by Dave Duncan
Sybilla came sauntering around the corner with her lithesome hips and sultry eyes and those worrisome bulges in her blouse. Alarm bells clanged. Wulf thought hard about Father Czcibor.
“God be with you,” he said, doubting it very much. “Is Justina here?”
Sybilla sighed. “No.” She bent over to put her hands and elbows on the stone table, so she could look him in the eye and he could peer in the top of her blouse. “She’s gone to Elysium. Are you hungry?”
“I would like something to eat, yes. Thank you.” It must be noon and time for dinner.
She did not move. “Would you like to kiss me like you kissed that skinny girl?”
“You were spying on us?” Wulf barked, outraged.
Sybilla smiled dreamily. “Of course. Speakers always spy on people. You can Look in on me any time you want. In this weather I sleep without a cover.”
“I’m not interested.”
She shrugged. That was interesting. “Well, except a man, sometimes.”
About to ask what she meant, he guessed in time, then veered away from the subject. “Tell me about Rome.”
She oozed into a new position, sitting on a corner of the table, with her skirt pulled tight over the thigh nearest him. “It’s dirty and hot and smelly and even men don’t dare go out at night. There are bodies floating in the Tiber every morning and the pope holds orgies.”
“Do you often attend the pope’s orgies?”
“Father won’t let me go.”
“Who is your Father?”
“Cardinal d’Estouteville. He’s dean of the College of Cardinals, you know.”
“A cardinal, and he’s your father?”
“He calls me his niece, but everyone knows.”
“Of course.” Wulf wondered if there might be some truth in all this.
“Begone!” Justina snapped, materializing beside them. “Go and tidy your room! Or muck out a stable somewhere, if you’d rather.”
Sybilla pulled a face and vanished like a bubble.
“Come indoors, squire. I am sorry about the wench. Subtlety is not in Sybilla. If she were a workaday, I’d thrash her backside raw, but you can’t thrash a Speaker.”
Wulf took up his cloak and went with his hostess. “I find her stories entertaining,” he said, being more polite than truthful.
“They’re rarely true, but not always lies. If I don’t get her jessed soon she’ll drive me out of my mind, I swear.”
“Jessed?”
“Oh… Never mind. Married and pregnant.”
No, that was not what it meant. Jesses were the tethers applied to a bird’s legs in falconry. He had just been given another hint, which made no more sense than the others.
“Is Rome really as bad as she says?” He wondered how Anton would react to Sybilla.
“Worse, probably. Please sit. What did she say?”
The kitchen was dim and blessedly cool, with its windows shuttered against the noon heat. Pans and shelves bearing pots or jars of spices festooned the walls; hams and strings of onions dangled from low ceiling beams. Only a soft buzz of flies disturbed the silence. A solid table large enough to seat eight or so was already laden with bread, cheese, grapes, and wine.
“Does the pope hold orgies?” he asked, sitting down.
“Not this one. Or if he does, he just invites boys.” Justina handed him a large earthenware bowl, which he balanced on his lap.
“No! Not the pope!”
Smiling at his horror, she brought an ewer and poured water over his hands. “So they say, but Rome eats and breathes rumors. He does have a basketful of nephews and he heaps riches and offices on them. We all know the Church is corrupt, squire. Do you doubt that Bishop Ugne bought his diocese with gifts to the archbishop and Cardinal Zdenek? Probably to the pope, also. Bishop Starsi the same. That’s simony: it’s a major sin, and it goes on all the time. They all keep mistresses. Oh, there are some good holy men, but the others outnumber them.”
“Our chaplain at Dobkov was one of the good ones.”
“I think I could have guessed that. Lucky you.” She thumped a pot of soup on to the table, then clattered a pewter bowl and spoon down in front of him. “Eat all you want. Speakers never need go hungry.”
He ladled some of the soup into his bowl and peered at it suspiciously. Vegetables he recognized, but the bulk of it seemed to be little rings of something.
“This is Friday.”
“It’s fish,” she assured him. “A sort of fish, calamari.”
