The torches drew closer until their light reached FireStorm's outer wall.
Roughly forty men approached behind them, armed with stone axes, rusted blades, bows, and shields. Their formation was loose rather than military, but they had enough bodies to surround the holding, and the bows meant the wall alone would not keep the defenders safe. Red and black paint marked faces among the band, while the black tusk symbols that gave them their name showed clearly on others. Several bowmen watched the wall for a defender careless enough to expose himself.
They came without any attempt at concealment, and the three horn blasts had already announced what they wanted; among the raiders of the Red Mountains, the signal came before a sack: submit and surrender what was demanded, or expect no mercy once the attackers crossed the walls.
FireStorm had offered neither surrender nor answer. The raiders' leader walked at the front, a huge man broader than most of the others, bare-armed despite the cold. He carried a two-handed axe with old blood darkening part of the blade. Black tusks were tattooed across his face.
The villagers who had survived Ser Edwyn's last fight recognized him immediately. This was the Blacktooth chief, the man whose face and oversized axe had remained in the survivors' memories after Ser Edwyn and the others failed to return.
Arlan recognized the face from his inherited memories. The fear around him confirmed it; no one near the gate needed to ask who stood beneath the torchlight. He stopped several paces outside the main gate and drove the head of his axe against the ground.
"People inside!" he shouted in broken Common Tongue. "Throw out Arlan Ashenblade's head."
The band behind him answered with laughter and the beating of weapons against shields, and the noise rolled across the low walls in a ragged clangor, loud enough to make the villagers inside hear exactly how many men waited beyond the gate.
"Give us the grain, the wine, and the women," the chief continued. "Do that, and I may leave some of you alive." Another burst of laughter followed.
Inside the stone hall, a child began to cry; women held children close while the elderly and wounded waited behind boarded windows with whatever stones, tools, and weapons had been left to them. The orders had been simple: remain hidden unless the defenses failed.
The sound ended abruptly when his mother muffled it against her clothes, and the two young defenders near the main gate held their pitchforks so tightly their hands shook, but neither abandoned his position, and Arlan checked the four throwing spears once more.
Larry had sold them as Common-quality weapons with hardened steel heads intended to penetrate layered hide; they were the only ranged weapons in FireStorm he could trust to strike with the force and accuracy he wanted. The bottle of Dwarven Fire Oil remained secured beneath his clothing.
He did not use it merely because he owned it, and the raiders were still outside the walls.
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Arlan climbed the projecting stones beside the entrance until he reached the top of the gatehouse. The structure was low and crude, but it gave him a clear view of the road and the men gathered below; the climb also reminded him how little strength the fever had left in his legs, though he gave the raiders no sign of it. Torchlight moved across the wall, and the Blacktooth chief saw him.
For a moment the big man simply stared, then he laughed.
"That's him?" Several raiders joined him.
"A half-grown boy killed eight of my men?" Arlan said nothing. The chief lifted his great axe and pointed it toward the gatehouse.
"I thought some three-headed hero had crawled out of this hole. Instead I find a child." More laughter. Arlan reached behind his shoulder and drew one of the hardened spears. The noise below changed. Not silence yet. Attention. The chief bared his teeth.
"Come down, boy. Cut off your own head for me, and I might leave the corpse whole." Arlan set his feet on the stone.
His body was still recovering from fever, and surviving the previous attack had not restored the strength the illness took. His ribs remained bruised, but the spear gave him another kind of advantage.
He tested the weight once without releasing it, and the balance sat where a throwing weapon should, with enough mass behind the steel point to carry through hide, and the chief stood well within the range Michael's old experience could judge. Arlan watched his chest; two layers of thick hide covered it.
Below the gatehouse, the chief struck the earth again with his axe.
"Did you hear me?" Arlan lowered his center of gravity and drew his throwing arm back. The man laughed again. Behind him, roughly forty raiders shifted beneath the torchlight; some held bows, though none had yet loosed an arrow. They had come expecting frightened peasants and a lord too weak to stand.
Inside FireStorm, no one answered their threats, and that silence slowly changed the mood outside the wall, and a few men stopped laughing.
Arlan could hear the defenders shifting their feet below him. Morton had carried out every order: women, children, and the elderly were inside the stone hall, while the few people capable of fighting were divided among the approaches. No one had rushed out; no one had opened a door.
The village was as prepared as its poverty allowed. Seven possible defenders, several of them injured, stood against a band several times their number; walls and brave words did nothing to hide the difference between them. The chief tilted his head.
"What are you waiting for?" Arlan did not respond. Michael Watson's old experience reduced the throw to practical pieces: footing, distance, alignment, release; no threat or speech improved any of them. He adjusted his left foot against the rough stone. The shaft remained steady.
One of the raiders beside the chief said something in the local mountain speech and lifted a shield, and the chief knocked it down with the haft of his axe, and he spread his arms slightly, making a show of the target.
"Come on, then!" Arlan kept the spearpoint fixed on the center of his chest. The night smelled of smoke, damp earth, unwashed bodies, and the strong spirit still cooling in FireStorm's courtyard; behind the raiders lay the road into the mountains. Behind Arlan lay forty-seven people with nowhere else to go.
The abandoned mine offered a way out. Arlan had chosen the gate, and the chief stood before it. He drew his shoulder farther back, and the spearhead caught the torchlight.
Below, the Blacktooth chief raised his axe and shouted another promise to tear down FireStorm if Arlan did not surrender. Arlan slowed his breathing and waited until the man's stance settled and both feet were planted. Arlan tightened his fingers around the polished shaft.
His ankles, hips, shoulder, and arm aligned for the cast, every part of the motion directed toward the same point: the raider's chest. FireStorm went quiet behind him as the muscles along Arlan's arm tightened.
He held the release for the smallest fraction longer, until the Blacktooth chief stopped moving and the target settled squarely beneath the spearpoint.