Argilac and Osric put their shoulders into the top of the patch and Alden and Doran put a joist end under the bottom of it like a lever, and the whole panel came away in two pieces with a crack that must have been audible on the slope. Cold air came in through the hole in a rush and the smoke went out through it in a sheet, and for perhaps four seconds everybody in that room could see.
Then the draw took hold and it got worse than before, because now the fire below had somewhere to send its smoke and the whole column of it came up through the boards and out past their faces.
"GO," Osric shouted. "Doran, GO."
Doran went over the sill with the line in one hand and his spear across his back and slid the fifteen feet and dropped the rest, and hit the slope and rolled and came up on one knee with the spear already in both hands.
Nothing came at him. He whistled once, low.
"The lady."
Isolde got over the sill without being helped. She went down that line hand over hand with her skirts kilted through her belt, and made the drop, and staggered, and did not fall.
Voss went next.
Voss had one arm.
Osric knew it and there was no other way to do it and he sent him anyway, with the line looped once round his good forearm and Argilac and Alden holding the top and paying him out.
He got twelve feet down and the harness strap slipped through the knot above him, not much, perhaps a foot in a second, and the jerk of it tore the line out of his hand.
He fell about seven feet.
He landed on the slope on his right side with his weight going over the ankle, and Osric heard the sound of it come up the wall, and Voss did not shout, which was worse.
"Voss."
"I'm down." His voice came up thin. "I'm down, Serjeant."
"Can you stand?"
There was a pause.
"I can hop."
Alden went. Alden made it, and took the last of it badly on his opened forearm and said nothing about it.
Then Erryk.
They got the line under his arms and round his chest and knotted it across his back where the arrow was not, and he came round enough to help, which was the worst part of it, because he tried to take his own weight on the sill and could not and knew he could not.
"Leave me the falchion," he said. "Leave me the falchion and go."
"No."
"Osric."
"You'd not have carried it out of that hollow for me either, so shut your mouth and hold the line."
They fed him out over the sill, Osric and Alden on the line and Argilac braced against the joist stub, and it was worse than any of them had allowed for, because a man that size is a great deal of weight and they were all of them half poisoned and streaming at the eyes.
He went down slow. Four feet. Six. Eight.
And then the crossbow cord went.
It did not break. It slipped. Voss had tied it because he was the only man there who knew crossbow cord, and he had tied it well, and then he had gone over the wall and left it in the hands of men who had been leaning against it for four minutes with wet palms.
The knot ran about eighteen inches all at once.
Erryk dropped the last twelve feet and hit the slope on his back with the arrow in it.
The noise he made brought every Khesari on the eastern side of that hill round.
"MOVE," Osric roared, "GO, GO, take him and GO."
Argilac went over the sill so fast he barely used the line at all, and Osric came after him and did not use it either, and hit the slope hard enough to jar every tooth in his head and take the wind clean out of him.
The smoke was thick as fog down there, lying along the hillside in a great slow drift, and out in it there were men shouting.
They came out of it in ones and twos, which was the only mercy of the whole morning. Nobody could see any better than anybody else.
The first came at Doran and Doran killed him with the spear before either of them had properly registered the other. The second went for Alden and Alden took him with the axe, badly, and had to hit him again on the ground.
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A third came round the tower's corner and straight into Osric, so close that neither of them had room for a blade, and the two of them went down together in the wet grass with their hands in each other's faces. The Khesari got a thumb into Osric's eye socket. Osric got the man's own knife off his belt with his good hand and put it under his ribs three times.
He rolled off and got up and could not see out of the left eye for a moment and it came back.
"UP. Get him UP."
Doran and Argilac had Erryk between them and were dragging him bodily along the base of the wall with his boots trailing, and the big man was not helping at all now and was making a sound like a bellows with a hole in it.
Voss was hopping. Actually hopping, with one hand on Alden's shoulder and the ruined ankle held clear, and going at a speed that Osric would not have believed and never afterward mentioned to him.
Isolde had a dead man's sabre in both hands and was walking backward behind the whole party watching the smoke, and did not once get in anybody's way.
They went north along the wall and then out onto the open slope and into the thickest of the drift.
Behind them somebody was blowing a horn.
They found the lip of the ravine by nearly going over it.
Doran got a boot into space and Argilac had him by the harness before he had properly begun to fall, and the two of them stood there for a second with Erryk sagging between them and the ground simply gone in front of them.