He was hungry and the calamari was tasty, if chewier than any fish he had ever tasted before, other than salt cod, of course.
Justina sat opposite and cut the bread. She gave him a slice, took one for herself, and dipped it in oil. But it was several minutes before she spoke, and he sensed a darkening of her mood since their earlier meeting. When she did speak, however, it was to praise him.
“That was good work you did this morning, squire. With the ladder, I mean.”
“Good for a haggard?”
“Good for a fledged Speaker with fifty years’ experience. Simple but effective. Most important, it went unnoticed, unless the Wends had Speakers watching the battle and saw you. You’re a very skilled Speaker already.”
The praise pleased and disgusted him at the same time. “What is the penance for killing a hundred men by witchcraft?”
She shrugged and dismissed that topic with a wave of her aged hand. “They were Orthodox, not Catholic. The pope will absolve you. The Dominican’s death is the real problem.”
“Not for me.” Azuolas had been a Speaker a kn a/dind a very unscrupulous one, in Wulf’s opinion.
“For others, though.” She chewed her lip for a moment, seeming much older than before. “I’m allowed to give you advice. I had to argue for even that much, and I’m not to give you any more help than that.”
He stared at her in shock. “The Spider?” What sort of betrayal was this?
“No, not Zdenek. He can’t know about the deaths yet, not unless he has one of his hirelings spying on us.”
“Hirelings?”
“His Speaker flunkies. I’m on loan to Zdenek, as a sort of mutual favor, but we don’t want to get mixed up in anything as messy as priest killings.”
“Who’s ‘we’ in this situation?”
She shook her head and dipped the last piece of crust in oil. Sybilla had said that Justina was in, or had been to, somewhere she had called Elysium.
He asked, “Did you spy on the parley also?”
She nodded.
“Is it honorable to use talent at a parley?”
“Of course not. That Alojz scares me. He doesn’t look old enough to have his talent under control. Mind you,” she conceded, munching bread, “he slipped a neat stroke by you when he tweaked the bishop. That was deft.”
“I wasn’t fast enough! How far can you twist a man’s mind?”
“Well, there’s a limit. If you try to make a man believe he’s a horse, you’ll drive him crazy. Tweaking only works properly if it’s used to make people change their minds when they already want to. If he wants to be brave, you could tweak him into thinking he was brave, at least for a day or two. Your Bishop Ugne would much rather believe he was deceived by an apparition than that he saw what he really saw. So young Alojz nudged him the way he secretly wanted to go.”
“Is that within the rules?”
“Not the Saints’ rules, but it gets done often enough. I’d say that if you meddle with a man’s free will, then God may lay all his future sins on your shoulders, not his. But yon Alojz boy would contend that he was striving to uphold the first commandment, concealing a public display of talent-which he was-and that excuses a lot. None of us want the workadays all upturned and shrieking about Satanism, and a sending is less threatening than a materialization. From what you tell me, that display that Havel and Vilhelmas put on in Gallant last night was shocking by any standard. I wish I knew why they did it.”
This was the sort of t
eaching he needed, and it confirmed much of what he had been thinking. She was stretching her orders to drop hints, and he mustn’t appear ungrateful. Yet questions whirled in his mind like midges. He forced himself to keep both his eating and his conversation slow and casual.
“Can you tell me what Havel really wants? Whose side he’s on?”
“His own, I’d ween. You’re sure you saw him with Wends at Long Valley last night?”
Wulf helped himself to more of the fish soup. “Absolutely certain.”
Justina shrugged and nibbled a dainty piece of cheese as if she were just eating to keep him company. “That I don’t understand. He’s definitely in the know. You said he had three Speakers, all related to him?”
“Vilhelmas was a distant cousin, the moronic Leonas is his son, and he presented Alojz as a nephew. His family seems to breed even more of them than mine does.”
“They breed more workadays, too. You think he had one of them murder the old count and his son?”
“Yes. I thought it was Vilhelmas, but it could have been Leonas.”
