The Dread Wyrm

by Miles Cameron

  They all looked at each other.

  Edmund said slowly, “That it will function as a sword. In the aethereal, too.”

  Master Pye gave him the glance of approval that they all treasured. He was not big on praise, was Master Pye. But he was more than fair. “Indeed, boys. That’s what is called a Fell Sword. Except that that’s a Fell Sword that will cut in the real or in the aethereal.” He bent over it and fitted a very pragmatic and ordinary loupe in his eye.

  “I wonder who made it?” he asked.

  The clerk repeated the question, and the infidel knight began to answer. He spoke for some time, and long before he was done, the clerk began writing.

  “He says his master re-made it. But he says that it was made more than a thousand years ago.”

  Edmund all but choked.

  Master Pye nodded. “Ahh!” he said, with utter delight. “It is one of the six!” He lifted the sword from the table, and in that gesture, he was transformed from a tall, ungainly man with bulgy eyes and bad breath to a hero of legend whose shadow fell over the table like a figure of menace.

  “Who is your master, my lord?” he asked.

  The clerk repeated the words.

  The infidel spoke. “Abū l-Walīd Muḥammad bin ’Aḥmad bin Rušd.” He bowed. His eyes were on the sword.

  Master Pye smiled. “I confess to a very boyish inclination to try and cut something with it.” He carefully put it on the table, and returned to being a bent-shouldered man in late middle-age with a fringe of hair and bulging eyes. “His master is Al Rashidi.”

  The journeymen all breathed in together.

  “The Magus!” Edmund said.

  Master Pye pointed at the tiny sign of an eye emerging from the sun. “The very same.” He offered his right hand to the infidel.

  The black man took his hand.

  Master Pye did something with his hand—changed grip somehow.

  The infidel knight grinned. “Ah—rafiki!” he said.

  “He says, ‘Oh, friend!’” said the clerk.

  Master Pye nodded. He turned.

  “Boys, that’s one of the six—on a table in our shop. I expect that in the next quarter hour, we’ll have the most complete set of weights, measures and dimensions for that sword as exist in all the world. Eh?”

  He took the clerk by the shoulder and led him—and the infidel, who didn’t want to leave his weapon—out of the shop.

  “Six?” Duke asked.

  Tom whistled. “Don’t you know anything?”

  Duke gave him a look that promised bruised knuckles. Duke had made journeyman on pure talent, and lacked the book learning of the other journeymen.

  “Hieronimus Magister was the greatest magus of the Archaics,” Edmund said. “You should read his essay on the property of metals. It is the origin of proper study.” He shrugged. “At any rate, he was the greatest of mages. In their world, he is treated as a prophet.” He pointed out the door, where the black man had gone. “When the Umroth attacked, he made a hundred swords for the Emperor’s guard to use against the not-dead.”

  Tom was measuring and Sam was writing everything in his neat hand on wax.

  “At the end of the last Umroth war, only six remained. They kill—both here and in the aethereal. But strange events follow them—weather, monsters, the Wild, assassins.” Edmund shrugged. “I thought they were a myth.”

  Duke reached out—always the boldest of them—and picked up the great curved sword.

  “Holy Mother of God,” he said.

  He, too, seemed to grow in stature and dignity.

  “Oh,” he breathed. He put the sword down, carefully. “Oh—my God.”

  As Duke was never impressed by anything, Edmund couldn’t stop himself. He plucked up the sword.

  Once, as a child, Edmund had gone with his mother and sisters to the cathedral and there, by chance, he had been standing in the nave when the sun emerged from the clouds and shone directly through the great central rose window of the cathedral. All around him, light exploded into bloom and in that moment, he had felt the touch of God—the direct, intangible presence of the universe and all wisdom, and everything: his sister’s laughter, his mother’s whisper, the priest’s hands, the passage of the smoking censor through the perfumed air, the perfection of its arc and the gleam of its silver shell; and every dust mote and every hint of the last chord of the last hymn and the whispers of the nuns and the gleam of a rich woman’s buttoned sleeve—everything made sense.

  Edmund had never forgotten that moment. It was at the heart of his craftsmanship.

