by David Keck
Knights—shields loose, faces bare—began to turn. In a heartbeat, the duke would crash down on Coensar and his crowd of well-wishers. The duke stood in his stirrups, the bloody axe high.
At the very last, Coensar wrestled Keening around— hopeless.
But Radomor did not swing. A twitch sent him past Coensar and careering on to the Lord of Mornaway. Moryn was just turning round.
Too late, his men understood. Too slow, they sprang to close ranks. The duke's tall horse tore a gap. Moryn's mouth was a black hole in a white frame. Swords slapped Yrlac's armor. The wheeling axe met Mornaway's shoulder and chopped him down.
Yrlac rode through as Moryn cartwheeled to the mire.
Durand swayed where he stood. Killing the heir was pointless. Where was the boon? What was to gain? Rain poured down like misery. Ouen and Berchard jounced close and reached to hook him under the arms. Durand swore, shaking off their nursemaid hands. Radomor's green knights were whooping as they left the field. Durand looked for the spot where Lord Moryn lay and saw a crowd of his people. As Durand slogged toward them, he caught a glimpse through the screen of henchmen: Lord Moryn was pulling himself up from the mud.
"Great is the Lord of Dooms." A grin twitched across Durand's smeared face. Yrlac had not succeeded. Moryn had survived. They had won. The crown was safe, war averted, and all of them were free. Ouen and Berchard trotted into the celebration.
It was then, as they left him momentarily alone, that he heard something: a slender whisde.
He was alone for yards in every direction, and the thin shrieking sound rose from nearby.
Someone moaned, "No-o-o."
The mangled form of the Champion lay only a few paces distant. The sounds piped from the carcass. Or somehow beyond it. "It is enough. It should be enough," he heard. The dry shriek whistled on, arising from some deep place as though the flattened corpse lay over the gate of some vast catacomb.
Abruptly something slithered, real and palpable in the rain. Something moved among the clay rents and craters. Blackened tongues of linen retreated into the mouths cut by hoof and blade in the Champion's mail. Gray hair poured long and brittle as spider's webs from the iron cask of its helm.
All at once, the Champion levered itself from the mud. Durand was alone with the thing.
Its twin voices moaned, lost in their dark passages below Creation.
Durand's hands jerked into the sign of the Creator. He couldn't turn away. "Hells."
The creature turned. Its mount lurched onto the field beside it—though its eyes flashed. For a moment, the man's tall carcass stood in the muck, dripping. The last long rags drew themselves in. The iron cask turned. Durand could see glints where his blade had struck it. For a moment, he felt himself under the eye of the man. He knew he could not fight this thing. Not now. But the towering Champion turned from him, finally, and swung onto its tall horse.
29 The Lion Snared
Your feet! The king, the king is standing!" said a voice. As the Champion rode from the field, Durand must have sagged. He found his hands in the mud. A wind had blown in from the sea, gusting strong enough to lift the trappers of fallen horses.
Berchard caught him under the arm. First, Durand saw Kandemar the Herald. The man was up, with his long trumpet in his hands and his tabard lashing. In the stands, Ragnal stood on wide-set legs. He had startled his oily flock of servitors. Around him, baffled lords and ladies— for and against the king—got to their feet as well, catching at hats and wimples. Prince Biedin looked from his place at his brother's elbow with a mollifying half-smile on his face, for the king himself wore a scowl.
With stiff fingers, Ragnal gestured to Kandemar, and, with one note of his slender trumpet, the pale Herald lanced the gale. Every man in Errest stopped silent and listened.
"Right," said the king into the empty wind. "It's done. Now we'll see the rest finished and know where we stand."
With this, the great man caught his flying cloak, and stalked from the box with starlings, lords and ladies following in his wake. The feast was set to begin as soon as the company could gather.
Now they would learn the result of all their labors.
CREATION FELL INTO darkness, tossing like a fevered giant. From the vast waste of the Westering Sea, came the greatest in a litany of storms.
Durand tore a clean tunic from his packs as the gale snatched and tugged at his tent. Beyond the loose-skinned drum of the tent, he heard the bark of laughter.
