The Starfollowers of Coramonde

by Brian Daley

  Swan knelt by Gil’s side as he tried to hold his breath and re-expand his lung by pressure, hand covering his wound. But the function of Dirge’s magic made it impossible to seal the injury. He gave up and looked at the High Constable.

  “You were right in Final Graces,” he labored, breath short. “About risk.”

  Springbuck appeared over Swan’s shoulder. His eyes flicked to the wound, then met his friend’s candidly, holding no hope. Gil tried to smile, but failed. “I know. I should have listened to you. Forget it. Bey’s still back there in the city.”

  Andre had left Hightower, for whom the wizard could do nothing. Now he led Balagon away from where the warrior-priest had closed Angorman’s eyes forever. The Divine Vicar had taken up Red Pilgrim; Andre took it from him gently, handing it away to Van Duyn, who stood nearest him. Hearing Gil, Andre nodded. “That is no less than true. There is still Bey. Gabrielle?”

  She still held Hightower’s hand, but said, “The Masters await. There is yet time to act.”

  “Are you not spent?” Springbuck asked anxiously.

  “Not so,” she replied. “I took in a measure of the force escaping Evergray. The rest is fled at random. The Five’s resources are diminished, but they will draw more to them, or be given of Amon’s. We have only this moment.”

  Hightower sighed weakly and squeezed her hand in approval.

  Their losses had been heavy. Because some must care for the injured and because the number of horses was reduced, Springbuck had fewer than seven thousand functioning mounted troops. He began rapid orders for assembly. Then he halted as an emaciated mare bore toward him through the drifting smoke and stench. She came to a stumbling stop and her rider dropped to his feet.

  “Ferrian!” Dunstan flew at him. “Kinsman!” They gripped forearms.

  “We are peculiarly met,” observed Ferrian, eyes sweeping the scene.

  Many Wild Riders came to their former Champion, saluting, pressing his hand in theirs, but he broke away, and came to Springbuck. When he’d heard what had happened, Ferrian motioned to Gil and Hightower. “Though Angorman and many others on the field are beyond help, these two here are not, for in Ladentree I learned many things. Yonder, east of Salamá some small way, is the hill where the Lifetree blossomed. Down within it lie those particular waters which fed the Tree, and would remedy Dirge’s magic.”

  Andre was unconvinced. “Those are for the Lifetree. I doubt any other influence could summon them forth.”

  “Carnage wrought by ordinary steel cannot be undone,” Ferrian answered, “but these of an eldritch nature, these might be. It would be ill of us not to try.”

  Gil knew a flash of hope so poignant it stripped him of his stolid resignation, slim as the chance was, and Swan’s face came alive.

  Springbuck knew he must be the one to say it. “The Masters will not defer that long, Ferrian. An hour’s delay will be the death of us all.” That same hour would kill Gil and Hightower. He searched Gabrielle’s face for vindication, desperate that she understand two lives were balanced here against many, as well as the fate of the Crescent Lands.

  Ferrian shook his head. “The gods have us on schedules all their own. But there is a third choice, Ku-Mor-Mai. Let those who must press on to Salamá, and let but a few of us detour, bearing these two comrades to the hill.”

  Dunstan seconded it, saying he would go. Springbuck’s expression showed how welcome that proposal was. “Well thought on. But how to transport?”

  The latecomer pointed to where the overturned war-dray of Matloo had been righted. Its tongue-hitch had been twisted and broken, but the team had been recovered, and hasty repairs made by septmen. “There is the method.”

  Springbuck ordered the dray brought over. Gabrielle took Swan aside. Low, she commanded, “High Constable, go with them. I hold little more confidence in this than Andre, but it must be tried.” Swan didn’t conceal her eagerness to obey.

  As the dray was brought up, Ferrian turned to Van Duyn. “You are Gil’s only countryman. Will you not come too?” The older man hesitated, then murmured that, of course, he assuredly would.

  Katya took his arm. “We both will go. And Reacher too, will you not, brother?” The King affirmed it, staring strangely at his old friend Ferrian, his wilderness sense telling him there was more here than was being said.