“Doesn’t matter now. Then he tried to take over the defense against the Wends, so he could claim the earldom as Castle Gallant’s savior? I can eat that. But it doesn’t explain what he was doing consorting with the Wends.”
“If they really were Wends,” Wulf said glumly. “I don’t know a Wend from a wood dove. Perhaps the whole war is a Havel invention, and he has men at both gates? Duke Wartislaw may not even know what’s being done in his name.”
“Huh?” Justina was surprised. “By Our Lady, you’re as sly as a fox, Squire Magnus! But how many men attacked the north gate this morning?”
“I was too busy to make an exact count. More than a thousand. And I think I saw that many camped down at High Meadows. Enough tents, anyway.”
“You think the bombard may be real enough, but still be back in Pomerania? I suppose it’s possible.” She sighed. Her age seemed to vary all the time, from motherly to ancient and back again. “But if Vranov’s really feinting at both gates, I don’t know how he can possibly hope to keep his treachery secret for very long. Faith, if there’s no real Wends peering over the hills at you, then I’m sure you can handle Havel Vranov and his family Speakers. When he got rid of the old count, he did not expect to run into you and your pack of brothers.”
Wulf ate in silence for a moment, relishing a sense of achievement and the old woman’s praise. He had certainly done his part. Withou k pae="-1"›Wult him Anton might have been tweaked into inviting the Pelrelmians in, or the Wends might have taken the north barbican and thrown open the gates. Terrified refugees fleeing south would have run into Havel Vranov and been slaughtered. Wulfgang Magnus had done well.
And if the “Wend” attack was a fake staged by the Hound of the Hills, then the war was over. Duke Wartislaw might absorb this morning’s losses, but a mere count certainly could not. His troops would melt away after such a mauling.
So now what? “Build on success,” Father had always said. Otto said so too.
“We’d better assume the Dragon exists until we are sure it doesn’t,” Wulf decided. “When I’ve finished this excellent meal, it might be time for me to go and look for it.”
He had not seen her truly startled before. “Gramercy! Now? In daylight?”
“Better in daylight while everyone’s busy than at night when it’s quiet and they have guards posted and I can walk into trees.”
She chuckled uneasily. “Sooth, you’re the soldier, young squire, not me. You’ll just look, though? Don’t meddle. They’ll have Speakers, and a halo shows up as bright by day as in the gloam.”
Somehow the thought of what he was planning had dispatched the rest of his appetite. Abandoning the idea of a third helping, he moved the bowl away from him. Without touching it.
“I can lift that,” he said. “Could I lift the bombard? Roll it over the cliff?”
“No. You’d outblaze the sun, and very likely damage yourself, but nothing else would happen. And you shouldn’t be talking about it, if you think that Alojz Zauber is in league with the Wends.”
Hellfire! “I forgot that. Well, I’ll need to wear something…” He shivered as he realized where he would have to look for suitable clothes. “I’ll come back here to change, if that’s all right?”
This time he wasn’t going to ask Anton’s permission. Anton was in the solar with Vlad and Otto. Radim, the secretary, and old seneschal Jurbarkas had been allowed to sit in the other two chairs. Dali Notivova was standing by the window. They were all listening to Vlad, who was spouting a seemingly endless list of things that had to be done, with occasional prompts from Otto. Radim was frantically writing notes. So the military end of things was being attended to.
“I’ll help you.” Sybilla slunk in seductively from nowhere.
“What do you want?” Wulf demanded.
“Well, I’ll help you change if you want k if›
“Can you ride?”
She tossed her head. “Of course. I’m a Speaker. You think a dumb brute could throw me off?”
“She rides,” Justina said, frowning.
“Then come and be welcome,” Wulf said. He didn’t care what happened to the little flibbertigibbet. Only Madlenka mattered.
