A King in Cobwebs

by David Keck

  Durand could feel the dying man struggle.

  The Rooks looked on, buffeted by the wind. They commented on the passage of each knight.

  After an age, the fits of the man in his arms finished and Durand could relax his grip. He lowered the sentry gingerly to the gravel where he crouched. Exertion had his hands trembling in his sticky gauntlets, but he would not move till the duke was past. And there he was, neatly trapped in the heart of the enemy camp where every man lying in that ring seemed on the verge of waking. He was certain that any motion on his part, added to the muffled scrabble from the track, would be too much. He concentrated on pulling the thin air in and out of his nostrils.

  The duke’s cart bobbed over the rise, with Deorwen sitting rigidly on the bench. When the wind stumbled, Durand heard the muttered syllables of a prayer from Almora. Coensar had sense enough to put them in a knot of fighting men. But to send them across so late was to risk their lives. They should have been first.

  Every grunt and mumble among the raiders, Durand heard. The insides of his gauntlets were wet as fresh guts when he flexed his fingers.

  Finally, the duke’s cart disappeared over the far bank. Packhorses, shield-bearers, grooms, sergeants, knights and their various war-horses, donkeys, mules, and palfreys crossed. Durand teetered in his crouch.

  At long last, the last of the duke’s company had passed across the stone ring, and the eerie procession was finished.

  “A miracle,” said a Rook. “Oh, to labor in the cause of Heaven, brother, where such wonders are commonplace. One might almost regret the path one has chosen.”

  Durand listened, soaked in the blood of murdered men; he doubted very much that Heaven would claim his part.

  “We were forever too inquisitive, brother. You know as well as I that we could never have restrained our various curiosities.”

  “We are, I suppose, as our Creator made us, more or less.” The thing shrugged its dead-bird wings, scattering maggots.

  Durand waited, not moving as the column vanished in the wind. He would not let a misstep on his part betray the girl or her father before they were free. Moonlight slipped down through slender rents in the ragged cloud. Durand watched faint patches of silver slide over the rumpled flanks of mountains.

  There was a sound.

  “What is this, now, brother?” said a Rook.

  From the mountainside above the ring, pebbles bounded down, landing among the sleepers. High overhead, a hulking silhouette stood poised atop the cliff above the ring. The shape was rounded and knobbed—like a set of hunched shoulders and a misshapen head—but was so still that it might have stood there since the First Dawning. And far too big to be a man. Still, he could imagine it springing to life—or giving its butchered-ox howl to shake the world from its sleep.

  “Do you remember that call from the south, brother?” said one of the Rooks. It walked a small circle. He wished they would stay still. He wished they would go to Hell.

  “A voice beyond the mountains! A horn. A call, certainly. Perhaps an answer?”

  “And the very sky shivered from the flames of Penseval to the depths of Fellwood. A call from Yrlac and an answer from some uncouth throat in the wastelands. It is a thrilling start, for we too once answered a call from Errest the Old, though ours was but a dreaming whisper.”

  “A summons of exquisite delicacy, I thought.”

  “Not a braying thing, not the rallying cry of vulgar hosts summoned to break a kingdom.”

  “But where is our Whisperer now, brother? That hidden hand? That weaver of many threads? He is still here somewhere, behind it all. Biding. Baiting. Moving in the dark.”

  They were goading him. Hoping he’d speak up, or crumble. Instead, he watched the misshapen thing on the clifftop, daring the thing to move before he did: gargoyle versus gargoyle. Finally, as he relented—thinking that he was a fool and that a man could not outwait a mountain—the Lost reached the northern lip of the circle.

  He had nearly forgotten them.

  He saw bloated Euric, tottering up the bank. The moon-faced man. The thorn-crowned king. The villagers of Broklambe, black and brittle. The sliding shapes snuffling at the gravel.

  “Now, where has it gone?” said a Rook, and Durand looked up. The high shelf where his hulking doppelganger had stood was empty. But, down below, the dead were already shuffling down into the sleeping camp, worrying at blankets. Men struggled against their cold touch.

