A King in Cobwebs

by David Keck

  “So, they’ll be waiting,” Deorwen said. “Trying again to snare us.”

  “Aye. Likely,” agreed Durand.

  “So we rush straight at them, hoping the Powers of Heaven will grant us some advantage at the last moment.” She tugged her cloak tight.

  “Such things have been known,” said Durand.

  “Sir Durand?” said Ailric.

  “Aye, what now?”

  “There is another thing. I cannot be certain, but I’d wager they’ve added to their number.” He shrugged. “It’s all stones up here.”

  “I suppose I was childish to imagine that there might be a shred of hope, was I?” snapped Deorwen.

  Durand shook the reins. “If your wise women have any magic for the mountains, we might be glad of it soon.”

  * * *

  HERE AND THERE, Durand saw signs of the ancient bones of the pass: tall stones jutted from the roadside, the inscribed rock aglow in the twilight. Almond-eyed Powers and serpentine beasts writhed across the stones—their tails, tongues, and tendrils hopelessly interlaced. Here in the wastelands of Creation, only the Wards of the Ancient Patriarchs kept the Banished at bay. The cavalcade crossed bridges. Balusters from broken railings high overhead lay by the trackside here and there like tusks. Impossible though it seemed in those days, pilgrims had once raced back and forth through the chill pass, muttering charms but carrying on a living trade when the Atthias were young and the Fellwood full of men. The track had been hewn from living rock straight across the mountains, and the patriarchs of the day had consecrated every stone against the haunted peaks. Now, who knew what remained of those ancient defenses?

  Durand rolled past a tumbledown roadside shrine. Uncanny Powers in alabaster beamed from the interior gloom. From the flagstones grinned an idol’s head, unperturbed at having been lopped from its shoulders. A black void had been opened in the floor, as though some spirit of the wilds had torn its way from some crypt below.

  His thoughts tended this way as the light failed. Among the peaks far above, he could no longer tell stone from Heaven. Everyone was anxious.

  “What was that?” said Almora’s voice. The girl appeared at Durand’s side. Her dark eyes glistened very near. He did not know how long she had been there. It surprised him how pretty she was, but she was very frightened.

  “A shrine. Heaven knows,” he managed. The girl looked out through the back of the cart as the company left the little ruin in its wake.

  Without a further word, she settled back at her father’s side.

  Shadows brimmed up from the depths of every gorge. Moment by moment, they rose like the waters of some dark wellspring until, soon, the flood engulfed Creation.

  * * *

  DURAND SWAYED PAST twilight and on for midnight. Knights jockeyed around the cart but seemed no more solid than ash and shadows. Once, rocks tumbled from high overhead to scatter across the track as pebbles no larger than knucklebones. Men grumbled questions about what was there to knock pebbles down. But Durand was certain that no man from Yrlac could have found his way so near the black vault of Heaven. Beyond that, he dared not inquire.

  Clouds that had hardly stained the sky at sunset now smothered the steely sliver of the Farrow Moon. There was only the sound of iron shoes falling, the rustling twitch of the cart roof, and the sound of the girl behind him.

  She prayed, whispering at her father’s ear. The old man coughed. Durand stole a glance back, but she noticed the motion before he had turned his head. In the black shiver of Almora’s wide eyes, he felt like a bear creeping under a manger door. He should have known their danger at the mill and kept their guard close. He should have let Euric talk, or argued him down. Kieren might have done it. Much could turn on a moment’s thought.

  Now, the girl prayed—and they were rolling toward hard men in the dark.

  As Durand brooded, something in the high rocks called out.

  There was a moan—not the old duke, but something from invisible cliffs.

  Tack jingled up and down the cavalcade.

  “What in the Hells?” asked one of the knights.

  “Host of Heaven,” said another.

  “What is it?” asked Almora. Deorwen unwound from her crouch as well. She’d found a knife.

  Durand twisted on his seat, the whole cart flexing under him as he scoured the black steepness of the horizon for the source of the sound. “Wind, maybe. My father’s hall stands at the head of a lesser pass a dozen leagues east of this place. Odd stones and hollow gorges can lend their voices to the wind.”

  “You hear strange things by the sea as well when the wind gets up,” added Deorwen.