Durand knew the men's minds: Despite all the cunning games Radomor had played, he had lost. Radomor's tricks had left him with nothing, and few men would see valor in that last wild charge for Lord Moryn. Petulance. A man's honor demanded more: A fighting man accepted his doom.
And so they chuckled among the tents as they brushed their best surcoats and gossiped about the king's haste. They played games with the wind.
But Durand had seen the fury stamped on Radomor's features. He had seen the dead man climb from the muck and knew that nothing was over. Radomor would not rest.
He buckled on his sword, setting teeth at the protests of mace-tom shoulder, weeping cuts, and black bruises. Radomor and his creatures would not stop. No one was safe from the Col to the sea. And they all stood on the balancing point: a kingdom teetering on the stormy rock of Tern Gyre. The canvas round him slammed and thundered. His eye fell on the Green Lady's token, black in the shuddering dark.
He could not leave it behind.
The voices were gone. Other knights, with shield-bearers and servants to sponge and brush and comb, had moved more quickly. Whatever happened, he must be there. He must keep his eyes open and be ready.
Taking a deep breath, he stepped into an empty courtyard and was rocked by the wind. Some tents had blown down. One rolled and bounded through the gloomy yard. He was momentarily alone. Above the salt grass yard towered the keep of Tern Gyre. In the wind, Durand saw things: eye-corner shadows that vanished when he turned. Firelight shivered in the narrow windows of the fortress. The Rooks would be slinking through the keep. Radomor's Champion would be poised above the high table. In his mind's eye, Durand saw Radomor sitting on that Ferangore throne. Creation rolled and thundered, full of rain.
A mouth of stone yawned in the keep's flank. Beyond was a stair. Durand pitched himself through the wind and slammed the great door behind him.
Beyond the whistles of the muzzled storm, Durand now heard Biedin's feast upstairs. But, as he listened to their blithe laughter, he flinched from something much closer at hand. The shadows around him seemed to be rustling—small living movements—like moths' wings.
He caught hold of his blade, thinking that, even after all that had happened, he must be mad to be in this place where the rage of Duke Radomor and the schemes of his Rooks had Creation itself boiling like a cauldron.
"I'll see where they've put us." It was Lamoric, his voice hammered flat by the length of a staircase. "Wait a moment."
Deorwen waited alone on the threshold of Radomor's Great Council.
Durand cursed himself. She should not be in this place. He mounted the stair. Some of the lads could get her out and safe. There might still be time.
"Deorwen—" he began, reaching out.
But a great hand caught him, and Ouen was smiling down, gold teeth winking.
"Durand, lad. Come inside, why don't you?" He was grinning, but his grip was tight enough to pop seams. "There's a place with us. Lamoric's just stepped inside to see where the Marshal of the Hall plans to sit them."
Durand glanced to Deorwen.
"For God's sake, Ouen," he said, "it's not—" "Come on. The lads were wondering. The Prince sets a fair table. There's wine."
Durand left Deorwen there, staring after him with wide, shocked eyes. He couldn't explain to her. He couldn't fight Ouen now, and there was no shaking the big man's grip.
DURAND PITCHED INTO a hall full of men who laughed and gloated while the wind wailed at the arrow loops above them. Tern Gyre's feasting hall was a tall, sm
oky room where a coat of smooth plaster hid the keep's dark fabric. On a dais at the head of the hall stood the high table, white as an altar. There were chairs for the whole of the Great Council: Biedin, the king, and every Duke of Errest—even the old ghost of Hesperand—but the only man seated was Radomor of Yrlac, hunkered like a dead man's curse at some fairy-tale feast. Mud and blood blackened his surcoat. Rust stained his scalp.
This was the man Durand had seen on the throne in Ferangore.
Ouen half-shoved Durand on.
Below the dais, serving men had set benches and tables around the great blaze at the center of the hall. There, Durand sat under the pressure of Ouen's hand while the wind moaned outside.
"There you are lad, sat down and safe." He snatched a cup of wine from one of the other's hands. "Here. A shot of this will do you good."
