The Dread Wyrm (Traitor Son Cycle)

by Miles Cameron

  The wyvern rose and turned, going north. The thermal lifted it—

  Ser Gavin watched with savage satisfaction as the thing was chased down. The dragon—incredible as it was—was faster.

  The wyvern made two attempts. Because of the altitude, both were visible. First it dived for speed, and then it tried to fly very low, turning under its mammoth adversary again.

  The dragon pivoted in mid-air. It was too far away for its size to register—far enough that the whole of the incredible monster was visible, top to toe, a bowshot or more long, with a neck as long as a road and a noble head with nostrils as big as caves and teeth as tall as a man on a horse.

  The great mouth opened, and all the men on the road gave a shout.

  Silence fell.

  And then all hell was given voice in the woods north of the road.

  When the ambush was sprung, Count Zac’s first thought was to envelop the northern arm of the ambush. It was bred in him, not a conscious decision. He gathered every man on every pony, all the pages and his own survivors, and they rode into the deep woods north of the road, sweeping wide around his best guess of where the enemy might lie.

  The great wardens were no aliens to the easterners. The lightning-fast carrion dogs were a terrible surprise, but he’d seen them now.

  Like the veteran hunters they were, the Vardariotes spread as they rode, casting a net as wide as they could. The pages tended to clump up. Zac ignored them as amateurs.

  His own boys and girls trotted—and then when his sweep turned in a neat buttonhook south, and he raised his arm, they reined in.

  Every man and woman with him drew their sabre and placed it over their right arm, so that the gentle curve nestled in the archer’s elbow, sword drawn and ready.

  In his own language, Zac called, “Ready, my children. Be the wind!”

  The pages followed, screeching.

  Zac was confident of his location and his array. He cantered back south, his skirmish line flashing red behind him.

  And, as he expected, the enemy had forgotten him. They had formed up to converge on another target, perhaps never having noticed his envelopment. His satisfaction was marred by how many of them there were. Twenty daemons were not going to be swept away in a charge.

  He had two calm heartbeats to take it in—three great wardens struggling with the branches of a downed tree. Another raising a stone axe and striking—what, the tree?

  Perhaps Zac caught a glimpse of red and gold surcoat. Perhaps he did indeed have a spirit to advise him. Perhaps his instincts for war were so finely honed that he guessed.

  “Through them!” he called. He loosed his first arrow, leaned over his horse’s mane, and began to kill.

  Gabriel lay, trapped in the weight of his armour, pinned to the ground by an oak branch that lay across his torso and had crumpled his left greave and broken the leg inside it.

  He tried to use potentia to move the tree. The pain from his leg was so distracting that he hadn’t even managed to open his visor when the first daemon appeared, sprinting in heavy-footed majesty, leaping through the branches.

  Gabriel watched it come. He stretched out his right hand for his ghiavarina.

  It was too far.

  He worked to summon it. He couldn’t even get into his palace. He reached for Prudentia and a wave of pain thrust him back into bloody reality.

  The daemon’s stone axe swept up. He saw its open beak, heard its scream of triumph.

  He thought quite a few things—about Amicia, and Irene, and Master Smythe.

  And then, despite the last efforts of his straining right hand to grab the ghiavarina, the axe fell.

  The daemon’s weapon seemed to slide around his head. It missed.

  Gabriel didn’t pause to consider the ramifications, although he was fully aware that he should be dead. He got his right hand on his baselard and drew it. Its effect was tonic—he steadied. The baselard itself held power—

  The daemon—so close as to be like a lover and smelling of burned soap and flowers and spring hay—cursed. Even in the alien language, his curse was obvious—the great axe flew up again—

  Gabriel dived into his place of power. He leaped onto the bronze disc set in the floor and pulled the lever. This simple symbol governed a nested set of pre-prepared workings, each cascading into the next.

  Gold and white and green light flared in a set of nested hemispheres over his prone body.

