by Kate Elliott
The town had not been large, and the shattered remains of pilings suggested it had once boasted a wharf. Farther up the strand, fish had rotted, their bones strewn like twigs along the shore. The sea lapped the strand placidly. John tried fishing but had no luck. Blessing tried to run away and after had a rope tied to her waist and had to follow along behind Frigo like a dog on a lead. He was neither cruel nor kind to her but dispassionately amused. Hugh rarely looked at the girl at all, and when he did, he would frown and set his lips in an expression Anna could not interpret. A man might look so at a two-headed calf, or at the child sprung from the union of his bitterest rival and the woman he desired most in the world but could never have.
“Should we camp in the town, my lord?” asked Captain Frigo.
“What do the men say?” Hugh asked him. “I think the shelter will do us some good, but if they prefer a more open site, if they fear plague, that is as well with me.”
Frigo nodded, scratching his beard. “They’re muttering that it’s well enough to walk a town like this in daylight, when night might bring ghosts, and devils carrying sickness. I think otherwise. There’s no sign of dogs or corpses. Deserted as we are here, it’s best to have a defensible position. They’ll see the wisdom of staying within walls if anything attacks us by night. Wolves or bandits. Those other things.”
“Wisely spoken, Captain. Set up camp.”
John and Theodore found a campsite that suited the nervous men. They planted their backs against the broken wall of a merchant’s compound with a long storehouse along one side and a stable along another. The courtyard gave them space to set up a couple of lean-tos for shelter without having to camp right within the ruins where scorpions might scuttle and ghosts poke their knuckles into a man’s ribs while he slept.
Scarred John unfolded a leather-and-wood tripod stool. Lord Hugh unrolled a map on top of the small traveling chest. He pinned the corners with an oil lamp, a heavy silver chain mounded up over a silver Circle of Unity, his knife, and his left hand. He studied the map, twisting a wick between thumb and middle finger but not yet lighting it.
“We escape tonight,” Blessing whispered to Anna as the girl trotted past in Captain Frigo’s wake. The big man glanced at her. Anna wasn’t sure how much Wendish he understood, but she guessed he couldn’t follow her conversations with the princess as well as she could follow the Dariyan spoken between soldiers and master.
Under the shelter of sloped canvas, she unrolled the blankets she and Blessing shared, and there she sat to watch Lord Hugh as he stared at the parchment. The canvas ceiling rose and fell as a twilight wind gusted out of the east.
The men chatted companionably as they got the horses settled in the stables and sentries up onto the walls. Liudbold and scarred John set to work splitting wood from the abandoned houses to fuel the fire. Frigo sat on his saddle and, with Blessing trussed tight beside him, set to work dressing a sapling trunk with an adze.
Lord Hugh had that ability to build trust between himself and those who served him. In this same manner, Prince Sanglant led his men, knowing all their names, their home villages, their sense of humor, and which man needed a coarse joke or which a kind word to keep his spirits up. In this wilderness, Hugh’s entourage was nervous and watchful but not terrified, because they trusted him.
In her mind’s eye, she saw Elene’s blood leaking over the chessboard and pooling around Berthold’s slack fingers. She could not shake off the memory.
He glanced up, noted her regard, and dismissed it. Scarred John brought him a cup of ale. He thanked him, drained it, and handed back the empty cup. Bringing out flint and tinder, he made ready to light the wick.
A strange sound rang over the ordinary moan of the wind along the deserted walls. Every man quieted and froze in position, as though spelled. She saw their shapes like pillars, arranged out of all symmetry. For ten breaths at least, no one spoke or moved. The wind turned abruptly, and grew cold as winter’s blast, swelling out of the northwest. The sound rang down on that wind.
“Sounds like bells,” said Theodore in a low voice.
A horse snorted and sidestepped.
A man yelped and cursed. “Ah! Ah! Right on my foot!”
“More fool you for standing there!” retorted his companion.
Lord Hugh moved his right foot to the ground, set the oil lamp beside it, and slipped the Circle and chain over his head. As he rolled up the map and stowed it in the chest, he spoke.
