by David Guymer
“Two hundred fighters?” she murmured, speaking in the language of the birds that she had mastered long before she had learned to understand the grunting sounds of her human father’s language. Her mother had been a wealdcaller and had taught many of the animals and trees the Latari tongue. She had also taught her daughter some of the magic, but her own skill was less than she would have liked. Too few opportunities to practice. “This I know already. I have followed them from the borders of Latwood and have informed my men as such. But why is what I want to know? Who is this blue knight that leads them? To be armored like that. To be walking around in my wood carrying power like that. She is somebody important, surely. A knight of a great order. Or a countess.” Greyfox drew her knee up and lounged back against the tree trunk. She had always wanted to kill a countess. Ever since she had been a little girl and a countess had hanged her father as a horse thief. “Should I kill this one, do you think?”
The bird swiveled its head as though surprised to see her there sharing its branch.
With a fluttering of wings, it took off.
Greyfox looked at the empty branch, nonplussed.
“Well. That was just rude.”
That was the problem with dealing with birds.
They were so… flighty.
She watched the blue knight and her entourage of peasant soldiers move into the clearing, humming a tune to herself as she idly attached a string to her longbow. The string was elf hair and it was the only one she owned. It had been her mother’s. Her own hair lacked the delicacy and the strength. When the work was done she removed her fingers from the knot and ran them down the intricately carved upper limb from nock to grip. The pale wood shimmered like pieces of the moon. As if by magic an arrow appeared on the string. The moonstone head twinkled like Latariana’s last gift to the world. Elves, even half-elves with thick Kellar accents, were rarities this far north of Aymhelin and south of the Salishwyrd. Even to sensible folk, her abilities were practically indistinguishable from magic. It had come in useful, once she had decided to start taking back just a little bit of what life had taken from her.
She stuck her tongue out the side of her mouth as she aimed.
The blue knight was, rather amusingly, walking brazenly towards her hideout.
She almost felt guilty for having warned her men of their coming.
The woman was not even trying to catch them off guard.
“I think I will shoot her first after all,” Greyfox murmured speaking now not in the language of the birds, because that would have been silly, but in her own common tongue. “Better to be safe than sorry.”
Chapter Thirteen
Trenloe the Strong
Spurn Castle, Hernfar, the Borderlands
The door to the Spurn fort was unlocked. It creaked slowly inwards against Trenloe’s shoulder. He ducked beneath the stone lintel.
The flooring was scuffed. A thousand years of heavy boots and shifting furniture had left their mark. There was a hearth in the middle, built up with a wall of blackened stone, a cook pot hanging over an iron grate. Several big chairs were set about it, draped with furs. A smaller number were set off to one side, near a private table cluttered with coins and dice and a few leather cups. Personal oddments lay here and there. A piece of bark with a picture of a woman drawn on it. A pair of worn boots next to the hearth. A captain’s dress coat hanging from the back of a chair.
The quiet made Trenloe’s breathing quicken.
He stepped inside as lightly as he could, but the floorboards still groaned under his bulk.
Dremmin crept in after him. The dwarf was taking no chances. Her winged helmet was pulled firmly down over her head. Her Dunwarr war hammer was gripped in both hands and ready.
“Hello-ooooo.”
No answer. Not even an echo.
Trenloe peered inside the hearth while Dremmin stood watch. “It’s cold.”
“For how long?” said Dremmin.
Trenloe shrugged. “How do you tell?”
The dwarf scowled, then gestured towards the pot. “What’s in there?”
Trenloe pulled off the lid. “Nothing. It’s burnt down.”
“I don’t like it,” Dremmin muttered. “There’re two things a soldier won’t abide: going cold, and going hungry.”
The rest came in behind them.