  Zac saw the fireworks and drew the correct conclusion—loosed a shaft with the daemon nearly at the point of his arrow, whirled and loosed again over his shoulder even as his magnificent pony leapt the downed tree and then he was turning.

  But the wardens were running. One of their number lay with his feet drumming in the final dance and one of his best warriors, Lonox, was down, cut from the saddle for being too daring, but the wardens wanted no more of the fight.

  Kriax, a woman with a face so tanned it seemed made of leather, reined up. “We have them!” she shouted and gave a whoop of pure delight.

  Zac pursed his lips. “If I set this ambush…” he said, and waved.

  She turned and looked at him. Her eyes were slightly mad with unexpressed violence.

  “… I’d have a covering force,” he said. “Back to the road and break contact.”

  She saluted with her sabre as her left hand flicked her bow back into the case at her hip. She gave a specific scream—an ululating yell.

  Like a flock of starlings, the whole line of Vardariotes turned all together and rode away, leaving the pages—exhilarated and terrified—to follow. Zac bellowed for them in his version of Morean.

  He rode over to the tree. The Megas Dukas was no doubt under the brightly coloured shields. Another warden lay there, too, his body sliced neatly in half by sorcery and both sides cauterized. A third lay pinned, badly wounded, under the branches of the trees. Some sand and a gilded beak suggested the ruin of a fourth.

  “Hey! Captain!” Zac called. “Hey! We’re here!” He edged closer to the tree.

  Eerily, like something really bad on the steppes, the voice came straight into his head.

  Be sure, Zac. When I drop these wards, I’m going to have nothing left.

  Zac didn’t like the voice in his head at all. “Can we leave you? To make sure? No fucking idea what happened to the east.”

  Hurry, said the voice.

  Ser Gavin had scarcely been engaged in the fighting, but he was sorely tested in the aftermath. Aware—as they were all aware—that the captain was down and so was the chaplain, Ser Gavin had to comprehend the scale of the fight, covering as it had, three different venues spread over almost half a league of ground, and then isolate and secure his three widely spread parties.

  He insisted that they be secured first, before any acts of mercy or rescue began. The downed captain, surrounded in his aethereal shells, he left to Count Zac. The chaplain’s body—dead or dying—he put in the charge of Ser Francis Atcourt and the squires, and the drowned wagon and the family he left to young di Laternum, who was suddenly thrust into command, with the sun setting in the west and children sinking in the mud and an unknown enemy moving in the woods to the west. Cully stepped up to the young man-at-arm’s shoulder and whispered in his ear.

  Ser Gavin rode briskly up and down the road in the fading light. His second time past the squires, he took Toby off the watch and ordered him to take his riding horse, ride his charger, and try to fetch help.

  Toby glanced west, gulped, and nodded.

  No questions were asked. Every man and woman present knew how dangerous their situation was.

  Ser Gavin knew what his brother would do next. The immediate crisis was past. It was time to plan.

  He ticked off the points on his armoured gauntlets.

  First, gather all his people in one place. Nothing along the road was particularly defensible. But in one place, with a couple of fires and a deception or two, they’d have a chance.

  Horses. The horses would have to be picketed.
There was no forage and none closer than the swamp.

  He rode back to di Laternum, who had the goodwife out of the water and had, himself, waded into the mud and retrieved the mangled corpse of one of her children. The other was, of course, gone. Cully had an arrow on every string—and had the wagon out of the water, for which incredible engineering feat No Head received Gavin’s terse and hurried thanks. Two horses from the wagon team were coyote food, and two were exhausted but alive.

  The goodwife, a solid woman who had seen many defeats, was sunk in her grief. Ser Gavin rode up to her—at a loss. She knelt in the road next to the appallingly small bundle that was her dead second daughter.

  “I made her,” she said. “I made ’em all, and I sweated blood, and I love ’em. Oh, blessed Virgin, why?” She looked up at the knight. “You came to rescue us?”

  Ser Gavin had seen enough grief to know the anger was a part of it.

  “Into the wagon,” he said gruffly. “We’ll mourn tomorrow. Tonight, we live.”