“All must retreat within the circle I draw. Bring the horses, too.”
He took a bulging pouch out of the chest, closed it, and secured the hasp. His hands were steady as he spilled a line of flour in a circle big enough to contain men and horses together. A stench like the breath of the forge swept over them. Horses shied. Men shouted in alarm, and the three who had not yet crowded into the circle raced out of the dusk to join them. At their backs a dark storm advanced out of the heavens.
One skittish gelding broke and bolted.
“Let it go!” Lord Hugh shouted. “Come. Come. Are all within?” His gaze caught Anna, and as if struck she gasped and covered her mouth with a hand. “Not you. You must take your chances outside.”
Scarred John drew his sword.
Blessing screamed and began to kick and pummel Captain Frigo. “No! No! No! I’ll hurt you! Let her stay!”
He slapped her, but the pain meant nothing.
John’s sword poked Anna’s hip. She edged sideways, seeing one curve in the circle not yet sealed by flour. He poked her again. The edge bit into her flesh, and she sobbed and skipped out beyond the sword’s reach.
“No! No!”
“Stop it!” warned the captain.
“Won’t! Let her come back!” Blessing squirmed. She kicked him again, almost got her knee into his groin.
Frigo took out his horsewhip and, swearing, slashed the girl across the chest, but the pain did not daunt her.
Anna started to cry with terror as a stinging wind poured over them. It was not quite utterly dark; they had not yet crossed the boundary into night past which there is no returning. But what fell out of the heavens was blacker than night, towers of darkness that stank of iron and muttered like bells heard down a vast distance. She heard them speaking. She heard names.
Hugh of Austra. John of Vennaci. Frigo of Darre. Theodore of Darre. Liudbold of Tivura. Each of them named and marked.
Blessing of Wendar and Varre, daughter of Sanglant.
The only name that was missing was Anna’s.
“Let her come back! Let her!” shrieked Blessing, writhing, slamming her fists into air as Frigo twisted away from her blows. He slugged her on her jaw, and she went limp just like that.
“As I thought,” said Hugh conversationally to Anna as he bent to pour the last of the line into place, to seal the circle, “you were not deemed of sufficient interest that anyone could recall your name and birthplace, if they ever knew it. You are more likely to survive if you move away from us. Follow the horse.”
Flour streamed onto the earth. Hugh was speaking words she did not recognize or understand, and as night and monsters crashed over them, the thread of flour met itself and between one heartbeat and the next the men and horses huddled inside vanished.
She screamed, choked, wept. Moaned.
A breath of stinking cold horrible air rushed past her, soaking her in a chill that stabbed all the way to the bone. Death! Death! She wet herself, but the hot urine soaking her leg jarred her wits into life. Darkness swept down as on a gale, and she fled, running as the horse had, but tripped over her own feet and hit herself hard. Elbows bled. She scrambled forward as a dark shape skimmed over her.
The horse had run itself into a corner. Kicking, it lashed out at the creature. Her vision hazed. The horse screamed as a black pillar engulfed it.
Sparks spit golden above her. An arrow fletched with a shimmering tail pierced the creature, and it vanished with a loud snap. Bones rattled to earth where the horse had been. Its flesh had be
en flensed and consumed. She scrabbled forward as another thing swirled into view above her. Its cold presence burned her. She sobbed. A second arrow bloomed as a splash of brilliance in the heart of shadow. With a hiss, it snapped out of existence.
The hardest thing she had ever done was in that moment to look back over her shoulder. Better not to see what would devour her, but she had to know. A haze of mist marked the spell in which Hugh had contained his retinue. Most of the galla swarmed about it, as if confused. Bells tolled in her ears. She choked on bile. She got to her knees and crawled, thinking she might not draw their attention if she remained low to the ground.
A third hiss, followed in a steady measure by two more; nothing careless, not in Theodore’s aim. She reached the scattering of steaming bones and fell among them. The clatter resounded into the heavens. A sixth bright arrow burned, and a seventh.
