A King in Cobwebs

by David Keck

  “All the hours of darkness have passed since those monks threw us in here. Anything might have happened. Almora is alone.”

  Durand nodded. Arrow loops pierced the far wall of the dormitory. “I will at least learn where we are,” he said, and padded across, blinking into the brilliance. He thought he might get a look at Fellwood. Instead, he found not the wilderness where evil once held sway, but the hard road back to Errest, Gireth, and Acconel. Leagues of clear air hung between the slit and the spot where Coensar’s riders had first sighted the fortress—and no sign of Leovere’s raiders on the leagues of bare road.

  Deorwen stood at another slit. “Arrow loops a thousand fathoms above the valley. What does this say about the minds of these men?”

  “It will have been habit,” Durand said. “And the air is cold. I will try the door.”

  The door opened onto a black passage.

  Durand was surprised by a rustle of mail, close at hand. Startled, he reached for the dark shape, only to be met by metal scales and sudden motion. A weight struck his back as something hooked his ankle, pitching him to the dormitory floor.

  Twisting from the flagstones, Durand jerked his dagger free. But the sight of the man in the doorway brought him up short. He was hardly more than five feet tall, and nearly square in a hauberk of dull steel scales. Under the weight of night’s exhaustion, Durand had hardly registered who these gray men were. Here was one of the Iron Knights of Pennons Gate: a knight of the Solantine Order.

  A dozen of the duke’s men grunted and mumbled.

  “I should not have laid hands on you, brother,” said Durand, replacing his dagger.

  The Solantine hooked his thumbs in his belt, his feet planted wide.

  “We wanted a man on the door,” he said.

  Durand gathered himself up and smiled. “You’re our jailer, are you?”

  “We needed the door shut.”

  Just then, there was a rattle beyond the Solantine and a gleam of light. Someone had opened a door across the dark passage. And, in that momentary flash, Durand saw a face he recognized: a man with the fat jowls of a toad. Durand had last seen him running from the mill in Broklambe. Now, he was here and only across the hall.

  “Morcar!” Durand said, and he started forward.

  This was a mistake. The Solantine moved with the snap of a siege-engine. His hand shackled Durand’s, instantly twisting his arm to the point of dislocation.

  “It is sacrilege, shedding Atthian blood in Pennons Gate,” the Solantine said, his eyes dull as nail-heads. “You and I? We are wrestling on holy ground. It is a perilous thing. One of us might bleed.”

  Morcar’s door, meanwhile, had rattled shut, slamming on the raider’s muffled laughter. But the Solantine waited another few strained heartbeats to relax his grip.

  “There can be no bloodshed here,” the monk said, “though you may go where you like in the company of my brothers—if you’ve good reason.”

  The monk—the Iron Knight—closed the door, and Durand’s gaze lingered on the dark wood. At least now he knew where Leovere and his henchmen had gone. The men who’d burned and killed to get their hands on the duke and his child were just across the passage, and maybe free to wander.

  “I need to see Almora,” said Deorwen. From the flash of her eyes, Durand knew that Solantines and murderers would not dissuade her.

  * * *

  THEY SPENT AN anxious day in the cell, hearing nothing from Deorwen or Abravanal or Almora.

  From the room across the hall, however, they could hear the shouts and laughter you might expect from soldiers throwing knucklebones.

  “My brothers are with him,” was all the monk at the door would say.

  Finally, Durand gathered himself up and had the Solantine arrange his passage through to the infirmary. The knight who played guide did not hesitate or turn as they penetrated the gloomy labyrinth. Evening probed the place. And suddenly, they came upon a long, low room. The Solantine stopped at the door, saying nothing.

  The room was large enough to accommodate a hundred men, but, as Durand peered through the doorway, he saw only one bed filled. Not far from the door, Abravanal lay on a narrow cot between two braziers of hot coals set out to drive the chill back into the stone. Almora knelt. Dark ellipses of melted frost bloomed over the coals.

  Deorwen, who had been perched on the bed, stood.

  For a moment, she seemed as small as some winter hedgerow bird in that stone place.

  “Night is coming,” said Durand, thinking of Morcar and his friends.