  Then the moan filled the gorge once more. It bellowed out as if an ox had been butchered somewhere among the crags.

  Almora’s face appeared at Durand’s shoulder. Her lips were open.

  Durand felt that he should say something to cheer her. “This pass is much grander than little Col of the Blackroots,” offered Durand. “Blessed by the Ancient Patriarchs. Kept by the Solantine Iron Knights. I remember Heremund the Skald saying that the ropes the builders used to haul the stone were woven of maidens’ hair gathered from the silver combs of a thousand bowers. He said the workmen’s calluses smelled of rosewater.”

  He tried a smile, giving her his few broken teeth, anyway.

  She looked no happier for it.

  Deorwen set her hand on Durand’s wrist.

  There was no new sound.

  * * *

  THE WIND VISITED them in the high places.

  Durand felt the track swing upward and, with a twitch of the reins, the mules hauled them to the face of a precipice high above a great chasm. An oxcart would have toppled over the brink. And it was still so very black that the weight of a glance seemed to crumble the peaks like a bit of charcoal. Gusts tugged at the willow cart and Durand prayed for the sense and senses of the mules on the too-narrow track. From time to time, some idiot’s voice would quaver out, certain he had seen something. Durand felt trapped, like an ox perched on the tinker’s worn bench. But he resolved that his imagination would not terrorize him—until he heard a shout that even he could not deny.

  It came from behind them, this time the voice of a man. It was a chilling battlefield sound: a yelp of hopeless terror. The trail was too narrow for easy passing, but riders galloped back, flickering in and out of sight. Coensar’s stiff face flashed past. Durand glared back through the barrel of the cart.

  Finally, Ailric popped his head round.

  “Sir Waldhere, a knight, riding rear guard.”

  “What of him, Ailric?” said Deorwen.

  “The man’s gone. His comrade saw nothing.”

  Deorwen spluttered. “I can see nothing, even now. That moan. It might have been anything with this wind. I’ll not wager on monsters yet. In this darkness, it’s more likely he’s followed his blind horse over the brink, poor man.”

  Durand could just see the track, but the whole white belly of the road slipped away when he tried to fix it in his eye.

  Durand wondered whether this Waldhere was another on his account. It was Durand who’d bullied the cavalcade up into the pass; now the man would not come home. Durand supposed that he would soon know, assuming the Lost could catch him on this long ride.

  Silence returned.

  In the cart, the duke rambled, and Deorwen slipped back to his side. Almora’s clear voice spoke comfort. Deorwen did sensible things, Durand was sure.

  “How far do you think we’ve come?” she asked.

  “Hard to know with the Farrow Moon a sliver and these clouds. Ailric may see something when the light returns.”

  As they spoke, the echoes changed.

  Creation had opened wide before them, and now a burly crosswind bowled out of the dark to wrestle the wicker cart. They had lurched out onto a stone bridge, and there the wind was really blowing—a proper storm, if a man could see it—and the pale deck was no more than two carts wide, with the greedy blackness beyond the wheel
s devilishly close.

  High on that bridge with the wind making a game of lifting the tinker’s cart, the butchered-ox groan rang out once more, this time beyond doubt. The animals shied, and Durand held tight, waiting for the one bolting horse to come barreling out of the wind to knock them all into the dark. But no runaway came.

  Ailric appeared from the gloom at the hip of the tinker’s mule, a pale face and staring eyes. Durand flinched.

  “Hells, boy,” he said.

  “There’s something up there,” was Ailric’s reply, and Durand was down in an instant, the flail clattering loose in his fist. At first, Durand couldn’t hear Ailric in the wind. He seemed very reluctant to shout. They rushed forward, telling every man “halt” and slipping past the few knights in the vanguard to a point where Ailric suddenly crouched low.

  The wind nearly knocked Durand off his feet. Even with a load of rain and damp, his cloak flapped like he’d got an eagle by the neck.

  They faced bushes and rubble on the far end of the bridge. “Here,” Ailric said, whispering hard and close against the gusting wind. “I’d been riding ahead, trailing the vanguard. Not far. Saw something move.” Behind Durand, the whole of the column was invisible, the tossing head of every horse had vanished as if it had never been.