"Here," Doran gasped. "It's here."
"Down. All of you, down. Sit and slide if you can't walk it."
They went down into the ravine in a manner that would have made a goat wince: on backsides, on hands, grabbing at thorn and root, with the scree going away under them in rattling sheets. Alden lost his footing halfway and went down twenty feet on his back with Voss on top of him and neither of them made a sound about it. Erryk was more dropped than lowered.
Osric came last, and stopped at the lip, and looked back once.
There was one horse standing thirty yards off in the smoke, saddled, reins down, left behind by a man who had gone looking for the fighting on foot.
He very nearly went for it.
He got three steps and stopped, because there were shapes moving in the drift between him and it, and because a horse cannot go down a ravine wall, and because the figures took about one second and came out flat.
He went over the lip and slid.
They got down into the creek bed with the walls rising over them and the water shocking cold round their boots, and lay in it, and coughed, and could not stop coughing for a good while.
Up on the rim above, dark against the smoke, riders came along the edge and paced them and did not come down.
Osric got himself up onto one elbow in the shallows and made the count.
Himself. Argilac. Doran. Alden. Voss with an ankle he could not stand on. Erryk on the stones with his eyes shut and his breath coming shallow and fast. The woman.
Seven.
He had ridden out of Valmarch's gate with eight men and had three of them left, and one of those three was not going to walk home.
"Up," he said, when he could. "On your feet. We follow the water."
"Serjeant." Alden's voice was thick and slow. "Erryk cannot"
"Then we carry him. We follow the water and we do not stop while it's light, and if any man argues with me about it he can stay here and explain himself to them."
Behind and above, framed between the ravine walls, the smoke went up off the hill in a single grey column that would be visible from the Valmarch wall and from everywhere else in the county, and stood there in the still air marking exactly where they had been.
They went down the creek for four hours and it took them perhaps five miles.
The water was ankle deep in most of it and knee deep in the pools, and every one of them was soaked to the thigh inside the first quarter mile and stopped noticing it inside the first hour. The ravine walls stood twenty and thirty feet over their heads, thorn and root and crumbling shale, and the light came down into it grey and secondhand. It was the worst ground in the county to walk and the best in the county to walk unseen, and Osric had chosen it for the second reason and paid for it with the first.
Erryk went on a litter.
They made it out of two boar spears and three cloaks in about ten minutes. It was a poor piece of work and it took two men at all times, and those two men had to walk a streambed carrying a fifteen stone man over wet round stones that turned under the boot.
They dropped him twice in the first mile.
The second time he came off it into the water on his bad side and Doran went in after him and got his head up, and Erryk did not make any sound at all about it, which frightened everybody more than the first time, when he had.
After that Osric took one end himself and put Argilac on the other and Doran went ahead to read the ground, and they went slower and did not drop him again.
The stones were the worst of it. Every one of them was rounded and every one was wet and about one in six turned when a boot came onto it, and a man carrying a litter cannot look at his feet. Osric went down onto one knee twice and did not let go of the spear shafts either time, and got up both times with the shoulder screaming and the packing shifted.
By the second mile they had worked out a rhythm of sorts: eight steps, stop, breathe, eight steps. Doran called the ground ahead in single words. Stone. Deep. Root.
Nobody talked about anything else at all.
Voss could not walk.
He tried for about six hundred yards with a spear shaft under his arm and his boot swinging clear, and he made it look almost possible, and then the ankle went sideways on a wet stone and he went down into the creek on his face and had to be pulled out coughing.
"That's enough of that," said Alden.
"I'm fine."
"You're not fine, you're a sack. Get on my back."
"With that arm?"
"You weigh nothing and I've one good one and you're not going to argue with a man who's had half his face opened this morning."
Alden carried him for two miles.
He did it with a forearm laid to the bone and a cheek open from the bone to the jaw and his own blood drying black down the front of him, and he did it without complaining once, which for Alden was the single most alarming development of the day. Voss made up the difference by complaining for both of them, quietly, into the back of Alden's neck, all the way.
Isolde walked.
Nobody had asked her to and nobody offered her anything. She had a dead man's sabre through her belt and she had torn her own hem to strips for Erryk's leg twice more since the ravine, and at the second mile she took the front of the litter off Argilac without asking and carried it for a quarter of an hour until Osric took it back.
At some point in the third hour she began to shake and could not stop, and kept walking, and did not mention it.