THE HIGH GROUND

The dying crimson glow of the signal flare faded into the morning mist, leaving the high granite shelf of the Black Gorge plunged back into a cold, suffocating grey.

Fifty yards below the cliff rim, the timber suspension bridge groaned under the weight of the canyon gale, its thick hemp and iron cables creaking against their stone anchors. Down on the western approach, Rashida and the two vanguard scouts were already moving out from the rock shelter, hauling old Oren’s pine-branch sled toward the first wooden planks. They had seen the red flare. They thought the way was clear.

They couldn't see what was coming down the upper mountain switchbacks.

"They’re moving fast," Corin breathed, his knuckles white against the yew wood of his shortbow as he stared up toward the northern pass.

Through the shifting breaks in the sleet, the vanguard column of the Gbantala war host looked like a black river of iron pouring down the narrow goat trail. There were at least sixty of them in the lead detachment—heavy mountain raiders clad in boiled ox-hide and wolf pelts, carrying long iron-shod pikes and round timber shields. Behind them, three massive wheeled mantlets of thick oak were being eased down the icy grade on hemp check-ropes to shield their archers.

"If that column reaches the eastern bridgehead while Rashida is in the middle of the span, they'll pin her against the drop," one of the scouts, a wiry veteran named Tarn, muttered from beside the dead mercenary's brazier. He wiped blood from his short blade onto his wool trousers. "We can't wave them back from here. The fog down in the trough is too thick, and the river roar drowns out everything."

Zafaro didn't look down at the bridge. His dark eyes were fixed on the narrow defile three hundred yards up the northern slope—a jagged pinch in the trail where the goat path squeezed between the sheer cliff wall and a thirty-foot overhang of rotten, frost-heaved shale.

"We don't wave them back," Zafaro said, his voice flat and calm over the whistle of the wind. "If we retreat back down into the gorge, we get caught between Dorian’s cavalry coming up from the sawmill and the Gbantala coming down from the peaks. The bridge is our only path to Captain Vane’s flank gate. Rashida crosses now, or none of us cross at all."

Corin turned his soot-streaked face toward Zafaro, his eyes wide. "Zafaro, there are sixty iron-pikes up there, and four of us here. Even with the high rock, we can't hold sixty men off the bridgehead with three quivers of arrows."

"We don't need to kill sixty men," Zafaro replied, kneeling beside the unconscious form of Garth.

With quick, ruthless efficiency, Zafaro unbuckled the enforcer’s heavy leather sword-belt and stripped the spare oil-skin pouches from the dead mercenary by the detonator box. Inside the pouches were three linen-wrapped cylinders of coarse black blasting sulfur—spare charges Garth’s crew had carried up in case the primary bridge cables failed to shear on the first pull.

Zafaro held one of the heavy grey cylinders up against the pale morning light.

"Corin, take Tarn and the other scout up into the cedar ledge directly above that shale overhang," Zafaro ordered, shoving two of the sulfur cylinders into Corin’s chest. "The rock face there is split clean through with winter ice. You wedge these charges deep into the main fault fissure behind the overhang. Wait until their lead shield-wall clears the bend beneath you."

Corin’s breath caught as he looked up at the crumbling dark cliff above the trail. "You want to bring the shelf down on their vanguard?"

"If we choke that defile with ten tons of shale, their heavy mantlets and the main column behind them are stuck on the upper ledge for an hour trying to dig out," Zafaro said, tying the third sulfur charge tightly to the iron head of a dead mercenary’s pike with a strip of rawhide. "That buys us the twenty minutes we need to get Oren and Rashida across the planks and up onto the eastern ridge."

"What about the twenty raiders already past the overhang?" Tarn asked, pointing his blade toward the front of the Gbantala column, where a tall scout-leader wearing a horned iron helm was already trotting down the switchback fifty yards ahead of the main body. "Once that rock blows, they’ll be cut off on our side of the slide. They'll charge straight down onto this shelf to clear the bridgehead."

Zafaro stood up, rolling his injured left shoulder once until the stiffness gave way to a familiar, sharp heat. He picked up his short vanguard spear in his right hand and hefted the sulfur-rigged pike in his left.

