A King in Cobwebs

by David Keck

  Durand was conscious of a strange ache. He had not drawn breath in the space of many heartbeats, and his living body must then be laying, drowning, leagues away through the night. In the Otherworld, a man could not draw breath.

  “Perhaps I was a coward. You were wise in this, as in all things. I know that I cast much work aside. But now, it is very difficult not to smile, I tell you. They have waged wars for me, made their speeches, righted wrongs, and now our little Hornbearer is among them, and how they will beg.”

  “Say nothing more,” said a voice: a whisper of lips nearly at Durand’s throat. “Someone has come to pay court to me after these long years and darkness.”

  Durand heard the swish and click of someone planting their hand on an iron-bound door. “What is this you say?”

  “A stranger.”

  The darkness rustled all around Durand in that gravelike chamber. Durand felt countless fleeting touches. Now Durand was addressed: “Stranger, I know you not. Yet you have found me out in my ancient hiding place. Who are you that my doom delivers you in this late hour?”

  Durand did not answer; he could not. His teeth and tongue were leagues from that spot.

  There was a savage rasp. “So many winters undisturbed, and now … This is the work of the Powers. This is doom. I have lain here these long winters waiting, tending the seeds of oaks that must grow and fall to plant the seeds of my desires.”

  “What would you have me do?” said the nobleman beyond the door. He had been forgotten.

  Again, the darkness stirred all around Durand.

  “Who are you?”

  Durand felt a sensation like eyelashes against his cheek, of the drape of crawling webs across a dark passage. A thousand thousand threads were passed around his wrists, his throat, and past his lips and teeth.

  “Who?” demanded the Whisperer. There was terror at the touch of this thing.

  Somehow, Durand recoiled. He was not a thing of bone and blood in that chamber, but rather a dreamer’s soul. The whispers burst like a nest of adders.

  But now Durand was beyond the door.

  He beheld a man. The figure knelt, pressed against the iron-bound door, hands splayed over rotting wood. There was a candle. Vast shadows juddered down a tunnel, black as a well. Durand could only see the man’s back, and a mantle of fine, dark wool.

  “He is here!” said the crouched figure, flinching from the door. Rising.

  As the man stood, Durand saw faces, packed tight as white apples, crowding the narrow tunnel from floor to ceiling—men, every one as ugly and avid as the next. And worse, by their grins, Durand knew that he had been seen.

  The grinning mob lunged, their touch like being speared by the tines of a rake, but Durand struggled, throwing himself from the bloodthirsty delight of the howling fiends.

  “Catch him! Keep him! I would know who spies upon our conclave. Bring him!”

  They were like cats upon a landed fish, but Durand lashed. He tore. And, finally, he broke free.

  Durand’s unmoored soul plunged into the empty darkness of the Otherworld, alone.

  Then he might have been a sailor, pitched overboard on a sudden, into a calm and midnight sea. On that still, dark sea under a black and starless sky, the soul of Durand Col was without pain, without memory, with hardly a trace of duty or regret—and, almost, without thought. In that wide-eyed blindness, he thought of nothing; he was nothing and no one. The lulling power of the place took him in its gigantic grip and he closed his eyes even on the drifting void.

  But a sound—it could not have been a proper sound—reached him. It reached him as if over leagues of empty sea. Something knocked, distant and echoing. Tock. And the still world shivered. Tock.

  Durand opened his eyes then.

  Far overhead, a light hung in the darkness: a solitary glinting thing like a burnished coin nailed to the firmament, high and huge as the Bitter Moon.

  He could do nothing but stare.

  The silvered disk then swelled larger and larger, until the thing—an unblinking eye—loomed as large as a world.

  It was then that Durand Col heard a familiar voice, a breath over that sea that was no sea.

  “Durand, no,” it said.

  And Durand’s faraway soul felt hands on his distant flesh. He felt smooth skin against his cheek, and he was once more upon Creation, once more among those who lived and died upon the world. He lay in the broken furrows of some plowmen’s acre with half an army staring down. Deorwen cradled his head in her hands.

