Unfettered
Page 32
The middle table was furnished with high-backed chairs rather than benches, and there sat a pale man with heavy-lidded eyes dressed in luxurious furs. A huge golden cross dangled about his neck and a simple golden circlet rested on his head. He seemed uninterested in the food before him. To his left sat a couple of noblemen, and to his right sat a man who could be none other than the Pict. The entire right half of his face was covered in tattoos that undoubtedly served a magical function, just as mine did. Perhaps thirty silver bars pierced his face on the same side; he must have heard about silver’s magical properties as well, so I could expect him to be fairly juiced. Still, I wasn’t terribly worried. No one had attempted to take away my sword yet, and that gave me confidence—that, and my own silver store of magic.
The Pict wore greasy dark hair down to his shoulders and his beard had been shoved through silver circlets so that it fell like a dark stalactite down to his sternum. It was to him, not the presumed Fisher King, that I was led. Dagda’s cauldron sat plainly before him; serving women were loading up plates as high as they could manage and walking them down the tables to serve guests. Since it was far more food than any one person could eat, a small pack of dogs waited behind them for the bonanza of leavings that would no doubt ensue. And yes, Oberon: there were sausages.
“Counselor,” the captain said, addressing the Pict by what must be his title. “This knight has come from the Frankish kingdom, where he says he has heard of the Fisher King.” The Pict looked up at me but the Fisher King did not stir at the mention of his name.
“Has he now?” The Pict’s voice was mellifluous and light; I had rather expected something reminiscent of sulfur and bone shards. “And you are?” he asked me.
“Sir Gawain, at your service,” I replied.
“Excellent. You can serve me by joining us for dinner. I would like to hear how you heard of the Fisher King in the land of the Franks.” He turned to the nobleman to his right. “Lord Gwynedd, might you do me the great courtesy of making room for this knight?” A shuffle of chairs, an additional one produced for me, and I was seated within choking distance of the Pict who’d stolen Dagda’s cauldron. Though I couldn’t be absolutely certain that he was also the necromancer that had turned Wales into bloody bollocks, he certainly looked the part. The captain excused himself to return to his post.
A serving maid placed a heaping plate in front of me and said, “Counselor, dinner is served.”
“Ah. Thank you. ’Tis your cue, my liege.” The Fisher King roused himself from his stupor and said grace before everyone began to eat. Everyone said amen and then the Fisher King slumped back in his chair.
“Is the king not well?” I asked.
“His appetite is a bit off right now,” the Pict said. “You may call me Domech,” he added.
“Thank you,” I replied.
“Tell me how you came to hear of the Fisher King,” he said. I spun him a story of how I had heard of a land wasted but a castle in the middle of it saved by God because the Fisher King was so faithful.
“I wanted to serve such a man, and so I came here to offer my sword.”
“A man of faith, are you?”
“Tremendous faith, sir. Let me show you this cross given to me by a lady I saved from the Saxons.” I took the silver cross from my pouch and brandished it over my plate. “If you say a small prayer each evening it protects you from the very demons of hell.” I spoke the words that would bind my vision to the magical spectrum. It was Old Irish, of course, and bloody Domech recognized it.
“That sounded like the speech of Druids,” he said, frowning at me. “Are you a Druid, Sir Gawain?”
At this point I’m sure he expected a denial. I actually expected to issue one. Instead my left arm whipped up and I smashed him in the face with my studded leather bracer. The back of his head hit the chair, stunning him, and I pushed mine back to give myself room and stood. The assembled diners gasped in shock and some angry exclamations wafted my way. I gave Domech another punch in the mouth to prevent him from speaking a spell and then checked out the Fisher King in my magical sight.
He wasn’t alive. That explained the loss of appetite. He had plenty of dark spells wrapped around him, however, some of them clearly bound with Domech, and other wisps of smoky malevolence that seemed to radiate in every direction until they disappeared at the walls. Domech was definitely a necromancer.
“Right,” I said, pulling out Fragarach. There wasn’t time to analyze the situation with a room full of armed nobles and guards who would shortly be after my head. I made sure the Fisher King lost his first, since he wasn’t using it anyway. It was telling that he hadn’t moved, even though his most trusted counselor had been whacked in the face—twice—in close proximity. I swung Fragarach through his neck and it tumbled onto the table; there was no blood. The shadowy spells around him dissipated.
Domech jerked as if I’d hit him again and the screaming began. I checked my rear to see if anyone approached from that quarter and found the nobles cowering in a satisfactory manner. The lesser folk and the maids tore at their hair in terror as they fled the hall. There were guards running my way, however, and I was quite clearly the bad guy from their point of view.
“No!” Domech cried, his eyes fixed on the head of the Fisher King. “He was chained to the land!”
No wonder the land had died out so quickly; Domech had bound it to a dead man. With the Fisher King gone, the land would be able to recover on its own—so long as the Pict didn’t do it again.