“Eight. Nine,” she whispered, pressed among the bones, hoping death would shield her.
Hugh of Austra. So it murmured as it circled the sealed earth, seeking its prey but confused by the mist that concealed him. An arrow blossomed in darkness off to her right. With a snap and a roar of brilliance the tenth flicked out. A line like silver wire spun in an eddy of air before drifting to the ground.
If the galla had intelligence beyond that of hunting hounds, she could not see it in them.
Eleven. The last shadow pushed at the haze. Blessing.
The fire that bloomed within its insubstantial black form almost blinded her, like the flash of the sun.
In the silence, her ears rang with bells, and after a while she heard herself sniveling. She stank of piss. The bones in which she lay stank of hot iron. Her eyes stung as she wept. She could not stop herself. She just could not stop, not even when the spell he had raised dissolved and his soldiers broke out cheering. Not even when flame sprang from the oil lamp and they set about their encampment, each one as merry as if he had faced down his own death and laughed to escape it.
She could not stop, especially when Lord Hugh came into view, carrying the burning lamp. He paused to study the bones with more interest than he studied her, a touch of that ice-blue gaze. The kiss of a winter blizzard would have been more welcome.
He was a monster, no different than the monsters that stalked him. Hate flowered, but she lowered her eyes so as not to betray herself.
“A cup of ale in celebration, my lord?” asked scarred John. She glanced up to see the soldier arrive with a cup in each hand.
Hugh smiled. Strange to think how beautiful he was. Impossible not to be swayed by beauty, by light, by an arrogance that, softened, seems like benevolence. All of it illusion.
So might the Enemy smile, seeing a soul ripe for the Abyss.
So might the Enemy soothe with soft words and a kindly manner: Come this way. Just a little farther.
They drank.
“Here, now,” said scarred John, sounding surprised. “The girl survived! Yet see—is that the horse?” He made a retching sound. He shook with that rush which comes after the worst is over. “That would have been us! Sucked clean of flesh!” He clutched his stomach, looking queasy.
“So would we all have been,” agreed Hugh. “The Holy Mother Antonia controls many wicked creatures. She is a servant of the Enemy. Now you see why we must oppose her and Queen Adelheid, whom she holds on a tight leash.”
The others gathered where Anna lay, humiliated. She did not know what to do except let them stare at her and pick through the bones around her as though she were deaf and mute. At last, she crawled sideways to get away from them. None stopped her or offered her a hand up. Her leggings were soaked through, and a couple of the men waved hands before noses and commented on the stink.
“Is it safe now?” they asked Hugh, kicking the remains of the horse. “Can we sleep?”
“It is safe. Before we left, I instructed Brother Petrus to scatter skulls and bones in the woodland a day’s ride south of Novomo. After some fruitless searching, a loyal soldier will by seeming happenstance lead the searchers to these bones, and Mother Antonia will believe we are all dead, killed by those black demons, her galla.”
They all stared at him.
He nodded to acknowledge their amazement. “I knew the plan would work because Antonia remains ignorant of the extent of my knowledge. I know a shield—this spell I called—that would hide us from the sight of the galla. I had in my possession griffin feathers to send them back to their foul pit.”
“How did you come by such things, my lord?” asked scarred John, always curious. “It was said of the Wendish prince, the one who killed Emperor Henry, it was said he led a pair of griffins around like horses hitched to a wagon. But I never believed it.”
Captain Frigo stood with Princess Blessing draped over his shoulders like a lumpy sack of wheat, but she was breathing. “Hush! It is not our part to question Lord Hugh.”
Hugh’s smile was the most beautiful thing on Earth, no doubt. If only he had been flensed instead of the poor horse.
“Questions betray a thoughtful mind, Captain. Do not scold him.” He nodded toward John, who beamed in the light offered by the lamp’s flame, content in his master’s praise. Above, no stars shone. In the gray darkness, men settled restlessly into camp, still unnerved by their brush with death and sorcery. “I was brought up in the manner of clerics, John, to love God and to read those things written down by the holy church folk who have come before us. I had a book … I have it still, since I copied it out both on paper and in my mind. In it are told many secrets. As for the griffin feathers. Well.”
