The cardinal stood in silhouette against the single sconced torch at the rear of the chamber. He raised his hands high above Pegrine’s bier, above the little girl’s body where she lay just as she had the day Renda and her father had first come into the crypt, with the vile wooden sword held peacefully in her hands. Even the flowers on her bier were fresh.
Renda’s lip trembled, and she gripped her weapon. Her hail to the cardinal, her injunction to him to stop, was upon her lips, but from the assembled body of priests, a new chant rose over her voice, loud and powerful, until the words began to echo over themselves in the darkness, making new words and new chants of themselves.
She stepped forward into the chamber, thinking to make her presence known, but just then, the cardinal jumped back in terror. Pegrine’s bier was empty; her body, her toy sword, everything had vanished, leaving only doucetels, rosebuds and snow berries.
The chanting slowed, degenerated into confused mumblings and finally stopped. The priests stood in stunned silence, staring at the bier. Above his head, the cardinal’s hands still gestured, but he took a shaky step backward. “Do not stop, damn you!” he cried. “We must vanquish her or all is lost!”
Behind her, Renda felt a rush of cool air, as of someone moving past her, as of a whole troupe moving past her on all sides, but try as she might to see them through her visor, she could not turn her eyes before they vanished from her sight.
The cardinal took another step backward.
At the walls of the chamber, tiny glints of torchlight appeared and disappeared, as if reflected in moving metal. Armor. But whose, her father’s? Surely not at every corner of the crypt at once. She glanced down at her sword and saw but a single reflection there. Her own.
Another step, and now Valmerous stood just before his panicked priests. “Start again, or by Xorden, your silence will be your end!”
By Xorden? Renda blinked. What could he mean, by Xorden?
Suddenly, from above the empty bier and at stations throughout the crypt came the sounds of men, armed men, swords coming unsheathed, armor creaking and clanging. Looking up, Renda saw only vague shapes at first, only the shadows that moved between flickers of torchlight.
For a single terrifying moment, the priests huddled in a mass, all praying and gesturing for protections. Then they scattered, running pell mell for the door.
Renda began to see now what had kept the priests paralyzed with such fear, and her eyes grew wide. At least two score of knights, whether shades or undead like Pegrine she could not tell, swung swords and maces over the priests, crashing and sparking against the protections they had set. She could not see them clearly, but their movements and cries of battle fired her blood, and in brief flashes, she saw the Brannagh coat of arms amid flashes of steel.
Some of the protections were formidable and had to have been set before the priests began their chants. Set against the living—against herself, against her father, perhaps. But these failed against the dead, and within only a few moments, one of the clerics fell beneath an ancient mace. As his life drained away, she saw his aura turn wispy and black, the false flat aura he had worn melting away with the last of his strength. Another fell before they reached the passage to the outer chamber where more of the dead knights awaited them.
The cardinal ran toward her, black veils of evil falling about his own head and shoulders. He took her hand and pulled at her, mistaking the horror in her eyes. “The vampire has unhallowed the whole of the crypt! The dead of Brannagh rise in their unrest and attack!” He tugged at her. “Please, I have spent my strength; I’ve not the power to turn them to their rest, not by night, please! We must to the glade where she died; it is our last hope against her!”
How could he stand there, reeking of his wickedness, and speak to her of destroying Pegrine? Her rage and disgust threatened to overwhelm her. She pulled herself free of his grasp and raised her sword, but in the sword’s pause at the top of its arc, the cardinal’s eyes widened. He backed away, mumbling and gesturing for protections. Renda swung on him, but his protections threw off her blade. Then he ran from the crypt.
She moved to follow him, but when she glanced once more into the rear chamber, she stopped, and her eyes grew wide. Upon her bier stood little Pegrine just as she had at Castle Damerien, hemlock sword raised high above her head. Behind her, white light filled the crypt, light that seemed to Renda to glow from the form of a grown woman around Pegrine’s tiny body, and another form as well, that she could not make out in the darkness.