Domech had more than earned the death sentence according to Druidic law; he’d been draining the life out of an elemental while cloaking his activities beneath a fog. There wasn’t a Druid alive who wouldn’t slay him for what he’d done, and I felt honored to get to him first. Unfortunately, he ducked under the swing of my sword and trapped my arm across my body before I could take a backswing. Magic swirled amongst the silver bars in his face and blood dripped from his ruined nose. His right hand grabbed me between the legs and then he lifted me bodily over his head, throwing me over the table into the clear space of the hall.
“Kill him!” he demanded, and pointed at me in case the guards hadn’t figured out I was a public nuisance.
A slim wee man like him shouldn’t have been able to pick me up and toss me. He was using the earth’s energy in the same way a Druid would to boost his strength. Except he’d stolen all that energy, leeching it through the Fisher King.
The minions in leather boots weren’t any trouble. Fishing out the silver cross, I used some of the stored magic in it to bind the leather on the insides of their calves together and they collapsed to the stone floor. Some landed less gracefully than others.
I couldn’t do the same to Domech; he had fashioned some kind of ward against my bindings. He couldn’t affect me directly with his magic either, since necromancers are incapable of affecting the living except through the dead. I used some of the juice to increase my speed and strength instead and charged him.
For all the power he had leeched, Domech was still at a disadvantage and he knew it. He wasn’t armed or armored and there weren’t any dead people in the hall he could use for his own ends. He did, however, have some big fucking chairs he could throw at me. I leapt over the first one but the second knocked me down. He was on top of me before I could regain my feet, his left hand pinning my sword arm to the floor while his right tried to grasp my throat. I prevented that by sweeping my left arm out, dropping the cross, and then I locked onto his neck—a rather skinny one—and began to squeeze with all I had. He could have grabbed me in turn, but instead he clawed at my arm and tried to break my grip. His damned nails ripped at my forearm and he bruised me, but he wasn’t enough of a fighter to know anything about pressure points or how to break bones.
“That black hand of yours got two Druids this way in the chapel,” I said through clenched teeth. “You know the one I mean, Domech? The wheel keeps turning, doesn’t it?”
He couldn’t answer me. I crushed h
is trachea and his hands fell slack as the strength left him. I rolled him off me and saw that there was still plenty of magic centered on his head. As a necromancer, he might have rigged his own resurrection, so I removed the Pict’s head and tossed it into the hearth to burn. I didn’t need my magical sight anymore, so I dispelled it.
More guards streamed into the hall, including the captain, alerted by the panicked dinner guests. The lads on the floor couldn’t decide whether to plea for help or to urge their friends to get me. It was time to make my exit, so I picked up the silver cross and hurried to the nobles’ table. Dogs had leapt on the tables to chow down since the humans had left all that perfectly good food there to cool. One of them was feeding directly from Dagda’s cauldron and couldn’t believe his good fortune. He snapped at my arm when I tried to take the cauldron but discovered that his teeth didn’t fare well against chain mail.
“Go on, you’re full,” I said, and he allowed me to take the cauldron without any more fuss. I upended it to turn off the infinite refill and then camouflaged it, my kit, and myself with the remainder of the magic stored in my cross. I sheathed Fragarach as the dismayed shouts of the guards echoed in the hall. Carrying the cross in my left hand and the cauldron—or the Grail—in my right, I did my best to hurry past them with a minimum of noise. It’s tough to sneak around in armor, but they were helping me out by loudly asking each other where I went.
Once out in the unpaved courtyard where I had access to the earth, it was a simple matter to maintain my camouflage and slip past the guards at the gate. I retrieved Apple Jack from the stable where I’d left him and set off across the wasteland toward Gloucester. Weather patterns returned to normal and the elemental was showing the first signs of recovery with the necromancer truly dead. You’d never know today that the area around Swansea had been a desert for a few months.
I didn’t see the Chapel Perilous, as it came to be known, on my way back. Most of the lads had cleared out of the Silver Stallion by the time of my second visit and I was able to get a room. There were only three people there, in fact—myself, the innkeeper, and one other—and it was with them that I shared the story of what happened, the quest for the magic graal. From there the story was told and retold through the centuries until poets like Chretien de Troyes finally started to write them down.
Ogma was waiting for me on the trail to Gloucester the next morning. I returned Dagda’s cauldron to him and he thanked me. I told him about Domech and what he’d done, the dead Druids at the chapel, and he was grateful that I had dispatched the Pict as well.
“What would you have of me?” Ogma said. “I owe you some favor for what you’ve done.”
“I’d like to stay out of Aenghus Óg’s sight for a while, if you can manage it.”
He gave me a hunk of cold iron and told me to wear it as a talisman. “It won’t completely shield you from divination but it will make it more difficult to pinpoint your location. And I’ve recently linked a new part of the world to Tír na nÓg. Feel like learning a new language?”
I told him I did. After bidding farewell to Apple Jack, Ogma shifted me east of the Elbe River, where the Slavic people were emerging as a distinct culture. And that was how I, as Gawain, came to be immortalized in legend.
Granuaile dropped her eyes to the fire after I finished and said, “Wow.”
Thanks, buddy.
My apprentice looked up from the fire. “Are necromancers common?”