Anna clamped her mouth shut over the words she wanted to speak. Prince Sanglant had captured griffins. Had Lord Hugh done so as well? Had he, like Bulkezu, stalked and killed one of the beasts?
He twitched his head sideways, as at an amusing thought known only to himself. “Does it not say in the Holy Verses: ‘He who lays in stores in the summer is a capable son?’ I took what I found when the harvest was upon me.”
“And in the morning, my lord?” asked scarred John.
“At dawn,” he said, “we ride east.”
At midday the wind that had been dogging them all day died. Dust kicked up by the horses spattered right back down to the earth. No trees stood, although here and there hardy bushes sprouted pale shoots. The rolling countryside looked as dead as if a giant’s flaming hand had swept across it, knocking down all things and scorching the hills.
Blessing rode in silence behind Frigo. She had not spoken since he had knocked her unconscious, only stared stubbornly at the land ahead. Because Anna was watching her anxiously, fearful that she’d sustained some damage in her mind, she saw the girl’s aspect change. Her expression altered. Her body tensed. She saw something that shocked her.
“God save us,” said Frigo as the slope of the land fell away before them to expose a new landscape.
Now Anna saw it, too.
East, the country broke suddenly from normal ground into a ragged, rocky plain whose brownish-red surfaces bled an ominous color into the milky sky. Nothing grew there at all. It was a wasteland of rock.
“That’s not proper land,” muttered scarred John. “That’s demon work, that is.”
“I’ve never heard of such a thing,” said Theodore, “never in all the stories of the eastern frontier, and I’ve been a soldier for fifteen years and fought in Dalmiaka with the Emperor Henry and the good queen.” He glanced at Hugh. “As she was then.”
Hugh had not heard him. He, too, stared at this wilderness with the barest of smiles. “This is the power that killed Anne,” he said.
“What is it, my lord?” asked the captain. “Is it the Enemy’s work?”
“‘There will come to you a great calamity. The rivers will run uphill and the wind will become as a whirlpool. The mountains will become the sea and the sea become mountains. The sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood.”’
Every man there looked up at the cloudy heavens as if seeking the hidden sun.
“‘All that is lost will be reborn on this Earth,”’ he added.
They stared, hesitant to go forward.
Theodore broke their silence. “What’s that, my lord?” he said, pointing east into the wasteland of rock. “I thought I saw an animal moving out there.”
Hugh shook his head. “How can any creature traverse that? We’ll have to move down toward the sea.”
Although they did this, and although it was just possible to keep moving east by sticking to the strand, they rode anyway always with one eye twisted toward desolation. It was so cheerless and barren and frightening that Anna wept.
3
HE came with his entourage of treacherous Arethousans from whose lips fell lies, false jewels each one, because their ears had heard nothing but the teachings of the Patriarch, the apostate whose stubborn greed broke apart the True Church.
Adelheid’s soldiers waited in ranks beside the gate and along the avenues. Servants swarmed like galla, each dressed in what best clothing they could muster. All must appear formidable, the court of queen and empress. The court of the skopos, the only true intermediary between God and humankind.
Adelheid did not rise to greet him as his retinue reached the court before the audience hall. She sent Lady Lavinia outside to escort him in, while Captain Falco hurried inside to report.
“This must be, indeed, the fabled one-eyed general, Lord Alexandros.”
“The one we heard tales of when we marched in Dalmiaka?”
“The same, so it appears. It’s said he became a lord by winning many victories for the emperor, who rewarded him with a noble wife and a fine title. He rides a handsome chestnut gelding and has a string of equally fine mounts, all chestnut. That suggests a man with vanity in his disposition.”
“Well observed, Captain.”
Adelheid wore a fine coronet of gold, but it looked a paltry thing to Antonia’s eyes compared to the imperial crown she should have been wearing. Still, Adelheid herself, robed in ermine, with face shining, looked impressive enough to stop any man in his tracks and distract him from such tedious details as the richness of her ornaments.