  She compressed her lips. “He is no worse,” she said, and, with a glance to Almora: “I will tell the rest, back at the room. I didn’t like to leave them.”

  “Good.”

  He noticed that she was very close to him. Likely cold, but it was she who was suddenly saying, “Make sure you put a blanket round you, and keep one on the girl: she won’t go. Maybe she will lie down. I think she’s afraid that, if she looks away, she will lose the old man. There are plenty of old rugs around this place. Though the sheep and shepherds are long dust who got the wool.”

  They were together in the doorway. And then Deorwen nodded and was gone with one of the monkish minders.

  Durand hesitated there at the threshold as the light drained from the infirmary’s few arrow loops. The Solantine Brothers came and went with plasters and potions. They spoke their charms and drew the evil with wine and saltwater while Almora prayed. Bells tolled through the dim passages, marking the hours.

  Durand glanced into the dark corners. His Lost friends had found him once more—though they flinched when the Septarim tolled the bells. In Pennons Gate, they were not quite the same as they had been in Acconel or the villages of Gireth. Something in Pennons Gate did not agree with them. Still, their shivering darkness brimmed in the cracks and corners, filling passage after passage behind him, they were so many.

  Durand did his best not to think of them. The old man must live. Without him, the king took Almora and no one would stand in Leovere’s way.

  Durand set his jaw and paced.

  * * *

  AS THE NIGHT deepened, the duke’s wracking cough worsened. He thrashed and mumbled as though his soul were wrestling with the infernal Powers. Durand shivered, thinking of Lamoric, dead. And the eldest son, Landast, gone before. Alwen and her child, dead at Radomor’s hands. He thought of his own part in all these things. He had been in the tower with Alwen. He’d seen Landast poisoned in spines of frost. Now, there was only Almora and her father of the whole family.

  Durand abandoned the girl, for a moment, leaving her with Ailric and closing the door on the scene. Deorwen joined him. The duke’s cough hammered against the door like a fist.

  “She’s slept a few hours on the next bed. They are scarcely softer than the floor. She’s tangled all of this up with running away, as if she’d set the fire or burnt the mill.”

  Durand sighed, and Deorwen came close to him then—as close as that night near Towerknoll. She lifted her hand as though to touch his wrist, nothing more. And it struck Durand that there was one dead man not among the shades around him. The man he’d followed, his friend, the man he’d betrayed.

  He almost wanted Lamoric to be standing behind him when he turned.

  Instead, he stepped back inches, saying only, “The girl’s done nothing.” And stalked off through a stirring of inky shadows, seeking space to breathe. He blundered into the fortress’s empty cloister where the stars were sharp as needles. The Farrow Moon was a sickle. There were crude icons under the squat arcades. Some, Durand hardly knew. One contained nine women with linked hands; another was a knight belted to a tree. He saw the twin Warders in their nail coats; their faces resembled acorns or the tapered backs of beetles. Almond-eyed kings glared above their bladed beards.

  Durand stopped, turning under Heaven, thinking that, in this place, the knights and heroes of the long war must have clasped their fists and wrestled with terrors of their own. The stone had a lumpish sheen
like brown wax, polished by uncounted brows and fingers.

  He saw what seemed to be a bird fluttering through the cloisters. But, after an instant, he realized that few birds flew so high. And, in a moment, shadows darted all around him. Durand spun on his heel. A few paces away, an icon beat tall wings—live flesh pinned to stone. Tiny birds—little curls of rock—skittered through the dark.

  Durand got out of the place. He’d had enough of the otherworld.

  Reeling from the cloister, Durand stepped into a towering figure and was half-certain that he faced another Power. There was an icy beard, and a pair of eyes like lodestones in a face of leather and seams. The man stood taller than Durand and was clad to the shins in a coat of scales that shone like new silver.

  “What is it that so disturbs our stone friends, Durand Col? You and your train of dead men have done little that might rouse the Powers from their sleep. Yet they see your doom, I think, and quail before it.”

  “What?”

  “Something comes, Durand Col,” said the strange knight.

  And Durand left him there, that man of ice and iron.