"I'll hold the lower step below the slide," Zafaro said.

"Alone?" Corin grabbed Zafaro’s torn wool sleeve. "Zafaro, your shoulder is barely holding together with pine pitch! Let Tarn stay with you on the step—"

"You need two bows and a spotter on the high ledge to keep their archers from pinning you before the fuse catches," Zafaro cut him off, his voice dropping into the iron tone that no man in the third platoon ever argued with. "Go. Use the hot coals from Garth’s brazier in a clay horn to light the slow-match. Move!"

Corin swallowed whatever protest was left in his throat, nodded once, and scooped a handful of glowing red charcoal into a hollowed iron tinder-horn. Within three heartbeats, he and the two scouts were scrambling up the steep, pine-choked gullies toward the overhang.

Zafaro turned back to the trail alone.

Down in the gorge below, he caught a fleeting glimpse of Rashida’s dark wool cloak through a tear in the river mist. She was halfway across the swaying timber bridge now, her small boots stepping carefully over the frost-slick planks while the two lower scouts steadied the ropes of Oren’s sled behind her. She didn't look down at the churning black water two hundred feet beneath her heels; she kept her face turned forward toward the eastern cliff where Zafaro’s flare had risen.

Zafaro reached up, his cold fingers pressing through his wool tunic to touch the carved red oak charm against his collarbone. Then he stepped off the brazier shelf and moved forty paces up the narrow goat path, planting his boots at a sharp, rocky dogleg where the trail was barely five feet wide—a stone lip bounded by a sheer granite wall on the left and a hundred-foot drop into the pine tops on the right.

He wedged the butt of the sulfur-rigged pike into a crack in the frozen shale at his feet, laying a smoldering chunk of brazier coal wrapped in dry moss six inches from the greased hemp tail of the charge.

Then he waited, his breath coming slow and deep in the freezing gray light.

He didn't have to wait long.

The heavy, rhythmic thud of iron-shod boots on frozen stone echoed down the ravine, accompanied by the harsh, guttural cadence of Gbantala war-chants. Around the upper bend below the shale overhang came the forward point—sixteen massive raiders moving at a ground-eating trot, their breath steaming through the iron nasal-guards of their helmets, their long ash pikes leveled forward.

At their head ran the horned scout-leader, a broad-chested veteran with a heavy notched cleaver in one hand and an iron-rimmed target shield strapped to his forearm.

The moment the horned leader rounded the bend and saw a single man standing alone in the middle of the narrow path with a bloody shoulder and no shield, he let out a barking laugh and raised his cleaver high.

"Kura-tala!" the raider bellowed back to his squad, pointing the flat of his blade at Zafaro’s chest. One dog in the ditch! Run him over the edge!

Sixteen pairs of spiked boots tore into the packed snow as the squad surged down the incline toward the dogleg.

Zafaro didn't flinch. His eyes weren't on the charging horned leader ten paces away; they were fixed fifty yards higher up the trail, where the main body of forty raiders and the first massive wooden mantlet were just squeezing beneath the dark belly of the shale overhang.

A tiny spark of yellow light winked in the pine shadows high above the cliff face.

One heartbeat. Two.

CRACK-THOOM!

The sulfur blast up in the fault fissure didn't sound like the open-air roar of the estate stables. It was a deafening, subterranean hammer-blow that split the mountain’s teeth open. A jagged white flash burst from the dark rock behind the overhang, followed instantly by the terrifying, grinding shriek of ten thousand tons of ancient black shale shearing loose from the granite wall.

The entire upper shelf gave way at once.

A boiling curtain of black rock, shattered pine trunks, and grey dust roared down across the switchback. The lead wooden mantlet was crushed like dry kindling beneath a falling boulder the size of a weaver’s cottage. Screams and the horrific crunch of iron and bone were swallowed instantly by the thunder of the rockslide as a thirty-foot wall of jagged rubble slammed onto the trail, completely severing the forward sixteen raiders from the rest of the Gbantala host.

A choking cloud of grey stone dust rolled down the ravine like a winter blizzard.

The sixteen raiders on Zafaro’s side of the slide skidded to a halt on the icy path, half of them thrown to their knees as the stone beneath their boots bucked and shuddered. They spun around in blind panic, staring at the towering mound of smoking black shale that now blocked their retreat.