  Durand would stay no longer. Silent as the dead, he ghosted through the wind and away. The Rooks stayed among the sleeping men and the dead, chortling and dancing their little circles as the gale lashed them against the turf.

  And Ailric was waiting for him just beyond the rise.

  9

  A Gate of Cloud

  Dawn came, faint and cold, with much of the duke’s exhausted party alive and marching. They never found Coensar’s outriders, though Durand had heard rock falls and strange noises on the heights through the night, and could guess their fate.

  Soon, the long blades of dawn slid up the valleys from the east, revealing the pass of Pennons Gate. Marble-gleaming spans danced through the high twilight between the peaks, and Abravanal’s column rode like looters through the wreckage of palaces. Men sang the Dawn’s Thanksgiving along with the old monks.

  Deorwen appeared on the bench beside him, marveling at the mountains. “I’ve been sleeping,” she said. “I can’t believe it is the same place. Last night, it could have been a tomb.”

  She turned to Durand, who’d been about to rub his burning eyes.

  “Host of Heaven,” she said. “Durand!”

  There was blood caked on his knuckles. He would be blood and soot from the top of his head to the soles of his feet. And, before he could stop her, she’d pulled a rag from the back of the wagon and was wiping at his face. “It is no wonder they mutter about you.”

  “Deorwen…”

  “You do nothing to help yourself. The scowls and scars. These black clothes. Now blood. We were camped by a fresh stream since that fire, and there is soot still. But you wear these things like badges of shame. Or is it to shame all the rest of us? You could be the Son of Morning himself.”

  Durand batted her hand away. He was shaking. Tired.

  She stared at him, startled, but began again: “Ailric has been looking after us through the night. He’s a good man.”

  Durand nodded. “He is. He is.”

  “I saw you with the dead man,” she said, “in that camp. You were stooped low, but I saw what you’d had to do.”

  She looked him in the eye, but whatever might have happened next was interrupted by another bout of coughing from the duke. The frail old man rocked the cart, even startling one of the stolid mules. When Durand looked back, he saw the panic in Almora’s face.

  He twitched the reins, willing the road shorter and the mules faster. He had sworn they would arrive at dusk. But the duke must last that long.

  * * *

  CLOUD SETTLED LOW.

  Each valley became a stone world of its own under great vaults of mist. Time seemed to freeze in the empty air. In the column, shield-bearers and sergeants rode with the gaunt resignation of the plowman or the ox. Exhausted horses balked on rubble hillsides. Men without remounts trudged till they washed up in the column’s wake, sitting on roadside stones, abandoned to Leovere’s thugs and worse.

  They could not gauge their progress in that forsaken place. Durand knew they must be getting nearer, but the crooks and twists of the pass seemed numberless. With every swell, he prayed to see the Solantine commandery, the fortress at Pennons Gate. Instead, each time, they found only another empty gulf, another stone cauldron under its cover of lowering cloud.

  In the end, it was the monotony of these dull hours that nearly killed them all.

  They climbed the flank of a rubble hill—no beginning or end in sight. Then, without warning, the man riding before Durand’s cart took a false step. In an instant, man and horse lost the trail, plung
ing down the steep face in a tearing skid. To Durand it was like watching a rabbit snatched by a hawk’s claws. It left him numb.

  But then he felt the roadbed move.

  The fall had torn the guts out of the trail.

  The cart slid a step or two, enough to alarm the mules. Then, before Durand could get hold of anything, the whole mountain seemed to give way beneath them. Rubble rushed from under the cart, and they were over, rolling, bodies flung the against each other, stones bounding all around. Durand had glimpses of the mules, screaming and twisting. Then, in a hundred, hurtling paces, the thunder subsided.

  They had come to rest under the broken cart. In the tentative stillness, it was all Durand could do to breathe. He had been hammered nearly witless, but he was still alive in the upturned bed of the cart. After a moment, he twisted for a look into the hollow of the upturned bed. The thing was black as a coffin. “Deorwen!” he said.

