The Baron Moruna

Prologue & Chapter One

PROLOGUE

In a locked wardrobe in a shop in a castle under siege, there was a Box of Stairs.

The castle, New Adathen, belonged to the Lord Protector, Sir Taran Denebar, presently away questing with his knights in a distant land. The fortress therefore fell to the care of his wife, the Lady Tethys Utryce, a knight and fearsome warrior in her own right, enobled for her heroics as sometime sergeant of the Revolutionary Women's Regiment.

The Box of Stairs, however, was the property of one Mrs Quin McGillycuddy, Saleswoman Extraordinaire and resident sorceress of New Adathen.

To these notable ladies we shall return, but only in passing, since their adventures and indeed the great and terrible siege of New Adathen have already been told at length in a preceding tale.

On, to the siege of New Adathen, to pick up a separate story which nonetheless begins, ends, and indeed is crucially concerned, with the fighting of that bloody and protracted battle...

CHAPTER ONE

THE BATTLE OF THE LOWER GATE

Luned had been stationed with the squad manning the Lower Gatehouse, and she was far from happy about it. She had been trying to avoid or at least delay her promotion to corporal, and being left in charge of the Gatehouse all night seemed nothing but a pointlessly cruel plot to deny her any sleep.

She was smoking a cigarette on the gatehouse ramparts in the pre-dawn gloom when the bombardment began, and was still there when Lance-Corporal Rasana came barrelling up the stairs to tell her what she could plainly see and hear.

"We're under attack!"

"Yes," Luned said, grimly taking another drag on her cigarette. "Well spotted."

"What do we do?"

"Sit tight."

"But..."

"No," Luned said firmly, flicking away the stub of her cigarette and beginning to roll another. "We're here for a reason. Buggered if I know what it is, but a reason there must be and so here we stay until ordered to move. Soldiers, y'see; we obey orders."

Rasana was a singularly blood-thirsty and gung-ho young woman, entirely unable to keep the resentful disappointment off her face. Luned knew exactly how she felt, deeply resentful herself that her next conversation with Sergeant Xenales would be to explain her actions no matter what she decided to do.

"Where's your rifle, Rasana?"

"Um... I left it in the guardroom?"

Luned surreptitiously looked askance, just to be sure that her own weapon was propped against the rampart where she sat before she continued: "We're under attack, what sort of soldier forgets her weapon when we're under attack?"

Rasana slouched back down the stairs into the gatehouse and left Luned alone. She sat on the rampart chainsmoking, watching the bombardment and the eventual infantry assault, wondering all the while how many bullets she could reasonably trade to Quin McGillycuddy for more cigarettes.

Although expressly forbidden, there was an unofficial amnesty on Riflewomen hawking ammunition to the castle's resident enchantress, since any bullets bought back acquired potency against the undead and other outré creatures after passing through Quin's hands.

Luned almost swallowed her latest cigarette when the barrack town midway between the gatehouse and the outer walls suddenly exploded into flames. Overtaken by a fit of coughing, Luned was still on her perch when a second firebomb went off in the Lower Gatehouse itself.