The Dread Wyrm

by Miles Cameron

  Blanche put her hands on her hips. “Men—out.”

  Ser Michael came in with more linen. “Sorry, lass. That’s not some friend of your ma’s having a baby. That’s the rightful Queen of Alba. If I could, I’d pack every peer of the realm into the room.”

  Gabriel nodded at Michael. “I’d forgotten that,” he said.

  “Somewhere, Kaitlin isn’t far from giving birth,” Michael said. “Mayhap I’ve just given it all more thought.”

  “Christ and all the saints,” swore Blanche. “The poor Queen!”

  Amicia turned—with more venom than Gabriel had ever seen. Amicia looked old. She had lines on her face that she’d never had, and even the torchlight was unkind. Gabriel, who had two bad cuts on his head, a blinding headache and a left hand so sore as to penetrate all that, assumed he looked as bad.

  He turned to Toby. “Get my harness off,” he said. “I don’t think we’ll be attacked while the Queen gives birth. And I’m about to drop.”

  As if on cue, Bad Tom appeared at the far door, by the donkeys. He had a long sword in his hand.

  “Barn’s all ours,” he said. He nodded to Lord Corcy.

  Corcy had been replaced at the water kettle by Nell, and he stood with a hand to the small of his back. “Weren’t you for killing us all, an hour back?”

  Tom Lachlan laughed. “Nothing personal,” he said. “Better this way.”

  Corcy nodded.

  It was a big room, a third of the barn, and the squires and pages moved in among the knights, disarming them. The metal falling on the stone floor made a racket.

  “Quiet!” demanded Amicia. “Can you so-called gentlemen not manage to let this poor woman have a little peace?”

  The squires began to move about more quietly. Somehow, the scrape of metal on the floor seemed even louder.

  The Queen screamed.

  Ghause stood in her citadel, amidst the dark trees and the bright cascade of flowers.

  The whole vastness of her working was all one brilliant plant with deep roots and a carefully cultivated single yellow rose that was as big and lush a blossom as the real had ever seen. It was perhaps more perfect for never having known real weather or real bees.

  Ghause did not pray, as she did not think it fitting to pray when she was about to kill. But she did reach out to her lady.

  “You promised me revenge,” she reminded her patron.

  And she thought—I hope Thorn is watching. Perhaps he’ll slink home.

  One slim hand reached out, and plucked the rose.

  The world screamed.

  Thorn could not smile in triumph, but the triumph was there. “I knew she would have to do it,” he said to the rain and the darkness.

  But Ash was elsewhere.

  Thorn raised his own net of cobweb and deceit and false guidance—camouflage and deception such as nature practised on herself—as long prepared as her working. Into her magnificent black cathedral of a curse he launched his own working so that it nested inside, like the resident mice and bats and moths in a castle.

  “Goodbye, Ghause,” he said.

  At the Queen’s scream, Amicia stood.

  Gabriel suddenly understood that this was not a matter of the birth.

  Blanche caught the Queen’s hand.

  Gabriel stepped straight into his palace. There, Prudentia stood on her plinth. She frowned.

  “It’s your mother,” she said. “Oh, Gabriel—”

  Gabriel pushed open the door to the aethereal. He loosed workings that he kept ready, a careful barrage—his own shield first, as he had learned from bitter experience, and then his glittering tapestry working.

  He spat names at his statues and his signs as his room whirled about him.

  In the real, his heart had beaten once.

  Then, having done what he could, he stepped to the door.

  Prudentia moved to stop him. “Master,” she cried. “This is death, come for the Queen, from your mother.”

  Gabriel nodded. “I’ve made all my decisions,” he said.

  “I’m no fan of your mother, boy. She killed me. But this—you would give your life to baulk her?”

  Gabriel set his jaw in a way that those who knew him often dreaded. “Yes.”

  Prudentia stepped out of the way. “Goodbye.”

  “I’ll be back, Pru,” he said. Then he stepped out of his palace.