From high above in the pine boughs, Corin’s bowstring sang out twice through the dust.

Thwack! Thwack!

Two raiders at the rear of the trapped group pitched forward into the snow with feathered shafts buried between their shoulder blades.

"Forward!" the horned leader roared, whipping his head back toward Zafaro as he realized staying beneath the cliffs meant getting picked off one by one by unseen archers. "Break through the lone dog! Take the lower shelf!"

The surviving fourteen men pivoted in the tight space and charged straight down the five-foot ledge toward Zafaro like cornered boars.

Zafaro waited until the horned leader’s boots were twenty feet from the dogleg.

With a swift kick of his heel, Zafaro knocked the smoldering moss-coal onto the greased fuse of the pike wedged at his feet. The sulfur tail hissed to life with a violent spit of white sparks.

In the same fluid motion, Zafaro snatched the heavy pike from the crack, stepped two paces back around the granite corner of the dogleg, and hurled the burning spear javelin-style right into the center of the charging pack.

The heavy iron pike point punched straight into the timber shield of the third raider in line, dragging the burning sulfur cylinder right into the pressed belly of their formation.

"Back!" the horned leader screamed, his eyes bulging behind his iron mask as he saw the spitting white fuse inches from his chest. "Drop the shield!"

The men behind him were running too fast down the icy grade to stop. They slammed into the back of the shield-bearer, tangling their long pikes in the narrow five-foot rock chute just as the fuse burned down to the linen wrap.

Zafaro dropped flat behind the granite corner, pressing his forearms over his ears and burying his face into the snow.

The world turned white and red.

The concussive wave of the blast tore through the narrow rock chute like a cannon shot inside a stone barrel. Snow, shattered pine needles, and ragged splinters of timber shield whistled out over the hundred-foot drop to the right. The granite wall against Zafaro’s back vibrated so hard it knocked the breath from his chest, showering his dark hair with loose gravel and freezing slush.

Before the black sulfur smoke had even begun to lift from the ledge, Zafaro was already on his feet.

He rounded the corner of the dogleg at a dead sprint, his short vanguard spear held low in both hands.

The blast in the cramped five-foot chute had been devastating. Five raiders had been blown clean off the cliff edge into the gorge below; four more lay mangled and still in the blackened, smoking crater where the snow had been vaporized down to bare granite.

Only five men remained standing on the shattered ledge, deafened and staggering through the yellow sulfur haze with blood leaking from their ears.

Zafaro hit them before they could clear the smoke from their eyes.

He drove his short spear straight through the leather throat-guard of the nearest dazed pikeman, using the dying man’s weight to pivot left and slam the iron-shod butt of his shaft into the temple of a second raider who was fumbling blindly on his knees for a dropped axe.

Two sharp arrows hissed down from Corin’s perch above, dropping two more men along the cliff wall.

Only the horned scout-leader remained.

His round shield had been blown in half, the left side of his wolf-pelt coat was smoking and charred black, and blood poured from a deep gash across his cheek where a fragment of his own man’s pike had struck him. Yet as Zafaro yanked his spear free from the snow, the massive northern warrior let out a deafening, blood-crazed roar and charged through the sulfur cloud, swinging his heavy iron cleaver with both hands at Zafaro’s wounded left side.

Zafaro didn't have room on the narrow ledge to circle away. He stepped straight inside the swing.

He caught the raider’s thick forearms on the cross-shaft of his spear before the heavy blade could gather full speed. The impact was bone-crushing. The stitches and pitch beneath Zafaro’s left tunic tore completely open, hot blood soaking instantly through his wool sleeve as his back slammed hard against the vertical granite wall.

The horned leader pressed his massive weight against the shaft, his bloodshot eyes glaring through the iron visor inches from Zafaro’s face, the sharp edge of his cleaver trembling half an inch from Zafaro’s collarbone.

"Die in the snow, valley rat!" the raider choked out in broken common tongue, leaning his knee into Zafaro’s thigh to break his stance.

Zafaro didn't push against the man’s arms.

