Crusade

by Daniel M Ford

  As Arontis exchanged words with the rider and took something small from the man’s hand, Allystaire hauled Ethrik to his feet and grasped his jaw with his left hand.

  Ethrik’s cheek and nose were broken by Allystaire’s fist. His eye was missing. He flailed weakly against Allystaire’s grasp.

  Gritting his teeth against it—wanting instead to just crush the man’s throat—he reached out through that haze of pain and fear and poured the Goddess’s healing into his defeated enemy.

  He was not gentle, nor was he complete. He staunched the bleeding from Ethrik’s empty socket but stopped short of the eye. He knit the broken bones, but not so that pain wouldn’t linger. Then he threw the babbling man to the ground.

  Arontis had come back into the circle by then, apprehension written in lines on his handsome features.

  “Is there anyone here who will claim this man?” Allystaire surveyed the crowd, settled his gaze on Gilrayan Oyrwyn. “Baron Oyrwyn? No? A few turns ago this man was your retainer. Is this how you value them?”

  Gilrayan Oyrwyn’s blue eyes were narrowed, his mouth drawn into a thin line. He did not look away, but neither did he speak up.

  Allystaire switched his gaze to Arontis, who raised his right hand, clutching a scrap of paper.

  “The Vineyards had a pigeon from Pinesward Watch. Brazcek Varshyne is besieged by Islandmen and Gravek marching together beneath the Sea Dragon’s banner.” Arontis’s voice was calm and clear. A light spring breeze tugged at both his hair and the scrap in his hand. “He begs for whatever aid we can send him. You can check the seals yourselves, my lords and ladies, if you still doubt Sir Stillbright’s words. I do not.”

  Quickly, Arontis turned to Allystaire, and gestured towards the priest who lay defeated and unmoving at the paladin’s feet.

  “That man, I will need,” Arontis said, clearly and powerfully. “We may need hostages. He is defeated.”

  “He is,” Allystaire says, “but I demand the peace accord, by midday. Such an army as can be gathered will march tomorrow, and no later. Go now and see to it. You will bargain with Torvul now, not with me. I am done bargaining, done pleading, done playing. I will lead the people in a crusade against Braech on my own if I must, but if I do, I will not stop with your chapels.”

  CHAPTER 41

  The Miracle Has Found You

  “It is not like you,” Idgen Marte said, “to change your mind about killing a man.” She had crowded into the tent with Allystaire and Gideon, helping the former remove his armor.

  “He wanted killing,” Allystaire said. As Idgen Marte helped to unbuckle the plates along his left arm, he looked down at the rent and bloodied gambeson, picking a finger past the drying stain and against the scar that had already formed on his arm. “I am not sure why I stopped.”

  “Probably,” she said, “but if you’d done it, they’d have decided you wouldn’t stop with him.”

  “Mayhap I should not,” he rumbled, as he probed the new fissure of hard, white flesh on his arm.

  “If you want to do the lot, every Winsar, Marynth, and the entire Choironate. I’ll float corpses in every river from here to Londray Bay. I’ll make it so we could walk from the coast to the Keersvast Archipelago without getting wet. But it’s not them I mean, Allystaire,” she said, as she ran her fingers along the upper cannon of the left vambrace.

  “Damn that dwarf, too clever by half,” she muttered. “Can’t Freezing see where it’s taken any damage. Just got t’feel for it.”

  “I am sure he has a way of seeing it.” Allystaire bent and twisted his left arm, flexed the muscle, winced, and grunted as a jolt of pain traveled up his arm. “I will need to ask him to repair it.”

  “If he has time after he spends all day trying to mend what you’ve broken,” Idgen Marte shot back. “Do you not see the fear you’ve put in them?”

  “They could do with some fear,” he said as he began working the straps along his right arm, freeing the gauntlet and the upper and lower cannons of the vambrace. “They have long forgotten what it feels like.”

  “They need to fear Braech’s army,” Idgen Marte hissed. “They need to fear for what it could do. They don’t need to fear us!”

  “Yes, they do,” Allystaire said. “Look at how they act, or how they do not. We show them proof of Symod’s intentions, they quibble. Gideon demonstrates his power to them, and what happens? Assassins in the night. We come with proof of that, and what do they do to the Baron who brought him? Feed him, ply him with wine, accord him respect, negotiate to secure his participation. They will secure their own power first, shore themselves up on all sides, then they will worry about the people Symod will crush. I will not have it anymore. I am no longer of their class. I never should have been. I will no longer pretend to respect it.”

  “That’s why you threw the sword away.” Gideon’s voice was quiet, but his assertion was powerful enough to draw them both to silence. “It was your way of affirming that to yourself.”

  “Sounds like a lot of rot, boy,” Idgen Marte rasped.

  “I don’t think it is,” he countered, tilting his bald head, drumming the fingers of one hand on his thigh. “In this part of the world, the sword is the weapon of the rich man, the nobleman, the knight. Glory and honor are won with it; common men are expected to fight with common weapons, aye? Flails. Axes. Hammers. What are they?” Gideon leaned forward, folding his hands together. “Tools. They can be weapons, yes, but they are tools as well, something any crofter might have. Yet a sword is, in the main, for knights and lords alone, and it has but the one purpose.”

