A Plague of Swords

by Miles Cameron

“Oh, Mama, I can do all that!” Phillippa was perfectly capable of telling her mother that she was stupid, and that she had ruined Phillippa’s life by dragging her from the glories of Lorica to this small manor house in the country bereft of fashion or eligible young men—not, strictly speaking, true, as the events of the spring had all but filled the manor with a series of attractive, muscular, brave, and dashing sprigs, but when the fit to yell at her mother took Phillippa, mere facts never stood in the way.

  But Phillippa was no fool. She was her mother’s daughter, and she knew that the death of Ser John Crayford in the great battle had been like a dagger into her mother’s heart. In fact, for two weeks, she had managed to avoid telling her mother about her many failings.

  She ran to the kitchen, told the women there about their august visitor, and then fetched Mother Crabbe’s morning hypocras from its place by the kitchen fire, ordered a yule cake brought down and sliced, as the only sweet in the house, and washed her face.

  When she returned to the hall, her mother was just making her curtsy. Phillippa joined her, watching the two men under lowered lashes.

  The Red Duke, as everyone called him suddenly, was of medium height, with brown-black hair and a mustache and beard that suited him well enough. Phillippa had a little experience of kissing, and she loathed facial hair, but such was life, she thought with resignation. Beards, pointed or forked, were the fashion with men.

  The man with the duke was as handsome as pictures of the old gods, with a magnificent mane of dark hair that curled, and pale skin, and red, red lips—he looked more like a painting of a man than a man, and the livid scar on his face only made him appear more handsome. He bowed to her mother and then caught her eye and smiled. His eyes twinkled.

  The Red Duke came in, saying something polite about being in the area...fine house...clearing new fields....

  He looked up, suddenly, and met her mother’s eyes. He took both her hands. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

  Helewise was not quite twice his age. She did not burst into tears. “I’m sorry too,” she said. “He was a good man, and he had good years left in him.” She shook her head. “My mother said he was a bad ’un when we were young, and forbade me to marry him.” She looked away, as if looking into the past. “So I didn’t.”

  The duke nodded. “Without him, we would have lost,” he said. “He saved the queen and the young king. He saved everyone.”

  “Everyone but himself,” Helewise said. “Ah, my courtesy is lessened, my lord. Here is my daughter, mindful of your comfort. A cup of hypocras, perhaps?”

  The duke made a face. “Not unless I must, my lady.”

  “It’s very chivalrous of you to come all this way to comfort an old woman,” Helewise said.

  The duke bowed and looked at the handsomer man. “My tutor wanted me to see something,” he said. “I was coming anyway. You are the most distant manor from Albinkirk, and I wanted to reassure you that we have a patrol system...”

  Helewise nodded. “My lord, I appreciate your planning—but Sister Amicia comes here often, and I think her to be a better defence against the Wild than a legion of knights.”

  The duke nodded. “I suspect you are right. Is she here now?” he asked, his voice rising slightly.

  Helewise looked at him with a frankness that he found a little hard. “She is in the fortress,” Helewise said. She smiled—surprising herself, but there was something easy to speak to in the young duke. “My lord—how did you come here?”

  “Please call me Gabriel. I came on the back of that griffon who is, even now, terrifying your field workers. They needn’t be afraid. He is not only gentle but very friendly. Terrifyingly friendly, when he’s hungry.”

  She laughed, and nodded again to the very handsome man. “I don’t believe I caught your name,” she said.

  He smiled. His smile was wonderful—Phillippa sighed, a different sigh than her mother’s. “I am called Master Smythe,” he said.

  Helewise put a hand to her throat and coloured, turning bright red for a moment. “You are the dragon!” she said.

  Master Smythe laughed. “Well—I am a dragon, certainly,” he allowed. “Although, to be fair, today I was a wyvern. And will be for many more days, while I...recover.”

  Lady Helewise curtsied again. “Well, my lords, you have caught us in our shifts, and in mourning. This is my daughter, Phillippa, who, despite her simpering, is a fine young woman. Most of the rest of us are working. If you won’t have hypocras, may I offer a little barley soup? A nice green tea?”

