A King in Cobwebs

by David Keck

But for all that Biedin was full of devilry, Durand was faster. The broad point of Durand’s blade found the prince’s gullet.

  Then, with a striding wrench, he pitchforked the scrabbling prince from the cist. The shrieking man’s jaw took his weight. Durand jerked the point free—but before the prince could gather himself, he swung the blade back around, swiping the prince’s head from his shoulders.

  The corpse sprawled across gleaming glyphs and toppled candles, and Durand balanced, one foot on either side of Reilan’s cist.

  He could see the prince asleep at the intersection of every woven sign. Shoveling the madman off had seemed like the only thing to do.

  Now, it was over. Now, there might still be a kingdom. There might be some reasons for all of the dying outside: Coensar and Leovere and all the rest, it might not all be wasted.

  “It is done!” Durand called to Deorwen. “Now, the fight!” He tried to spot a ladder. There would be men dying every heartbeat, but he didn’t like the idea of leaving Reilan unattended after all this. “Would you stay with the boy, Deorwen?”

  Deorwen had found a plain wooden ladder and was already skidding the thing down into the sacred hole and following it down.

  There was a quick hug. “Oh, Durand.”

  Durand felt tears.

  The dead man’s body was still half-heartedly groping at the floor.

  “The rite would have roasted him,” Durand said, but Deorwen was looking down at the boy.

  “I’ll have the priests down as soon as they finish their vigil. Host of Heaven, he looks so small in this tomb for grown kings. I’m not sure he’s warm enough. Old Oredgar should know better. And that Semborin! And here he’s still asleep despite his uncle. I feel we’ve all something to be ashamed of … priests and everyone. The crown seems big as a barrel.”

  Durand could not suppress a huge, brigand’s grin. He had his hands on the ladder when he thought he saw something moving in the spiraling sigils, like a thread tugged down one of the gilded channels.

  The Powers give a man no more warning than this. He should’ve moved at once.

  The prince dropped from the hole, straight into blackness.

  Gray webs jumped in every line of the ancient sigils. The boy was smothered, cocooned—and then torn right through the floor of the stone cist, beyond Durand’s reaching fingers in an instant.

  Ragnal’s sword clanged, out of sight.

  With hardly a glance at Deorwen, Durand plunged headlong into that black void in the floor, catching at skeins of gray web. He tumbled down the broken stone into the dark, crashing to a stop in a corridor, with a bloody jaw and torn hands.

  From the corner of his eye, he spotted something alive in that space—a man-like thing had been watching, as still as a spider. Now, it crabbed backward and Durand was upon it. The webs fouled his blade, but Durand launched his weight against the apparition. In an instant, the thing’s brittle fingers struck out. It cracked Durand against the ceiling and down upon the floor, lashing him about like a rabbit in the jaws of a hound.

  In the very same instant, Durand’s head exploded with whispers. Here was the voice of the mountains. The voice that had summoned Leovere of Yrlac and drawn the Rooks from beyond the Sea of Darkness. Thousands of thoughts spun through his head. The thing had been knotted around the very heart of Errest.

  He could not think.

  But, in the faint traces of candlelight that found them through the broken cist, he saw. A wizened thing hung there in the maelstrom of its own gray hair, its beard plastered against the ceiling. Durand stared up at the Whisperer.

  The voices were still.

  “You are the thing that Whispers!”

  Durand saw images. They burst before his mind’s eye. The Blackroot Mountains. The rotten forests of Fellwood. Battles far away. The Rooks. Radomor of Yrlac brooding in Ferangore. Radomor hanged.

  “It has been you!”

  Now, he saw different images. Errest the Old in ancient times. Banners on the ramparts of Eldinor. The Mount of Eagles full of light. A king’s face and priests. Years in the dark. A wooden door.

  The Whisperer writhed, hardly larger than a child. A dry curl of a thing.

  “Who are you?”

  The thing tugged and Durand was off the ground once again, smacking the ceiling, the floor. A maelstrom of images poured over and through him while he was still stupid with the blows. He saw war in a desert land. The banners of Errest and stranger arms from across the Atthias. He saw princes, giants, thralls, and maragrim in all their nightmare shapes.