Durand set the cup aside. Green knights leaned on their elbows and talked with their knives. The massive Champion sat hard by the dais, his notched helm hanging over the table. The Rooks preened.
Berchard, snug at Durand's side, spoke as Ouen threw his leg over the bench. "Thought you'd got lost," he said. "How's the shoulder?"
Durand hardly remembered. "Fine."
Straight across Biedin's hearthfire, the king's black gaggle of functionaries wrestled with a jug. Though they were bald and soft with years, these men—treasurers, clerks, cofferers, and chroniclers—plucked at each other, slopping wine back and forth and gabbling like children.
Berchard was eyeing Durand's back, seeing God-knew-what.
"You'll need a new surcoat, I think," he decided.
A glance showed a dark stain, but, with Radomor hunkered at the high table like something risen from the Hells, he did not care. He could not believe the others were laughing.
The heavy notes of great drums boomed and rolled, summoning all eyes to the high table for the somber procession of the dukes of Ragnal's Great Council. A stooped man, some prelate by his beard and jeweled robe, took the lead. He carried a gilded sunburst high over his head.
Each lord to step out behind him wore a city's ransom in stones and stiff brocade. Weapons glinted at their hips and crowns winked on their brows. A snapped collarbone had not kept Lord Moryn away. When the procession reached the high table, each magnate stood behind his own tall chair, noting, with varying humor, Radomor's presence there, already sitting.
A thread of the gale outside curled through a window to bludgeon the candles down. Radomor got to his feet. The hearty Duke of Beoran gripped Radomor by the elbow, squeezing his reassurance and muttering through a lopsided smile.
Kandemar, in the meantime, had appeared.
"My lords, ladies, and gentlemen," spoke the Herald, "His Royal Highness, Ragnal, by the Grace of far Heaven, King of Errest: the Elder Kingdom of the Atthias, and realm of the Cradle's Landing."
The drums called every man and woman to their feet. Only Radomor did not heed them.
The priests swayed forward, incense swinging. They parted around the table. In their wake, the Holy Ghosts filed in, forming a rank behind the dukes, as cold as ancient Kandemar.
Candlelight was golden. Incense bloomed.
Finally, into the stillness of the feasting hall, prowled Ragnal, King of Errest. An heirloom blade glinted at his hip, and, on his brow, the kingdom's black sapphire, the Evenstar, winked in its knotted band of red gold.
"Let us begin this foolishness," Ragnal rumbled, and at his word, the feast began. Ragnal's priest-arbiter said wise words over courses of heron and porpoise and ox, and lords passed tokens among the brave. All the while, the gale built beyond the walls. Lightning snapped at the arrow loops with force enough to make the warriors flinch. Durand's hand hardly left the blade at his hip.
Through it all, Radomor neither spoke nor moved. According to every word Heremund had uttered, there were not enough votes to unseat the king. But here was Radomor in his fury. Soon every man at the tables had one eye on the dais, reading the smug looks among those who meant to vote the king down. Even the fools heard the storm. It was all about to fall in.
And, right in the heart of it, was Deorwen. She sat a few places up the table, but was nearer to the Rooks and the Champion and the dukes of Errest. She lifted a cup to her lips, and caught what must have been Durand's wild-eyed stare.
"What was it you called those black fellows?" asked Berchard abruptly.
Durand found Ouen squeezing his arm.
"—'Rooks' wasn't it?" Berchard said.
"I think it was, Berchard," said Ouen.
"You know. I met these two lads, engineers, taking a barge up the Green Road. I'm on this barge—caravan guardlike what with there being word of bandits on the Gray Downs south of Wood's End—"
"When ain't there?" said Ouen. "Good pickings down that way. Half the trade from Errest runs up and down the Green Road. Or so I hear."
One of the Rooks glanced up, transfixing Durand in a hollow instant between heartbeats.
"Now," said Berchard, "I'm standing there with a crossbow in one hand, scratching fly bites with the other. These two lads are staring down at the river, and it's thick as fish oil in the heat, and the flies are hanging in clouds over us, and I'm mopping my forehead, stifling in the mail coat I'd got on, when I mumbled something about how bloody hot it was. And these two lads, they just took up laughing, saying they'd just got back from the South and how a man didn't know hot until he'd spent time choking on the dust in Totarra."