Renda stepped toward the bier, shielding her eyes from the child’s glow, trying to see who it was who stood behind the child.
“Auntie?” little Pegrine called happily. Once the cardinal was gone, the glow that enveloped the child faded, and she ran toward Renda and threw her arms around the knight’s armored waist. “I knew you’d come.”
“Peg,” she said, hugging the child to her. “I’m so sorry...”
“Halloo, Renda.”
She stood then and stared at him, afraid of what she might see once her eyes adjusted to the dimness again. His wounds had been grievous. But he stood before her as he had in life, in perfect armor the equal of her own, and as ever, he smirked at her bafflement.
“Roquandor. Dear Brother…But how—”
He raised his hand to silence her and sheathed his sword with a hiss. “We’ve no time. Where is Father?”
Her eyes moved over him in amazement. “I—in his chambers, I should think.”
“In his v’ry chaimbers, withal,” thundered a voice from behind her, and she wheeled to see a man of about her father’s age, his height, even the flinty steel of his eyes, glaring down at her from his raised visor. But this knight’s armor was at least half a thousand years old in design, of thicker, heavier steel forged at a lower temperature than hers, though it might have been smithed that morning, and he wore a thick white mustache above his lip. “What Shire Raiffe of Brannagh, Daerwin, to set in whaiting at his chaimbers whilst his childerns fight the Hodrachian horde belough!”
“Peace, Lord Borowain,” spoke Roquandor softly, “the sheriff, my father, has no idea what the cardinal is about.”
Borowain? The Peacekeeper? The last Sheriff of Brannagh before Kadak seized control; the first to fall to him. This was all so far beyond her ken that Renda had to tear her gaze away and look instead at her brother. Her dead brother. She had to focus, to give her thoughts some ground.
“An he’d have his eyleds opent and his sworde draughn instedde of hiding in chaimbers...” grumbled the ancient knight, but the rest of his words were lost as he ambled back into the shadows of the crypt.
“Roquandor, you said we’ve but little time,” she said, looking about her at the great gathering of knights who stood near, the ancient sheriffs of Brannagh, and she fought down a dizziness that threatened to overcome her. “But the cardinal tells me his strength is spent.”
“Perhaps for the moment, assuming he speaks true, but that is all that grants us any respite. He will attack us again with the few priests left to him, and by day whilst the child sleeps.” He ruffled his hand absently through Pegrine’s hair as he spoke, just as he had in life.
“I think not,” said Renda, looking between the shades of Brannagh’s dead. “He spoke of the glade where she was killed; he said it was his only hope against her.” She looked back toward the entrance to the crypt. “He knows I have found him out; I doubt he will wait any longer than he must.”
“The glade,” echoed Roquandor. He crouched beside his daughter. “Peg, do you know why the glade?”
After a moment’s pause, the child shook her head.
“Ef I mayte,” came a lilting deep voice from nearby. At this, another knight came forward, only a few years older in appearance than Roquandor, yet she had from him a sense of extreme age. His armor was no more than a pair of spiked vambraces over his forearms and a thick breastplate of urine-hardened leather over chain, somewhat more aged than even Borowain’s; ancient when Borowa
in’s was yet new. This knight had no visor on his helmet, only a mesh of coarse steel mail across his jaw. When he spoke, his Syonese was so very different in character even from Borowain’s that Renda found she could hardly understand him at all.
Roquandor turned to her. “Lord Dilkon says that in his time, it was well known of undead, even those created as Pegrine was by a god’s will, that they hold three places sacred to their unnatural lives, three places in all the world wherein they lie vulnerable to attack: the place of life, the place of death and the place of repose.”
Dilkon. Renda glanced for only a moment back toward the outer chamber of the crypt, toward the place where the two skulls of Dilkon’s daughters rested. She nodded to him a bit self-consciously, like one who had unwittingly stumbled onto the most personal effects of his life. Then she raised her eyes to him. “So the cardinal must destroy all three, then.”