Instead, Zafaro let his left hand slide entirely off the spear shaft—giving up the bind on that side so the raider’s own furious downward push carried his cleaver blade crashing into the granite rock beside Zafaro’s hip. While the raider lunged off-balance into the wall, Zafaro’s free left hand snatched the six-inch boot-dagger he had taken from Garth’s belt and drove it upward beneath the rim of the man’s horned iron helm, straight into the soft hollow behind his jaw.

The huge warrior stiffened, his fingers spasming open on the cleaver hilt.

Zafaro shoved with his right shoulder, rolling the dead weight off his chest and sending the horned leader tumbling silently over the icy lip of the trail into the fog below.

For three long seconds, the only sound on the shattered ledge was the hiss of falling sleet against hot blackened stone and the ragged, tearing sound of Zafaro’s own breathing. He leaned his back against the cold granite wall, his left arm hanging heavy and red at his side, his fingers trembling slightly from the sheer exhaustion of the climb and the fight.

"Zafaro!"

He looked down the trail toward the brazier shelf.

Rashida was scrambling up the rocky steps from the eastern bridgehead, her torn skirts gathered in one hand, her dark hair blown wild around her pale face. Behind her, the two lower scouts were just hauling old Oren’s sled onto the safety of the stone platform.

Rashida didn't stop at the dead mercenaries by the cliff edge. She ran straight up the smoking, debris-strewn path toward the dogleg, her boots slipping in the ash until she reached him. When she saw the fresh dark blood soaking through the left side of his wool coat from shoulder to wrist, a sharp, choked sound broke in her throat.

"You're bleeding through the pitch," she whispered, her cold, slender hands immediately pressing against his chest as if she could hold him together by sheer will. "Zafaro, look at your arm—"

"It's just the old cut," Zafaro rasped, though when he lifted his right hand to cup the back of her neck, his palm was shaking. He pressed his forehead briefly against hers in the swirling sulfur smoke, breathing in the clean scent of pine and cold wool that clung to her skin, letting it steady the hammering pulse in his ears. "You're across. How is Oren?"

"He’s breathing easier now that we're out of the river damp," Rashida said quickly, her fingers sliding down to grip his right hand, the wide bronze ring on her finger clicking hard and solid against his calloused knuckles. "Corin is coming down from the trees now. The slide completely buried the upper trail—we have time to get you inside Captain Vane’s gate and stitch that shoulder."

Corin and the two upper scouts dropped down from the pine bank onto the trail twenty paces away, their quivers nearly empty, their faces streaked with black powder dust.

"That shale shelf came down clean, Zafaro!" Corin called out, a breathless grin breaking through the grime on his face as he trotted toward them. "There’s twenty feet of rock wedged in that chute! The rest of the Gbantala column won't get a horse or a siege frame over that pile before nightfall! The way to the northern bastion is completely open!"

Zafaro slowly straightened up from the rock wall, his dark eyes lifting past Rashida’s shoulder to look up the remaining half-mile of open snowfield toward the towering cedar walls and stone watchtowers of Captain Vane’s mountain fortress.

The morning mist was finally burning off the highest crags, giving them a clear, unobstructed view of the northern gatehouse for the first time since they had left the river.

Zafaro’s hand went completely rigid around Rashida’s fingers.

"Corin," Zafaro said, his voice dropping so low it barely carried over the crunch of the scouts' boots. "Look at the main flagstaff over the bastion."

Corin stopped in his tracks and turned around, squinting up against the glare of the high snowfields toward the fortress parapet. Rashida turned with him, her hand flying to her mouth.

The heavy blue-and-iron banner of the Mountain Soga Vanguard was gone from the high tower.

In its place, snapping sharply in the freezing morning gale above the scarred timber gates, hung the crimson-and-gold silk standard of Chief Steward Haren and the High Council—and swinging from three long hemp ropes draped over the outer stone battlements were the bodies of Sergeant Miller and the northern gate watch.

As they stared in frozen horror, the heavy oak doors of the fortress slowly groaned open from the inside, and a column of fifty fresh, silver-armored High District bailiffs marched out onto the snowfield, led by a woman on a white charger wearing a dark velvet riding cloak.

Hikma hadn't waited for Zafaro in Town Sogala. She had beaten him to the mountain.