by David Keck
Every room that they entered, every passageway, men threw themselves upon the shutters and doors with axes and iron bars. And the dawn broke through. Bright planes and blades shot through the gloom, driving thralls cringing before them.
* * *
THE HALL OF the Hazelwood Throne was a vast place, nearly as lofty as a sanctuary and treed with columns in glittering rows. Gems bulged in the twilight, glinting like uncountable mute and lidless eyes as Durand brought the boy onto the bare patch of floor before the dais of the throne itself.
Durand paused while half a dozen black-clad men flapped down a side passage.
Almora stood tall.
Heremund explained. “Turnskins, men call them, not maragrim. The turnskins went among the Sons of Atthi as brothers and sons and children. Bulging in dead men’s skin.”
As the last starling vanished, Durand scowled. “They are not like the maragrim when they see the Eye of Heaven.”
“But neither do they care for its touch,” said Heremund.
Deorwen had her hand on the child’s forehead. “He is not dead yet. This will set old Semborin running.”
“Now we must see about the boy’s mother.”
Deorwen caught her lip in her teeth.
Durand could feel the old throne above them. Under garnet, gold, and beryl were timbers felled upon the Shattered Isle, before the Cradle landed in Errest the Old. Undaunted, Deorwen commandeered one of the old feasting tables and some of the least unsavory pallets. She probed the king’s stiff abdomen and worried over the heat of his brow as Durand laid him down.
Durand knew himself to be no nurse, and so he looked to the defense of the boy in that half-haunted old hall. “Men at the doorways, Ailric,” Durand said. There were many doorways in that gloomy forest of pillars. Two hundred men would not be enough to guard them all, and he did not have half so many.
Durand thought of the boy king’s order. He had sworn to find the boy’s mother, so he could see only one way forward. He took hold of Ailric’s arm.
“Nothing must harm His Highness, Ailric. If the Patriarch cannot reach him or priestcraft cannot prevail, that is doom. But no thrall will touch him while any of you lives.”
Ailric nodded. He must have seen how Durand eyed the passageway to the royal chambers; how he filled his lungs and set his teeth.
Almora was no fool. “Let us send men with you.”
Deorwen shook her head. There were tears in her eyes. “There are not men enough, and he will not unspeak his word to this boy. He will not let his king die for being a boy and loving his mother.” Very pointedly, she did not look up. Her lips were a stiff line. “He will go.”
Durand wished he could do or say more, but there was the boy king dying, and there was the Lady of Gireth, his betrothed, looking on with poor Ailric. Ailric was still holding her hand.
Durand left the Hall of the Hazelwood Throne and took the stair to the lady’s chamber with whispered directions from men who knew the Mount of Eagles better than he.
* * *
WITH OUEN’S SWORD in his fist, he climbed a corkscrew stair with his shield between him and whatever might come barreling down. Soon, though, he was putting his head into a broad passageway. Mail made it hard to hear. He saw slashes of light slipping between shutters here and there. He twisted his neck, thinking that the last devil had nearly torn his head off. The royal apartments were along the passage. There were meant to be stools at either side of the doors to that apartment. Durand stepped out.
At one shadowed door, he saw two stools. And, when nothing leapt on his back, he moved closer still. The door was set deep. What he saw was unbroken, but scarred. How long would the thralls have been loose in this place? Till the Whisperer died, the things had been on a leash.
Durand moved through a curtain of light.
He wondered if the thralls had given up. The door was stout and there must have been easier pickings among all the passages and storerooms and kitchens of the palace. Then three lumpish men uncoiled themselves from the shadows of the deep doorway. All three smiled, but every one was spattered with the grim evidence of their ravenings. In their eyes, Durand saw nothing more human than a bit of glass.
“Ah,” said the closest one. It winced nearsightedly. “What a night it has been! Yes. Quite a night. With these … things … at liberty … in the Mount of Eagles.” The thing managed a shaky bow. There was something familiar about the face; the black-robed creature seemed to feel likewise. It tilted its head.
