A King in Cobwebs

by David Keck

  “None alive knows their number,” said Heremund. “Your heroic ancestors left many behind in their rush to drive the Enemy over the sea. But this is not one of the general multitude. A great man, he would have been. A hero, fallen. A great man cast down and bound.” What shame could bind so fearsome a soul?

  “Five hundred winters,” said Berchard. “Lost and bound. More! What will become of us? I’ve fixed it for us all now.”

  It was hard to hear Berchard talk this way. Thankfully, then there was a flash as fire bloomed between Ailric’s palms.

  “I cannot believe this door will keep such a thing at bay till— Host of Heaven.” Durand took his eye from the shutters, turning with the others to warm his hands, and saw the room for the first time—along with the things that shared its narrow confines.

  “Why has everyone shut up?” said Berchard. “What is it?”

  Everywhere, misshapen beings crowded the longhouse, groping at the few sticks of furniture, crouching in the cottage corners: abominations thrown together in mockery of beasts and men and worse. These were the maragrim of legend, the drinkers of souls. One mad thing leered through a monk’s cowl, and there was a man’s outsized head sporting the limbs of a crab. The things roiled in tangles. They rocked and slavered. And, as the fire caught, they began to murmur.

  “Durand?” Berchard hissed. “What is that?”

  But Durand did not answer. He had seen a rafter of slack faces, and, beyond the monstrous things, bones—thousands of bones. The mad will of the maragrim had wrenched apart the bones of hundreds of men and driven each thigh and rib into the thatch. Ribs swirled in flat fans, pinwheels. Bands of long bones spiraled around grinning skull after skull. A man might empty the charnel houses of a city without finding so many bones.

  He heard a rising moan: the maragrim in greed or despair, trapped between life and death. The maragrim would drink their souls. The house was their snare.

  “Durand, by the Host of Heaven, what is it?” Berchard said as talons and toes and fingers reached him.

  “We must leave!” Durand answered. “We must risk the thing outside!”

  With a nod from Ailric and cursing agreement from the others, the four shoved their way out the door, tearing a path through the groping appendages of a hundred maragrim and into the clearing beyond.

  Durand imagined that he might hold the giant thing, stopping it long enough to let the others run or ride, but in a few heartbeats he knew that they were not alone. The forest seethed with fiends. Chittering, rocking abominations crowded the bushes. A glance took in bare skulls. Cowls. Animal limbs. Empty visages. And the pulsing carapaces of vermin. He saw Berchard’s horse broken up like a roast among a dozen fiends. The horses thrashed in jumbled talons. And the things from the longhouse tumbled into the clearing around Durand’s men as the giant stared down on the scene, fathoms high and as black, narrow, and still as a long-limbed spider stretched in its web. Durand could see the crown glint high in its hackles, now; a dark horn of bronze curled round its shoulder.

  In the face of all this, Durand might have died then without a murmur, but—only a few steps away—the bastards had Brand. And maybe it was the sight of the red horse wallowing in the hands of the maragrim that woke Durand, but he moved. He caught Ailric by the surcoat. “That river of yours!” Shriker was still standing. Brand was alive. They would ride downhill and hope to hit water before they were overcome. He threw the shield-bearer at old Berchard. “Ride!”

  Durand took a tearing stride and flung himself on Brand’s neck, snatching Heremund up behind him and howling back to Ailric: “Ride! Ride or be lost!” And Brand was away, bursting through the ring of fiends as Durand snarled and swung the iron head of his flail through the bones and scales and God-knows of the maragrim. Brand tore free.

  The trees flashed past, pale as specters but hard as marble. But Durand clung to Brand’s bull-neck as the animal plunged into holes and thrashed on. They were still alive. He twisted in his saddle, spotting Ailric and Berchard jouncing on Shriker’s back.

  Durand rode to open the distance. There had to be a river. It had to appear before a branch or hole threw them all to the maragrim, but he hardly knew where to find it, and the devils were all claws and bounding speed behind him. Durand broke into a clearing of tall grass and saw the Hornbearer, the Crowned Hog, stalking from the black forest, its shins like ships’ prows, striding nearer and nearer with a maragrim flood boiling round its ankles. What hope had mortal men against a thing such as this? It would be easier to outrun the wind or wrestle the bones of Creation. They needed the river.