  And now he relived it in half the beat of his heart. He was the sword. The sword was in him and over him. And everything, everywhere, made sense.

  He regained control of himself—aware of a nearly overpowering urge to use the blade on something—anything—to feel its perfection in culmination, almost exactly the feeling he had when he lay beside Anne and kissed her and wanted more. To finish.

  To be complete.

  Instead, he laid the sword gradually down on the table.

  “Be careful,” he said to Sam. “But you must try it.”

  “Can you imagine wearing that every day?” Edmund asked Duke.

  Duke sighed. “Oh—aye. I can imagine.” He smiled weakly. “I wanted to cut you in half, just to see if I could.”

  Neither laughed.

  An hour later, a boy came from Prior Wishart with a note for Ser Ricar. By then the sword was returned to its owner, who seemed profoundly more at ease to have it at his side. He was seated at a table in the yard, writing out words in his odd flowing runes at the dictation of Ser Gerald’s clerk.

  The clerk made an odd gesture. “He speaks Etruscan well eno’,” he said. “I’m trying to give him a few words in Alban.”

  “Etruscan?” Master Pye asked. He shook his head.

  Ser Ricar appeared at his elbow and handed him a note.

  Master Pye took the note and read it.

  “Christ on the cross,” he snapped. “Boys! On me!”

  Long before the King’s Guardsmen came, Blanche was gone, and her bed was stripped and the maids were washing in the yard. The black man vanished as if he had never been, and Ser Ricar vanished with him.

  The guardsmen searched in a desultory way. Blanche had friends throughout the palace. The guardsmen were not very interested in finding her, but they had a warrant for her arrest.

  When they were gone, Mistress Pye put her arms around her husband. “Bradley Pye,” she said. “I think it is time to get out of this town.”

  He was watching the last two guardsmen as they went through his gate.

  “Worse ’n you think,” he muttered. “They’re going to suppress the Order.”

  His wife crossed herself. “Blessed Saint Thomas,” she said.

  Master Pye had tears in his eyes. “My life’s work is here,” he said. “But our secret guards will be gone, now. The prior’s calling his knights away before the King can get to them.”

  “So?” his wife asked.

  “So we’re naked,” Master Pye said. “And an army of Galles will land in the next day or two. Gerry says the Venike know they’re coming.”

  “Gerald Random won’t let us down.” Deirdre Pye shook her head.

  “I’d be happy if you were gone,” Master Pye said. “You an’ the maids.”

  “Bradley Pye, when will you learn that we’re not hostages? We’re willing hands.” His wife crossed her arms.

  Pye pursed his lips. “We’ll see,” he said.

  No Galles came the next day, or the next.

  Outside the southern walls of the city, the bleachers rose for the tournament, and lists were built. There were lists for foot combat, with oak beams four fingers square that rested on oak posts, so that a knight in full armour, thrown by another, wouldn’t budge the fence. Four feet high, eighteen feet on a side—a bear pit for armoured fighters.

  The mounted lists were more complicated; a central barricade the height of a horse’s haun
ches, walled in oak boards, the whole length of the course, with another oak fence all the way around the outside, a hundred and fifty feet long and forty feet wide.

  Both lists were nearly complete. At the foot lists, a dozen pargeters and painters had begun hanging painted canvas and leather decorations that looked, for all the world, like solid gold and silver pedestals holding magnificently decorated shields.

  The Master Pargeter already had a master roll of every knight and squire expected to fight. On the ninth and tenth pages, shields had been added to indicate the late entries—Galles who had not yet arrived, and Occitans who were rumoured, even now, to be en route.

  The royal arms decorated the royal pavilion—the King was a noted jouster and had every intention to participate—and the stands.

  The Master Pargeter had narrow red lines through a number of coats of arms, as well, from the original roll. The Earl of Towbray was no longer included. The Count of the Borders had been ordered to take a force of Royal Foresters into the west country in response to raids from the Wild. Edward Daispansay—the Lord of Bain—had taken his retainers and left the court a month before. Only his son Thomas remained, and the difference on his arms—an eight-pointed star—was, thankfully, an easy correction to paint.