“It is Sir Durand, is it not?” The thrall pawed a drop of something from his upper lip. Embarrassing. “You came to this place. Lamoric and the hostages. You were his man. Ten winters, or nearly. Hod took charge of you.”
Durand remembered the creature. “The Master of Tapers,” it had called itself. Boiling tallow somewhere beneath the palace. And it had not changed, though its hesitant progress left a heron’s splayed track every second or third step. The Master of Tapers was absentminded.
Durand felt the grip of Ouen’s sword through the mail and leather palm of his gauntlet. Tapers was not alone. And three of the things would be too many for Durand. He thanked the Powers that door had held.
The Master of Tapers cringed low as it bobbed nearer: three paces now. Durand was desperate to find an advantage.
“Her Ladyship is within, we believe,” said Tapers, “but we cannot know. She will not answer. The door is barred. Or there is a barricade.…” The fiend’s eyes glinted blankly. “Perhaps some harm has befallen her.” It remembered to blink and took another step. “We must know.”
With these final words, Tapers was near enough to strike. Its jaws flashed wide—belt to brow in an instant—and its clawed hands sprang.
But Durand was not fooled. He bulled straight at the thing, knowing that few would have dared such an act before. He drove hard behind his shield, jamming the cover into the scrabble of teeth and claws till he had the devil on its back.
Durand spun then and swung in a new direction. A second thrall, not ready, pitched into the rising arc of the blade. Its face and shoulder flew free, the bilious flesh bursting.
From the floor, the Master of Tapers caught Durand’s mailed leg in its teeth and talons. Nearly, Durand fell, but rage and terror kept him upright. He drove his blade down. And the devil dodged free, yielding the leg for a moment.
Two remained. One tall and baggy, the other, old Tapers. They watched him.
Durand staggered past a window. The thing had been painted black, but there were flaws. Durand’s shadow flitted across the face of the tall one and it winced.
Durand backed a stepped into the alcove where the window hung.
Meanwhile, the tall turnskin stepped forward. He was all jowls and a high gray skull. His jaw lolled, and a tongue like a skinned serpent jumped among the knife-blade fangs all up and down.
As Durand stepped before the blackened glass, the thrall leapt.
And Durand collapsed at its first touch, making a fulcrum of braced arms. The monster was airborne, levered high in a wrestler’s throw that sent it crashing through the black glass.
Though Durand had struck his head, the devil was done, and now the passageway blazed with the Eye of Heaven.
But before Durand could clear his head, the Master of Tapers was leaping left and right, bounding like a jungle cat through the blades of light, impossibly quick and strong. More sudden than an adder, it snatched the long sword from Durand’s fist. Another slap from the shadows cracked Durand against the window frame, cartwheeling him into the passageway. For good measure, the floor stamped his mouth full of blood.
Tapers swarmed forward while Durand gulped at the air. It flung Durand onto his feet and thrashed him from wall to wall. He broke one of the queen’s stools. He tumbled into the alcove by the door. Then he saw it gathering itself. The vast mouth dropped once, then its lips—as long as a fat man’s girdle—twitched in a big slack grin. It leapt.
In the same instant, Durand’s head and spine struck th
e queen’s door, and the old door broke. He landed with the broken door slapped flat beneath him and then the thrall’s fingers were in his lips, hard as iron hooks, wrenching while the warped face slathered above him, full of stink and teeth.
Durand caught at the thrall’s arms, at the black eyes, at the slack and rippling features—at the raw gory thing now only half-hidden by its stolen skin. This creature could not prevail.
The thing’s eyes crackled with glee.
In that moment, Durand caught a glimpse of Queen Engeled herself as she looked on. Her room had tall, deep windows, all shuttered. Things shone in the gilded walls. She had been trapped with the devils wheedling and beating on the door. They would have her next.
He thought that she should jump for it. Choose a window. It did not matter. There might be drain pipe.
And, as if answering his prayer, Engeled threw the shutter wide.
