“You are Jhesta Tu, or you are not,” she said while Ethelbert laughed. “Which are you?”
“I am Jhesta Tu,” Bransen said, lowering his gaze to the floor.
M
y arm’s getting tired and I just might let go,” Jameston warned. “You must be gone,” the woman replied.
“I was going—” Jameston started to say, but he bit it off, suddenly realizing what she really meant. He had tracked them and had found them. He had fought this very woman and believed he was beating her when her friend had intervened.
He knew of them, which made him an intolerable threat.
“So that’s what it is, is it?” he said. “You can’t have me wandering on my way knowing what I know.” He gave a little laugh. “Well, I know a lot more now, I expect. . . .”
He heard the pop behind him, a sharp bang and the splintering of wood, followed by what he thought was a hard punch in his back just behind his right hip.
Jameston instinctively glanced down, and then he knew. For the nun’chu’ku had blown right through the wall behind him and into his back with such force that Jameston’s leather jerkin was pushed out in the front.
“Oh, now,” Jameston muttered, realizing that the pole had gone right through him. Already the feeling was leaving his legs, and he was having a hard time drawing breath.
He looked up at the woman, who stood easily now, smiling at him.
Jameston managed a nod. Growling, he drew back and sent his arrow at her. She got her arm up with amazing speed, but the arrow bored right through her forearm and into her forehead. She was still smiling when she fell dead to the floor.
Jameston shuddered, a thousand fires exploding within him as the warrior with the shaven head—it had to be that one, Jameston knew—tugged the nun’chu’ku out of him and back through the wall.
Jameston was sitting when the fierce warrior came around the front and entered through the door. The scout wanted to put his bow up for one last shot, for one chance to kill this vicious man, but when he lifted his left arm, he only then realized that he wasn’t even holding the bow anymore, that it was on the floor at his feet.
Merwal Yahna crouched over the dead woman, then rose and glanced at Jameston. He would come over and finish the job, Jameston figured, but surprisingly the man just snorted and turned away.
Jameston watched as the warrior cradled his fallen friend, then carried her out of the house.
And as he left, the darkness began to close in on Jameston Sequin.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Bloodletting
M
cwigik leaned his elbows on the top of the small barrel boat tower, staring at the distant fires and candles twinkling in windows. So many lights. More than Mcwigik had ever seen, more than he had ever imagined possible. For a hundred years he had looked across the waters of Mithranidoon, where even a single firelight was an oddity. For many years of life before that, the largest collection of people together he had ever seen was the town of Hard Rocks on the Weathered Isles.
But even that place, once thought impressive, couldn’t have been one-twentieth the size of this!
“Got to be Palmaristown,” Bikelbrin said, coming up beside him. “We’re at the mouth o’ the river, and that’s where Shiknickel said it’d be.”
“We get ten of us boys together, and we call it a town,” Mcwigik replied, shaking his hairy head. “Thirty and we call it a city, a hundred and it’s a kingdom.”
“Lot o’ people in there,” Bikelbrin agreed.
“Lot o’ blood,” his friend reminded.
“We get killed to death in there, and there’s none to be burying our hearts.”
“Bah, but we won’t be knowin’ that anyway!” Mcwigik said with a laugh, and he and Bikelbrin clapped each other on the shoulders.
The powrie shiver stayed offshore as the lights went down in the city, and only then did the eager dwarves resume their pedaling, moving very slowly and quietly. With a hundred thirty warriors among all the boats, they figured they’d find themselves outnumbered a hundred to one or more.
Dreams of berets shining brightly enough to light up the night carried them on their way.
B
ransen sat on the roof of the inn in Ethelbert dos Entel, his legs tightly crossed before him, his hands on his bent knees and his eyes skyward, basking in the contemplative light of a million stars. His thoughts were out there and within himself all at once, a meditative state of serenity in the face of the great questions of purpose and being. To face the many questions of his future meant that he needed the cleansing experience of being fully in the present, of recognizing his mind-body connection and putting that in context with his greater connection to the universe around him. He needed to find that moment of perfect, unfettered clarity, that complete sensation of peace.
But the stunning revelations and twists of the last day stayed with him, nagging him with doubts, particularly on where Cadayle might fit into his new allegiance to Affwin Wi. She had dismissed Jameston out of hand; what might that portend for Cadayle?
Bransen took a deep breath and threw away that unsettling thought. He forced himself back inside his ki-chi-kree, his line of life energy, and then sent that line spiritually up into the dark and starry sky.
A different sensation tugged at him, though, and suddenly and unexpectedly, a feeling that something, somehow, was amiss.
Bransen interrupted his meditative journey to refocus on this disturbance, this ill feeling. It had direction, like a cry of pain, out in the dark night.
Bransen let his soul slide through the soul stone of the brooch and escape his corporeal form. He started away spiritually, but hesitantly, until he felt again that strange sensation that something was terribly wrong.
Then he moved with purpose, willing his noncorporeal form over the city’s wall and out across the empty fields to the edge of a forest he had traversed that very morning.
