The Ghost's Crusade

XV: Tiernan (cont.)

Tiernan looked over and saw Drystan fishing coins out of a satchel actually attached to the outside of his belt for once. "Since when did you give up using your coinpurse for a codpiece?"

The Inferi laughed. "Since my friend spent over a year harping at me day and night over how unseemly he thought it was to stick my hands down the front of my trousers to fetch correct change. And this coming from a man who wore a skirt most of his adult life. He calls it a kilt, but it's a damn skirt."

Still not quite sure what to make of the revenant, he had to admit that ridding Drystan of his habit of keeping his coinpurse in the most awkward and socially unacceptable place on his body was a victory for Arathron. In the years he had trained with the man, Tiernan had never been able to convince him of how awful an idea it was.

The Inferi left to pay the innkeeper, who gave him no change and promptly went to hide the money in the larder, probably in the false floorboard he had noticed creaking earlier that morning. Shrugging at the fiddler, he left with the message cylinder under his arm through the front door. Tiernan followed him out and found Akkali with the two horses they had taken out to the mines, saddled and packed with their belongings. Her rescued mutt was sitting smartly under the awning of the tavern out of the drizzle, keeping dry until it absolutely had to get wet. It was still limping on its cloth-wrapped leg but seemed otherwise eager to get going.

Tiernan looked up and down the street and still could see no one outside despite the fact that the rain had let up and it was still an hour or so before sunset. "Where are you headed first?"

"Sonnes," replied Drystan. "Antenox has an outpost there and my Taskmaster will have sent my horse and provisions."

A sudden thunderous crack not caused by the weather shattered the grim silence of the city. It was followed by two more in slow succession, though by that time the booms were being drowned out by screaming civilians fleeing the area where the cannonballs were landing. Though it was barely visible from where they stood, the northern gate of the city was under attack, and a slowly-forming column of black smoke signaled that something there was burning hot enough to ignore the rain.

"Why the hell are they firing on the city?" Tiernan growled. "It's not as if there's any bloody defense being mounted against them."

"Pride, vanity, a love of pointless destruction," shrugged Akkali, cinching her travel pack tightly against her back and adjusting her hood so that little of her face could be seen unless one was standing directly in front of her. "Take your pick, Inquisitor. Can't go wrong with any of them really." She draped the horses' reigns over the nearest man's shoulder. "Move it or die in the stampede."

Tiernan grabbed the reigns of his roan stallion off of Drystan's shoulder and climbed up into the saddle, then turned towards the north. Ignoring the stares he was getting from both her and the Inferi he spurred his horse into a loping gallop towards the besieged gate. The last thing he heard was Akkali's mocking shout of, "Never thought I'd find a human more foolish than you, Drys!"

Most of the fleeing city-folk had at least enough sense left in them to stay out of the way of his horse as he rode through the mob, though he was sure he had clipped a few of the more frantic people riding through. As he neared the gate he saw it was the small guard's barracks that had caught flame, and the oil stores kept foolishly within were feeding it enough fuel to engulf half the gate and nearby wall. The orange flames hissed back at the rain like a heap of angry snakes.

Half a dozen wall guards lay dead in their matching regalia, either knocked from their posts on the wall fifty feet above or simply crushed when the iron gate fell in upon them as they stared out at the cannons being brought to bear. The rest stood stupefied, all of them being shouted at by the single competent man among them, a wall captain he had seen a few times at the Grand Gate in the south. The brown-haired youth, perhaps barely into his twenties, was red-faced and screaming at the shell-shocked men standing either rigid or quivering in their boots without weapons or much of an idea what was happening to them, attempting to get them to do something useful like evacuate the civilians.