Vile

by Keith Crawford

  Calf deep in the snow, she set about reloading her pistol. The procedure had been drilled into her. Half-cock the hammer. Take a small measure of gunpowder and pour it into the barrel. Don’t look back to see if the wolf is closer. At the Academy, hours of intense physical training matched hours in the classroom. Admission was at the age of 13. Then the winnowing began: the unworthy, the incapable, those who lacked the determination to make it to the heights of advocacy or the prestige of combat. Advocate Magistrates for the court. Combat Magistrates for the field. If Elianor had simply shot the Garn boy, she would still be on her way to Shadowgate Castle. Take the lead shot from the pouch, wrap it in a little piece of cloth, and shove it into the barrel until it fits tight. Don’t rush. Don’t waste time thinking about what you should have done. Don’t look back.

  Elianor wanted to look back. She worked the shot into the barrel.

  Magistrates were enforcers of the Republic’s peace. The Queen’s peace, now, technically, with the Kingdom restored by Northern invaders and the remains of the Republic throttled by their Wardens. However, while a Queen might once again rule Trist, it was governed by a Senate, and the Senate was split between Royalists trying to restore the glory of the aristocracy and Republicans longing for a new revolution. Put a pinch of gunpowder in the pan by the flintlock, then snap the hinged frizzen into place. Through the rise and fall of the Republic, Magistrates showed Trist what an age of reason could achieve. She shouldn’t have hesitated when Derec would not obey under threat. So, why had she?

  Elianor turned, pulled back the hammer, and pointed the pistol towards the howl.

  Empty mountainside looked back.

  “If I were a wolf,” Elianor muttered, “I would stop howling when close to my prey.”

  That thought wasn’t much help. She holstered the pistol, brushed the snow from her sleeves, and looked around.

  The Kingdom of Trist was a peninsula. Shadowgate Mountain was its westernmost choke point, a narrow bridge of land to a forbidden continent, the rest of the realm surrounded by sea. In turn, the mountain had given its name to the Shadowgate Castle, built high into the stone on the road to Demon’s Pass, and Shadowgate Town, lower to the south. This confused visitors, who mistook mountain for town, and pleased locals, who felt people who couldn’t tell one from the other had no business visiting in the first place. Even the name Shadowgate was strange, foreign, not constructed from the same Tristian dialogue as other parts of the Kingdom. Distinctive r’s were replaced by long flat vowels with nowhere to go. Not a place where you belonged, not a place from which you came.

  Eastwards from the mountain, the landscape fell away, the snow becoming stone and then fields that lined the route back to Durançon and then farther on to the capital city, Lutense. South from the road the terrain was rougher, more suited to goats, Elianor thought, or sheep, or whatever farmers do with land that will not grow wheat. From up here, Shadowgate Town was just a grey stain on the green. Wait long enough and she might spot Derec Garn’s flight along the road towards whatever sanctuary he imagined he would find with his father. A tempting shot, if her rifle were not on the cart with the rest of her things.

  Elianor snatched up her oilskin-wrapped rapier, then made a quick search to see if anything else useful had fallen with it. Nothing. Her boots skidded on the ice, and there was a sharp pain in her right hand when she stumbled. She pulled off her glove and checked the skin, front and back. No significant bruising. No broken bones. Some light swelling? She slid her hand back into the glove and flexed her fingers. A Combat Magistrate needed a working right hand.

  She looked, finally, northwest. Shadowgate Mountain defined the Kingdom that sat at its feet. Without it, Trist would have been nothing more than another little nation in the spread of the pirate-infested Southern Archipelagos, an insignificant fly buzzing at the belly of the Northern Kingdoms. Yet beyond the mountains lay the lands of the Kindred, macabre shape-shifting monsters who marched through Demon’s Pass every other generation to murder and burn and destroy. Or so the Kings that fought them claimed. Elianor suspected most things said about the Kindred were lies.