  In the real, Toby saw the captain pause, and his face did—that thing.

  Toby had the spear to hand—he’d just put it by the fire, having oiled the shaft. Nell saw him, and without more thought he snatched it and threw it to her, and she pressed it into the captain’s unmoving hands.

  In the aethereal, the curse was like a thick black curtain of felt—if an entire quadrant of the sky could be made of black felt that extended for an infinite distance.

  Gabriel found himself on the infinite plain of the true aethereal. He was not alone. He and Amicia stood side by side, and Desiderata stood a pace behind them.

  The curse was so remarkable that Gabriel wasted a non-breath in awe.

  “I will not surrender,” Desiderata said. Gabriel watched it rush at them.

  There was something in it—something riding it. He had the senses—thanks mostly to Harmodius—to see the fine details in the aethereal.

  He had the time to curse his bad fortune. And his mother.

  And the delightful irony that if he could reach her to tell her that he was about to offer his life to defend her target, she would relinquish the working. That and other ironies. It was all—absurd.

  He had nothing to lose, and the aethereal offered the illusion of time.

  “What did you promise God for my life?” he asked Amicia.

  Amicia didn’t look at him. “Everything, of course,” she said.

  “All I did was cast a little love charm,” he said.

  She turned. Desiderata laughed aloud, for all that her existence was about to be blotted out. “She is not charmed,” Desiderata said. “By my powers I tell you.”

  Gabriel wanted to grin like a boy with his first kiss. “Take power from me, Amicia. All you can. Spend, and save not.”

  The three of them joined hands.

  “No,” Desiderata said. “Let me.”

  Amicia turned her head away from Gabriel, and began, “In nomine patri…”

  She began to walk forward into the black, and they went with her, arms raised.

  And then, in the way of the aethereal, he held the spear.

  Too much time, and no time.

  He thought that the idea of felt was itself interesting. Usually, the manifestation of the working had something to do with the caster—and everything to do with the context.

  Gabriel thought—how do you defeat a mountain of felt?

  And then it filled their aethereal horizon like a sudden summer storm.

  Gabriel cut with the spear.

  But at the moment that they met the curse, it overcame everything.

  Thorn’s working was the flight of a butterfly passing a spider’s web.

  But Ghause was an old, powerful spider, and in that moment her foolishness was revealed, and she saw her adversary’s working.

  Discovered, but deep inside her defences, Thorn had no choice but to strike. He enveloped her power, the better to subsume her—to take every iota of her essence. Her soul. Her power.

  Ghause laughed. “Richard Plangere—is that all you want of me?” she asked, and her voice dripped with the seductive contempt of an experienced woman.

  She raised no shield in her instant to act. Instead, she cut him with an image—an erotic image, powered by her rich imagination and all her phantasms, full of the smells and tastes of sex.

  Thorn roared. The sound shook the walls—soldiers hid their heads or trembled.

  Cracks appeared in the stone of his skin, and moisture poured forth.

  Damaged, he lashed back with hate.

  Her laughter was extinguished as he killed her in one mighty blow, the
working like a stone fist of ops carefully tended for the moment—

  But not for this moment. Thorn stood in the fastness of his dark palace. His frustration was immeasurable. He collected his stored ops, the power he had saved to battle her, and cast it at the great gates of Ticondaga. The gates exploded in a hail of stone and concrete and lethal wood splinters. Heedless of his own Wild infantry or the Galles and Outwallers who thought him an ally, he began to call down the stars themselves from the heavens and hurl them at the fortress, and his aim had only grown more accurate since the taking of Albinkirk.

  Like a fist of God, the first rock struck the high tower from which Ghause had cast, and blew it to atoms, leaving only a glow of incredible heat and glasslike slag where her corpse had been cooling in the high tower.

  Aneas had enough talent to know the breath when his mother died—and to know what it meant.

  He was in the inner yard, by the doors of the great hall, and he had a dozen veteran men-at-arms to hand.