  Springbuck asked if they would need a driver from the men of Matloo, or an escort. “No,” Ferrian answered, “for all danger here will be directed at the deCourteneys. The last contest will be of magic, and in Salamá; thus we should go unmolested.” Ferrian thought for a moment. “Still, my kinsman Dunstan is unarmed. If Andre will not need his sword, perhaps he would lend it to a weaponless man?” He fixed the wizard with a strange look.

  Obeying a sense of inspired impulse, Andre unhooked the scabbard from his belt and gave his sword to the surprised Dunstan, commenting, “I wish no one to be… unprotected.”

  The dray was beautifully made, meticulously planed with its joined timbers reinforced with armor plate, braced and strapped with metal. It was articulated, flexible in its center, to lend maneuverability. Its port-plates were raised, from combat against the Dead, and there were red stains on its polished wooden deck and bulkheads, drying to brown.

  For this ride, the northerners agreed, they needed no Lead-Line Rider. Being lifted aboard, even by so many careful hands, made Gil wince in pain. Van Duyn knew that wound was killing his countryman quickly, filling the pleural space with blood and pressure that had probably started a mediastinal shift, pushing toward the uninjured side, straining the heart and placing even greater demands on the overworked right lung. Gil hadn’t gone into shock yet, but that might happen any second, and against the magic of Dirge, no conventional technique of aspiration or drainage could avail.

  Hightower was even worse. The steady loss of blood had covered his midsection, and coated his mailed legs. Gabrielle helped strap him in on one of the benches that ran the length of the dray, while Gil was eased down on the other. She kissed the Warlord, patted the American’s shoulder, then walked stiff-spined to her horse.

  “To Salamá,” she said.

  Katya and Reacher rode up, leading Van Duyn’s steed. Ferrian took Red Pilgrim from Van Duyn and handed it aside to Dunstan, who crouched in the dray. Swan had mounted Jeb Stuart.

  Springbuck groped for words. “Grace of the Lady upon you,” he finally bade them.

  Ferrian answered, “I bid you good fortune, son of Surehand. Here under the shadow of the Five, where every word and deed is heard and seen by them, I say it. May the deCourteneys carry the day.” He climbed into the dray as Dunstan stood to the vehicle’s armored prow and gathered handfuls of reins.

  The men of Coramonde were drawn up in their squadrons, interspersed with the other war-drays of Matloo. Behind them were women of Glyffa and men of Veganá, units of Freegate and gathered clans of the Horseblooded. Springbuck joined the deCourteneys at the head of them all.

  Gabrielle needed no divination to read his mind. “Would your presence not mean much to MacDonald?” she inquired. “And to Hightower?”

  “The armies must be led,” he evaded.

  “We deCourteneys have a smattering of talent for that, as has been seen. But you can do little in Salamá save sit and wait. Go with your friend.”

  Andre spared him further agonizing by shouting the order to ride, slapping Fireheel’s croup. The big gray sprang aside as the ranks moved by. Joining the others at the dray, Springbuck found that a weight had left him. Dunstan clucked, flicked the reins, and started off eastward as the rest fell in behind and beside.

  The northern armies rode through the obsidian arch, a quarter-mile span, that was the entrance to Shardishku-Salamá. Andre had a small contingent fall out here, to guard and keep watch on the plain.

  Then they continued, clattering up boulevards hundreds of yards wide, past the vacant palaces and deserted towers of the city. They met no opposition; the Masters, guarded by the Host of the Grave, had
never thought they would need any defense but their own powers. Now, after the huge drain caused by the death of Evergray, the Five were conserving those. They might have made feints, or even tangible attacks, but that would have cost critical amounts of energy, and the outcome would have been in doubt. In their own arena, in their own time, the Five would confront Andre and Gabrielle, whom they held to be the only serious threat.

  The armies flowed between the soaring structures of the city. In silence, they viewed the stupendous bas-relief depicting the destruction of the Lifetree. Most of the residents had fled and others had expired when the Masters, pressed by demands on the strength left to them, withheld it from their subjects.

  The Crescent Landers drew up before the Fane, its vast curve sweeping out above them. Its doors had seemed small, in proportion, from the far end of the boulevard. Now they stretched upward, higher than a donjon, of cold dark metal that gleamed like onyx. Here the deCourteneys left the massed warriors, telling them to stay back from the magic that dwelled within. They were well and quickly heeded.