Corporal Bethan muttered a few verses of a prayer, her hand in her pocket, playing with her lucky coin, as she looked over the deserted guard room. While the Companions explored, Dremmin crossed to the table and its abandoned game. She prodded a small stack of coins, baring crooked teeth in a grin that Trenloe knew well enough from an ancient dungeon or two. The dwarf picked up a cup. Its contents sloshed about. So, not empty. She lifted it to her broad nose and sniffed.
“Is that the first thing you can think of?” Trenloe hissed. Despite the emptiness, his abiding instinct was to remain quiet.
“I’ve always said you should drink more,” the dwarf countered.
“I don’t drink at all.”
A man as big as Trenloe couldn’t surrender his inhibitions like that. Someone could get hurt. It was a small sacrifice to make.
“My point exactly.” Dremmin swallowed what was left in the cup. She pulled a sour face, sticking her tongue out and setting the cup back down. “If you’re asking me these cups haven’t been touched in days.”
“I’d listen to her,” Bethan murmured from across the room. “If it’s a song you want then go to a bard. If it’s a question about ale then ask Dremmin.”
The dwarf patted her leathered belly and leered. “What did I say, Trenloe? Drink more.”
DameRagthorn stamped inside, and Trenloe whirled towards the sudden noise.
The Lady of Hernfar was red-cheeked stamping the mud from her boots as she turned to Marns and her herald, Barden, coming up behind her. “Wait outside with the horses. It’s getting crowded in here.”
Trenloe let out a slow breath, his heart reluctantly slowing its beat. “You should wait too, my lady. Until we can find the garrison. Or what’s become of them.”
The woman snorted. “I’ll not be seen fretting in the courtyard of my own castle. I told you what this lot were like. Miscreants to a man.” She looked around the grubby guardroom. The coins, Trenloe noticed, were no longer on the table. He glanced at Dremmin who looked innocently elsewhere. “Had the door been broken in or the horses missing I might have worried. But no, we will trip over them somewhere around here, you have my word. If they have not been celebrating the changing of the guards by putting away the next three weeks of beer ration in one night then I’m a Loriman.”
“Our three weeks of beer ration,” Dremmin grumbled. “The storeroom’s downstairs, is that right?”
“That’s right,” said Ragthorn.
“Go take a look,” the dwarf said to Bethan. “If there’s been a party and we weren’t invited, then odds are it’ll have been there.”
The corporal brightened appreciably at being handed responsibility for securing the beer cellar.
Dremmin turned to Trenloe. “You and I had better have a peek up top.”
Across the guard room stood another door. It wasn’t locked either, and opened onto the narrowest of stairwells. Trenloe looked up. The stair wound upwards into ominous gloom on a right-handed spiral. He would not have wanted to fight his way up those steps. Not even if he had been Dremmin height and Bethan’s width. A decently armed soldier could hold it forever.
He swallowed nervously.
But again, there was no sign at all that anybody had.
“You should go first,” he hissed back to Dremmin.
The dwarf scoffed. “That’s not the way we do things.”
“Your eyes are better in the dark than mine.”
“What’s to see? Face forward, put one foot in front of the other. If you walk into me then yo
u’re going the wrong way.”
Trenloe swore under his breath. He led the company because, as Dremmin put it, his name was golden. It had been Dremmin’s idea, and Trenloe had long accepted that Dremmin made most of their decisions.
He took a deep breath and squeezed his right hand around the outside handrail, drawing reassurance from its existence.
“All right,” he said.
And then he climbed.
The fortress may have been a small one, a few cramped rooms and a tower, but its walls were still high. High enough to peer across the full width of the Lothan on a clear day. High enough to see nothing at all of its ramparts from the ground when the day was not quite so fine.
He pushed open the door at the top of the stairwell.
Light that seemed to have come to him through a dishcloth laid its wet hands on his face. The wind rushed and snuffled about, pulling at his tabard and nipping at bare skin as he stepped into it. The Lothan, as wide here and as powerful as at any point on its thousand-mile run, hastened by under a coverlet of fog. The sound of it gurgling over the shallow bed of the ford was the only reassurance that the river was in fact still there.