  The threat of Kindred invasion made the stability of Trist an international affair. The Northern Kingdoms were a vastly powerful conglomerate of nations scattered about the high seas, with access to technology and weapons as impressive as they were incomprehensible. Trist blocked the trade routes between the north and south, just as the mountains barred the Kindred from Trist. Ten years ago, in 1672, the North had intervened to put an end to Trist’s revolutionary government and place Queen Beatrice on the throne, just as it had propped up centuries of weak Kings and Queens before her. Pirates to the south and east, Wardens to the north, and Kindred to the west. The prison of Trist had many walls.

  Shadowgate Castle was the last fortified position before Demon’s Pass, where a monastery sat at the only traversable point through the mountains into the West. The most recent Kindred incursion had been turned back here, when young Arbalest Vile slew a Kindred Prince in single combat. Arbalest Vile, the undefeatable general who destroyed Demons, drove back the North, made the Republic possible, then refused the Presidency and took refuge in the solitude of the provinces. Now Lord of Shadowgate and the object of her mission. When Derec had pointed out the rough location of the castle, it had been only a smudge on the distant mountainside. And it was getting dark.

  Elianor unbuttoned her jacket and wrapped the oilskin from her rapier across her chest. She couldn’t carry it otherwise, but at least this way it might provide warmth. Then, with some practised juggling of her bag and belt, she buttoned herself up, buckled the sword, and pulled her hood as far forward as it would go. Turning left towards the town would insult her pride and injure her mission. So, she could turn right, follow the road to Shadowgate Castle, and risk a journey too long to finish before nightfall. Or she could attempt the steeper but more direct route up the mountainside.

  “You are too arrogant to be an effective Magistrate.” The voice was nothing but a memory, words her master Senator Théophile Carada had spoken as he sent her on this mission. “A trip to Shadowgate might teach you the humility I cannot.”

  The mountainside might prove as treacherous as its inhabitants. The wolf might stay away from the road. The road might be impossible to follow in the dark. Might, might, might.

  “Bring Lord Vile back to the Senate before the 30th Ventros. If we do not defeat the Republican vote, there will be another revolution. Persuade his Lordship to return and defend the Kingdom, one last time, and secure your future in the Magistry.”

  Elianor made her decision: Truthsense was useless on rock and snow, and a lack of humility was Carada’s problem, not her own. She set off along the safer road towards Shadowgate Castle. It was slow going. The road was made for carts: it took its time winding long and shallow when her destination was hard and high. Elianor leaned into an ungainly half run, half walk. The road went upwards and around. Coniferous trees came and went in patches of flora, losing their battle with the mountain. Sudden stark drops punctuated the route with startling severity. The clouds of her breath thickened, expelled in sharper bursts.

  Still the wolf did not howl. Perhaps it had never been chasing them. Perhaps—and she forgave herself a small smile at the thought—it had gone after the more substantial meal of Derec Garn on his horse and cart. Perhaps it stalked her, waiting for night to fall. It would not have to wait long. She was in a race against the shadows, and the shadows could scale any height, and were not slowed by ice.

  Suddenly, at the crest of a rise, the road straightened. A great chasm blocked her route. Wind whipped through the crevice, blowing dust and ice up in Elianor’s face. It stretched north and south as far as she could see, which, in the deepening gloom, was less and less by the moment.

  Shadowgate Castle stood at the other side of the abyss, unreachable. It was a great mass of black rock, a silhouette cluster of hostile stone, a forbidding wall built into a cliff face. The light of a single wa
tchtower beckoned from beyond the divide.

  With no way across, she would die here on the mountain.

  She stumbled forward, following the road towards the edge of the crevice. The land stopped. Yet somehow the road continued, transformed into a bridge, a solid stone span that looked as if the Gods had reached down and severed the mountain on either side. The block of narrow stone divided the chasm in two, north from south, east to west, a dam built to prevent the mountains flooding the plains. It continued for more than a kilometre, an implausibly straight column of rock barely wide enough for a cart and horse.

