by Tom Holt
meet the author
Tom Holt was born in London in 1961. At Oxford he studied bar billiards, ancient Greek agriculture and the care and feeding of small, temperamental Japanese motorcycle engines; interests which led him, perhaps inevitably, to qualify as a solicitor and emigrate to Somerset, where he specialised in death and taxes for seven years before going straight in 1995. Now a full-time writer, he lives in Chard, Somerset, with his wife, one daughter and the unmistakable scent of blood, wafting in on the breeze from the local meat-packing plant.
if you enjoyed
THE MANAGEMENT STYLE OF
THE SUPREME BEINGS
look out for
KINGS OF THE WYLD
The Band: Book One
by
Nicholas Eames
GLORY NEVER GETS OLD.
Clay Cooper and his band were once the best of the best, the most feared and renowned crew of mercenaries this side of the Heartwyld.
Their glory days long past, the mercs have grown apart and grown old, fat, drunk, or a combination of the three. Then an ex-bandmate turns up at Clay’s door with a plea for help—the kind of mission that only the very brave or the very stupid would sign up for.
It’s time to get the band back together.
Chapter One
A Ghost on the Road
You’d have guessed from the size of his shadow that Clay Cooper was a bigger man than he was. He was certainly bigger than most, with broad shoulders and a chest like an iron-strapped keg. His hands were so large that most mugs looked like teacups when he held them, and the jaw beneath his shaggy brown beard was wide and sharp as a shovel blade. But his shadow, drawn out by the setting sun, skulked behind him like a dogged reminder of the man he used to be: great and dark and more than a little monstrous.
Finished with work for the day, Clay slogged down the beaten track that passed for a thoroughfare in Coverdale, sharing smiles and nods with those hustling home before dark. He wore a Watchmen’s green tabard over a shabby leather jerkin, and a weathered sword in a rough old scabbard on his hip. His shield—chipped and scored and scratched through the years by axes and arrows and raking claws—was slung across his back, and his helmet … well, Clay had lost the one the Sergeant had given him last week, just as he’d misplaced the one given to him the month before, and every few months since the day he’d signed on to the Watch almost ten years ago now.
A helmet restricted your vision, all but negated your hearing, and more often than not made you look stupid as hell. Clay Cooper didn’t do helmets, and that was that.
“Clay! Hey, Clay!” Pip trotted over. The lad wore the Watchmen’s green as well, his own ridiculous head-pan tucked in the crook of one arm. “Just got off duty at the south gate,” he said cheerily. “You?”
“North.”
“Nice.” The boy grinned and nodded as though Clay had said something exceptionally interesting instead of having just mumbled the word north. “Anything exciting out there?”
Clay shrugged. “Mountains.”
“Ha! ‘Mountains,’ he says. Classic. Hey, you hear Ryk Yarsson saw a centaur out by Tassel’s farm?”
“It was probably a moose.”
The boy gave him a skeptical look, as if Ryk spotting a moose instead of a centaur was highly improbable. “Anyway. Come to the King’s Head for a few?”
“I shouldn’t,” said Clay. “Ginny’s expecting me home, and …” He paused, having no other excuse near to hand.
“C’mon,” Pip goaded. “Just one, then. One drink.”
Clay grunted, squinting into the sun and measuring the prospect of Ginny’s wrath against the bitter bite of ale washing down his throat. “Fine,” he relented. “One.”
Because it was hard work looking north all day, after all.
The King’s Head was already crowded, its long tables crammed with people who came as much to gab and gossip as they did to drink. Pip slinked toward the bar while Clay found a seat at a table as far from the stage as possible.
The talk around him was the usual sort: weather and war, and neither topic too promising. There’d been a great battle fought out west in Endland, and by the murmurings it hadn’t gone off well. A Republic army of twenty thousand, bolstered by several hundred mercenary bands, had been slaughtered by a Heartwyld Horde. Those few who’d survived had retreated to the city of Castia and were now under siege, forced to endure sickness and starvation while the enemy gorged themselves on the dead outside their walls. That, and there’d been a touch of frost on the ground this morning, which didn’t seem fair this early into autumn, did it?