Lord Dilkon shook his head and spoke once more to Roquandor.
“No, he says Valmerous need make use of only one.” Roquandor looked down at his daughter. “But as each is defended, the nursery by Nara, the crypt by us, he has only the glade left to him, and none to defend it but Peg herself.”
Renda raised her sword. “Aye, and the living knights of Brannagh.” She faltered. “Those of us who remain.”
Roquandor nodded sadly. It seemed for a moment as if he would say more, as if they would all say more. But instead, he offered her only a brave smile and a clap at her shoulder. “Away, then, Renda. You’ve not much time before sunrise. May the gods ride with you.”
Twenty-Four
Chul rode carefully and quietly, no more or less so than any Dhanani rider would traveling through Invader lands, and he took no especial pains to hide his presence or his horse’s tracks. Gikka’s spies had said that Maddock always kept two or three of his people watching the castle, but unless they knew to watch for a Dhanani, they would not pay him much notice. Assuming they saw him at all. If they did stop him, if for some reason Maddock was with them and recognized his face, well, he had an answer for that, too. But he was willing to risk the confrontation to keep his horse’s speed as long as he could.
The Groggy Bear’s Moon had been full most of the way from Farras, a mixed blessing since it had illuminated his white horse as well as the light frost covering the path. But it was down by the time he and Gikka had reached the eastern side of the foothills, and the night sky had grown even darker since they had parted ways at the hilltop. The horizon still showed only darkness. He put sunrise at half a night away yet, and beyond the lumpy shadowy meadowlands at the base of the hill, he was already beginning to make out the dark lines of the castle. He had plenty of time.
But as he came around a small clump of rock and brush a few hundred yards from the castle wall, the hair on the back of his neck bristled. Chul slowed his horse and dropped silently to the ground in a low crouch behind a dense clot of trees and brush. He could smell it in the dust hanging over the fields and in the shocked silence of the night. Something was wrong.
The whole land around him shuddered with fear. He looped the horse’s rein over a branch and crept closer, pulling Gikka’s cloak free of his rope belt as he went. Starlight glimmered over the bare fields and over the terrified eyes of the night animals—over his own, if he was not careful. The animals stood as still as stone on the open ground, too frightened to move even with a hunter stealing up behind them.
Chul held his breath and listened against the darkness, against the low mist rising near the castle. Strange. No noise of crickets, no bats. He pulled the cloak close about him and slowly let out a frosty breath. His father had warned him about such silences; they always ended in death for a reckless hunter.
But already the sense of disruption and danger was fading, and before long, a few of the animals took tentative steps toward the dark northern meadow and sniffed the air. Satisfied, a few crept timidly back to the shelter of the brush, still watchful but no longer quite so terrified. Their caution seemed to fade, and in just a few moments, the quiet scurry and bustle of the night had returned.
He frowned to himself, frowned over the darkness, but whatever had frightened the animals so completely was gone. He sorely wished he could have seen it go, whatever it was, a mountain lion or a bear. Just to be sure.
Then he laughed. What, was he an old woman now, to be so fretful? He had his knife; he’d have been safe against it, whatever it was. Besides, it was gone.
A new silence fell over the land, similar to the first but somehow different, far more frightening, and the remaining animals scattered and scrambled for cover. To the south, a slow wave of darkness rippled up over the low ridge that separated the higher northern meadowlands around the castle from the lowland farms, so subtle against the featureless black of the landscape that he was not sure right away what he was seeing.
He blinked and squinted through the darkness, trying to see the whole shape of it, trying to find the outlines of black inside black. It seemed only to breathe, this wave, not so much to move, and a moment later, it settled into the shadows again. Everything was as it had been before, except that now an army was coming up to surround the castle.