  “I’m not—” the woman said, but whatever she was not, her eldest daughter took her elbow and moved her to the wagon.

  “But Jenna! We can’t leave Jenna to get ate!” she wailed.

  Her eldest son, without even a flirtation with hesitation, scooped up the bloody linen shawl that held his sister’s corporeal remains and carried it—tenderly—to the wagon.

  Cuddy had the heads of both horses. They were weak and twitchy and deeply scared.

  Ser Gavin reined in.

  Cuddy waved him off. “I’m gonna walk with ’em.”

  “We’re going back,” Ser Gavin said. “For the captain.”

  “Course we are,” Cuddy said.

  “Amen to that,” No Head agreed.

  Gavin wanted to gallop down the road. There were ten minutes of useful light left, and something was making noise north of the marsh.

  It made him want to cry, deep inside, that he was learning to lead men from his brother—the brother whose effeminacy he’d mocked throughout his youth. But he took the time to turn his horse and clap a hand on di Laternum’s arm as the wagon began to move. “Well done,” he said.

  The Etruscan boy—he looked like a boy now, with dark circles under haunted eyes—shrugged. “I scarcely did a thing, my lord,” he said. “Cully…”

  Ser Gavin managed a hard smile. “Listen to Cully. But think for yourself, too.” He gave the boy a crisp and very real salute, hand to his visor, and cantered off east to find his brother. He still didn’t know if his wonderful, terrible brother was alive or dead.

  And only now could he let himself wonder.

  Zac had a cordon around the tree, and he’d found the shaman’s feather cloak and the pieces of his axe.

  Feeling almost foolish, he said aloud, “Darkness is close. You’re safe for the moment. I have people all around you.” He shrugged, talking to a rainbow. “Your brother has taken command.”

  Good. When I let go, the pain may knock me out. There’s some better than remote chance I’ll just die. I’ve made a stupid mistake and I’m out of ops.

  Count Zac crossed himself and touched an amulet.

  The rainbow of light shimmered and went out. The woods were suddenly darker.

  The captain screamed.

  When Gavin had the archers—when the knights and squires were together, and the wagon was parked over Father Arnaud, who hadn’t moved—he led every spare man to try and save his brother.

  Who was still alive, as could be told from his screams.

  It took an hour of torch-lit axe-work to clear enough of the trunk to allow them to make the right effort, and the constant movement of large animals or enemies out in the darkness did nothing to improve Ser Gavin’s sense of urgency.

  But he pretended to be calm, and twice, he told archers to take their time.

  The steppe woman, Kriax, volunteered to go into the darkness and watch. She slipped from her pony and vanished into the haze at the edge of the torchlight.

  “She has cut many throats at home,” Zac said with a shrug. “That’s why she’s here.”

  It took ten men and a woman to move the tree. By the time they levered the section of trunk off his brother’s legs, the stars were out in the sky above.

  Ser Gavin calculated constantly. Assume that the company is camped a league from where we left them. That’s four leagues from here. An hour for Toby to find them, if something doesn’t eat him. An hour back, and half an hour to raise the force to get it done right.

  I should never have sent him alone. I should have gone myself. Or sent Nell and Cully with him to get the message through.

  But a wyvern would eat all three of them.

  I’ve heard wyverns are blind at night. And that they can see in the dark.

  I hate this. Is this what he does every day? What Pater does? Decide people’s lives?

  Ser Gavin sat on his war horse, still in full harness, his shoulders straight, and pretended to be a tower of strength and leadership. Like all commanders, everywhere.

  When the pole star rose, the archers sung a quiet night prayer and everyone joined in, even Cuddy, who was notorious for his blasphemy. When the prayer was done, Kriax slipped into the fire circle and tossed a toothy head on the fire. She had a grim smile, and Zac had to bandage both her arms, which had been savaged. She never so much as grunted. The squires watched her with something very like worship.

  Adrian Goldsmith volunteered to crawl out into the darkness.

  Gavin let him go.