  Before Durand’s horrified eyes, the forest giant hauled the horn from its shoulders and swung the thing round to its tangled face. But Durand saw Ailric—hardly a pace from the giant’s grasp—sheering away.

  “The river! The river!” the shield-bearer was screaming. He pointed. A way through! Durand wrenched Brand’s head round, vaulting a cataract of fiends to match Ailric’s course. And the giant sounded its horn. The roar of it stamped a hurricane of leaves into the air. It resounded in Durand’s bones. He could not breathe. But, before Durand could pitch from the saddle, the ground tipped away. They hit the running stream and spun and crashed.

  Through glassy blackness, Durand fought to the air and thrashed for the far bank. Brand’s hooves threatened to batter him to death, then the horse was gone, tumbling in the current. Durand fetched up against something solid in the dark: the slime of a piling. There was some sort of pier or landing. Durand groped past the thing in the current and soon felt mud and reeds under his fingernails. He clawed his way up the far slope.

  Their horses had tumbled off into the night—Durand felt a little horror at that. But all four human fugitives had survived the crossing and now lay sprawled among the reeds and willows, unable to do anything more than pant in the dank air. But Durand could not leave the maragrim unwatched for long. He levered himself from the turf and peered through a screen of leaves, noting first the uncanny silence. He could hear nothing but running water and the wind in the high branches.

  But, as he squinted into the dark forest, Durand spotted a glint among the trees. Eyes blinked. And soon he made out dozens, hundreds—thousands—more obsidian eyes winking. And he knew that a host watched him. They were high and low, hanging in the trees and hunkering low like a shield-wall at the water’s edge. This was the war-host of the Hornbearer. And, as Durand watched the silent, insectile eyes, something enormous stirred and the Hornbearer himself strode to the riverbank. Its black eyes were lost in the broad mask of a face rimmed in tusks and horns. In a single step, it might have crossed the narrow waterway, but it did not follow.

  “The river,” said Heremund. “Running water. Thank Heaven. You hear these things, but I don’t know. How can you trust a bit of cold water to keep a thing like that at bay?”

  As Heremund spoke, Durand heard a hollow, comical little splash from somewhere near the maragrim bank.

  “It makes a man wonder,” said Heremund, “what good were these maragrim to the Enemy when the merest trickle could hold them?”

  And then a stone plopped somewhere up the stream.

  “I will confess to doubts,” said Heremund. “How can they hold the fastnesses of the Fellwood? The old forest is veined with nameless streams and bogs and ponds, but here we are.” The skald smeared mud from his forehead. Durand got to his feet.

  Another stone splashed into the river. And another. “We must go,” Durand said. In an instant, a rolling hail of stones poured into the river. And there were bared teeth glinting now from the far bank. How had the things marched the thousand leagues from the Sea of Darkness over land veined with rivers? How had the things crossed this Fellwood with its uncounted streams? A tree—roots and all—crashed into the river, throwing spray over them all.

  The Hornbearer tilted his crowned head.

  “Here!” Durand shouted. “Quick!”

  The giant bent and plunged its spidery hand into the earth, uprooting a grea
t boulder. Durand looked up into the splayed, flat, featureless face. The tusks and horns. The Hornbearer was as still as an oak. Then, with a sudden twist, the giant flung the stone over the river. Clay and water exploded at the riverbank, spattering Durand and his comrades. In another instant, a second long-limbed fling had buried another boulder in the bank. The Hornbearer tilted its head.

  “Run,” said Durand.

  The men scrambled into the forest, colliding with barricades of thick undergrowth as they thrashed and climbed away from the things at the river. Durand pitched between facing hillsides, careering along a rugged track that rose from the landing at the water’s edge. He fought uphill, clawing when he stumbled, catching at the hands of Berchard and Heremund when they fell.

  And he stumbled into a broad clearing—and fifty wild-eyed soldiers.

  A body of armed men crouched in a ragged crescent with a campsite at their backs. They must have been shaken from their cooking fires by the giant’s horn. Now, every man gripped a spear or sword or axe. There was a paddock of fierce war-horses. Tents bulked in the gloom.