  Finally, he was blinking up at the death’s-head pucker of the Whisperer’s grimace.

  At that moment, something clattered back where the ceiling had come down.

  Deorwen had come to gather up poor Reilan. And Durand wondered if, just perhaps, she might get free.

  Durand drew the Whisperer’s eye.

  “I saw you. In my dream, I saw you. You were happy to whisper then, but not now. Now, I see you as you are.”

  The shriveled maw opened wider. The claws twitched.

  “You are the one who dragged himself home from the wars. The one Willan buried.”

  Durand hoped that Deorwen could get clear.

  For now, a scream stabbed through Durand and the whole of that dark place. Durand closed his hand upon the hilt of his blade. The tunnel might have been a torrent then. And Durand flew from wall to wall. He got a fist on the old corpse’s neck. The baleful cold of the thing jabbed through his knucklebones, twisting and prying at his joints. Coils of hair lashed around and around him, binding his jaw shut. Choking his mouth and nostrils.

  Then the scream stopped.

  Ouen’s sword was trapped against Durand’s ribs. Ragnal’s blade was paces—leagues, they might have been—across the floor. And Durand was nearly finished. He hoped Deorwen had got the boy away, but then, with the last guttering flickers of awareness, he spotted Deorwen and the boy. Already, the tendrils were coiling about them. The sleeping boy. The last woman in Creation that Durand would have allowed to see harmed.

  As the coils flinched tight around Durand, something clinked from the floor. Maybe a bit of silver from Durand’s purse …

  But the Whisperer twitched back.

  Deorwen was no fool. She had seen the creature shrink, and she snatched a red glinting thing from the floor.

  “Was it this?” she said. In her fingers was a gold and garnet ring, the one from the Lindenhall. The same garnet, the same serpents.…

  The Whisperer shuddered backward.

  “Just who are you then, you old devil?” Deorwen breathed. She had the ring held high. “The old ring stirs something in you.” She twisted the thing. It winked.

  “Shut away by Willan Blind—a mercy. Came up from the war. That’s you? Kandemar has been talking.”

  She stepped free of the gray webs.

  “Who would be so trapped by shame that the Enemy could bind him three hundred winters? Who would see the ring and remember shame? Kin to Willan Blind. A Prince, then. Shamed by the ring. Not Calamund the elder. Not the heir. Was it the second brother, then? Is that who you were? The second brother. You loved the girl too, didn’t you? Is that what this was?”

  The Whisperer watched, as still in his gray mane as a dead lamb in a whorl of dry grass. The bare holes of his eyes stared.

  “But you gave your brother the ring. Did you not? And in the fighting far from home. Across the sea. Did something happen?”

  She watched the dead thing, gauging its discomfort. “In the riot of battle, did you slay him?” A hiss. “No … a smaller treason. A hesitation. A warning unspoken.”

  The thing twisted.

  “You loved that girl and you held your tongue or stayed your hand—just a moment—and he died, your brother,” she said. “And thus, they had you. You are Heraric. The Lost Prince, buried alive. And you’ve been here. Lifetimes passing in the city above. Wars and kings and princes. Your kin entombed beyond your door while you whispered here, a maragrim prince
.”

  The truth of Deorwen’s assertions flashed past Durand’s mind’s eye. He saw a battlefield. He saw a stalking thing and a warning too late, and it was enough: this prince of maragrim broke his frozen silence and sprang for Deorwen, forgetting everything but hate.

  And Durand had an instant of freedom.

  Durand tore Ouen’s old sword free and flashed the blade at the fiend’s back. The wild swipe had caught the neck bones, and the devil’s head was off.

  The tunnel erupted. The Lost Prince lashed out in all directions, but the dry hollow of its skull had come adrift. Durand sprang upon the thing, driving the blade home—digging and tearing and gouging at the bony torso, the head, the clutching hands, till finally the storm subsided.

  Deorwen had the boy prince and was hauling him away.

  Durand found himself crouching upon a shriveled curl as dead and as dry as sticks in a hearth. Had this been the man, the prince? Near three hundred winters since his dying day. Untombed.

  One of the Lost Princes, found now.

  Durand looked about them. And realized he knew where they were—or he knew the door, at any rate.