Pip returned with two pints and two friends Clay didn’t recognize, whose names he forgot just as soon as they told him. They seemed like nice enough fellows, mind you. Clay was just bad with names.
“So you were in a band?” one asked. He had lanky red hair, and his face was a postpubescent mess of freckles and swollen pimples.
Clay took a long pull from his tankard before setting it down and looking over at Pip, who at least had the grace to look ashamed. Then he nodded.
The two stole a glance at each other, and then Freckles leaned in across the table. “Pip says you guys held Coldfire Pass for three days against a thousand walking dead.”
“I only counted nine hundred and ninety-nine,” Clay corrected. “But pretty much, yeah.”
“He says you slew Akatung the Dread,” said the other, whose attempt to grow a beard had produced a wisp of hair most grandmothers would scoff at.
Clay took another drink and shook his head. “We only injured him. I hear he died back at his lair, though. Peacefully. In his sleep.”
They looked disappointed, but then Pip nudged one with his elbow. “Ask him about the Siege of Hollow Hill.”
“Hollow Hill?” murmured Wispy, then his eyes went round as courtmark coins. “Wait, the Siege of Hollow Hill? So the band you were in …”
“Saga,” Freckles finished, clearly awestruck. “You were in Saga.”
“It’s been a while,” said Clay, picking at a knot in the warped wood of the table before him. “The name sounds familiar, though.”
“Wow,” sighed Freckles.
“You gotta be kidding me,” Wispy uttered.
“Just … wow,” said Freckles again.
“You gotta be kidding me,” Wispy repeated, not one to be outdone when it came re-expressing disbelief.
Clay said nothing in response, only sipped his beer and shrugged.
“So you know Golden Gabe?” Freckles asked.
Another shrug. “I know Gabriel, yeah.”
“Gabriel!” trilled Pip, sloshing his drink as he raised his hands in wonderment. “ ‘Gabriel,’ he says! Classic.”
“And Ganelon?” Wispy asked. “And Arcandius Moog? And Matrick Skulldrummer?”
“Oh, and …” Freckles screwed up his face as he racked his brain—which didn’t do the poor bastard any favours, Clay decided. He was ugly as a rain cloud on a wedding day, that one. “Who are we forgetting?”
“Clay Cooper.”
Wispy stroked the fine hairs on his chin as he pondered this. “Clay Cooper … oh,” he said, looking abashed. “Right.”
It took Freckles another moment to piece it together, but then he palmed his pale forehead and laughed. “Gods, I’m stupid.”
The gods already know, thought Clay.
Sensing the awkwardness at hand, Pip chimed in. “Tell us a tale, will ya, Clay? About when you did for that necromancer up in Oddsford. Or when you rescued that princess from … that place … remember?”
Which one? Clay wondered. They’d rescued several princesses, in fact, and if he’d killed one necromancer he’d killed a dozen. Who kept track of shit like that? Didn’t matter anyway, since he wasn’t in the mood for storytelling. Or to go digging up what he’d worked so hard to bury, and then harder still to forget where he’d dug the hole in the first place.
“Sorry, kid,” he told Pip, draining what remained of his beer. “That’s one.”
He excused himself, handing Pip a few coppers for the drink and bidding what he hoped was a last farewell to Freckles and Wispy. He shouldered his way to the door and gave a long sigh when he emerged into the cool quiet outside. His back hurt from slumping over that table, so he stretched it out, craning his neck and gazing up at the first stars of the evening.
He remembered how small the night sky used to make him feel. How insignificant. And so he’d gone and made a big deal of himself, figuring that someday he might look up at the vast sprawl of stars and feel undaunted by its splendour. It hadn’t worked. After a while Clay tore his eyes from the darkening sky and struck out down the road toward home.
He exchanged pleasantries with the Watchmen at the west gate. Had he heard about the centaur spotting over by Tassel’s farm? they wondered. How about the battle out west, and those poor bastards holed up in Castia? Rotten, rotten business.
Clay followed the track, careful to keep from turning an ankle in a rut. Crickets were chirping in the tall grass to either side, the wind in the trees above him sighing like the ocean surf. He stopped by the roadside shrine to the Summer Lord and threw a dull copper at the statue’s feet. After a few steps and a moment’s hesitation he went back and tossed another. Away from town it was darker still, and Clay resisted the urge to look up again.
