The Baron Moruna

Chapter Three

CHAPTER THREE

NOY'S COMMANDO

Of thirty Dacoit commandos to dare the assault on New Adathen, only one returned alive. So it had been intended; a suicide mission. Three squads of ten had entered the fortress; one to assault the gatehouse, one to firebomb the Riflewomen's barracks, and the third, most daring, to massacre the wounded in the infirmary.

Captain Anayis Fell, leader of the mission, fought her way out of the infirmary and fled. The slaughter of her troops, trained for long weeks in readiness, troubled her not at all.

The fortress was on full alert now; already besieged and patrolled day and night, the garrison had stood to at the first sign of danger. Anayis had barely descended to the second floor of the keep before she met the first soldier on guard. The Riflewoman barely even saw her killer: Exiting the stairwell at a dead run, Anayis launched a flying tackle, breaking the woman's neck as they both hit the ground. Rolling to her feet, she ran on without a backward glance.

The interior of New Adathen's keep was a maze, the stairwells from one floor to the next situated with no discernible logic. Anayis did not attempt to negotiate the keep's passages more; the main gate was impassable in any case, by now filled with more Riflewomen than even she could take alone.

Instead, she found the first window wider than an arrowslit, and slithered out with the agility of a contortionist. Clinging like a fly to the wall outside, she took a neatly-rolled rope from a pocket in her black jacket, unfolded the collapsible hook and secured it in the corner of the window.

New Adathen's keep stood on a sheer crag deep in a mountain valley; the drop from the window encompassed two stories of the castle and a full sixty feet of natural cliff beyond. The ground below was lost in darkness; Anayis abseiled down in ten-foot hops, oblivious to the height and the chaos in the fortress all around.

On every parapet and rampart, lights had come up. Soldiers ran to secure every sensible escape route, but none thought to look up at the unclimbable walls of the keep itself. None would have seen Anayis in any case, merging with the night in her black Dacoit garb.

She gained the ground within a minute. In the darkness at the foot of the cliff, she quickly stripped off her clothes. Her uniform was double-sided, black on one side and dark green on the other. Reversed, Anayis' jacket and trousers were identical to those worn by the Riflewomen defending New Adathen. This was not odd; Anayis was a Riflewoman herself, like every one of the thousand soldiers laying siege to the fortress.

The war was a schism within the Women's Regiment itself, leadership divided between those loyal to the Lord Protector of New Adathen, and Colonel Noy of Fort Jiar. But the Lord Protector was questing far away, and had no idea that his castle lay besieged.

Anayis quit the shadows and ran across the grounds of the fortress below the looming keep. On her left, a natural causeway buttressed with towers and ramparts swept down to the valley floor. Torches burned along the causeway, lighting on the figures of Riflewomen racing to the keep like bees to the defence of their hive.

Anayis permitted herself the ghost of a smile, but did not slow her run. The darkness ahead was lit by the burning barracks-town, firebombed in the opening moments of the midnight assault. Beyond the flames lay the outer curtain wall and beyond that, no-man's land and the trenches of the besieging army.

Within a few moments' run, Anayis discerned the figures of Riflewomen silhouetted against the flames, fighting the blaze. She changed course, not slowing but avoiding the firelight until the wall itself was before her. Since escaping the keep, she had considered herself in no danger. Even now, crouching invisible in the darkness, watching the enemy running to and fro in the flickering light of the burning barracks huts, she held her peril very slight. Born to the most brutal terrain of far northern Kellia, she had absolute contempt for the sons and daughters of easterly Silveneir.