  “Follow me,” he said.

  Muriens men-at-arms didn’t ask questions.

  The Earl of Westwall had trouble with his eye—double vision, rather than no vision. But he armed as soon as his men told him of the size of the assault, and he was waiting in person when the gates were blown in by sorcery.

  He was knocked from his feet. And as he struggled to rise to his knees, he knew she was dead. Nothing but her death would have allowed the spells on the gates to give way.

  He would have cried. But there was no time. Stone trolls were coming up the ramp of rubble that had once been the gatehouse.

  “You old bitch,” he said with enormous fondness. And went at the trolls, and his death, with a high heart.

  Gabriel had never been in this kind of sorcerous duel before. Neither, he suspected, had Harmodius—no help was coming from that quarter.

  The spear cut the curse the way a heavy, sharp knife would cut a tapestry—with immense difficulty. The curse seemed to rip more than cut. The felt analogy was shredded into tougher filaments that tried to bind the spear in place. Further, tendrils of the curse gathered to him—his aethereal legs were matted with the stuff.

  He cut back on a new line, amazed that the feeling of powering the cut with his waist and shoulders was exactly like using the weapon in the real and then such thoughts were lost in the heart-breaking futility of the third, weakest cut.

  The curse was clearly winning.

  It didn’t seem to do him any harm.

  So he stopped fighting, pointed the spear at the heart of it, and spoke one word in High Archaic.

  “Fume.”

  If Amicia preferred God’s power to his, he’d use it himself.

  The curse burned. It burned best where he had cut it with the spear.

  A tendril of the curse drifted across his eyes and another across his mouth even as he poured power into the fire. He tried to move the spear, but it was locked in place, a thousand black ribbons criss-crossing on the haft.

  He brought his first casting—the shield—to his face, and the energy forced the tendrils away. He took a breath and cast, imagining his memory palace to find a piece of Mag’s superb ice bridge working and throw it into the curse.

  Water, fire and ice.

  It was one way to unmake felt.

  Amicia felt Gabriel leave her, and then she was with Desiderata in a castle of golden bricks with walls as tall as ten men and lofty towers.

  “Why didn’t he come with us?” Desiderata asked. “I could use his strong arms on my battlements.”

  “He always has to do things himself,” Amicia said.

  The wave of black water crashed against the stone palace. It was clever, the water—it went over the battlements and the towers, filling the courtyards and the spaces between.

  But it could not enter the citadel, and it could not seem to undermine the walls.

  Amicia raised a shield of brilliant gold, and another of sparkling green—no mean feat in the aethereal itself.

  The magnificent golden outer wall collapsed.

  “Oh, my God,” Desiderata said. “Oh, blessed Virgin—this is not the dark lord of the dungeon.”

  The aethereal ground on which the golden walls rested began to erode away, disintegrating like the dream it was.

  Amicia was beyond anything of her experience of the hermetical—or anything else. She could only bow her head and pray.

  And continue to flood her shields with all the power that she possessed.

  The citadel walls began to collapse from the bottom.

  “My baby!” screamed Desiderata. She reached out, and put her hands on the walls of her palace and held them with her own will, commanding their obedience, and she began to build a flood of gold to link them.

  The black water leached through the widening cracks and puddled on the new golden floor—and began to rise.

  Outside was a gale of laughter.

  Desiderata raised her head and her eyes met Amicia’s with no fear. Only pride.

  “There he is, come to see my fall,” she said.

  Between sleeping and waking…

  Gabriel moved the spear easily, back and forth, and hunks of the curse like dead goat-hair fell away.

  It was a waste of will, however, as the curse was suddenly dead, unpowered. Impotent.

  Or complete.

  Gabriel retreated like a beaten army—but one with its rearguard intact. Or that was his analogy, and analogies matter in the aethereal. He chose to retreat through the door of his palace, because he could see nothing but the tattered remnants of the curse around him—no Amicia, and no Queen.