They were still far away, and he well hidden; they had not seen him yet. He jerked the hood of his cloak over his head and settled back silently against the brush as Gikka had taught him, calming the panic in his breath and waiting for the cloak to awaken. Almost at once, his body reeled with the fatigue and heat of a day’s run while the Keeper’s cloak drank its fill of his strength. He breathed slowly, deeply, until the heaviness passed, and watched the darkness creep slowly northward toward the castle, the scatter of eyeshine.
This was supposed to have been easy. Get in past Maddock’s scouts, warn the sheriff and Lady Renda about the cardinal, and get out again before daybreak. The Idri, the cardinal, Xorden. He swallowed a bark of desperate laughter. Gikka had been so worried about the Hadrians and their Old Voice chants, but what were a few priests next to an army?
Chul clutched the cloak about his throat and looked back toward the hills, wishing Gikka had ignored Renda’s orders and come with him. But she hadn’t. Nor would she ride in at the last minute to save him if something went wrong. It was up to him to get what he knew about the Hadrians and now this army to the sheriff and Lady Renda. If he got himself killed—
The Invaders burned the whole village because of the boy’s foolhardiness.
—if he failed to reach them—
The Invaders killed them all because of the boy’s stupidity.
—but no. Gikka trusted him to do this, enough that she had left him to it and gone on to Graymonde to wait for him. She had taught him well, especially since their exile in Farras, and, as she’d said while she tied her cloak through his rope belt, the time had come for him to earn his keep, Hadrians or no. Army or no.
Before he moved, he counted those he could see like a herd of elk, two hundred, four hundred, maybe more; it was hard to tell in the dark and mist, and more kept coming over the ridge behind them. He watched the stealthy cloud of bodies press closer to Brannagh, and he frowned. Black cloaked, almost silent as they moved; these could not possibly be farmers, not even warrior-farmers a season out of trim. Never mind that Gikka’s spies had numbered the remaining villagers and farmers at no more than fifty; this army was far too careful, far too disciplined. It was as if the war had never ended for them.
As soon as he regained his strength, he backed out of the brush and edged his way away from them to the north and east, refusing to give in to panic. He could get past them; after all, it was still night and he would not have to go by all of them, just the front ranks. This had to be easier than getting around in Farras in broad daylight with wary constables and merchants watching. The cloak would conceal him as long as he did not make any foolish mistakes—
The Invaders cut out his mother’s tongue because of the boy’s arrogance.
He touched the long thin coil of rope around his waist to reassure himself.
His horse would be here, west of the castle instead of up in the northern meadow as Gikka had suggested, but other than that, he told himself, the plan was the same: cross the moat and up and over the northern wall, just the way he’d practiced in Farras. Once his message was delivered, Lady Renda would see him safely out again—how, Gikka had not said, nor did it matter. With any luck, he’d be away by daybreak with the attacking army none the wiser that the Knights of Brannagh were prepared against them. Looking over the encroaching army, he allowed himself a brief, arrogant moment of pity for them.
A twig snapped not far from him, and he froze.
North of him, someone lumbered out to meet the wave from the south. Large, hulking. It shambled along wrapped in threadbare blankets against the cold, and its hands were bound in tattered strips of cloth, but as it came nearer, there was no mistaking the odor of the tannery about it, the same smell that had burned in the boy’s nostrils on the road outside Graymonde. Chul’s eyes narrowed. Maddock.
His knife was already loosened in its sheath; a throw as the man passed—
From his other side, a strong hand gripped his arm.
Idiot. Pull away! Get free!
No. The cloak was made for this; he would not defeat its illusion by moving. Instead of pulling away, he settled his weight deep into the ground as Gikka had taught him and used his other hand to slip his knife clear. But the large man released his forearm without looking at him and reached across him to the next branch to pull himself along between the trees and low brush, making his way to meet Maddock. He never so much as glanced at the boy’s face.
Chul blew out a slow, relieved breath, mildly alarmed to see a cloud of mist congeal in the cold air in front of him. Such a thing could give him away; he would have to be more careful.
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