  Master Smythe turned his eyes on Phillippa. “Your daughter is very lovely,” he said. “I would have some green thistle tea, if allowed.”

  Helewise didn’t curtsy again. Her eyes narrowed.

  The Red Duke put a hand on Master Smythe’s arm. “I think the lady of the house would prefer fewer predatory comments and a little more action. She means that the household is busy, and we are in the way. So perhaps you can show me what we’ve come for.” He smiled all the way through this little speech.

  Helewise didn’t turn her head. “Pippa? Fetch the gentlemen some cups. I’ve heated the water.”

  Then she followed them out the door and around the house. To the south, the griffon was so big that it seemed to loom over the field of wheat—a field that, thankfully, needed no work whatsoever so close to midsummer. Master Smythe led the way as if he’d walked over the springy turf of her dooryard and the sheep stubble of her near pasture all his life.

  “You aren’t going to the circle of stones?” she asked.

  “I am, too,” he answered in just her North Country accent.

  “Oh, that thing.” She looked at Ser Gabriel. “It’s very kind of you to—well, I suppose even to know what John meant to me.” Master Smythe kept walking briskly, avoiding sheep dip and goose turds as he went. “I met your mother,” Helewise said. The words just slipped out. She had been hoping to say something—she wasn’t sure what—to indicate that she really did appreciate his coming out here to speak of John.

  Gabriel stopped walking. “You did?” he asked.

  “A month back, or perhaps a little more. She came to our little inn, with your brother and all his entourage. Your brother Aneas was the talk of our hall for a week.” Helewise winced. “But your mother was—formidable.”

  Ser Gabriel laughed. “So she was,” he said. He scratched his beard. “Did you like her?” he asked.

  They had come to the hedgerow that some thoughtful soul had planted hundreds of years before to keep the ring of standing stones out of sight of the house.

  Helewise wished she had a beard to scratch. “Yeeees,” she said. “A little above my likes and dislikes, I think. She was grilling poor Amicia, and Amicia stood it well enough.” She looked at the duke. “Do you love Amicia, young man?” she asked.

  “And now,” Master Smythe said, “we are on very dangerous ground indeed. Tell me, mistress, what do you see?”

  Helewise had known the stones since she was a child. “Seventeen stones standing, and nine fallen. Maybe ten, too. And there—well off to the west—is another. We call him the Forlorn Lover.”

  “You’ve counted them, then?” Master Smythe asked. “How delightful! Count them now.”

  Helewise didn’t need to count. She let out a small shriek, and for the first time in fourteen days, no thought of John and his death was in her head.

  There were eighteen stones standing. One of them, the new one, stood a head taller than the other stones, and seemed dirty, stained with dark earth like rivulets of blood, as if it had risen straight up out of the ground.

  Helewise stopped and put a hand to her throat. “Someone has raised one of the old stones,” she said.

  “Mmmm,” said Master Smythe.

  The new stone was different from the others. It had a curiously convoluted surface, that might have been carved, or might instead have been formed by the sudden fossilization of an infinity of snakes and worms. Helewise knew that some of the
other stones had surfaces full of the stone worms, especially when the plough caught a little of the earth at the base. Most of the worms were eroded away by wind and water.

  Helewise found herself almost frozen. It was as if the stone were attacking her will. She certainly did not want to get closer to it. She wondered, in fact, when she had last been here, in the enclosure.

  “Well,” Ser Gabriel said. “Well, well.”

  Master Smythe placed a surprisingly warm and heavy hand on Helewise’s bare shoulder. “I think, my lady, that perhaps you should go back to the house,” he said. “I forget how—fragile—people can be.”

  He looked into her eyes, and his own were odd—golden, and with pupils that seemed for a moment more like a cat’s eyes than a person’s.

  “You are pregnant,” he said quietly. “Protect your baby from this. Go back to the house. I’m sorry I brought you here.”

  Helewise jumped. His words were taking control of her, but the word pregnant carved through the fear and the subtle spell he cast. Especially as, in the moment he said it, she knew it must be true.