  He hadn’t gone twenty paces before he encountered Ailric. “The men of Leovere’s company are in the passage ahead,” he said. “The Solantines have asked us to find another way.”

  * * *

  THEY WERE SUMMONED to a feast—and, though their liege lord barely clung to life, Abravanal’s people were hungry. The bulk of their own provisions had been abandoned among the carts at the foot of the mountains, and the monks ate the grim, boiled fare one might expect in a barracks with neither fields nor pastures, where every dried bean must be hoisted a thousand fathoms.

  A monk led them to the refectory. The peers of the duke’s retinue sat at its long table alone, squinting up at the imposing ribs of the refectory vaults and the trophies below. Steel and silk banners caught and held the flicker of each candle in their gleaming curves.

  Durand put himself at Coensar’s right hand; Raimer sat at the other. “I would at least hear your mind,” said Raimer. He sounded anxious.

  “When it’s necessary,” said Coensar.

  “It is only that the girl will be the king’s ward. He will be protector of the girl and the duchy both, if nothing changes.”

  Coensar’s attention was fixed on the doorway where the lone Solantine stood.

  Raimer leaned nearer. “And what will Ragnal do with Gireth? With you? With everything?”

  “Raimer…”

  Raimer subsided. “I know. But the man has begged and borrowed in every corner of the kingdom for a dozen years. And I fear he will not be content to pick a few apples from our orchard, but may well cut the orchard for the timber. Or burn it all to ashes.”

  Coensar sighed. “You are worried about orchards, Raimer?”

  And the knight put his face in hands. “Coensar. Lordship. Here is our liege lord, comforted with village simples—an old man. The king might sell the girl’s hand if someone does not move, and, even now, we may be too late.”

  Durand could not decide whether he was furious with Raimer or not. Those around the duke had allowed the old man to hesitate, too meek to force him to do what terrified him. And what would this kindness cost them?

  But, before he could settle his mind, something whispered in the doorway—and there was Abravanal. With Deorwen on one side and Almora on the other, the duke made his way to their end of the vast refectory.

  Durand stood. Every man in the company was on his feet.

  The duke had survived, and so might his people—though he was still as gray and wobbly as a hatchling.

  Durand was not the first to shout “Praise Heaven!” The men swarmed round the tottering duke until the old man had been seated at the board. He lifted his head to the assembled company.

  “I am told there is to be supper. I am famished,” he said.

  The men erupted, crowding round the old man to clap him on the shoulders and wish him well.

  Then they turned to the entrance, where the solitary representative of the Iron Knights stood, still silent.

  “What of it, then, sir knight?” Raimer said.

  “It is the week of the Ascension,” the knight answered, with a puff of pale steam from his mouth.

  “I see,” said Raimer.

  At this, the sound of voices issued from the room’s only doorway. The Solantine stepped aside, and another knight, identical but for a pinched scar that crossed his face from lip to ear, stepped from the dark mouth. In his wake strode noblemen in rich surcoats, with arming swords belted at their hips: Leovere’s men. At their head was a knight neither tall nor heavily built, but standing like a man who could run with deer. Red-gold hair flowed in waves past his shoulders. On his chest was the blazon of a round horn. This was Leovere, would-be successor to the last free duke of Yrlac.

  Leovere hesitated in the doorway as his men found their seats across the long table. To Abravanal, Leovere bowed low. “Your Grace.” And again, catching sight of Almora, “Your Ladyship. I am heartily glad to see you safe.” There was concern and relief in his look.

  Durand stepped between the girl and the traitor.

  The escorting knight told Leovere to find his place.

  Abruptly, from the head of the refectory came a heavy shuffling, and all movement in the room stopped as the Iron Knights of Pennons Gate made their grim entrance. They marched in two long lines, every monk in battle gear: mostly long hauberks of antique design, with horn scales and skirted cuirasses of iron splints. At every hip was a blade: arming swords, swords of war, cleaver-bladed falchions. Under each arm, a burnished casque. Every head was bare.

  There was the better part of a battalion, perhaps seven-score knights.

  By unspoken assent, the ragged strangers to Pennons Gate got to their feet.