  She pressed her forehead to his, managing only to say his name as tears wet both their faces. For several heartbeats—and there were heartbeats—memories returned to Durand: his name, his duty. They settled upon him like coats of iron mail. Last of all, he remembered the reasons that he must not hold the woman who had summoned him back from his dream of death.

  “Durand, you are very far from us.” Deorwen sat up, knuckling tears from her eyes. Almora was near. Garelyn. Mornaway. Everyone. “You fell from your saddle. You did not breathe.” She swallowed. “You were very far from us.”

  Durand shook his head. Not a soul in the field was speaking.

  “I dreamed,” he said, “but I can hardly say of what.” He recalled much of what he’d seen: the vast unblinking eye, the narrow chambers, dark currents, and the sense that years of waiting—the plots that had brought the Rooks to Radomor, that threw down the sanctuaries, that left a king hanging in Acconel. Sieges and tragedies scattered over years. All of these things were coming to an end, and he—the landless knight from Col—would be caught in the midst of it all. “Everything moves toward its conclusion now. Kings and starlings and traitors and whispers. We ride toward the end.”

  He climbed from the ground to his horse’s back, conscious of the listening multitude around him in a way he had not been before.

  They were watching as he nodded.

  They rode at his signal.

  29

  Battlefields

  The army reached the River Cygnet at a muddy, empty village that Heremund, in a haunted murmur, named “Wethers Bridge.”

  “What is the smell?” asked Berchard.

  “A flood,” said Heremund, “by the looks of it.” The street was a mire. Doors stood empty. The stains of high water spread their traces upon the whitewash, and the army rode between silent houses full of shadow.

  “And the people?” asked Berchard.

  It was Durand who answered: “No sign.”

  The Wethers Bridge itself still stood—a covered wooden affair, quite long and full of carved Powers that beamed and glowered down upon the army as the host clattered and rumbled under the black beams and shingles.

  It was like taking an army through a church, though it rumbled like a barn. But the din of their crossing did not disturb the creatures they found upon the far bank.

  Ravens, rooks, crows, and brown eagles ringed a meadow. They were like moldering windrows, like dark spectators. They encircled the trampled acres like a sullen tidemark. Beyond, where thorns hedged the meadows, wolves, perhaps, or feral dogs, wove sly circles.

  “Many must have died here,” said the Duke of Garelyn, looking at the creatures. “But the beasts do not enter the field.”

  Durand rode into the trodden ground with Heremund and the men of rank, and Almora behind them. Durand hopped down with Ailric. He saw hoofprints by the score, squad after squad moving in disciplined ranks. There were banners, bloody and torn. Trappers. Broken horses. He turned to Ailric, who had his fingers in one deep track.

  “Hours only,” Ailric said. “No more.”

  Here was a host fully as large as most dukes could muster, riding across Saerdana. Who were they? Durand bent. He could see the marks of nailheads in the clay as if the riders had scarcely gone.

  “All white,” said Almora.

  “Hmm?” said Durand.

  “The banners, the pennons. They are, all of them, white.”

  Ailric provided an explanation. “The Knights of Ash. The
Septarim.”

  Berchard was nodding. “The Holy Ghosts. You remember, Marshal Conran and the rest at Acconel. The man’s a giant—a one-eyed giant!”

  Meanwhile, Durand stood and tried to read the sweeping patterns that the battle had left on that torn meadow.

  “It would have been full dark, the Cygnet over its banks. The Farrow Moon growing old.” Across the meadow, there were regular marks in the turf. Mounted men had waited in still ranks. “They watched the thralls heaping stones. They waited for the things to make the crossing.” Durand could readily imagine what the Ash Knights saw. Perhaps they’d had the villagers evacuate before nightfall. Perhaps they came too late and heard the maragrim about their work in the dark lanes. “They could not squander their few knights.”

  Almora was looking over the field. There were lances. Here and there, a sword lay in the grass. The men upon the bridge were listening.

  “Marshal Conran will have wanted a crowd—enough that a charge would tell. And then they came from the dark.” In his mind’s eye, Durand saw the white banners and burnished mail. He saw the ashen lances strike deep into the grotesque mobs of the thralls, ripping hundreds from their feet, impaled on razor spears. “The thralls were torn by lances. Scores went under the iron-shod hooves or were driven into the water.” Flailing, screaming.