T
he docks were quiet, those few guards on duty either asleep or gambling, throwing bones against a warehouse wall. One or another would occasionally glance at the harbor to check the masts of the few ships in port.
Barrel boats didn’t have masts.
The powrie craft came in slowly, their underwater rams prodding the sand below the wharves so that even as the dwarves climbed from their craft and slowly walked across the top arc of those rams, they remained out of sight to the distracted guards up on the boardwalk.
“Beat that point!” one gambling sentry shouted triumphantly as the bones rolled a strong number.
The words had barely left his mouth when a mallet cracked down atop his head, breaking his skull and shattering every bone in his neck.
“As ye asked!” a dwarf explained.
How the other four guards started to scramble! Started, but never even made their feet, as a score of powries, weapons flashing and swung with bloodlust, fell over them. They cried out for their companions on the docks but those sleeping or inattentive men and women were already dead, powries already wetting their berets in freshly spilled blood.
The dwarves methodically formed into six units, each crew as a battle group. They used the very bones the men had been rolling to determine which of the six would stay behind and watch the boats for the first forays.
“Not to worry,” many told the losers. “Plenty to kill.”
Five battle groups moved up into sleeping, unwitting Palmaristown, a hundred weapons, a hundred serrated knives to open veins.
Like a plague of hungry rats they roved through the town, sweeping through houses and tenements, at one point overwhelming a group still drinking and shouting in one of the nearby taverns.
They came in, and they killed. They dipped their bloody caps, and they moved on.
After a very brief while, the crew still on the docks realized that their companions were into powrie bloodlust now and would not be coming back, so they, too, went up into the city. As their friends had assured them, there were plenty still to kill.
It took nearly an hour, with hundreds and hundreds murdered, before Palmaristown even began to organize any semblance of defense against the intruders. Many, many more people died to powrie blades before the dwarves faced any real resistance. Even then, with armies of both Prince Milwellis and Laird Panlamaris out of the city fighting in the war, the fierce powries pressed on.
With Laird Ethelbert on the run in the south and his own mighty warships securing the gulf, Laird Panlamaris had never imagined such an attack.
The bloodbath went on throughout the night, a night that would be known in the region for decades hence as “the dark of long murder,” and, when the powries finally did retreat, they set fire to every structure they passed so that, by the time their barrel boats pushed back out into the river, a quarter of the great city was ablaze.
By the time those fires finally died away days later, two of every three structures in the great city—the second largest in Honce—lay in ruins. One in every three residents within the city was dead.
Warships sailed fast for home as the word of the tragedy spread, but the powries, with their shining berets, slipped past them unnoticed into the open waters of the gulf.
U
sing the cat’s-eye gemstone set in his brooch, Bransen had no trouble navigating the darkness beyond the wall of Ethelbert dos Entel. He ran on light feet, falling into the malachite as well as the soul stone to provide added lift and distance to each desperate step.
Soldiers walking perimeter outside the wall called to him, but he ignored them and sprinted on. They couldn’t hope to catch him with his magically enhanced speed, and even the few spears they threw out at him fell far short of the mark.
Bransen didn’t look back, his focus squarely ahead as he tried to recall the exact route his spirit had taken as he tried to hear again the disturbance that had sounded so clear in his state of meditation.
His heart beat even faster when he entered the small forest. He nearly fell over with fear as he skidded to a stop before the small cluster of ruined houses. Behind him in the east the sky was still dark, still hours before the dawn.
Bransen tried to hear again the psychic cry, but all was silent. He summoned his courage and ran into the house, to find Jameston crumpled on the floor, blood pooled about him.
“No!” Bransen fell over him, reaching into the soul stone, bringing forth mighty waves of healing magic.
But Jameston was already cold.
Bransen dug deeper, seeking any flicker of life energy, any notion that the man’s soul had not yet fled, seeking resurrection itself, something even the greatest of gemstone users had always believed impossible, something Abelle himself had never managed.
Because it was not possible. Jameston, this man he had come to know as a friend, as a teacher and mentor, as a father, even, was lost to him.
TWENTY-NINE
Darkness Rising
A
storm?” Brother Pinower asked. He stood on the wall with Brother Giavno, looking out to the west. The sun was not yet halfway down from its zenith to the horizon, but a dull pall had already settled on the land, a premature twilight.
Brother Giavno was shaking his head before Pinower even asked the obvious question. “No. Not a storm, not clouds.”
Pinower looked at him curiously, and the man’s grim expression, horrified even, had the young monk even more perplexed.
“Smoke,” Brother Giavno explained.
“Smoke?” Pinower echoed, turning fast to regard again the strange phenomenon. “But that is too far . . . I see no flames. It is out to the horizon and more. . . .”
Brother Giavno didn’t bother to respond. It was smoke, he knew. Somewhere far to the west something big was burning.
More monks came to the wall over the next few hours as the daylight waned and the gigantic cloud in the west grew darker and more ominous. Across the field the army of Palmaristown seemed equally engaged by the spectacle.
Many brothers stayed on the wall after night fell to view the sky three-quarters full of stars and one quarter, the western edge, an eerie combination of blackness built on the foundation of an ominous orange glow.