Now both Rooks had turned from the plucked carcasses on the shared trencher before them, and were looking across to Durand, eyebrows raised. He could hardly breathe.
Somehow, Berchard kept talking. 'They'd just got back from working the siege of Pontiam. The one in the song?" He set a hand flat on his chest and sang out loud. "In Pontiam nine towers stood, though Barris stood alone. For Waldemar, old Barris would, though many more had flown." He smiled into Durand's face. "Over the Weasand from Vuranna?"
Transfixed by the attention of the Rooks, Durand held his tongue.
"Anyway, they got talking about King Waldemar down there—a hard man they said—and the rebellion, of course. These Rooks of yours sound like a pair in the rebel camp, what with the black robes and all. Worked in a noble's court. Used to be priests. Or so they said."
Across the hall, the Rooks were playing with him now, smug grins splitting their waxy faces.
"Priests?" breathed Durand, incredulous.
"So these lads said," said Berchard. "Scribes or arbiters at some court or other. Anyway, our friends must've got greedy cringing around the high table, tugging their master's brocade sleeves, crawling over silk carpets, sleeping in dank cells, sucking stale water while the nobles slosh their gilded mazers of Vuranna's best all around."
As Berchard spoke, the two Rooks poured claret dark as blood. One licked his lips. Durand felt something strange under his hand, but he couldn't look away. Lightning flashed with the crack of thunder hard upon it.
"Seems their rivals had a habit of bowing out. After one feast, the castellan and three bailiffs got so ill that all died but the castellan. Said he lost every hair on his head."
Ouen laughed. "A lucky escape."
"—And a month later slipped on a stone staircase. Fell so hard they could hardly tell who he had been. It wasn't too long before our pair were the only ones left—where once there was a whole choir whispering in the rebel's ear.
"And they'd had their beaks in the wrong books: moldering tomes, scrolls. Things left in cellars from the Heshtarian days before the Crusade cleared the bastards out. They fell to spending nights upon the wastelands, crawling among the catacombs and altar stones rotting beyond the eyes of Heaven and living men."
Under Durand's palms, the tablecloth seemed to tingle.
"If it's the same pair, they came to nothing."
Durand wrenched his eyes from the Rooks. "What?" He could not look further than Berchard's face.
"Backed the wrong horse. Their pet rebel was too faithless for the faithless.
With the Rooks in his ears he'd swear anything to anybody and break his word just as easy. Our villains, they slipped away just before Waldemar caught up with the rebel. What they did to that man..."
"Thorough?" Ouen laughed.
"So they said," Berchard allowed. "And thorough with the Rooks, as well, what they could find of them."
Back across the fire, the Rooks grinned. With a tiny ripple of his fingers, one roused the picked dove on his trencher. For an instant, it might have been some sleight of hand, but then the creature's walnut skull twitched up as if conscious of the pain of being cooked and picked to pieces. The Rooks smiled at Durand, as though they were sharing a joke.
"This is where my engineers came in, you see. Priests came down to deal with the Rooks' rooms, including two of the Patriarchs themselves. Laid each chamber open to the Eye of Heaven and razed the rebel's castle. But that weren't enough! No. They turned a river over the place. That was what these engineer lads had been doing last. They hired on with the Conclave after they lost their contracts with the rebel. They wouldn't speak about what they saw when the Rooks' rooms came down or when they took the floors up." - The tablecloth sensation—as though he had his hands in something damp—nagged him till he looked down. Like a spreading stain, the whole of the cloth around him had turned black. As he lifted his hands, he saw their silhouettes, pale as the Lost but filling in.
"God in Heaven," Berchard said. Ouen grimaced, twitching his hands into the air.
Table, wall, bench, and food were all scabbed over. A half-finished leg of goose had sunk in on itself, putrid with mold. Maggots teemed. Behind the leering Rooks, a similar broad fan of mildew had bloomed over the plaster. Insects scrabbled down the table. One of Ragnal's own black functionaries plucked one of the running things—cat-quick—and popped it in his mouth.