Best keep your eyes on the ground, he told himself, and leave the past where it belongs. You’ve got what you’ve got, Cooper, and it’s just what you wanted, right? A kid, a wife, a simple life. It was an honest living. It was comfortable.
He could almost hear Gabriel scoff at that. Honest? Honest is boring, his old friend might have said. Comfortable is dull. Then again, Gabriel had got himself married long before Clay. Had a little girl of his own, even—a woman grown by now.
And yet there was Gabe’s spectre just the same, young and fierce and glorious, smirking in the shadowed corner of Clay’s mind. “We were giants, once,” he said. “Bigger than life. And now …”
“Now we are tired old men,” Clay muttered, to no one but the night. And what was so wrong with that? He’d met plenty of actual giants in his day, and most of them were assholes.
Despite Clay’s reasoning, the ghost of Gabriel continued to haunt his walk home, gliding past him on the road with a sly wink, waving from his perch on the neighbour’s fence, crouched like a beggar on the stoop of Clay’s front door. Only this last Gabriel wasn’t young at all. Or particularly fierce looking. Or any more glorious than an old board with a rusty nail in it. In fact, he looked pretty fucking terrible. When he saw Clay coming he stood, and smiled. Clay had never seen a man look so sad in all the years of his life.
The apparition spoke his name, which sounded to Clay as real as the crickets buzzing, as the wind moaning through the trees along the road. And then that brittle smile broke, and Gabriel—really, truly Gabriel, and not a ghost after all—was sagging into Clay’s arms, sobbing into his shoulder, clutching at his back like a child afraid of the dark.
“Clay,” he said. “Please … I need your help.”
Chapter Two
Rose
Once Gabriel recovered himself they went inside. Ginny turned from the stove and her jaw clamped tight. Griff came bounding over, stubby tail wagging. He gave Clay a cursory sniff and then set to smelling Gabe’s leg as though it were a piss-drenched tree, which wasn’t actually too far off the mark.
His old friend was in a sorry state, no mistake. His hair and beard were a tangled mess, his clothes little more than soiled rags. There were holes in his boots, toes peeking out from the ruined leather like grubby urchins. His hands were busy fidgeting, wringing each other or tugging absentmindedly at the hem of his tunic. Worst of all, though, were his eyes. They were sunk deep in his haggard face, hard and haunted, as though everywhere he looked was something he wished he hadn’t seen.
“Griff, lay off,” said Clay. The dog, wet eyes and a lolling pink tongue in a black fur face, perked up at the sound of his name. Griff wasn’t the noblest-looking creature, and he didn’t have many uses besides licking food off a plate. He couldn’t herd sheep or flush a grouse from cover, and if anyone ever broke in to the house he was more likely to fetch them slippers than scare ’em off. But it made Clay smile to look at him (that’s how godsdamn adorable he was) and that was worth more than nothing.
“Gabriel.” Ginny finally found her voice, though she stayed right where she was. Didn’t smile. Didn’t cross to hug him. She’d never much cared for Gabriel. Clay thought she probably blamed his old bandmate for all the bad habits (gambling, fighting, drinking to excess) that she’d spent the last ten years disabusing him of, and all the other bad habits (chewing with his mouth open, forgetting to wash his hands, occasionally throttling people) she was still struggling to purge.
Heaped upon that were the handful of times Gabe had come calling in the years since his own wife left him. Every time he appeared it was hand in hand with some grand scheme to reunite the old band and strike out once again in search of fame, fortune, and decidedly reckless adventure. There was a town down south needed rescue from a ravaging drake, or a den of walking wolves to be cleared out of the Wailing Forest, or an old lady in some far-flung corner of the realm needed help bringing laundry off the line and only Saga themselves could rise to her aid!
It wasn’t as though Clay needed Ginny breathing down his neck to refuse, to see that Gabriel longed for something unrecoverable, like an old man clinging to memories of his golden youth. Exactly like that, actually. But life, Clay knew, didn’t work that way. It wasn’t a circle; you didn’t go round and round again. It was an arc, its course as inexorable as the sun’s trek across the sky, destined at its highest, brightest moment to begin its fall.