  The Count D’Eu, the Champion’s cousin and a famous lance, had just withdrawn that morning.

  But the biggest change was that the Queen’s arms had been ordered stricken from the record. Desiderata’s arms—the Royal Arms of Occitan, quartered with Galle and Alba and supported by a unicorn and a Green Man, were well known throughout the kingdom, and her knights had, on other occasions, been the most cohesive team after the King’s. Now her arms were banned, which led to a great deal of speculation among the workmen, and not a single one of her knights was to break a lance or swing a sword in the lists.

  Ser Gerald Random, the King’s “merchant knight,” stood on his wooden foot, supported by a thick ebony cane with a head of solid gold, watching the workmen. Around him stood most of his officers for the tournament, and with him was the new Lord Mayor of Harndon, Ailwin Darkwood, and the past mayor, Ser Richard Smythe.

  A dozen sailors were rigging an enormous awning over the bleachers.

  “I saw ’em do it in Liviapolis,” Ser Gerald said. “Mind you, they had a magister to seal it.”

  The Lord Mayor made a hasty wave of his hand. “God between us and evil. Until we’re rid of the new bishop, don’t even speak of such things.”

  Random spat in annoyance. “Gentles,” he said, “among us, we control most of the flow of capital in this city.” He looked around. “Are we going to stand for this?” He pointed his elegant cane at the two pargeter’s apprentices who were carefully taking down the Queen’s arms from the central viewing stand over the mounted lists.

  “What choice do we have?” Ser Richard asked. “I don’t have an army. Nor am I much of a jouster.”

  Ser Gerald looked around carefully. “There’s Jacks moving into the city,” he said. “And there’s Galles coming. And a tithe of fools who ape the Galles.”

  Darkwood spoke very quietly. “And Occitans. The Queen’s brother won’t just stand by and let her be arrested.”

  Ser Gerald looked around. “Let’s speak frankly, gentles, as it becomes merchants. Leave lying to the lords. The King’s champion and his cronies are leading us into a civil war, as sure as the wind blows.”

  The other two men shifted uncomfortably.

  “And if they fight here, in our streets—” Ser Gerald narrowed his eyes. “Imagine fire in our houses. And soldiers. Looting.”

  “Sweet Christ, we’d all be ruined.” Ser Richard shook his head. “It would never happen here.”

  Ser Gerald looked around again. “Since my adventure last year among the Moreans,” he said with some authority, “I have friends among the Etruscans.”

  “So I’ve noted, to my discontent,” admitted Darkwood. “There were Venike and Fiorian merchants who got their furs before I did!”

  Ser Gerald raised an eyebrow. “There was fur eno’ for every house,” he said. “And one of my principal backers asked that I make sure the Etruscans weren’t cut out. Any road—the Venike captain, Ser Giancarlo, what docked Thursday last—he’s brought me news.” He looked around again. “He says the King of Galle has ordered all this. That it is a plot—that de Vrailly works for the King of Galle. That he will seize the kingdom and hold it for his master.”

  Ailwin Darkwood tugged his beard. “I’ve always thought so. Since the assault on our coinage started.”

  Ser Gerald was surprised. “But—”

  Darkwood shrugged. “I take my own precautions. What do you suggest we do?”

  Ser Gerald raised an eyebrow. “Nothing against the King,” he said.

  Ser Richard looked furtive. “This is treason.”

  Ser Gerald shook his head vehemently. “Nothing against the King, I said.”

  Master Ailwin and Ser Gerald both glared at Ser Richard. “What do you have planned?” Ser Richard asked, but his body language clearly said that he was not with them.

  An hour later he was sharing wine with the Archbishop of Lorica, who affected unconcern.

  “Fear nothing, good Ser Richard. Some of your countrymen are traitors, but the King is safe. Indeed, I think I can tell you that in the next few hours, a plot will be revealed that will do much to allay your fears.”

  Ser Richard rose. “Random and Darkwood and Pye, between them, control most of the militia—the Trained Band. They will use it.”