The thing on Durand’s chest hissed.
The woman should have jumped. He saw her foot on the windowsill. But she had seen the devil react and suddenly she was on the move.
With a bound, she crossed to the next window, darting up and throwing the shutters open. Plane after plane of bright dawn fell across the room, and the thrall writhed in the face of it. The Eye of Heaven blazed on every gilded wall.
The thrall crabbed backward and Durand could do nothing more than blink at the image repeated in gold leaf and polished stone: there was the thrall cringing before the Eye of Heaven, dragging itself from the room and into the safety of the passageway.
There was a swirl of skirts through the light and the queen was before him. She had one long shutter. It flashed like a sail high over her head, and she drove it axing down on the thrall.
Again and again.
Even to find her son, the Queen of Errest did not leave Durand, though he could not blink the fog from his aching head.
“Years I have lived in this place, surrounded by these leering devils.” She clutched herself. “I find that I am shaking.” The bright walls of her chamber shone upon them. “You will take me to my son, Durand Col. You will wake up and take me to my son. He is alive or you would not be here.”
Durand’s tongue would not answer, but he allowed himself to be helped to his feet and let the Queen of Errest nursemaid him down the many damnable stairs of the Mount of Eagles.
Deorwen and Almora ushered the queen close to the unconscious boy while Durand supported himself on a pillar nearby.
He peered up and down the ancient hall, seeing doorway after doorway, each with some poor solitary knight standing guard—as if any man could stop a thrall who meant to do the king harm. Breathing deep cost him a spasm of pain. They must find a bolt-hole somewhere. Somewhere they could defend.
Deorwen looked into his face. Her glance skittered over him, seeing torn seams, bruises, blood, and nails uprooted.
“The king’ll have a shrine,” Durand said. “We should take the boy to the king’s shrine.”
It was the queen who answered. “There is such a place. It is not far. Follow me!”
* * *
THEY LAID THE boy before an altar with the breeze from the Bay of Eldinor spinning in the vaults and broken windows. Almora and Deorwen brought water, making useful rags of an altar cloth. Durand packed the shrine’s two doors with fighting men and stood watch with a drawn blade. Soon, Patriarch Semborin appeared, bringing a better healer: a lean man who had worked in city hospices. Long fingers probed the boy’s ribs. And the knee was viewed with winces.
When he could not help himself, he watched the boy breathe.
All the while, Reilan’s mother held his head in a delirium of hope and dread, and hours of prayer and watchfulness passed while the doom of the realm waited upon a small boy.
He was not well.
* * *
THREE HOURS AFTER Dawn Thanksgiving, Heremund stepped out to learn what had become of the city and the host.
Two hours after Semborin muttered the Noontide Lauds, the Duke of Garelyn appeared at the sanctuary door with Maud of Saerdana and the Duke of Beoran in tow.
Very nearly, Durand ordered them to wait, but, nose-to-nose with Maud of Saerdana, he relented. Despite long nights of perilous flight and battle, she looked every bit the ruler of two dukedoms. Beoran, following after, now seemed nothing more than a beard and sunken eyes.
“Look whom I’ve found,” said Garelyn. “Spent the night in a stout oak wardrobe, it seems. And I’ve led them past some nice bright windows to see if they flinch or shrivel.”
There was a flutter of offense from Beoran; Maud merely peered past Durand, her eyes on Reilan.
“Sir Durand,” said Maud, “will he … how is His Highness?”
With the child’s mother so near, Durand would say only, “We are watching.”
“Of course,” allowed Maud. “Of course, Sir Durand. The poor child.”
The woman slipped past Durand and descended upon the boy. The queen had to give her space. “The poor thing. So brave. His father would have been so proud.”
Durand blinked deeply. “If I had not hanged him,” he refrained from saying. “I am sure,” he said, instead.
“Of course, poor boy,” said Maud. “He will need someone to look after him.”
“He will,” said Beoran. “He will need his interests protected.”
Garelyn snorted. It was the loudest sound they’d heard for hours.