  As Durand wavered on the edge of their clearing with Heremund and Ailric and Berchard bowling in behind, a familiar figure pushed through the line of warriors. And there was the damnable Morcar, mouthing the air like a frog. He had found a spear somewhere and he shook his head, eyes bulging. “Black Durand,” he said. “The Devil of Gireth himself, delivered into our hands!” The man seemed to remember the spear in his fist and let the thing fly. Before Durand could slip the thing, its blade had gashed his hip. And Morcar was screaming: “A barony to the man who takes him!”

  The knights of Yrlac rushed Durand, swarming after him or sprinting for the horses.

  Wild, Durand shot a glance at the impenetrable branches and high hillsides. There was only the black ravine behind him as the spears surged forward—no way but back to the maragrim. But, as Durand pictured the downhill charge, he saw one desperate chance and seized it. “Follow me!” he roared and was off again, bolting past a gaping Ailric and Berchard and into the ravine.

  He pelted back for the river and its devils as Heremund howled after him: “Durand are you mad?”

  “Keep up!” Durand replied.

  After a few lashing heartbeats, the black flash of the river swung into view. Somewhere, the maragrim thronged in the shadows. But on Durand’s heels, the Yrlaci horses tore through the branches. In a moment, he must leap into the water with the horses tumbling after him. The horsemen must sense it. But, at the very last, Durand spotted the planks of the landing. There was just time. “Now!” he roared and threw himself down, rolling into the slime and reeds below the landing.

  They slipped under cover just as the Yrlaci horses thundered overhead, blind with an evening by the campfires. The rotten boards shuddered an inch from Durand’s face. The ever-canny Ailric had Berchard pinioned in the mud, and they lay as still as crayfish on their bellies. Horses struck the stream. Some balked. Some collided with bone-snapping force. Men thrashed. Men tumbled downstream. Durand could see a slot of open water under the dock. The whole thing might have been a fine joke between fugitive and hunter had it not been for the maragrim.

  With the river full of thrashing, cursing men of Yrlac, the maragrim wailed in the darkness. Durand did not look away. The Powers had given him little choice. But this was his doing. Long limbs snatched men from horseback. Pouncing shapes ripped men from the water and carried them back into the talons of the multitude. In moments, the surge of nameless creatures swarmed forward, carrying men and horses like a spinning tide. Yrlacies on the far bank had little hope. Some in the water thrashed toward the safer bank.

  Durand clung to one greasy piling, knowing that this carnage had been his wish.

  Ailric slipped to Durand’s side, whispering, “Look.” He pointed at something shimmering at the surface of the water, and, after a moment, Durand understood what he was seeing. Where there had been deep water, now the river brimmed with pebbles. Durand nearly drifted from cover, for here was the maragrim causeway, finished. And, as Ailric pointed, Durand heard stealthy movement through the tangled branches all around the dubious shelter of the landing’s deck. Durand felt his stomach lurch. The maragrim had already crossed the river. Durand risked a look around the deck and saw shapes moving among trees until finally the Hornbearer itself stepped from the trees, tall as towers. And here they were lying at its feet with no way to escape.

  The Hornbearer strode forward, instantly overhead and swinging down. Durand writhed back under the dock, but the thing’s taloned hand snapped wide, catching the deck with sudden force and pulling until the pilings ripped from the slime like rotten teeth.

  The monster’s face hung over the four men, blank as a saddle and bearded with tusks. The four comrades shrank against the slime. The Hornbearer reared back.

  Then there was a sound from the far bank. It ran through the trees and the terrible Hornbearer stopped. Its great horn-shaggy head turned, raining earth and debris onto Durand’s bare face.

  The sound was the long hollow note of a hunting horn, moaning out from another time, and it was the perfect match for the thing round the Hornbearer’s neck.

  “From the south,” Ailric gasped. “South and east.”

  “Leovere! He and his horn are at the Crowned Bones,” said Berchard.

  “He calls the Hornbearer,” said Durand.

  In an instant, the maragrim were gone.