  The door was shut. He had a moment of panic before he realized that, almost by definition, he had the key. He opened it, and there was Pru.

  He slammed the door shut, and leaned against it, spear in hand. “Told you I’d be back,” he said.

  Prudentia, who always rose to his arrogance, said nothing. Only, when he’d breathed a few times, she said, “You should know. Your mother is dead.”

  Of course she was dead.

  The curse was unpowered.

  A host of thoughts came into his head, and filled it.

  The back of her hand struck him. “Are you an idiot?” she screamed.

  Her hands folded across his back in a warm embrace.

  Crouching over Prudentia’s body.

  His hand on her latch, and her head next to Ser Henri’s on a pillow.

  His first casting in her solar—a housefly subsumed, its tiny spirit in him.

  Her voice in his ear the day—the day—

  He mastered himself. It was what he did.

  “And Amicia and the Queen?” he asked Prudentia.

  “Ticondaga is falling even now,” Prudentia said. “Can you not feel it?”

  He could. Oh, now that he let himself, he could feel it. The stones of the ancient castle were in his soul, and they were being pounded with fire and rock and hate. Only the struggle with the curse would have covered this much terror.

  For the first time in his life, Gabriel fled the aethereal, because it was more terrible than the real.

  Nell pushed the spear into the captain’s hands—and instantly he began to use it. She only just rolled free, and she had a scar on her right ankle for the rest of her life.

  And in the next heartbeat or two, the Queen screamed again, and then said, quite clearly, “My baby!”

  Tom pushed Toby out of the way and drew his sword. “By Tar,” he roared. “Let me at it, whatever it is!”

  But denied access to the aethereal, he was only a spectator to the captain’s one-sided fight. The spear shone like a bolt of lightning, and blue-red fire crackled around the room.

  All the candles went out, then the fire.

  “Jesus Christ!” someone said.

  Nell found herself by Lord Corcy. He was saying “pater noster” over and over again.

  The darkness was absolute, and then sound went, too, and there was only the beat of her heart and the feel of the
floor and the mantelpiece under her arm. The fear was itself like a heavy, wet piece of damp felt, and threatened to suffocate her—she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see or hear—

  And then a baby cried.

  Blanche, at the Queen’s side, had never quit her task, despite horror and terror and blindness. Her arms were between the Queen’s legs, and when she had the head, she did what her mother had said to her fifty times—ran a hand back, and pulled gently.

  Pulled the puling thing clear, and gave it a slap.

  In that moment, the curse shattered.

  No light returned, because the candles and torches and fire were truly extinguished. But the quality of darkness changed, and sound returned.

  Nell struggled with her belt pouch to find her tinder kit.

  Blanche clutched the baby, wiping all the birthing away with one of Bad Tom’s best ruffled shirts. She dared not assay the darkened room, so she sat, the baby crushed to her.

  She heard the other woman—the living saint—say, “Fiat Lux.”

  A candle popped into flame. The light seemed as bright as daylight.

  “God be praised,” said the sheriff, on his knees. Then—a set look on his face—the man rose and approached the bed.

  “Your grace,” he said. “It is said that a woman in the moment of birth cannot lie. Whose child is this?”

  Desiderata groaned. But her eyes opened in her sweat-slick face. “The King my husband’s, and no other,” she said.

  Then the sheriff went back to his knees, and as Nell lit more candles, the other men bent their knees.

  Ser Gabriel was crying.

  No one present could remember seeing him cry, and Sauce, who might have had something to say, was two hundred leagues away.

  But he reached out with the spear.

  It pointed straight at the babe.

  Before Blanche could think to protest, the spear moved, and cut the cord.

  “God save the King,” Ser Gabriel said. He knelt.

  For a moment, that’s how they all were—the Queen on the bed, where Blanche put her babe in her arms and knelt in her turn, and Amicia standing at the Queen’s shoulder, her face seeming to emit light, and all the knights and pages and squires on their knees, bareheaded, in a barn on a late spring night.