  They built a second fire—a decoy. They put it up the road, and then they built a third down the road.

  The third watch came. Ser Gavin began to despair that he would have to add Toby to his butcher’s bill. His brother wasn’t moving, and neither was Father Arnaud.

  Ser Gavin started to pray.

  Gabriel was not so much unconscious as deep in his palace—by far pleasanter than screaming his lungs out at the pain from his crushed and mangled right leg. Even as it was, a tidal wave of pain would, from time to time, push him out of the aethereal and into the real. Where he would be painfully aware of his loss of blood, of how cold he was, and how little time he had left to live.

  He tried to sort the shaman’s memories—those he’d managed to take. His sublimation of his opponent had been too fast and too thorough. And he’d spent the power foolishly. His shields—his emergency spells—had been far too powerful. He could see, now—too late—the error in design that allowed them to seize every scrap of his power, like a tax collector seizing a poor man’s assets.

  He replayed the other daemon’s cut at his head. His unprotected head.

  I should have died. But I didn’t.

  And now—even now—I should probably be dead.

  It occurred to him to work out why he was alive. There was a small, constant feed of potentia coming from outside. He could feel it.

  It occurred to him—time was a problem in the palaces—that he should try to find Father Arnaud.

  To think was to act.

  He stepped across into the chaplain’s memory palace and found himself in a darkened chapel. It was beautiful—the lectern was a magnificent bronze of a pregnant Madonna with her hands crossed over her stomach, standing quietly. A magnificent stained-glass rose window rode over him, set—in the freedom of the memory palace—as a three-dimensional rose roof that rose like a cupola of glass. On the window were portrayed scenes from the life of the saviour, but it was too dark to determine what, exactly, they were.

  Indeed, it was very dark, and very cold, and Gabriel’s first thought was that the light behind the window was fading.

  “Arnaud!” he called.

  To think was to find.

  Father Arnaud lay in the midst of his place of power, arms out-flung. He smiled at Ser Gabriel.

  “Welcome,” he said. “It might have been better if we had been this way when I was alive.”

  “Alive?” Gabriel asked.

  “My body is passing,” Arnaud said with some humo
ur. “In the real, I have perhaps twenty heartbeats left.”

  Gabriel reached for his link, checking, like any veteran magister, for enough ops to heal.

  Arnaud smiled. “No. I will heal you. I will give you this last gift. And as I cross the wall and go into the far country, I leave you this. Save them, save them all. In doing so, brother, you will save yourself.” He smiled, again with pure good humour, and Gabriel could see what a handsome young man he had been. “Please accept these gifts.”

  Arnaud’s body gave a convulsion, and light flared, and for a moment—an eternal moment—the chapel was bathed in light. The figures of the rose window leapt into life, and a leper was cured, a blind man given his sight, a dead man raised, and a centurion’s servant saved.

  “Arnaud!” Gabriel shouted.

  But the miracle of light was declining, and in its wake the cold of absolute void, and the dark.

  Gabriel wrenched himself clear of the dying man’s palace and

  woke.

  The pain was gone. Around the fire stood a dozen men and women and every head was turned to him, and they all looked stunned.

  His leg was healed.

  Gabriel burst into tears. “I don’t want this!” he shrieked.

  And then rolled over and put his hands on either side of his chaplain’s helmeted head. But Father Arnaud was a corpse, and wherever he had gone, his face was calm and wore the gentle smile of absolute victory.

  When the flare of power lit the aethereal worlds, Thorn was hovering, torn by indecision, balanced on the knife edge between aggression and caution. He’d followed some of the combat; he sensed the Dark Sun’s injury and depletion but he had a healthy fear of the Dark Sun’s reserves and talent. To project himself across the aethereal could be done but was, itself, fraught with peril. And it would expose him, like an army too far from its supplies, to envelopment. It was too new a talent to be trusted. And his dark master was not available for advice or encouragement.

  Something passed across the divide between life and death—something mighty.

  Is he dead? Thorn whispered into the darkness. Suddenly bold, he cast himself across the abyss.