Clay blinked, having lost himself in his own head. He did that sometimes, and could have wished he was better at putting his thoughts into words. He’d sound a right clever bastard then, wouldn’t he?
Instead, he’d stood there dumbly as the silence between Ginny and Gabriel lengthened uncomfortably.
“You look hungry,” she said finally.
Gabriel nodded, his hands fidgeting nervously.
Ginny sighed, and then his wife—his kind, lovely, magnificent wife—forced a tight grin and reclaimed her spoon from the pot she’d been tending earlier. “Sit down then,” she said over her shoulder. “I’ll feed you. I made Clay’s favourite: rabbit stew with mushrooms.”
Gabriel blinked. “Clay hates mushrooms.”
Seeing Ginny’s back stiffen, Clay spoke up. “Used to,” he said brightly, before his wife—his quick-tempered, sharp-tongued, utterly terrifying wife—could turn around and crack his skull with that wooden spoon. “Ginny does something to them, though. Makes them taste”—Not so fucking awful, was what first jumped to mind—“really pretty good,” he finished lamely. “What is it you do to ’em, hun?”
“I stew them,” she said in the most menacing way a woman could string those three words together.
Something very much like a smile tugged at the corner of Gabe’s mouth.
He always did love to watch me squirm, Clay remembered. He took a chair and Gabriel followed suit. Griff trundled over to his mat and gave his balls a few good licks before promptly falling asleep. Clay fought down a surge of envy, seeing that. “Tally home?” he asked.
“Out,” said Ginny. “Somewhere.”
Somewhere close, he hoped. There were coyotes in the woods nearby. Wolves in the hills. Hell, Ryk Yarsson had seen a centaur out by Tassel’s farm. Or a moose. Either of which might kill a young girl if caught by surprise. “She should’ve been home before dark,” he said.
His wife scoffed at that. “So should you have, Clay Cooper. You putting in extra hours on the wall, or is that the King’s Piss I smell on ya?” King’s Piss was her name for the beer they served at the pub. It was a fair assessment, and Clay had laughed the first time she’d said it. Didn’t seem as funny at the moment, however.
Not to Clay, anyway, though Gabriel�
�s mood seemed to be lightening a bit. His old friend was smirking like a boy watching his brother take heat for a crime he didn’t commit.
“She’s just down in the marsh,” Ginny said, fishing two ceramic bowls from the cupboard. “Be glad it’s only frogs she’ll bring home with her. It’ll be boys soon enough, and you’ll have plenty cause to worry then.”
“Won’t be me needs to worry,” Clay mumbled.
Ginny scoffed at that, too, and he might have asked why had she not set a steaming bowl of stew in front of him. The wafting scent drew a ravenous growl from his stomach, even if there were mushrooms in it.
His wife took her cloak off the peg by the door. “I’ll go and be sure Tally’s all right,” she said. “Might be she needs help carrying those frogs.” She came over and kissed Clay on the top of his head, smoothing his hair down afterward. “You boys have fun catching up.”
She got as far as opening the door before hesitating, looking back. First at Gabriel, already scooping at his bowl as if it were the first meal he’d had in a long while, and then at Clay, and it wasn’t until a few days after (a hard choice and too many miles away already) that he understood what he’d seen in her eyes just then. A kind of sorrow, thoughtful and resigned, as though she already knew—his loving, beautiful, remarkably astute wife—what was coming, inevitable as winter, or a river’s winding course to the sea.
A chill wind blew in from outside. Ginny shivered despite her cloak, then she left.
“It’s Rose.”
They had finished eating, set their bowls aside. He should have put them in the basin, Clay knew, got them soaking so they wouldn’t be such a chore to clean later, but it suddenly seemed like he couldn’t leave the table just now. Gabriel had come in the night, from a long way off, to say something. Best to let him say it and be done.
“Your daughter?” Clay prompted.
Gabe nodded slowly. His hands were both flat on the table. His eyes were fixed, unfocused, somewhere between them. “She is … willful,” he said finally. “Impetuous. I wish I could say she gets it from her mother, but …” That smile again, just barely. “You remember I was teaching her to use a sword?”