  Ser Gabriel was doing something in the aethereal. She could feel it—she was no practitioner, but like most North Country people, she could feel a working and sometimes even see the threads that tied like to like, that sort of thing. She saw the red power pulse under his hand, and in a moment of sight also saw the lines of grey radiating like a wormy sun from the new menhir. Many lines, like thick spiderweb, but a majority of them reaching for her. For her baby.

  She stepped back.

  Ser Gabriel produced a blade of red light and cut with it.

  The worms became smoke, and vanished, where they were cut.

  “Worse than I thought,” Master Smythe said, very calmly. His left hand opened, and a mass of what appeared to be hermetical bees flew out of his palm—each tiny animicule flew to a single writhing, wormlike strand and landed on its end.

  Helewise turned, free of compulsions, and ran for her house.

  Ser Gabriel continued to cut down any worm that tried to follow her, until Master Smythe’s hermetical bees had done their work. Stung, all the worms drooped, and died.

  The stone became, once again, a stone.

  “Much worse than I thought,” Master Smythe said.

  “Is this an Odine?” Gabriel asked.

  Master Smythe sighed. “Yes and no,” he said. “But just now, more yes than no.”

  “I thought the Odine were all dead,” Gabriel said.

  Master Smythe began to walk around the tall stone. “Hmmm. Hard to explain, really. First off, I’ve never been sure that the Odine are alive—not in the way we are alive. Second, when we defeated them—and I mean we, the powers and our fine human slave soldiers—when we defeated them, we bound them. I’m not sure whether we killed them. I’m not sure they can be killed. I’m not sure, as I said, they’ve ever been alive.”

  “You are so helpful,” Gabriel said. “This is a bound Odine?”

  “Well, I wasn’t here, and I didn’t bind this one, so it is difficult to be sure. But I’ll guess that yes, this is the site on which at least one of them was bound.” Master Smythe suddenly stepped in, like a new lover wanting a kiss, and put his one hand on the stone.

  Gabriel watched a titanic amount of ops flow from the dragon into the stone and vanish.

  Master Smythe slumped and stood back. He pulled his spotless jupon down on his hips and straightened his hood where it lay over his collar. “I have reinforced the wards,” he said. “What you just saw should not have been able to happen for eons. It wanted the new life in Helewise. It is very weak—probably only strong enough to take something unborn.”

  “Take?” Gabriel asked.

  Master Smythe glanced at him like a disapproving schoolmaster. “What do they teach you?” he asked.

  Gabriel looked at him, head cocked. “I never had a class on how to fight the Odine.” He reached out his right hand to touch the stone, but Master Smythe caught it. “Don’t,” he said. “Don’t let it know you. Something is happening.”

  “What, do you think?” Gabriel asked.

  “I didn’t fly all the way out here for the thistle tea or the pretty girl, although I rather fancy both,” Master Smythe said.

  “I think you’ll have to confine yourself to the tea,” Gabriel said.

  “Hmmm,” said the dragon. “I am reconsidering everything I think I know.”

  “That’s not good,” Gabriel said. “But I do it all the time.”

  They both looked at the unwrithing menhir.

  “Do you know the sorcerer that men in Antica Terra call the Necromancer?” the dragon asked.

  “Not personally,” Gabriel said. “Yes, I know of whom you speak. In fact, Harmodius was just mentioning him. It.”

  Master Smythe looked at him. “Do you know what the Odine did?” he asked.

  “This was what, ten thousand years ago?” Gabriel asked.

  “About that,” Master Smythe said.

  Gabriel shook his head. “No,” he said. “I have no idea what they did.”

  Master Smythe turned so fast that his fashionable cloak swirled out behind him. “I should go. I’m well enough to return to my own hold. It is important—that I return.”

  “What did the Odine do?” Gabriel asked. He was following the dragon-dressed-as-a-man out of the circle of stones. He looked back. “And why did you need people—humans—to fight them?”

  Master Smythe led the way back through the hedge and across the field of goose turds and sheep dip. Safe in the kitchen garden, he turned with another dramatic swirl of his cloak.

  “Let me explain. The Odine are not...alive. No, that is not where I should begin. The Odine seem to feed off that quality that, in most of us, makes us alive. I believe that to the Odine, you and I are close kin. No, that’s foolish, you and I are close kin.”