Llovar’s star was a twinkling spot of red, a smear just beyond the deepest fog.
A soldier was standing on the east-facing ramparts with his back towards them. His cloak fluttered in the wind, steel helm aglitter with wet. Trenloe felt a sense of relief go through muscles he had never imagined could be so tense. He would have to tell Dame Ragthorn that her opinion of her soldiers was unfairly low. The man was merely intent on his duty, so fixed on his watch of the east that he had not even heard the castellan’s herald.
“Greetings, friend,” he called out.
The soldier did not hear that either.
It was only when Trenloe was close enough to smell his rotting flesh that he realized why. His hand went to his mouth.
“Blessed rock and vengeful earth,” Dremmin muttered, emerging onto the battlement behind him with her hammer gripped tightly in both hands. “I hope the poor sod was already dead by the time this was done to him.”
The soldier had been driven onto his own spear by something tremendously strong. His face, unhelmed, had been pecked by the birds, and the sight made every muscle in Trenloe’s body cringe anew. He felt physically ill. He had killed before, of course he had, but only in battle, as a last resort. This… Someone had delighted in this.
“Who…?” he managed, shaping the words around the gag reflex in his throat.
Dremmin came to join him. She looked along the rampart. “What did Dame Ragthorn say the strength of the Spurn garrison was? Twenty?”
“Twenty,” Trenloe confirmed, placing both hands on the crenulations, looking steadfastly at the battlement-walk and breathing. “Do you count twenty?”
Dremmin peered into the fog as though afraid of what might come out of her mouth were she to open it. “Aye.”
There was a clatter from the stairs.
Man and dwarf both whirled.
“My…” said Ragthorn, looking about her. Her expression twitched like that of a person talking to someone in their sleep. “My word.”
“Tell me again how long it’s been since your last word from Spurn?” said Trenloe.
“How long exactly,” Dremmin added.
“I… I…” Ragthorn blinked and turned to them. “I don’t know exactly. I would have to ask Marns, or…” Her gaze drifted back to the impaled soldier. “Six weeks, I would say. Yes, six.”
“The ford has been unwatched for six weeks?” said Trenloe.
Dremmin shook her head. “No. No. It’s not as bad as all that just yet. This one’s not been gone more than one.” She tapped the side of her nose. “The beer downstairs tells the same story.”
“All right,” said Trenloe. “One week then. How many Uthuk could have crossed in that time?”
“I… I don’t know,” said Ragthorn.
“Hundreds of Uthuk could have made it into Kell.”
Dame Ragthorn did not try to argue. For the first time since Trenloe had met her, she seemed at a loss, confronted by a situation she had not predicted and could not overturn with charisma alone.
She nodded like a broken woman.
“They could.”
Trenloe made to say something more, but Dremmin’s hand shot up to demand silence and Trenloe closed his mouth. The dwarf shuffled back to the battlements, giving its grim sentry a wide berth, and peered down. “Something’s crossing the ford as we speak.”
“What?’
Trenloe joined his friend at the ramparts and looked down
A chill ran through his bones. A ghost story of the First Darkness, when all that was good in the world had been one heroic deed away from annihilation, wrapped itself in the shroud of Hernfar’s mists and breathed down his neck.
He stared into the gray until his eyes began to water.
Then he saw it, and somehow on this occasion the reality was far worse than the fear of it.
“Golden Kellos almighty,” he breathed.
“What?” said Ragthorn, still stood by the door. “What is it?”
Trenloe was too stunned to answer her.
“Uthuk Y’llan,” said Dremmin darkly. “It’s happening now. They’re crossing.” She turned to Trenloe. “Just my luck to be stuck here for this.”
“How many?” said Ragthorn.
“It’s called the Locust Swarm!” Dremmin snapped at her. “Work it out!”