  Her head appeared. “We’ve got to get him out this.”

  Durand grunted relief. She lived, as did Almora, though there was blood.

  They set to work, pulling out survivors and meeting rescuers who scrambled down the slope. The fall had not been enough to kill Abravanal either, though his breath rattled in him as though he were a hollow thing. They had found a place to lay him on bedrolls and cloaks. He could not have long.

  Coensar had gathered the leaders. “It’s time we gave some thought to what we’re doing,” he said. With the slide and the long night, they would leave many dead men in the pass.

  “Coensar, the duke must reach the Solantines,” said Durand. “There’s nothing for him between here and the Pennons Gate.”

  “Milord Steward,” said Sir Raimer, “you’ll find no man here willing to give up, but dozens are dead already. Half of the horses are dead or will surely be lame. If the men rest, we might make better time.”

  Coensar turned to Deorwen. “And His Grace? How long can he last?”

  “You’ve heard,” Deorwen said. She was daubing blood from his face. Almora held his hand. “He cannot get a breath. I do not know what the Solantines will do for him, but he cannot go on much longer. Even the fall did not wake him.”

  “Ailric,” said Coensar, “by all accounts, Euric dragged you through this pass twice, there and back. You’re the only one of us to have seen this road from end to end. How far have we come? Where is this damned fortress and our Knights Solantine?”

  Ailric did not speak at once, and he began by shaking his head. “There are landmark peaks that travelers use to chart their passage, but…” He gestured at the low cloud above them.

  “No peaks,” Coensar said. “Nothing.”

  The duke succumbed to another fit—the hacking, drowning cough shaking the nerves of everyone who heard it. Almora’s comforting murmur acquired a hysterical edge.

  “We must stop,” said Raimer. “The Blackroots cannot be crossed in one march.”

  “If we stop, how will it be before Leovere’s men overtake us in the dark?” said Coensar. “We cannot have the light much longer.”

  Raimer frowned. “We passed a sort of blind glen half a league back, Lordship. Less. Off the road. We could manage that, I think. Slip back and vanish for the night. Let Leovere’s raiders search how they will. I don’t know how they’d find us in the dark on this stony ground. In the morning, you can make up your mind: send gallopers up the pass to fetch the Solantines; saddle the whole cavalcade.”

  There could be no doubt that Raimer’s plan would leave Abravanal dead. “Coensar,” Durand said. “The men are weary, it’s true. But”—Durand dropped his voice—“the old man does not have another night. Not if he must lie with us in some cold gorge, waiting till morning for someone to ride for the Solantines. We cannot wait.”

  Durand stared into the steward’s lined face. Raimer’s exasperation was clear.

  “He is right. While we can, we’ll go on,” said Coensar, finally. “The duke must have his chance.”

  They rigged a horse litter for the duke, and, with a few sharp orders, the cavalcade lurched back into motion.

  * * *

  OVER THE VERY next rise, they saw it.

  The impossible weight of cloud overhead lifted, and, slowly, leagues of stark mountain valley opened around them. Above their heads, a massif swept a thousand fathoms into the Heavens like a second, barren world.

  “Host of Heaven,” murmured Coensar.

  “It is here!” breathed Ailric. Moment by moment, they saw more of the vast cliff. Some great force had rent the blank face of the mountain, so that a fissure ran from the valley floor, broadening until the half-hidden peak was split.

  But Ailric was not looking to the rent peaks. His eye was on something low, where the fissure began. “There!” he said. The fading mists had revealed a squat tower, sitting like a child’s block at the foot of the split mountain. Where the keep stood, the fissure was narrow—only paces across—and it neatly barred the way.

  “Pennons Gate,” said Almora. “Just as the stories tell.”

  The mountain was named for the white banners that streamed from its peaks when the wind rose in the south. Even now, Durand could see the ponderous banners of fog rising into billows above the double summit, red as copper in the fading light.