  Durand walked the bank. Almora took his hand. He helped her over the rutted ground and sucking mud. In moments, he had found the high-water mark. There was a great fan of ruined earth, and he knew that he’d found the place where the maragrim had stepped into the meadow. “There were so many thralls. Even with hundreds caught on the ford, more crossed the river.”

  Almora did not relinquish his fingers.

  Durand imagined the hideous creatures on all sides, like the waves on a hellish sea. “They were here. The knights fought.” There were so many marks in the damp earth. He saw the clear prints of long-fingered, gripping hands. He saw clawed gashes and barnyard marks of pigs and goats. And then he saw the marks of the Hornbearer: huge, deep, and long-toed. Blood tinted the crooks and angles. White surcoats, stained. No men. White banners, swords and lances like half-erupted teeth. Trappers and no horses. Conran the Marshal would have made his stand here like some wild ship’s master. So much blood.

  Almora nodded. Her dress was marked with blood.

  There was something else over the meadow, as if the mud had been scattered with white chips of wood.

  Ailric, a step behind, had crouched. He did not touch the strange fragments.

  “You can see here where the Hornbearer left his mark. The Knights of Ash stood before the fiend here and were struck down.” All of this Durand saw before he could snatch his fingers from the mud. In a spinning instant, he had seen it all.

  The Duke of Garelyn was trailing behind among the commanders. Now, he spoke. “Ragnal banned the Knights from Eldinor.”

  Heremund was staring into the southwest. “Not within a day’s ride. That was Ragnal’s command. We are not much more than that now.”

  Garelyn blinked. He tried a bluff grin. “Stiff-necked devils, the Knights of Ash. Many’s the man who would have left the king and his kin to fend for themselves after such treatment. But they came here. And it must be confessed: the Cygnet was well-chosen. They will have stolen hours from our Hornbearer. And it might be that many of the devil’s host will not rise after this bit of work.”

  It was Almora who spoke next. The place had clearly shocked her. “The beasts will not enter the field.”

  “What do you mean?” said Berchard, but no one answered.

  “Perhaps, the thralls are here, even now,” said Heremund. “Under the sod.”

  “And where are the fallen?” wondered Garelyn. There was not so much as a horse. “Maybe a sign that some fought till morning. Lived to see to their brothers.”

  Ailric was still crouched low, examining the ground. But now he looked up. “These chips,” he said. “It is bone. Splinters of bone, tens of thousands,” he said. Split for marrow.

  And so the Knights of Ash had not left the field. Not a soul among the Host of Gireth spoke for a time.

  Heremund had not taken his eyes from the rutted ground. “I never thought I should see the end of the Ash Knights in Errest the Old.”

  Half the army looked on from the covered bridge, like a host in an inn yard, and the dead were all around—men broken up for marrow bones. The House of the Knights of Ash was empty now, and open to the wind.

  And the beasts of battle who bulked around the field, they would not come. Durand wondered if the maragrim were still here, trembling below their leavings.

  Durand looked at the men on the bridge.

  “I think the Knights of Ash have stolen hours from the Hornbearer. A night maybe.” Uttering the thing’s name conjured an image of that whole vast horror curled under the mud, a knot of roots and horns. “We must not squander a moment.”

  * * *

  THEY RODE THAT day in near silence, with the Rooks flapping before them.

  As the host lumbered from village to village, their advance set plowman’s dogs to barking. From field to field, the dogs sounded the alarm so that every house and barn was shut up and silent when they passed, but the village shrines were a different thing. Every one rang with chanting voices while their rude idols craned from their niches. Their haunted eyes followed the company. Men counted omens in the flight of birds, a fox flushed by the horses, a deer that stood transfixed in the steaming path.

  Durand wondered about the messengers Almora had sent ahead from Dunnock. Had they reached Eldinor? Would there be an army waiting for the Hornbearer?

  It was nightfall when one of Almora’s men galloped in. Durand joined the urgent crowd of knights surrounding the man, catching hold of his foaming horse’s bridle and helping the man down. “Heremund,” said Berchard. “What is it? What’s he got to say?”