  Ailric was pointing. Durand thought, maybe, he caught a bitter smell in the wind. “We should get them out of here,” he said. “But we’ll never turn the column on a bridge. In the dark.”

  Something moved, white as bleached bone against the bobbing roadside brush. In a moment of wild impulse, Durand rushed at the thing. In an instant, he’d struck, his full weight hammering a surprisingly human grunt from the shape. Durand rode the stranger to the ground. The spot where they landed stank of the shit and the sour wood-smoke reek of a man.

  Durand mashed the man’s jaw into the gravel. “Who are you?” But he got no answer. He twisted until the man’s joints popped. “Answer me!”

  “I am a crossbowman … Leovere’s.”

  “Hells.” It should have been impossible. Durand’s thoughts scrambled over the catalog of fatal possibilities as the wind snatched at his cloak: ambushes, spies, and stealthy attempts at kidnapping. It should have been impossible. Where were Coensar’s scouts? This man must be one of a party stealing back to attack them on the bridge.

  “What’re you doing here?”

  The man managed to choke out, “Sentry.”

  “Sentry?” A sentry was no part of an ambush; Durand put a fearsome pressure on the man’s shoulder.

  “We’re camped ahead. Lost the light. A camp! Just there,” he panted.

  Durand looked up, and, with a dull horror, spotted the lumpen shapes of many sleeping men only a dozen paces away, in a sort of a ring-shaped gravel plateau. They had walked right into the enemy’s camp. And, with the wind knocking the bushes about, Durand thought they were all getting up. The man had just stepped off to void his bowels. With hardly a thought, Durand cracked the butt of his flail over the stranger’s temple.

  The camp was very close, and they could risk nothing. He had to wipe a stinging splatter from his eye. Ailric nodded.

  “What’s happened to Coensar’s outriders?” Durand demanded.

  Ailric cupped his ear, not hearing.

  Behind them, Durand could see nothing of the bridge or the waiting column. An animal snorted. He heard somebody chatting. There would likely be another sentry. He winced up into the black-on-black horizon for any sign, but saw no one. Still, only a fool would leave one guard on a camp of fifty.

  “Ailric, down the line. Everyone’s to shut up and hold still. I’ll find Coensar,” said Durand—far too loudly. But the boy heard him. They separated.

  Durand met the steward at the bridgehead, appearing from the dark to catch his horse’s bridle. “We just caught one sentry. He was bent over emptying his bowels right there.” He jabbed his finger at the bushes. “The rest are just up that bank. You could throw a stone at them if the wind wouldn’t take it.”

  “My lads can’t have trotted right through an armed camp,” Coensar said.

  “Those boys are dead, or sleeping, or lost. It doesn’t matter now.”

  “All right. We cannot go on, but we’ll never turn this lot on the bridge,” said Coensar. “There’s no getting off.”

  Durand pictured a chaos of men and beasts jostling on the narrow bridge only to be struck by fifty fresh raiders just when the column had got itself most tangled. “We’d be better pitching His Grace over the bridge and saving the sweat.” What could they do?

  “Did you see Leovere?” Coensar asked.

  “I didn’t go poking around in their camp.”

  “No, of course.” The man glanced into the hundred shades of coal and soot and ashes ahead, following the smudge of the path. “But you will. We all will. There are nothing but damned high rocks ahead; no path fit for a horse anywhere but straight through that camp. There’s no other way.”

  “We have enough men,” said Durand. “They don’t know we’re here.…” They must swarm the camp, blades in their fists. Throat after throat before a man could wake. It would be grim, but they’d sworn to keep the duke alive.

  A gust caught Coensar’s cloak. There was rain in the air. And the wind bowled through like a slap. “We’ll muffle the horses the best we can.”

  “You mean to ride us through?”

  “Maybe this blasted wind will help us.”

  “Coensar, if so much as a single man wakes, we are fighting for our lives, with the duke and his daughter right in the midst of it.”

  Coensar ducked close. “Durand, our men won’t do what is in your mind.”

  “These devils are asleep. That is our chance. It’s not what anyone would want, but Leovere’s men would treat us no better.”