  The double file of gray men parted as it met the long table. And finally, when each man reached his appointed place at the board, they moved together. A drum-roll of hollow thuds pounded from down the line as the Solantine knights set helm after helm on the bare boards. Candlelight gleamed in dents and scratches.

  Not a man sat then. Instead, their faces turned back to the old doorway.

  A last knight appeared, but waited on the threshold. He might have been some mad ship’s master. His beard was white as salt and ice, and his eyes were like lodestones. His coat shone like new-minted silver. And Durand knew him.

  One of the brothers spoke in a gruff, foreigner’s accent.

  “Brother Maedor, called ‘the Greyshield,’ Constable of Pennons Gate.”

  This was the tall knight who’d seen the Lost and guessed at Durand’s doom.

  Almora touched Deorwen’s hand. Maedor had been among the heroes Almora had named when they first saw Pennons Gate. How near to the Powers was he? Even the Herald of Errest was a child next to him. When the Sons of Heshtar last swarmed the walls, he had been commander. When the Sons of Atthi threw the giant Hornbearer back into the forest with his host of thralls, he had been roaring on the battlements.

  “Sit,” said the Constable, and a dull thunder followed as the whole congregation subsided onto the benches—all but the Constable. The tall man stood with head thrown back and scarred arms wide.

  “By our Creator,” he said, “by his Queen, by the Warders of the Bright Gates, by the Champion, the Maiden, the Nine Sleepers, by the whole Court of Heaven. It is the Feast of the Horn. I greet Abravanal, Duke of Gireth and Yrlac; Leovere, Lord of Penseval; and Kandemar, Herald of Errest.”

  The pale Herald inclined his head, and the Greyshield answered.

  “Long years have passed, Herald,” he said. “Einred ruled in Errest the Old when last we met. Calamund and Heraric rode to war beyond the Dark Sea, his sons. And Heaven had not yet bound your tongue.” Three hundred winters had come and gone.

  “You are welcome, all of you.”

  Men in Solantine gray served the assembled company, lugging claret as bitter as green acorns and bowls of peas pottage tangled in threads of g
ray salt pork.

  The company ate without comment. Who could dare complain?

  Durand watched the men of Yrlac, noting that Morcar and the principal raiders were absent.

  “I am pleased to see that your health has improved, Your Grace,” Leovere said across the table.

  The old man’s wrinkled face drew itself up in disgust, and he shrugged off Almora’s gentle hand.

  “I hope His Grace does not believe I ordered his company waylaid,” said Leovere.

  “A futile hope,” snapped Abravanal. “A futile hope indeed!”

  Coensar narrowed one glinting eye. “We knew your men. Men from Yrlac.”

  “Not mine. Not on my orders.”

  “And this Morcar who penned us in the fire?” said Abravanal.

  “He has told me that he meant to protect you, but that your man would not listen.”

  “Indeed? Then tell him I shall not survive his protection a second time.”

  Leovere subsided, and the uneasy company supped their pottage and ate a coarse rye bread, tough as rope. Until, without obvious sign, the Solantines stopped. Every one of the men was finished. There was not a bit of bread at any bowl. And, once more, Maedor the Greyshield stood at his place, the candlelight finding the thousand facets of his hauberk’s scales.

  “On this night of the rolling year, it falls to me to recount the history of Uluric and the Horn.” The man closed his eyes for a long moment before beginning.

  There were glances exchanged among the guests. Leovere blinked at the man’s words, or so it seemed to Durand.

  “It was in Aubairn of the Forests, in the days when King Aidmar reigned there in peace and prosperity. They were happy days.” It had been nearly six centuries. “No man foresaw that their doom was upon them. Word reached Aidmar’s court of strange happenings in the south—of an army—that the Sons of Heshtar had stretched their hand across the Dark Sea once more, and that their minion thralls were swallowing up the kingdoms of the south faster than messengers could ride. The Enemy was coming. So the messengers said.

  “Aidmar sent riders to every corner of his realm, summoning the war host of Aubairn to the capital. More than this, wise Aidmar chose also to send the knights of his household to keep watch over his southern marches till the host could gather.