  Elianor edged forwards. The chasm was a wide trench that separated the two parts of the mountain, a four-metre drop to widening tundra, the bridge between the two a solid block of rock that looked like a cliff on each side. She blinked and cleared her face of sweat. It was impossible. Who manufactured something like this? It would take a hundred stonemasons a thousand years. But a supernatural explanation was ridiculous. Only peasants and dilettantes believed in the Gods, worshipped the deified names of dead Kings and Queens. Therefore, it must be a natural phenomenon, some erosion caused by water, some defect in the stone. The founders of Shadowgate must have discovered the bridge, and, quite logically, decided it was here they should build their castle. It could defend against an army of a thousand soldiers, who would be funnelled by the bridge into the maw of the castle and then massacred. There was an explanation for the bridge. Nothing that exists can be impossible: we must see through the lens of reason.

  Why build the castle facing east when the Kindred came from the west?

  A little unsteady, legs aching from the run, she edged onto the bridge. The sun was setting so fast she could see it move behind the mountains, taking the last light into the land of the Kindred. It made it hard to tell the road from the fall. The black could as easily be solid stone as empty space. She leaned out over the edge with her weight kept as far back on her legs as possible. The drop may have been only four metres, but that was more than enough to kill. And it was too dark to see what waited at the bottom.

  She drew her rapier and pointed the tip so it lined up with the flickering light of the watchtower. Something moved in the corner of her eye. If she went towards the light, she should avoid wandering off the edge of the bridge in the gloom. Elianor lowered the point of her sword like a blind man uses a cane. Then she walked, painstaking, slow, the fear of slipping and falling quickening her breath into gasps of cloud silvered by the faint starlight.

  Something had moved in the corner of her eye.

  It was close, but she couldn’t turn her head. She might lose sight of the watchtower, her peripheral vision blocked by the hood, and stumble into the void. How much time did she have? She switched the sword into her left hand and put her right hand to the grip of her pistol. How close was she to the edge? How far could she move without falling?

  The wolf growled, a thick, menacing rumble that told her she was out of time.

  Her left foot slipped as she span on her right; she fell to one knee with her pistol raised to fire.

  It was not a wolf.

  The black sky camouflaged the beast. She saw claws sprung from long man-like fingers and short fur grown from muscular flesh, a mesh of man and monster. Even on all-fours it was almost as large as she. This must be the Black Dog, crouched, ready to strike. Elianor did not propose to give it a chance. She pulled the trigger.

  The pistol did not fire.

  Elianor’s mouth went dry and flooded with the taste of iron; adrenalin rushed to her extremities. The fall from the cart had damaged the mechanism. The beast let out its horrible, piercing howl, rose on its hind legs, and leapt. She swung her rapier upwards but couldn’t get it round with her left knee on the floor. The point caught against the stone as the beast smashed into her.

  A horrible, heavy mass struck the right side of her chest. Her sword blade, still caught in the ground, snapped under the weight of them both. She gave way beneath the Black Dog. Tooth and claw tumbled above, over, and past her. Elianor fell onto her side, scrambled, slipped, then stepped back, striving to get on her feet before the beast recovered and came again.

  The blackness where her foot fell was empty space. She twisted, tried to fling herself towards solid ground. It was already too far away. The star spattered sky span mercilessly above her.

  Chapter 3

  “I’m just taking a breath, Uwen, don’t fuss so.”

  Ifanna Brek let the notion that her eldest son might fuss tickle her in the safe place she kept all the emotions family had no business seeing. They were on the mountain road, the route between the castle and the town, still below the snowline but high enough that the air finally felt clean. When Uwen only slowed and didn’t turn back, Ifanna gathered her skirts up about the tickle and nudged her pony into the lay-by. It took the hint and began to nibble on the hedgerow.

  “We should keep moving, Ma,” Uwen said. “It’s not safe to be out after dark.”

  They said you shouldn’t have favourite children, but of course everyone did. Uwen had big shoulders and strong hands. Beneath the mass of black hair sprouting from every inch of his body was a man who carried the spring lambs like they were his own yet-to-be-born children, who let his cousins weave daisy chains into his hair and taught his sister to swim in the river by the farm. Best of all, Uwen looked nothing like Ifanna’s husband, Tannyr. While Dale had his father’s freckles, and Eira his nose, Uwen was…Well, Ifanna knew exactly who Uwen looked like. Memories she stored with her scores and her lists, with her little tickle, with the true side of her face.