  “When Hod brought us below the palace, when the king and the starlings were out for our blood, he led us to this secret way. Me and poor Lamoric. A choked tunnel led to the crypt below the high sanctuary, but there was a locked door between. It was this door.” The Whisperer’s door hung open. Durand reached toward the doorframe. “He was here, even then. Right at the heart of the wards, a canker in the very bones of Errest the Old, whispering like a spider on the wards. And Lamoric and I walked by.”

  Durand looked down the tunnel, thinking of the proud Mount of Eagles, remembering as Hod guided them to the narrow entrance to the tunnel. “He said this was where he found young Biedin, lost three days. He was here.” The notion chilled him. “A boy, running off. A boy’s fears and pride and jealousy—and he found this thing. This Whisperer. What poison did that devil pour in the boy’s heart?” He thought of the twitching corpse among the candles.

  In a few moments, scores of priests were scrambling down the broken hole. They seemed hardly to notice Biedin’s twitching remains or the husk of Heraric. Instead, they fought for a place before the boy and put their foreheads to the floor.

  Durand found Patriarch Oredgar. Old Semborin could not have made the climb.

  “Father. What—”

  “He is king.”

  For a moment, Durand blinked.

  “The rite is ended,” Oredgar continued. “He is King of Errest the Old, and the Wards of the Ancient Patriarchs rest upon his shoulders. Semborin has said it.”

  So the king was a child, and only now blearily waking.

  Beyond the wall, however, the battle was still raging. And now there was a king to fight for. A king—and perhaps the wards bound the kingdom a little tighter.

  Durand stepped between the priests and caught the boy up. “Your Highness—lad—they need a king at the wall.”

  The boy blinked into Durand’s face, and Durand felt like another of the monsters who harassed the child.

  “You should decide,” he concluded.

  Deorwen gave Durand a look, but Durand only waited.

  “Let us go,” Reilan said.

  * * *

  DURAND LED THE whole company into the streets. Deorwen had the boy, and Oredgar of Acconel strode at the head of a hundred priests of Eldinor. Durand noted a backstreet shrine of the Traveler, real pennies nailed up for eyes. Durand had little idea what he was doing. He knew only that the Whisperer and all the rest had wanted kings and clergy out of their way. Now, he would bring every king and clergyman he could lay his hands on.

  They ran.

  “A breach!” said Oredgar.

  Durand caught hold of King Reilan’s little hand and the fighting was right before the wall. Three hundred men had reached the street. Biedin’s door could never have admitted so many men. Things screamed in the breach. A towering rent stood in the old wall, seeming to hang like a jagged bit of sky.

  Something larger than a wagon shot through the gap, exploding above the crowd in a rain of timber and plaster. They covered their faces.

  The Atthians had fallen back—had been driven back—into the gap. They would have been dead without the breach as a bolt-hole. The thralls could not be allowed to reach the safety of the streets.

  “What do you mean to do?” said Deorwen.

  “We must get a look at the enemy,” Durand said. “Come!”

  Durand bulled into the crowd. He saw Berchard flailing, and Heremund with him. In twenty paces, Durand found Almora with her father’s broken sword held high like a talisman.

  “The tide!” she cried. “A moment longer! We must hold them!” as the Atthians fought hard to keep the enemy beyond the breach. Already, the maragrim were leaping onto the backs of the Atthians. Two hundred men held the jagged opening. The maragrim surged wildly against the Atthian lines, and all courage and loyalty in Creation would not hold the thralls back.

  The press jostled Durand and the breach itself. He saw the broad tidal flat—and the half light then beginning to touch the Heavens glinted on the broad green of the tide. So near.

  “Host of Heaven, it is true,” he said.

  Something long-limbed with a peasant woman’s face rolled over him. He struck. The massive obscenities climbed into the breach. The Atthian line was scrabbling back. Thralls spidered up and around the broken wall. Mad things lashing fists and talons, driving men back. Hauling them down. Too slow, the spreading ripple of the onrushing tide crossed the flat.

  Durand spotted the nearest tower in the curtain wall. The collapse of the wall had torn a ragged gash in its side. This might be a place to rally.

  “Come!” said Durand, “or there can be no kingdom!”