Durand closed his eyes. His head ached from the thralls’ beatings. Here was the injured boy lying on the very threshold of the Gates of far Heaven, with his grieving mother at his side, and already these fools were wrangling over influence. They were, very nearly, worse than the turnskin thralls. He took a big breath through his nose.
Almora stepped between him, Maud, and the Duke of Beoran.
“Perhaps we should let the boy rest,” she said. “These are important matters, but he is not well.”
“Wise words,” said Garelyn.
“I think that nothing is finished,” said Maud. “We all saw the tide and the Eye of Heaven. But who knows what has survived of this host from the Fellwood, and the king has only a few hundred fighting men remaining to him. The Host of Hesperand is no more. The Duke of Yrlac died upon the tower ruin, if we can grant Lord Leovere that title.”
“I think we’d better,” said Garelyn.
“And Eodan of Windover,” said Maud. “No one knows what has become of him.”
“For now,” amended Beoran.
“And there is the young king to consider,” said Maud. “He is only a boy, after all.”
Durand felt his fists tighten. In an hour, the boy might be dead and Engeled a grieving mother only.
“Come,” Almora said. “There is a chamber, a vestry, just beyond the door.” The highborn fools seemed to think this reasonable.
Durand had not moved.
In the carved doorposts, the stone Powers of Heaven shifted at his glance, stone eyes rolling in their carven sockets. This old Mount of Eagles was a place of uncountable warrens, and the maragrim prince had been casting his whispers upon the dark for three hundred winters, drawing the devils down.
“Sir Durand,” said Almora. She had likely expected Durand’s support. Maybe for him to do the speaking.
“You must go, Almora. You are daughter of the Duke of Gireth. Ailric can advise you.”
The girl blinked a moment, but then nodded.
Lady Maud had opened her long mouth to announce her approval, when Heremund appeared.
“They’ve found the boy’s uncle.”
People turned, about to exclaim with joy, but the skald flapped his hands. “Ah, no. Sorry, no. They found a number of men at the tide’s ebb. The waves had been at them, but hauberks and helms moored them fast to the bottom. They had a time making out faces.”
Without a word, the men and women in the dim shrine turned to the boy near the altar. There was no king but Reilan. None of Ragnal’s line survived.
“Now,” said Garelyn, “we must talk.
”
33
The King’s Watch
The king did not heal.
Hours passed in the sanctuary. Soon, night winds breathed through the tall windows. Somewhere, beyond the Mount of Eagles and the streets of Eldinor, the bay flooded with the cold, deep salt of the Westering Sea and drained away once more.
Semborin’s priests and wise women hovered about the boy and his mother, and the prayers were never ending. Deorwen worked. Durand watched near the sanctuary door, far from the altar. And it was not long before he realized that the Lost were standing among the columns, keeping a mute vigil of their own as they crowded the sanctuary.
One breath from the window across the aisle carried something rank in it. Durand was not surprised to see the Rooks settle in, peering over the dark blades of broken glass still trapped in the frame.
“Oh,” said a whisper. “Such a time we’ve all had.”
“It has been a long night for the poor boy.”
“Aye. Though others have had it worse, I fear. The tide is a sudden thing about the walls of Eldinor. So many wounded men. The wild struggles. And then the silent hours … brave men bobbing against the weight of iron rings.”
Bits of broken glass crackled under their claws.
“And then, of course, the sea drew back its coverlet and laid bare their graves.”
“For the curious.”
“And the brothers and lords and fathers and sons of the slain.”
“And those gulls, of course.”
“The black-backed gull can yelp just like a man!”
“It had not occurred to me until this day.”
“It is a most disconcerting effect when a fellow is tripping and stumbling among the corpses, to be sure.”
“And I had not thought to see eagles picking among the slain.”
“The king’s bird, they say.”
“But here is the poor boy, struggling now.”
“The issue is very much in doubt.”
“With Eodan crawling with rag worms and crabs.”
“What will become of Errest the Old after so much bloodshed?”