  They had come to the modest rear door of the Solantine fortress. It was twenty fathoms to the battlements.

  Despite herself, Almora was shaking her head. Lowland men thought of a wall stretched between the peaks. What the Solantines had built was different, and here they saw behind the stage: a cavernous fissure between mountains, a backdoor keep, a clutter of ropes and landings in the high vault. “Pennons Gate. Two thousand winters barring the pass. Maedor the Greyshield. And the Solantines of old, beating back thralls like a seas of nightmare. Giant Hornbearer, driving maragrim waves against them with all of the south fallen.” The girl’s eyes glowed with the impossibility of it. She could not help herself. Somewhere above was the commandery of the Solantines with its rime-crusted battlements, stained in blood.

  “It is a smaller fortress than I imagined,” said Deorwen.

  “There is more,” said Ailric.

  Quite abruptly, Coensar laughed. “How close you came, Sir Raimer. We nearly turned on the doorstep. It is of such accidents that a man’s fame is made.”

  * * *

  THE GATES OPENED as Durand and Ailric reached the keep, Abravanal between them. The strong hands of ugly, silent men ushered the company into the keep. There were whispers. A thickset soldier with a face of creases scowled over them.

  “You’d best come,” he said.

  The gray soldiers ushered the company through a cavernous tunnel and into a gravel courtyard right at the heart of the keep, where they were led onto a timber platform. The thing had been moored to a stone ramp. Burly hempen cables rose from the corners. “Catch hold of something,” said the creased soldier. “And be thankful: once, we had naught but nets for this work.”

  The dour soldier gave a nod and the men leapt to the lines, brandishing long gaffs. Hawsers creaked tight, and the barge-like platform swung between the naked walls of the mountains.

  They were swayed up from derrick to derrick.

  A dozen of Abravanal’s people clung to the deck with Durand and the duke’s family as the platform rose and the lower keep sank below them. Men on corner stays kept the thing from spinning. Durand knelt against the splintered timbers, glad that his glance found wrought-iron fittings. Ailric looked to Almora. “With Sir Euric, we climbed stairs. I lost count of the steps at five thousand.”

  Stage after stage, they were hauled upward. The Solantines had landings like brackets on the walls, each strung with counterweights and treadwheel cranes. It was a sailor’s work to rig them. But when the party finally landed among the battery of groaning treadwheels in the high dark of the uppermost fortress, the mountains swayed below their weaving feet.

  Two gray knights waited. They picked Abravanal up and made to carry him off. The knight who had admi
tted them even stepped in Durand’s way.

  “The duke alone.” The man’s scowl was like a clenched fist.

  Durand saw Almora’s lips part.

  “The girl’s his daughter,” said Deorwen.

  “We have no nursemaids to follow you about in Pennons Gate.”

  The girl’s eyes were wide.

  “He may not have long,” said Deorwen. “He should not be alone.”

  “Then only the girl. You will not be wandering this place.” With a jerk of the knight’s ugly head, Abravanal and the girl were taken up into the fortress.

  The homely knight remained behind. “Follow me,” he said, and the rest were taken by a lower way to a near-lightless gallery. Their guide’s solitary lamp smeared a slick glitter over the passage walls. His shadow bobbed in a black ring, until, finally, they were deposited in a stone chamber with neither light nor windows that Durand could perceive.

  * * *

  DURAND AWOKE TO the tolling of a great bell. Something masked his face, and he clawed for a foolish moment until he realized that he’d been scrabbling at the iron links of his own chain hood. Overhead were the stone ribs of a long, low dormitory vault. The place was colder than a meat-larder in midwinter, and his breath bloomed white in the air. Somewhere, the deep and trembling harmonies of Dawn Thanksgiving throbbed faintly in the frigid air.

  Prisoners since the door rattled shut, they had slept.

  Durand pried himself from the floor and found Deorwen stealing toward him across the disorder of pallets, bedrolls, and sleeping men. Snow had dusted both the sleepers and the bare floor between.