  Leaving their horses, the two spread their arms before the doors. They sensed the might of the doors, the Masters’ first test.

  “Masters of Salamá,” Gabrielle challenged, “we are for earnest combat. For preliminaries, we care no more than this!” With that, she spat on the doors. Where it landed, blue essence of her magic sizzled and popped, spreading to the hairline crack between the two portals, racing up and down. The doors quaked, caught in the conflict of wills between the deCourteneys and the Five. Thick hinges rang like tuning forks. In that first contest, the Masters found that the new Trustee was indeed worthy of her office. The Five didn’t exert every effort, but let the deCourteneys put theirs forth. The doors burst open, swung wide.

  Andre and Gabrielle walked together into lightlessness. When they were within, the cyclopean portals swung shut. No one outside tried to stop that, nor could they have done so.

  Though Dunstan kept the ride as smooth as he could, the passengers were still swayed and jounced. Gil was feeling cold, his respiration shallow and fast, his chest screaming for air. Hightower seemed to have lost consciousness. There was a yelp from Ferrian who, for some reason, stared back across a flat landscape at Salamá rather than ahead.

  “The glows of thaumaturgy are there,” the Horse-blooded shouted. Dunstan hauled on the reins. Ferrian, with a hair-raising Horseblooded whoop, dropped through the rear hatch while the dray was still rolling. He pointed back toward the Necropolis, calling jeers to the Five.

  The others looked. Ripples of enchantment and anti-spells disrupted one another, sending multicolored distortions through the skies over Salamá. Springbuck and the others turned worriedly to Ferrian, and Dunstan clapped a hand to his shoulder.

  “Kinsman, have your senses fled?”

  The other Rider shook his head, the long tail of his hair flying. “Oh cousin, no. I held back a secret from you all, for the Masters hear every word and see every deed here, in their inner domain. But their battle with the siblings deCourteney is in full career. I will explain all, as I dared not do before.”

  They heard him out in assorted states of skepticism or befuddlement, even Gil, who watched through the rear hatch. “When I was recuperant at Ladentree, I saw a strange thing. The Birds of Accord had brought forth hatchlings, yes, a thing they can do only under influence of the Lifetree. I bespoke Silverquill, the Senior Sage, and he remembered the Birds had lit on the Crook of the Trustee. We reasoned the rod of her office was wood of the Lifetree itself.”

  “The Crook was consumed,” Katya pointed out, “stopping Evergray.” Springbuck closed his eyes in sorrow, seeing salvation appear and disappear in moments.

  “But hold,” Swan objected, “the Trustee had been many times in Ladentree. Why did the birds not respond before?”

  “The same occurred to us, and so that scholarly process of elimination came into play. We started with a different, theoretical answer, and proved it by diligent research through the library, piecing together Rydolomo’s secret in reverse, as it were, and had a bit of information even Bey lacked. At the Lady’s instigation, a limb of the Lifetree, cut to Her likeness, went northward as figurehead to the bow of a ship. Do you understand?”

  Gil blinked. Shaped like the Bright Lady? “Angorman’s axe,” he blurted. It lay where Ferrian had put it, under Hightower’s bench.

  “No other. The helve comes of a fragment of that figurehead. Wildmen burned the rest but did not know, and hence Bey never learned, that one vestige survived.” Ferrian drew the greataxe out of the dray, its haft looking like ordinary ashwood.

  “The Lifetree,” he declared, “come south by dint of the Trailingsword, when the Masters think it safely consumed.” He pointed eastward. “And under that hill are those healing waters it will call forth, and in which it will thrive. We must take it there, sink it into the ground. If our star fails us not, it will flourish again.”

  Hightower, clinging to life by insistence alone, produced from somewhere in his ruined depths a spasm of a laugh. “Now must yon webmakers of Salamá be a-spin! Duped, like any bumpkin, by the Lady!”

  “I should have brought more troops,” Springbuck muttered.

  “Untrue,” Ferrian corrected. “The Masters can only stop us by their arts, if at all. Thus, I took this.” He handed the axe to Springbuck and showed Andre deCourteney’s sword from its scabbard at Dunstan’s side. Unscrewing the pommel, he pulled out the mystic gem-stone Calundronius. He held it up, chatoyant on its chain. “This will negate all spells, but can protect only a few. So, I contrived a purpose to keep our number small. Our only word now is haste, our one purpose to see the Lifetree replanted. Not all our lives nor any other price matters against that.”