Trenloe tried to get his mind to think. A battle was coming. He was a soldier. But he could not overcome the first mental hurdle he came to which was that this simply could not be happening. The end of the world. “I… I only see a few hundred.”
“There’ll be more behind them.”
“We can hold them,” said Ragthorn, to their disbelieving stares. “We can! The ford is narrow, and the river is vigorous. The Uthuk won’t be able to charge across it. Nor will they be able to come at us in good order. Set my soldiers up here, on the walls. For all the poor choices they have made in life to bring them here, they are warriors of Kell. There are none better this side of the sea with spear and bow. If the Uthuk dare cross then it will be into a hell of arrows, and to find Trenloe the Strong and the Lady of Hernfar waiting with a proper Terrinothi welcome.”
Trenloe took a deep breath and nodded. His mind was still struggling to conform to the enormity of what was happening below, but a fight he could understand. His body felt ready for it even if his mind was not quite there. He had come north to make a difference.
He was ready to save the world.
“I will hold the ford,” said Trenloe. “Your place is in Nordgard Castle.”
“What are you saying?” Dremmin wailed. “We should all ride back to Nordgard.”
“It took us half a day to get here, but a faster rider could be there in under an hour and have reinforcements back here in four.”
“I’m not the lightest of riders, Trenloe, though bless you for not noticing,” said Ragthorn with the stiff grin of martyrs and the very finest of generals. “Even if I was as swift as a verdelam scoutrider I would have sent someone else in my place. I’m not about to miss the chance to stand alongside Trenloe the Strong!”
“I’ll go,” Dremmin interrupted.
Trenloe and Ragthorn turned towards her.
“I’ll go,” she said again, more forcefully. “We’re mercenaries, Trenloe,” she said, her gruff voice becoming wheedling, and she shifted as though to make a bolt for the stair if either of them disagreed. “I’m not fighting the entire Uthuk Y’llan for these people. We don’t do last stands. Nobody gets paid after a last stand.”
“Go,” said Trenloe, though it broke his heart to think of this as a farewell.
“Ride fast!” Ragthorn called after her.
But the dwarf did not ans
wer.
She was already gone.
Chapter Fourteen
Andira Runehand
The Whispering Forest, South Kell
“Runehand!”
Warrior-pilgrims streamed from the wood. Arrows zipped at them from the roof of the great tree. A pilgrim fell with an arrow in her chest. Then another. And another. The handful of pilgrims carrying bows, mostly those led by Yorin of Gwellan, dropped to one knee as their comrades ran past them, then drew, aimed, loosed. The rattle of bow-fire looped up towards the platforms, thudding into wooden mantlets and clattering off clay pots. The horses and livestock who had been grazing in the clearing bleated in sudden fright, as some captain amongst the brigands waiting in the hollow trunk shouted a charge.
The two groups ran at one another, like fighting dogs set loose in a pit, smacking together with a thump of meat and mail and a snarl of blades. Screams rang out, men and women bowled over, as the mess of fighters broke into a hundred individual contests of strength.
Sir Brodun ducked under a swinging axe, hamstrung its wielder with a neat low blow, then swept out his legs. Yorin sent an arrow whistling into a woman’s chest as she ran at the knight. From there, Hamma rose to block a sword-thrust to his eyes, kneed his assailant in the groin, then sliced open his throat as he knelt before him. He moved to engage a third, the other fighters still bleeding to death behind him.
A tall woman screamed something incoherent as she ran at Andira.
Her face was half-hidden behind a bandana, long hair drawn back into a ponytail. She was carrying a short spear that she wielded overarm like a javelin. Andira let the shaft of her own weapon run out through her fingers as she swung. Power pulsed from her rune and coursed the length of her poleaxe. The bandit’s spear disintegrated before Andira’s axe-blade even touched it and the bandit went flying, her leather cuirass coming apart as though savaged by a four-armed makhim berserker. Dead the moment the blow landed.