  “The Black Dog doesn’t want little old ladies,” she said, “and we’re plenty close enough to get home before sundown.”

  She squinted up the road, wondering why Uwen hadn’t seen it yet. The setting sun stretched shadows down the mountainside, those same shadows that gave the region its name. Even her aging eyes could see the shape moving fast along the road towards them. In a flash, her confidence faltered. What if there really was a Black Dog? What would get Uwen to raise his head?

  “You’re welcome to stay with us, tonight.” Ifanna chewed her tongue for a moment. An errant snowflake settled on her cloak. “Your father won’t be there.”

  “I know, I saw Da at the castle,” Uwen said. “But I’d like to get back to my Gwen before nightfall.”

  Ifanna sucked saliva through her teeth and spat it at the side of the road.

  “Come on, Ma. Gwen’s just fine. Let’s get moving.”

  She kept her horse at the hedgerow.

  “A wife’s no good to you if she can’t give you children.”

  “Gwen’s plenty good enough for me.”

  “You could do better. What about Begw?”

  “Begw? The guard with the curly hair?”

  “Hodri’s girl.”

  “I have a wife, Ma. Besides, Begw’s got enough troubles coming. She doesn’t need mine.”

  Now, what could that mean? Ifanna had spent the last few days down country, helping Brigid Tafal’s eldest give birth. While she’d been away, the cloud on Uwen’s brow had thickened. Just as she was about to mount a defence of Hodri’s daughter, the cloud broke and that broad, slow smile, that smile that came out so rarely, spread from beneath Uwen’s beard.

  “Can you imagine our kids? They’d look like sheep.”

  “Uwen Brek, bite your tongue.” Her rebuke was half-hearted. Why wasn’t Gwen keeping him happy? It couldn’t still be about his father. About Tannyr. Surely, he had grown far too big to still be afraid. Uwen’s smile had gone back behind the cloud.

  “Someone’s coming,” he said.

  “Really?” Ifanna said. Better they think of her like the snowflake, merely settling where the wind sent her. “Can you see who?”

  Uwen put his hand to the cudgel on his belt and squinted.

  “Derec Garn. He’s running that cart way too fast.”

  A cold wind came off the mountain.

  “I should get you home,” Uwen said.
“We can cut across the fields.”

  “Let’s see what’s wrong with Derec. Maybe he needs our help.”

  He couldn’t move if she wouldn’t move, and she wouldn’t move if he wouldn’t move her. So, they waited. She let the thought of helping a Garn join her tickle.

  ◆◆◆

  The cart had slowed to walking speed by the time it reached them, but the horse was lathered and Derec Garn’s face was flushed.

  “Mrs Brek. Uwen.”

  “Something wrong with your cart, Garn?” Uwen called.

  The sideboard was broken, and the tail board fallen open.

  “Just trying to get home before nightfall. You should do the same. For your mother.”

  “How nice of you to be concerned,” Ifanna said. “What are you carrying there?”

  Strapped in the cart was a chest and some long device wrapped in cloth.

  “You just back from Durançon?” Uwen said.

  “Don’t waste time getting on home,” Derec said. “The Black Dog’s abroad tonight.”

  He flicked the reins and the exhausted horse started the cart forward. Uwen stayed in its path as long as possible, taking a long hard look at the contents as Derec passed. Ifanna left her podgy pony gnawing on the hedgerow, until Derec was out of earshot, then:

  “You’ll stay with us tonight, Uwen. Your father will want you in the morning.”

  Chapter 4

  It was the last day of the summer of 1672. Twelve-year-old Elianor, small for her age, clutched her hands in her lap and tapped her heel against the leg of her chair. Her father sat alone at the head of the family dining table. There were no other children.

  “You must study harder to win a place at the Academy,” he said. “If you want to be more than just someone’s wife.”

  Sebaraton Paine always talked like this, talked while he ate, talked like he was standing in court, waving his hands and forgetting where he had put his napkin. Elianor wondered what her mother thought about his contempt for becoming “just someone’s wife,” but never dared to ask. Mother put breakfast on the table then shuffled out of the room. There were no more servants, and Lady Paine was always too ill to eat in the mornings.