, her eyes fixed on the scene, she saw smoke and fire billow forth from the cannon, black specks of shrapnel flying ahead of the blast. DeKellia and the rest flung themselves flat behind the battlements; only Kern, the primary target of the fusillade, was too slow to escape. Sorcha winced as the first fragment of shrapnel struck the Darian, but she could not look away; in awful slow-motion, she saw the deadly hail tear into him. Kern was flung backwards by the blast, buckshot and shrapnel ripping through him in fine red spray. Then the blast itself struck him, the roar of cannon fire reducing the Darian to a ruin of charred gore spattered across the rampart.