  14

  A Road of Stone and Spirits

  The men crawled and tumbled downriver in the blackness, finally coming up against a bank of reeds and slime and willows. Durand sloshed out of the current and hauled the rest out by their sopping clothes. None of them could speak. And, when something huge loomed out of the dark at Durand’s shoulder, spluttering its hot breath into his ear, Durand gave himself up for dead—until the monstrous creature nosed him and closed its horse teeth on his shoulder. Here was Brand, washed up alive.

  In the end, they found three of the animals alive: Brand, Heremund’s mule, and Shriker. Nothing could kill Shriker.

  No sooner had they corralled the animals than the four men heard voices through the dark. They heard first one call, and then two. Heremund was saying, “This is a lucky thing, finally. I’ve had the mule eight winters,” when Durand clamped his fist over the skald’s mouth. How many of Morcar’s squadron had survived, Durand could not guess, but he didn’t dare risk a fight, not with boys and old men in his charge and a wilderness of maragrim doing Heaven knew what. It was time to get away.

  “Leerspoole,” Durand said. It was a town and must have priests and walls and fighting men. “We must go.” And they left.

  The night was a delirium of trees and clawing thorns. They led the horses when the forest closed in, and when the trees soared like temple columns in the vast silences of the wilderness, they scurried like insects over the empty places, starting at every sound, knowing that the snap of a twig could herald an onslaught of horrors beyond counting. It was dawn before any of them dared to speak.

  “Host Below, where is this place?” said Berchard.

  “I wonder. Was that river the Keen?” Heremund said. They had reached a clearing of high bracken. There was no horizon but trees.

  “Another night like that, I cannot stand,” said Berchard, and, indeed, he looked very old. His skin was white as a smear of lard.

  “That horn!” gasped Heremund. “There we were, like grubs, when that Hornbearer ripped up that dock, writhing against the slime. That face!”

  “I begin to think there is something to be said for blindness,” said Berchard.

  “We may yet regret that trumpet blast,” said Heremund, “moaning out through the trees. So like the Hornbearer’s groaning cry, and from Crowned Bones.” Ailric nodded: south and east, where Leovere’s trail had been leading. Where old King Aidmar had fallen to the maragrim after leaving Uluric to die. Where the Solantines had found the dead king’s crown: Crowned Bones. A man might profit from knowing how t
hose things were connected.

  “Uluric’s Horn in Fellwood,” said Heremund. “He should have left it in Penseval.”

  “The duke’s men burned Penseval,” observed Ailric.

  Heremund gaped for a moment. “That’s twice. Radomor burned it before that. Poor fool Leovere, but what is he doing?” Leovere came to Fellwood full of rage and vengeance, meaning to give Abravanal one last chance, but carrying the forest horn in his bag.

  Durand saw a pair of black birds arrow overhead. Ailric had seen them too. The Rooks settled in the branches of a dead elm.

  “What has the man done?” said Durand.

  Ailric looked back from the ill-omened birds. “The Hornbearer has answered,” he said. It was unlike him to play at guesswork. “That is what I think. We heard a call from Penseval, and an answer from the Crowned Bones.”

  “Now, here is the Hornbearer and his Host.” Heremund was shaking his head.

  “I like nothing about this,” said Durand. “I will not be able to keep clear of Abravanal, after all. We must tell them of this.”

  Berchard grunted. “Durand, you are a dutiful type, no one would deny it, but I fear we’re not in the best shape for riding messenger, lost in Fellwood with all the maragrim from here to the Sea of Storms on our heels.”

  Heremund’s eyes darted. “What strange doom is this that has drawn us to this place, together? What Powers are meddling here?”

  The Rooks laughed. The company was riding near their gray perch.

  “I am muddled as to direction,” said Berchard. “We ran from the river last night. What of it, Ailric? Are we to spend our last day wandering the forest without hope?”

  Ailric had found a stone and was eyeing the Rooks. “We’ve been working north and west,” he said. “We’ve crossed no real river since Last Twilight.”

  “I say we’ve yet to meet the Keen. The Keen is deeper than that trickle last night, even below Leerspoole. Below the falls.”

  “It is true,” said Heremund. “We might reach Leerspoole yet.”