  “We are? What?” Gabriel paused.

  Master Smythe waved his left hand in dismissal. “Another story. The point is, the Odine leech life away, but they sometimes give it. They do not see the world as we do. One of us, who studied them, posited that they do not experience time as we do.”

  “But you fought them?” Gabriel asked. He wished he had Sauce, or Amicia, or Michael to hand. All three were adept at helping him listen to this sort of thing and sort it out. Especially Sauce.

  He didn’t, so he took a deep breath.

  “Well, we fought them. Yes, for possession of the gates and this world and others. But...” Master Smythe looked away. Out across the fields, the griffon was surrounded by field workers and bathing in their admiration. He spread his wings—they all retreated—and for a moment, sunlit, he was the very archetype of a griffon, the heraldic beast come to life, silhouetted against the deep purple mountains in the distance.

  Master Smythe shook his head. “The Odine can seize a living thing, take its essence, and then replace its will with their own.”

  Gabriel could smell bread baking, and he stood in the sunlight of a bright day, but he felt the chill.

  “Even a dragon?” Gabriel asked.

  “Perhaps...even a dragon,” Master Smythe answered. “A horrible suggestion. They can project power from any body they possess. Any one. Well, there are limits...nothing much smaller than a wolf.”

  Gabriel twitched. Just for a moment, he felt a flare of pain in his missing left hand.

  “But why did you need people?” he asked. But even as he asked, he saw it. “Oh sweet lord. Because they had armies of slaves. And you had to kill them.”

  “Every one,” Master Smythe said.

  Gabriel had grown better at talking to the dragon. “What is this to do with the Necromancer?” he asked.

  “It is only a fear,” Master Smythe said. “A fear that possessed me when I saw the stone manifest. I know little of the Necromancer, but I know he has the power to create the not-dead, and he made the Umroth, or brought them from outside.” Master Smythe frowned. “I know that ages ago, Rhun...one of us...went t
o find out what was happening in Ifriquy’a. And he told another of us that all was well.”

  Gabriel nodded.

  “But now I wonder if he lied,” Master Smythe said. “I look at this and wonder if the Odine have in fact returned. There are other signs. Gabriel, this is what I was studying when you appeared at my door, so to speak.”

  “How long have you suspected?” Gabriel asked. “Crap, Smythe, you mean I’m a sideshow?”

  Master Smythe closed both eyes, together, not a very human gesture. “I need tea, and perhaps a sight of the very attractive Pippa, to steady me. I have suspected, in a scholarly way, that something was amiss for half a thousand of your years. But today is different. Listen. I really do not want to tell you too much. I feel our friendship and our alliance is precarious enough. I know perfectly well that if it were not for you, I would be dead, if not at Ash’s claws than at Harmodius’s hands. Yes?”

  Gabriel shrugged. “Perhaps.”

  Master Smythe met his eye, and for a moment, both of them were locked, like lovers, in a gaze.

  “I do not want to tell you the details of my own race or even my part. Because, my dear friend, someday we may be foes.” Master Smythe was looking away now, at the mountains.

  Gabriel nodded. “I know,” he said, without hesitation. “But I will do what I can to prevent that.”

  Master Smythe nodded. “I know.” His face went through a range of patterns. In a human, they would have been emotions, but Master Smythe was like a classical actor trying on masks, unable to choose the appropriate one. The effect was unsettling. “There are not very many of us left,” he said quietly, as if he feared being overheard. “We lost our home, and we almost lost this place.”

  Gabriel nodded. “So?” he asked. We lost our home...

  “So I can envision a future in which I am allied with Ash,” Master Smythe said. “Can you?”

  Smythe meant to leave it that way with his excellent sense of drama. He turned toward the kitchen door, but Gabriel caught him by his good shoulder. “Against the Odine?” he asked.

  “Gabriel,” Master Smythe said. “It never ends. We hold a castle at a crossroads that others want. All the others. This is not a joust, where you can tell the marshal that you have done enough. This is not a child’s game, where you can laugh and take your toy home. The races that live here...this is all we have. And those outside will keep coming. My people are forbidden to fight among ourselves...”