  He led the boy, tearing toward the flank of the ruined tower, hauling him up into the cleft and then stumbling higher into a half-ruined stair that shot them in and out of moonlight, with the priests upon their heels.

  Durand thrust his head into a moonlit gap where the wall had tumbled away. Over the broad sea of dull mud and eelgrass, he made out a slender arc of silver spreading over the flats, rushing onward, spreading. Below, he saw the fight. A few hundred men tried to hold the Hornbearer’s Host. He could see the waves coming—too late.

  He heard Almora’s defiant screams. He saw Coensar’s Hesperand Knights, and Leovere’s last Yrlacies. Eodan and his rear guard were overwhelmed. The fighting men of Gireth and Beoran and Garelyn were all scrabbling backward, with the thralls swarming over them. The wave was coming, but it would be too late. The maragrim would be in the streets.

  There was the Hornbearer, flinging stones.

  Durand turned to the boy. “Maybe there is a place for a king here,” he said.

  And Reilan climbed into that notch of moonlight. He must’ve seen the wild battle below them—the Hornbearer, and the dead men torn across acres of mud.

  But the little boy pushed himself into the gap. He reached back, and somehow fearsome Oredgar knew to pass him the jeweled hilt of old Ragnal’s sword. The glistening crescent of the tide swept nearer.

  Durand helped the boy out onto the broken flank of the tower. And, as Durand looked on, the thousands of horrors in the field staggered. They gaped up: twisted men, monsters in human clothes, babes, beasts, and fishes.

  All paused as that child tottered for a moment on the ruinous tower and thrust Ragnal’s blade at the pale Heavens. There was the King of Errest, the crowned child, the first knot of the patriarchs’ wards, and the whole web snapping tight. And, above the ancient city, his blade transected the first ray of dawn.

  The thralls were spellbound. A glint from Reilan’s blade flashed over a thousand wide eyes.

  The deep had unleashed the tide of Eldinor and the great wave rolled nearer and nearer, its hiss and roar shivering in the tower. Not one of the maragrim stirred. The froth of the expanding wave hissed in the twilight while the Atthians scrambled ashore. The
wave was rushing through and not a thrall of the Fellwood Host was moving. The king and his royal blade had transfixed them all.

  The Hornbearer turned its hideous eyes upon the young king. Somewhere in that dark mind, the thrall must have understood that the hopes of Errest the Old hung completely on the child atop the tower.

  The Hornbearer plucked a massive stone from the slime. And, even before Durand could seize the boy to throw him clear, the Hornbearer had flung the stone through the battlements like a spear through a man’s teeth. On the tower, everything was blood and splinters. Priests had become a mess of rags. But Reilan tore free of Durand’s hands and raised his sword yet higher. The tide was rushing over the flats, and the Hornbearer knew its peril. It charged.

  In midstride, the giant snatched up a stone like a cowshed. Beside the king, Durand could only wince as the monster wheeled its arm and struck the tower again. They felt the heavy shock in their knees. Then, a dull thunder rose from the hollow bowels of the old turret. “Host of Heaven,” Durand snarled, and he felt his stomach roll as the whole top of the tower pitched like the bow of some ship plunging over the end of Creation. Oredgar called upon half the Powers of Heaven.

  The tower fell, and they rode it into the bay. Men screamed on its stairs and thralls were in the water all around. Durand had the boy by the wrist.

  The tower exploded into drowning mountains of water.

  Durand got hold of the boy’s tunic and hauled him up as the rubble of the tower subsided into the salt waves.

  * * *

  HE MUST HAVE taken a knock.

  He woke, blinking at the silver crescent of the Farrow Moon, full of bruises. The rush of water at his ears brought him round.

  The thralls were drowning. And Durand lay on a new and painful spit of land. The rubble had made a new jetty beyond the wall, where the tide swirled the last of the thralls from Creation. He saw a hand, a helmet, a long beetle-back. And they were gone.

  Closer to hand, he beheld a mystery of broad yellow petals thrusting up through the rubble. Only slowly did he understand that these were hanks of priestly cassock and that there was much blood. He saw the battered soldiers of Errest scrabbling at the bank, hauling stricken comrades from the waves, letting the maragrim lash against their fate.