She was leaning over a blood-soaked table, steadying a wounded man, her hands caked in dried blood. The patient was little more than a boy, but he had taken a longbow arrow in the upper part of his chest. Descending steeply, it had probably lodged against his shoulder blade, for otherwise it would either have gone right through him or she would have tried to push it through. The burly young surgeon had cut off the excess arrow and was inserting a set of tongs, like two pointed spoons on a pivot, hoping to grip the arrowhead and crush the barbs so he could pull it out. The patient, thanks be to God, was unconscious. If his lung had been damaged or was about to be, he would probably never wake up.
Wulf could go there and heal him with a touch. But the first commandment would not allow that, nor let him heal any of the many other injured likely to die within the week. There must be quite enough whispers already about the mysterious squire who had cured Anton, who came and went so inexplicably.
He had never imagined Madlenka calmly assisting in such butchery. Her courage must be as solid as the castle walls. Although he loved her to distraction, he really did not know her very well. In fact, he did not know women very well.
Sybilla was still smirking.
He told her, “I’ll come back here. If you want to come to Long Valley with me, you’d better make yourself less conspicuous.”
And then he opened a gate into limbo.
CHAPTER 10
He went back to the little bartizan, trusting that it would be unoccupied, and that from there he would have a clear view of the northern approach. The first thing he saw was Madlenka’s footprints. The thin snow on the floor had been trampled and had mostly melted, but only her prints showed on the steps outside. He gazed at them sadly. Anton’s wife!
But there was a war to fight. Who knew what prize the winner might claim?
He had come to the bartizan to view the Silver Road north of the castle. At the far end, where it turned the corner into the gorge, the Wends had put up blindings to hide what they were doing, but it wasn’t hard to guess that they were excavating a gun emplacement for the bombard, a nest for the Dragon.
A party of eight or ten horsemen was heading down to the castle, with a herald in front-obviously a flag of truce seeking leave to recover their dead, plus their wounded, if any had not been killed by the victorious defenders. Wulf could see scores of bodies all over the road, and even then his view of the area directly in front of the gate was blocked by the corner of the barbican. That was where the building stones had been dropped, so corpses would be lying in heaps there. The attackers had been sent in across a well-designed killing ground, and even the undermanned garrison had managed to put it to good use.
The truce would be granted, of course, because other
wise the Cardicians would have to dispose of the carrion themselves. The Wends’ main task would be to identify the nobly born among their fallen, which would not be easy after the Castle Gallant scavengers had stripped the corpses. The missing nobles would be tallied by now, and close aides sent along to identify them. A few more bodies might be selected on the basis of calluses on the inside of the knee from riding, better nourishment, old wounds, and so on. Those might be taken back to the Pomeranian camp in the hope that some friend or relative would recognize and name them. The commoners would be tossed over the edge while a priest chanted a prayer and sprinkled holy water. Ravens or the Ruzena River could do the rest. Naked we enter the world, and equal we shall stand before the Throne at the last day.
It was the charnel ground at the bottom of the cliff that interested Wulf. The rocky shelf on which Gallant stood jutted out from the side of the Hogback at a sharp angle, and the corner was cut off by the bend of the Ruzena. In places the softer rock below the shelf had even been undercut, but that corner sheltered a triangle of dead ground, like an armpit, a rocky slope sheltered from the wind and inaccessible to firewood hunters, so that vegetation had survived.
The ladders had snapped when they fell, with the top parts taking their burdens over the cliff. The ghouls would not have had time, and probably not much inclination, to scavenge down there. Wulf chose a large, fairly flat boulder close to the water and opened a gate to it.
No one would see him appear out of nowhere, because branches shielded him from the castle above. Behind him the river swirled, fast and dark and deadly, speckled with flecks of rabid foam. Much of the rock must have fallen as waste when the road was carved out and the town site leveled, for it was a jagged nightmare, nothing like a river’s tidy shingle. From where he stood, he saw no bodies; hunting through that nightmare of shattered rock and thorns and spindly conifers was going to be a slow and dangerous process. Then he spotted a weathered skull grinning at him from among the rocks and realized that today’s Wends would not be the first dead to be abandoned here. It was an evil place, a backdoor to hell.