  The archbishop laughed. “Peasants with pitchforks? Against belted knights?” He laughed heartily. “I hope they try. In Galle, we encourage them—it thins the herd.”

  Ser Richard knew little about war, but he tugged his beard in agitation. “I think your knights may find them formidable, ser. At any rate, I must away. I cannot have my hand in this. After this unpleasantness is over, I’ll need to do business with these men.”

  The archbishop escorted him personally to the door of his chamber, saw him handed out the door, and returned to his desk. To his secretary, Maître Gris, a priest and doctor of theology, he said, “That man imagines that when we are done, he can go back to his business.” He shook his head. “Usury and luxury and gluttony.”

  His secretary nodded, eyes gleaming.

  “We will have the richest church in all the see of Rhum,” the archbishop said.

  “And you will be Patriarch,” his secretary said.

  They shared a glance. Then the archbishop shook himself free of his dreams and leaned back.

  “Fetch me my Archaic scribe,” he said.

  The secretary frowned, but he went out, his black robes like a storm cloud.

  The archbishop concentrated on a letter explaining—in measured tones—that no priest of the church was subject to any civil or royal law, and that the Manor Court of Lewes had no jurisdiction nor right to hear any case against their reverend father in Christ.

  His secretary returned. In tones of quiet disapproval, the man said, “Maître Villon.”

  A thin figure in the threadbare scarlet of a lower caste doctor of law bowed deeply.

  The archbishop could smell the wine on him. “Maître,” he said sharply.

  The red man stood solidly enough. “Your eminence,” he said.

  The archbishop gestured sharply at his secretary. “I will handle this,” he said.

  His secretary nodded sharply.

  The archbishop sat back. “Maître Villon, you understand, I think, why I brought you to Alba.”

  Maître Villon’s bloodshot eyes met his and then the doctor of law looked at the parquetry floor in front of him. “I am at your eminence’s will,” he said softly.

  “Very much so, I think,” the archbishop said. “Need I go into particulars?”

  Maître Villon didn’t raise his eyes. “No, Eminence.”

  “Very well. I wish a certain set of events to come to pass. Can you make them happen?”

  The man i
n red nodded. “Yes, Eminence.”

  “I wish a man to die.” The archbishop winced at his own words.

  “By what means?” the doctor of law asked.

  “By your means, Maître Villon.” The archbishop spoke sharply, his voice rising, like a mother speaking to a particularly stupid child.

  “By the hermetical arts,” the doctor of law said softly.

  The archbishop half rose. “I have not said so!” he said. “And you will keep a civil tongue in your head. Or you will have no tongue at all.”

  The red-clad man kept looking at the floor.

  “Can you effect this?” the archbishop asked.

  The red-clad man shrugged. “Possibly. All things are possible.”

  “Today.” The archbishop leaned forward.

  The man in red sighed. “Very well,” he said. “Can you have someone get me something he wears? Something he wears often?”

  The archbishop seemed about to expostulate, but then paused. “Yes.”

  The man in red nodded. “If, perhaps, someone could steal his gloves? I assume he is a gentleman.”

  The archbishop was looking elsewhere. “Pfft,” he said.

  The man in red ignored him. “And then, later today, we could return his gloves, as if they were found in the street.”

  “And you can work your hideous perversion in that little time?”

  The man in red bowed. “In your eminence’s service.”

  “You try me, Maître Villon. Yet I hold you and all you think dear in my hand.” The archbishop fingered the amulet he wore with his cross.

  The man in red shrugged. “It is as you say, Eminence.” He sounded tired, or hopeless, or perhaps both.

  As he went out, the secretary glared at him with unconcealed hate.

  “How can you allow such a man to live?” he asked.

  “Tush, Gilles. That is not your place to ask.” The archbishop frowned. “Have you not asked yourself whether Judas was evil, or whether he was bound to deliver our lord to the cross? And thus merely a tool of God?”

  The secretary shrugged. “The scholastica tells me that it was a matter of God using Judas’s evil for His own purposes.”

  The archbishop sat back. “If God is free to use evil to further His ends, so then am I.” He looked over his steepled hands. “What of the Almspend woman?”