“Quite rare, actually, outside of video games. Domech was one of the worst, but I was able to surprise him. If he’d had time to run the fight his way, I don’t think I would have made it.”
“That’s where you got the idea for your cold iron amulet, isn’t it?”
“Yes, that gave me the idea. The silver cross gave me the idea for the charms, and Apple Jack is the reason I have a talking hound today.” I scratched Oberon behind the ears. “Ogma did me quite a favor by sending me on that trip.”
Of course I did.
Meat and potatoes in the most delicious gravy I’ve ever had, Oberon. I still dream about it.
Good night, Oberon.
“That story actually made me a bit hungry,” Granuaile said. “Anybody up for a snack?”
Oberon leapt to his feet, tail wagging. he explained.
I smiled at him. Understood.
When Shawn invited me to drop a short story into his super-thology, I said yes immediately. I had quite a few short stories going spare.
When he asked if it could be a story based on my Broken Empire trilogy, a Jorg story, that gave me pause. I’ve always written short fiction as stand-alone. It allows more freedom. To write a short story that used established characters in an established world and yet that delivered something self-contained in a few thousand words and didn’t require the reader to have first read Prince of Thorns…that was a significant challenge.
In the end I enjoyed the attempt!
— Mark Lawrence
SELECT MODE
Mark Lawrence
They call me a monster and if it were untrue the weight of my crimes would pin me to the ground. I have maimed and I have murdered and if this mountain stood but a little higher I would cut the angels from their heaven. I care less for accusations than for the rain that soaks me, that runs down every limb. I spit both from my lips. Judgment has always left a sour taste.
“Keep moving!” And he strikes me across the shoulders. The staff is thick and polished from hard use. I imagine how he’ll look when I make him eat it. Avery, they call him.
There are five left to guard us now, twenty when they found us on the Orlanth Road. A man like the Nuban doesn’t give up easy but two against twenty are poor odds, especially when one of the two is a child. He surrendered before the Select had even drawn their horses up around us. It took me longer to reach the same decision, hampered by my pride.
“Pick it up!” The stick catches me behind the knee and I stumble, loose rocks scattering beneath my feet, rolling away down the steep path. Rope chafes at my wrists. We exchanged our weapons for rope, but at least those odds have narrowed. They set only five men to take us into the mountains for judgment. Two against five are the best odds I’ve had in a while.
The Nuban is ahead of me, huge shoulders hunched against the downpour. If his hands were unbound he could throttle four of them while I fed Avery his staff.
Back on the Orlanth Road the Nuban had shrugged off his crossbow and let it fall. Set his short sword on the ground, leaving only the knife in his boot against the chance of discovery.
“One black as the devil and the other’s not thirteen!” Avery had called out when they surrounded us, horses stamping, tails flicking.
A second rider leaned from his saddle and slapped Avery, a cracking blow that set the white print of his hand on a red cheek.
“Who judges?” A thin man, gray, but hard-eyed.
“The arch, Selector John.” Avery pushed the words past clenched teeth, his scowl on me as if it were my handprint on his face.
“The arch.” And Selector John nodded, looking from one man to the next. “The arch judges. Not you, not I. The arch speaks for heaven.” He rode between us. “And if the man, or this boy, are Select then they will be your brothers!”
And now the pair of us walk, soaked, freezing, beaten toward judgment on the mountain, wrists bound, and with Avery’s staff to encourage us on and four more of the Select to see we don’t stray from the path.
I choose each step, head down, rain dripping fr
om the black veil of my hair. I wonder at this arch of theirs, puzzle how an arch could judge, and what it might say. Certainly its words have power. The power to bind Selector John’s disparate band together and hold them to his command.
“If you are Select you will ride with me,” he had said.
“If not?” the Nuban rumbled.
“You won’t.”
And that seemed to be all that underwrote the Select, feared across the north counties of Orlanth, famed for their loyalty and discipline. Men taken at random from the road and judged in secret, bound by nothing but the good word of some arch, some relic of the Builders no doubt, some incomprehensible toy that survived their war.
The water runs in rivulets between my boots, their frayed leather black with it.
“Hell—” Avery’s cry turns into something inarticulate as his slip turns into a sprawl. Even his staff can’t save him. He lies for a moment, embracing the mountainside, stunned. As he starts to rise I skip forward and let myself fall, letting the whole of my weight land behind my knee as it hits the back of his neck. The sound of bone breaking is almost lost in the rain. With bound hands pressed to his back I manage to stand before the others reach me. Avery does not stand, or move, or complain.
Rough hands haul me back, a blade at my throat, colder than the wind. John stands before me, a hint of shock in pale eyes unused to such expression.
“You murdered him!” he shouts, fingers on the hilt of his sword, closing on it, opening, closing.
“Who judges?” I shout back and a laugh rips its path from me.
I slept until my ninth year, deep in the dream that blinds us to the world. The thorns woke me. They gave me sharp new truths to savour. Held me as my little brother died, embraced me for the long slow time it took my uncle’s men to kill my mother. I woke dark to the world, ready to give worse than I got.