  “No matter what we say. Almora, Deorwen. Half the knights. They won’t, if it kills us all.”

  The wind roared between them. “Kill us, it may.” But Durand could not slit fifty throats on his own. “I’ll head to this camp of theirs,” Durand said, finally. “Keep your eyes on me. If they’re not moving, I’ll wave you on.”

  “Take care. We won’t survive a mistake.”

  With a nod, Durand was off. Keeping his head low, he mounted a steep bank to reach the stony lip of the camp’s plateau. Once there, he realized that he was looking at a sort of ringwork. There was a ditch and a bank studded with a broad circle of idols, like a jaw full of dull teeth. He set his hand on the pointed head of one limestone Power, toppled and half-buried in the heather. On his right, a steep mountainside brooded above the gravel circle of the camp.

  There had to be scores of hips and shoulders.

  A low tent or two jumped and rumbled like tethered beasts.

  He saw the big, hump-backed shapes of horses across the clearing to his right, almost invisible against the mountainside. Coensar’s scheme was madness.

  Durand hunkered low on that windy bank, holding his cloak in fistfuls to keep it from betraying him. From time to time, one of the lumps in the ring would roll from back to shoulder. The tents jolted against their ropes.

  After an age, Coensar signaled from the bridgehead, mantle lashing. And Durand could only call the column across.

  It was Durand’s guess that the road had once skirted the circle. In another age, that track had fallen and so, now, the track humped over the bank between the idols. Thankfully, most of Leovere’s men had not chosen to bed down near the road.

  As the first horse stepped out, the Rooks plopped down on the ridge at Durand’s knee. It was the first he’d seen of them since Wrothsilver. They had to grab at a knot of gorse to hold on.

  “Brother, despite these tiresome winds, we have found brave Sir Durand!”

  “And we have arrived at the very moment of decision! See how, at our hero’s word, his allies creep across the raider’s camp.”

  A knight led his horse up onto the rise, and, stroking the muzzle of his mount, walked the beast into the ring. From where Duran
d crouched, he could hear the gravel under each muffled hoof.

  “How the listener will incline his ear when, someday, the tale is told. I can see them cringe when they learn of the second sentry, blithely walking his rounds as the duke’s men are helpless and—”

  Durand shot another glance over the camp, this time spotting someone: a standing figure, on the far bank. Here was the second sentry, looking off toward Pennons Gate, far across the camp.

  One of the damned Rooks opened its dagger mouth to speak, but Durand had already gone, running a tightrope between the sleeping raiders while Coensar’s first fool tiptoed by. With every step, Durand was sure he would stamp his heel into someone’s gut or trip over an out-flung arm. He ran with his breath caught in his teeth.

  From Coensar’s side, another knight crested the bank, leading yet another horse.

  The sentry’s eyes flashed, and Durand struck, swinging one arm around the man’s head, lips smearing apart under his fingers, dagger hooking round to gash the man’s throat. Together, they slipped from the bank into the camp among the sleepers, tottering, nearly stamping on hands and feet. Blood, like warm oil, pumped over Durand’s fingers, but he held on, crushing the man’s lips shut, swiveling to survey the camp around him. He’d fetched up in the remains of a cooking fire. The risk had been mad, but the camp remained still. He crouched low with his still-twitching victim, not daring to flinch himself.

  Another horse entered the ring.

  The Rooks landed right at Durand’s feet. “Oh, valiant! Oh, brave! Such decision, brother. Where the others quail at doing the necessary thing, Sir Durand throws his soul into the service of his fellows. Where is their honor, that they allow such a sacrifice from so gallant a champion?”

  Durand gritted his teeth and held the sentry tight, like some parody of a lover. He was slick with blood.

  But what else could he have done? Even now, a horse’s snort or man’s stumble would turn the camp into a butcher’s alley. Each passage gambled the duke’s life. Coensar had done one thing right: they made no more noise than the wind. The riders that jagged across the camp passed almost like trooping spirits. They had used every horse-thief’s trick. Durand saw rags stuffed through the rings of bit and bridle. Hooves had been knotted in cloaks. Men shivered in shirtsleeves. And, oh, but they were praying, calling the Powers of Heaven down to that place in the roaring wilderness with every sinew.