  “We should tell the Trustee,” Swan suggested.

  “No time,” Gil coughed, head spinning. “It’s just us. Springbuck?”

  “Precisely. If no one objects, I will go in the fore with the stone, and let the rest range round the dray.”

  As Ferrian relinquished Calundronius, Katya asked, “What if the Five muster some pursuit? Were it not sound policy for one or two to stay back, to repel that? Edward and I are well suited.” Van Duyn cleared his throat, resettled the M-l, and agreed.

  “And,” added Ferrian, “the team will need a Lead-Line Rider now, a job for a Horseblooded.”

  Ferrian drew himself up onto the wagon’s tongue. Nimble as a tightrope walker, he made his way along, flipping shut each horse’s blinders. Used to that, the huge animals waited, knowing they’d be expected to do their hardest work now. Ferrian mounted the special saddle on the left-side leader’s back. In the Lead-Line Rider’s perilous station, he whistled sharply.

  Swan had stopped long enough to lean in and brush Gil’s lips with hers. Hightower exerted himself to say “That’s it! No one will take this life from us now, laddie!” But his own face twisted in pain.

  Springbuck, settling Calundronius around his neck, wondered if the deCourteneys could engage the Five for the needed time. If not, what hue and cry might the Masters set on the northerners’ heels?

  Chapter Thirty-six

  The desire of rising hath swallowed up his fear of a fall.

  Thomas Adams

  Diseases of the Soul

  AT the center of the Fane, supporting the stupendous bowl of its roof, was a titanic column of granite, dozens of paces in diameter. A small ring of light showed, far up the looming pillar, a spread-eagle figure, hung upside down by the ire of the Five.

  Yardiff Bey, shorn of the accumulated powers of centuries, had been set there to wait. When the moment’s emergency had been dealt with, the Master would exact a slow, precision-pain revenge.

  But that must be postponed; the armies of the Crescent Lands were already within the gates of the city. And if the might of the Masters was decreased, if the day had already seen reversals undreamt of, still the brooding Five, defended by their spells and their Fane, had few misgivings. Here, of all places, the Five
couldn’t lose.

  Yardiff Bey, bones vibrating, sinews close to snapping, stifled his pleas. Almost, the subsequent punishments of the Masters would be anticlimax; they’d done the worst when they’d stripped him of every favor and cast him aside like used goods, discarded by the Lords of Salamá.

  The Masters readied themselves, in that cold unanimity Bey had always idolized. Their common will began to coalesce; and weakened as their prepotence was, it still awed the sorcerer. But in the midst of that amazing marshaling there came a sound that even Yardiff Bey had never heard.

  The Masters, in one voice, wailed dismay. A single image slipped through their guards and Bey caught what the Five had sensed on the plain outside their city, a sky filled with singing, soaring Birds of Accord.

  There were multifold things in the gathered minds of the Five then: confusion, panic, anger. And there was a hatred of the sorcerer, for this, too, was a failing of his; he’d assured them that the last of the Lifetree was burned. The Birds, drawn by instincts of their own, proved the Lifetree was coming again to its accustomed waters.

  The Lords of Salamá grasped it no sooner than their apt Hand. Bey achieved a strangled laugh. “Masters of Shardishku-Salamá,” he shouted, “how will you crush the deCourteneys if the Lifetree takes root, and sends all your powers back to thin air? Which of you is willing to go prevent that, leaving the spell-forged safety of this Fane, and your mutual protection? And who will stay, with strength diminished, and face the wizard and the Trustee? Decide! The Crescent Lands are at your doors!”

  It was true. The Five had acted in concert throughout the ages, and dared not separate now, with their powers so reduced. And now the deCourteneys spread their arms before the doors of the Fane. Yardiff Bey had seen the only solution even before his Masters.

  He was freed from his bondage, eased down lightly to stand in the ring of light at the foot of the granite column. On him the Five must fasten all their hopes. “Go forth, with the forces with which we shall arm you,” they instructed, “and be foremost in our goodwill once more.”