  He was a rangy young man with down on his cheeks and a child’s brown eyes.

  Durand addressed him. “What have you seen, lad? Is the prince in the city?” There was much that they must know.

  “Your Grace,” said the young man. He could hardly breathe.

  This was when Deorwen stopped them. Very deliberately, she got the man the space to breathe and a skin of wine, and even summoned a camp stool from the Garelyn baggage.

  Soon, there was a polite circle of commanders waiting on the haggard boy.

  It was Lady Almora who spoke.

  “Now,” she said, “Lady Deorwen has saved you a moment to recover. They’ll have questions. We all will. I suggest you tell the story.”

  The messenger nodded. “Aye, Ladyship. We rode out from Dunnock as you bid us, and made good time. A man alone, you understand. Not an army. We made Eldinor.” He winced. “It was this morning, but— We hired a boat at Scrivensands and rowed across. The place was empty. Or nearly—the city itself. All the Council knights had ridden out, but the city was thick with those birds. Starlings, like the things in Acconel before the king.… Anyway, there was something. I don’t know. Kenard, he went in—took the ring to the Castle, the Mount of Eagles. We thought one of us had best wait. I was to give him an hour or two.” He frowned. “Kenard never came back. And those black-robed devils, court clerks or the like, I saw them sniffing about. I thought sure they were looking for me.

  “Someone had holed our boat,” he said. “They were waiting. I stole another, or I should not be here.”

  Garelyn laughed wryly. “We’ll hang you when you’re finished.”

  “Also, the ring. Your Ladyship. They’ll have your ring. The seal.”

  “Don’t think about that now,” said Almora.

  Durand scowled. “What of the Council Host? They could not have been in Eldinor long, and already they had left?”

  “They’d only just gone. In Scrivensands, the man we had the boat from, he said the knights had ridden to meet Eodan’s Host of Windhover.

  Heremund chose this moment to grumble. “Eodan’s host? The fool man
. What a time for such games!”

  “Prince Eodan was coming from the southwest. Maybe he was in Cape Erne already. But he’s crossed Mornaway and the Glass, and he’s in Saerdana. The Scrivensands man, he thought there would be a battle.”

  “Mighty soothsayers, these sailors,” said Garelyn.

  “Who knows more than a ferryman?” Berchard said. “Ain’t much they don’t hear.”

  Durand did not say, “There will be no army in Eldinor.”

  He looked up into the Vault of far Heaven. Already, the maragrim would be awake, rising from that bloody meadow at Wether Bridge, stalking the dark, gobbling up the ground at Durand’s back. And now the whole army of Gireth was off to fight Prince Eodan. A day’s march, it sounded like, and they would have left Prince Reilan in that cist below the high sanctuary with none but priests to defend him when the Hornbearer came.

  Cool night breezes moved among them all.

  “We are in your debt,” said Almora. “Heaven willing, we will see Eldinor before long.”

  “Aye.” The man nodded. He planted his knee on the road. “Aye, Ladyship.”

  Almora smiled. “In any case, I am afraid that we can offer you little rest.” And there was no safety for a man left behind in the path of the maragrim.

  The man nodded a sharp bow. “I would not be left behind.”

  It was foolish, but Durand wanted to cry for the poor man. Maybe for all the poor men behind them as well. Deorwen stood very near, and Durand found her hand in his, unnoticed in the moonlight. Durand squeezed, but then let go.

  “We will ride for Eldinor,” Durand commanded. “Let us see how soon we can reach it.”

  * * *

  IN THE NIGHT, they heard uncanny sounds. Eerie shrieks and calls echoed from the distance. Soon, though, the whole of Saerdana rang to the barking of plowmen’s dogs. From the terror of these beasts, the army knew that the Enemy was there in the dark and not far away.

  But, despite their certainties, the Eye of Heaven rose before the Hornbearer could overtake them. The Eye split the horizon. A few men sang out with Dawn Thanksgiving.

  “Dawn, is it?” said Berchard, wincing. “I’m not sure I expected to see it.”