Dawn’s light showed the cloud expanding still, and that morning everyone in St. Mere Abelle moved to the towers and the walls to view the spectacle, even Dame Gwydre and Father Artolivan.
The old father groaned at the site.
“What could it be?” Brother Pinower asked from behind him.
“Palmaristown,” the old monk said with certainty.
T
he Highwayman is still out there,” King Yeslnik said to his perfumed wife.
“And you think he is coming to slay you?” Lady Olym asked.
“Do not be flippant with me, wife!”
“He didn’t kill your Uncle Delaval.”
“You know nothing!” Yeslnik scolded. “We found his sword. . . .”
“There are many swords.”
“Not like his!”
Lady Olym sighed and waved him away. “Perhaps he dropped it or someone took it from him.”
“Plundered his corpse, perhaps?” said Yeslnik in a sneering tone that struck hard. “That would not please you, would it?”
“I do not know of what you are speaking,” she said, but the possibility worded by Yeslnik had clearly knocked her off-balance here, and there was little conviction in her assertion.
King Yeslnik slapped her hard across the face. It was the first time he had ever done anything remotely like that. When she lifted her hands to try to deflect him, he punched her squarely in the nose. She staggered back and fell on her backside, staring at him in wonder.
“I will hear no more of the Highwayman from you. Ever,” Yeslnik warned.
“You spoke of him first!”
“Ever!” he repeated threateningly. Wailing, Olym curled into a fetal position.
“Ever,” King Yeslnik said again, leaning over close. “Bannagran will kill him. Kill him!” he shouted suddenly, and the startled Lady Olym jerked and wailed. Yeslnik whirled away from the pitiful woman and plopped into the chair at his desk, dropping an elbow on the arm and chewing at his nails.
Had he failed in fleeing the field before Ethelbert dos Entel? Should he have accepted the losses and pressed Ethelbert to the edge of the sea to be done with this foolishness quickly? But Ethelbert’s assassins would have killed him!
He lurched to his feet and began pacing nervously. “Panlamaris will deal with those traitors at Chapel Abelle,” he said to himself. “Why is this so hard? Why won’t these fools just concede to the inevitable?”
“You are king,” came an unexpectedly supportive voice. Yeslnik spun about to see his wife sitting up. He looked at her curiously, then more closely.
“You are the King of Honce,” she said again. “Only the prideful laird of that miserable city in the south and the traitorous fools at Chapel Abelle refuse to see it. All the rest is yours.”
Yeslnik continued to stare at her, but he felt compelled to move over to her. He fell to his knees, very close, and stared into her eyes, one swelling from his punch.
“Gather the lairds who follow you,” Olym suggested. “The dozens who love you. Lend them warriors to extend their holdings to engulf all of those flattened by you in your glorious march and by Prince Milwellis. Take the Inner Coast and the Mantis Arm. Take all those communities along the Belt-and-Buckle. Take them all, and let Ethelbert in his city and the monks in their chapel watch from their walls as the world, as King Yeslnik’s Honce, goes along without them.”
Yeslnik’s jaw hung open, for never had he heard such advice from this source. He was amazed that Lady Olym even knew about the march of Milwellis in the east or of the many communities he had run across and run over to Ethelbert dos Entel and back. He continued staring for just a few heartbeats. Slowly shaking his head with disbelief, he pulled her close and kissed her more passionately than he had in a long, long while.
Lady Olym pushed him back after a few more heartbeat
s. “They cannot come out against you, or you will destroy them,” she said.
“Delaval warships will blockade Ethelbert dos Entel,” King Yeslnik proclaimed.
“Yes!” Olym squealed.
“And Chapel Abelle!” said Yeslnik. “A prison of their own making!”
“Yes! Oh, yes!”
“And I will send Panlamaris by land and by sea into Vanguard, and Dame Gwydre will know her folly!”
“Lead them yourself! You are the King of Honce!”
Yeslnik tackled her, showering her with kisses all over her face.
“Take me, my king!” she cried. “Ravish me!”
Yeslnik nearly swooned, overwhelmed, for he had never seen his wife in such a state of passion aimed at him before. His confidence grew with every kiss and every caress.
It was good to be the king.
P
anlamaris,” said the whispers across the wall as the lone rider stormed across the field toward St. Mere Abelle. “That is Laird Panlamaris himself!”
Some calls went out for archers or for gemstone assaults as the large and imposing Laird of Palmaristown drew closer to the wall, but those were few and without conviction.
That cloud of smoke rising in the west, that sign of Palmaristown burning, served as a white flag of temporary truce in the stunned sensibilities of all who glimpsed it. Although Palmaristown had come against St. Mere Abelle, even in the face of the executions of Fatuus and the other brothers, the image of certain horror occurring in the west allowed Panlamaris to make this ride unhindered, right to the base of St. Mere Abelle’s high wall.
Behind him on the field a few other riders halfheartedly followed, but it was obvious that the laird’s seemingly reckless ride had caught his own soldiers by surprise.
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