Ascension to the Lost Throne novel · Chapter 3 of 24
Chapter 3: Eight in the Dark
Jude fights eight Black Banner raiders; the one left alive wears Tobin's Council pin.
Jude had his trousers fastened and the war blade in his hand before the first shape reached the yard.
"Under the table," he said.
Marina was already pulling her blouse closed.
"No," she said.
"The stove, the lamp, and the kitchen knife."
"I'm a nurse, Jude, not a child."
He did not argue.
He kicked the door open and stepped out barefoot into the cold.
There were eight of them, strung along the fence in dark field jackets, with black cloth tied around their left arms.
Black Banner cloth.
The nearest man was already over the rail with a hatchet.
Jude met him in the middle of the yard.
He turned the hatchet aside with the flat of the blade and drove his elbow into the man's face.
The man dropped without a sound.
Two more came at him from the left.
One had a length of chain, and one had a short axe.
They ran side by side, without getting in each other's way.
Jude let the chain wrap his forearm.
He pulled, and the man behind it stumbled forward onto the point of the sword.
The axe came down at his head.
He ducked, and the blade skimmed his shoulder and opened a line of fire across his back.
He pivoted, caught the axe handle under his arm, and broke the man's wrist across his knee.
The man screamed.
Jude hit him in the jaw with the pommel, and he stopped screaming.
Four left.
They came together now, wide apart, trying to circle.
Jude backed up against the cottage wall so they could only come from the front.
It was an old trick, and he had taught it to half the Compact.
The first man swung a crowbar, and Jude stepped inside the arc and cut him across the thigh.
The second tried to tackle him.
Jude brought his knee up under the man's chin and heard teeth click together.
The third raised a pistol.
There was a sound, and the pistol flew out of the man's hand.
Marina stood in the doorway with the cast iron stove-lid in both hands, swinging it for a second time.
The third man folded over the lid with a grunt.
"Behind you," she said.
Jude spun.
The last raider was the biggest of them, a thick-necked man with a combat knife, and he was running straight at Marina.
Jude threw the sword.
It was not a thing he did often.
The blade went through the man's shoulder and pinned him to the doorpost, and the man hung there screaming with his boots off the ground.
Jude walked up, took the knife out of his hand, and put the point under his chin.
"Who sent you?"
The man spat blood.
"Corwin Quillon says thank you," he gasped.
"He says the Council opened the gate for him."
"Corwin Quillon is dead."
"He sat across the fire from me last night," the man said, and he laughed, a wet and horrible laugh.
"He's missing two fingers on his left hand, and he says you're going to count them."
Jude looked at the yard.
Seven men lay in the dirt.
Two of them were not getting up again.
His own back burned.
Marina came down the step and put her hand flat between his shoulder blades.
"You're cut to the bone," she said.
"Sit."
"Not yet."
"Sit down, Jude, or I'll put you down."
He sat on the step.
She had a roll of clean cloth from the infirmary bag, and her hands were shaking, but they were quick.
She cleaned the cut with the last of the whiskey from the shelf, and he hissed through his teeth.
"Eight men," she said.
"You took eight men in the dark with no shirt on."
"Seven," he said.
"Eight, if you count the one I hit," she said.
He almost laughed.
Then he looked at the man pinned to the doorpost, and he stopped.
The man had gone quiet, with his head sagging, and Jude stood up and pulled the sword free.
The man slid down the doorpost to the ground and sat there, grey-faced and breathing.
Marina knelt and pressed the cloth to his shoulder.
"He'll live if I stop the bleeding," she said.
"Do it."
She worked in silence.
Jude crouched beside them and went through the man's jacket pockets one by one.
A phone with the back pulled off.
A folded road map with the cottage circled in red ink.
A small round brass pin sewn inside the collar of the jacket, hidden under the lining.
He turned it over under the lamp.
It was a Council pin, the kind only thirteen people on earth were given, stamped with a cairn of stacked stones.
On the back, scratched with a nail, were the initials T.A.
Jude closed his hand around it until the edge cut his palm.
Marina looked up.
"What is it?"
"My brother's," he said.
"Somebody gave this man the road to our door, and he was wearing Tobin's pin when he came."
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