The Iron Revolution Chapter 58: Crown Work

Chapter 58: Crown Work

Twenty-four n in a guardroom built for half that number made a particular kind of sll by the ti the night reached its last hours. Cedd had stopped noticing it soti after midnight, which was also about when he stopped trying to sleep.

He sat with his back to the east wall and his spear across his knees and worked through the sa problem for the sixth or seventh ti, reaching the sa answer.

The treason annotation would reach the capital in the quarterly dispatch.

His mother was in Dunvarre. His brother was in Dunvarre. His three sisters had made decent marriages under the family na, and what a treason record did to a family na was not sothing he needed to think through in detail. It was obvious enough.

He was here because he had been posted here. He would rather not be doing this.

The captain, Brun, stood near the lamp. Eighteen years a crown soldier, and it showed in the way he stated the problem, not like trying to persuade anyone, but like a man who forced his opinion on those below him.

"I don’t care what any of you think." Brun said.

He looked across the twenty-three faces packed into whatever space they had managed to find. "The road outside is occupied by n who should not be there. That’s our job. We kick them out."

From sowhere near the back, "This isn’t our fight."

"Shut the fuck up," Brun said. "It’s now."

The man did not answer.

Cedd stood when Brun gave the order, and the other n stood with him.

The gate’s upper hinge on the right side had been shimd with a piece of scrap iron that had sat there long enough to rust into the fra.

When the gate opened, it caught on that joint and made a sound halfway between a scrape and a low ring before the weight carried it through.

Cedd had passed through this gate perhaps forty tis in his posting here, and he knew that sound the way he knew his own breathing. It marked the change between inside and outside as clearly as a spoken word.

The road outside was cold, and his breath ca out visible in the gate’s lamplight before it vanished into the dark beyond.

The eastern sky had begun to separate from the horizon, not light yet, only less dark in one direction, and the road existed in the half-visibility of a night almost over.

The blockade was forty yards out.

He could see the shadows of n on the road, so standing, so sitting against carts on either side. They were placed without ceremony, people who had been there for days and had stopped pretending to be alert.

One of them was standing and watching the gate as it opened. Then two. Then all of them.

"Move," Brun said.

Forty yards of stone road in full kit, and Cedd’s boots struck each cobblestone with an impact that ran up through his shins, and the cold air ca through his teeth. The shadows ahead were no longer sitting.

They had set themselves, feet wide, weapons ready, the position of n braced for what was about to hit them.

Cedd hit the blockade with his spear leveled at the man directly in front of him.

The man went sideways, not down, his shoulder catching the point and turning it past him with the ease of soone who had survived this before and learned exact thods for doing it.

The spear kept moving, and Cedd’s montum carried him into the struggle, and then they were inside each other’s range and the spear was useless at that distance.

To his left, soone fell.

He heard it rather than saw it, the compressed sound of a man struck hard enough to lose his breath, then the heavier sound of a body hitting stone. He didn’t know which side the man was from, and he didn’t look for confirmation.

He let the spear go, and his right hand had the short sword clear of the sheath in the half second the deflection had bought him.

The man who had deflected the spear was large in the way of soone who had spent years on hard labor, and he carried a mallet rather than any military weapon, a broad-headed mallet on a long handle that gave him reach and that he used without any of the technique weapon training created.

He did not settle into a guard. He did not commit to a line.

He kept shifting in small, constant movents that changed his position faster than Cedd could read it. The mallet ca in from the left and Cedd got his sword up to block and the impact ran from his wrists into his shoulders and loosened his grip.

He stepped back and his boot found sothing on the road surface.

He could not see what, could not look down, and his weight went wrong and he dropped to one knee.

The mallet ca down.

He got the sword up in a two-handed guard and the force drove the crossguard into his left hand, and sothing in that hand scread in acute pain.

His left hand stopped closing fully.

From his right, a crown soldier went down against the road, not near him, farther into the fight.

He saw the man’s legs fold and then nothing more because the mallet was coming back and he did not have ti to track anything except the imdiate problem.

He drove his right shoulder into the man’s legs.

He tucked it behind him in a grip he could not properly feel, and his shoulder drove forward and caught the man at the knee and the mallet hit the road instead of Cedd’s back, and they both went down onto the cobblestones together.

Wrestling on the ground was a different kind of fighting altogether, and Cedd hadn’t been trained for it.

The other man had not been trained for anything, just survived long enough to build instincts instead, and his instinct was to get an arm around Cedd’s throat before they finished falling.

The arm ca over his shoulder and under his chin and tightened with the deadly purpose of a man who knew exactly what he was doing.

The road surface was under his face. His sword was sowhere behind him. His left hand was not working.

Cedd felt the pressure in his throat increase, breathing becoming harder, his consciousness leaving him little by little.

Then the sounds ca.

Multiple sounds, close-spaced, the sharp snap of crossbow bolts in flight, then the impact sounds that followed, the disgusting tone of flesh being ripped apart, followed by the screams.

They were coming from above and behind, from the direction of the city, from the wall.

The arm around his throat released.

He felt the man body shake, struggle, and then drop down in inertia. The pressure that had been on Cedd’s back beca only of the man’s weight.

He got his knees under him. Then his feet.

The motion took more effort than standing usually should. His left hand hung at the wrong direction and his throat had a layered ache to it that he expected would get worse before it got better.

The road around him was different from the road it had been thirty seconds ago.

Multiple n from their side were down with expanding pools of blood beneath their bodies. Others were moving away from the fight.

The crown soldiers still on their feet were watching the withdrawal instead of pressing it.

He looked up at the wall.

The eastern sky had brightened enough that the wall was outlined against it, stone and shadows, n visible on the walk.

The bolts had co from there. He could not see whose n they were at this distance in this light. He could not see any markings or any detail.

The bolts had saved him, and he did not know whose hands had drawn the strings.

His sword was sowhere on the road and he would need to find it. His left hand was hurting like hell.

The ache in his throat beca sothing that intended to stay.