  Idgen Marte’s hand went self-consciously to the weapon at her belt. “So then what’ll you do? Kill every man who’s rich enough to own one?”

  “Of course not,” Allystaire replied.

  “Just the Barons, then? And the lords?”

  “We can’t destroy the system unless we have something to replace it with,” Gideon said matter-of-factly.

  “I do not want to destroy anything,” Allystaire said, tossing his vambrace and gauntlet to the bed. “Yet what choice are they giving me? These Barons will fritter and delay and play against each other and they will let each other die if they think it strengthens their own position.”

  “Frighten them too much, and you don’t know what they’ll do,” Idgen Marte said.

  “I know precisely what they will do,” Allystaire said. “Delondeur and Innadan will support us. Harlach will go his own way. Telmawr will offer weak-hearted support to Innadan, but always they will be too few, too far from the field. Oyrwyn will search out the method to turn things to his own gain. And it will all be the same mess even if we do defeat Symod’s army.”

  “You can’t frighten them into following you,” Idgen Marte said. “And even if you did, they’d turn on you as soon as Symod was defeated.”

  “Then they need someone else to follow,” Gideon said. “They need a king. Isn’t this what the Succession Strife was about in the first place?”

  Idgen Marte and Allystaire both turned stunned eyes to Gideon, and in unison, the same name fell from their lips.

  * * *

  Torvul was waiting, his boots propped upon the table and legs crossed at the ankle, as the Barons and Baronesses joined him. Blinking and knuckling their weariness away from their eyes, they gravitated towards the pitchers of wine and platters of bread and cheese at either end of the table.

  Unseldt Harlach fixed an icy glare at the dwarf as he heaved himself into a chair. “Are we to treat with peddlers, tinkers, and thieves now?”

  “Peddlers, tinkers, and thieves are too honest for this lot,” the dwarf replied, swinging his legs to the ground and sitting up straight in his chair. “And I would be more honored to be counted among their company than this, in the main.”

  “Then why are you here, dwarf? To hurl petty insults?” The huge Baron curled his arm and slopped
a mouthful of wine down his throat with a gargling laugh. “You’ll have to do better than that,” he roared, setting his cup down. “You can’t hope to mingle freely with folk of quality, with great names—”

  “My name,” the dwarf said, his voice instantly cutting through Harlach’s, “is Mourmitnourthrukacshtorvul. I am the Wit of the Mother, the last student of the last Stonesinger Ochsringuthringolprine, and I have titles, names, appellations and honorifics you could not understand even if I were to try and translate them into your poor excuse for a language.” Torvul’s voice rose in volume but sank in pitch as he spoke; it was a voice that summoned attention and held it. “And you will treat with me if you wish to save yourselves, because there is one angry Cold-damned paladin in our camp, and may my tunnels collapse if I don’t just want to let him take your heads and be done with it!”

  Torvul heard the whispers, the indrawn breath, could imagine the race in their minds to summon replies of suitably high dudgeon.

  As if any of them could beat him to the necessary word.

  “But I won’t,” Torvul said calmly. “I won’t because it would not serve the Mother, and he knows it as well. Yet the longer you wait, the more you cost us all, and the closer you bring yourselves to the moment where it might serve the Mother. Face this fact, gentlemen and ladies: we are here to save your people from a marauding army. That some of you,” he said, turning his eyes at Gilrayan Oyrwyn, who stood smirking on the other side of the table, “would like to believe this army doesn’t exist, I want you to think very deeply about what wagering on that would entail. Very. Deeply.”

  The dwarf’s voice assumed a slow, hypnotic tone. “Think of Gravekmir at your gates,” he said, and he stood up in his chair, drawing all the eyes to him as the Barons sank down into their own seats. “Your walls may have held strong against men, but what of giants?”

  “Giants have broken themselves on Wind’s Jaw before,” Gilrayan protested.

  “Probably when Allystaire resided there to lead the defense, eh? And in what numbers? A dozen at a time? A score? What will you do against a hundred? Two hundred?”

  Torvul smiled as all eyes settled on him. And if those eyes were the tiniest bit glazed or distant, well, so much the better.

  “In the mountains they’re as good as siege engines, and you can’t sally out t’set fire to them,” the dwarf said. “And that is not to mention the Dragon Scales. Who among you has seen the work of the Sea Dragon’s Holy Berzerkers?”

  Landen Delondeur raised a hand. “I have. Two of them killed eight of my men before they were brought down. And we had them outnumbered by dozens.”

  “Symod has gathered hundreds of them. Maybe thousands.” Torvul said. “Men who go to battle with skin like steel, arms that can rend rock, and no fear of death.”

  “They embrace it,” Landen said. “It is a holy thing for them, to die doing battle in Braech’s name. I’ve seen them sing praises to him after taking wounds that would’ve killed any six normal men.”

  “Your knights and your soldiers haven’t a chance against them alone,” Torvul said. “For all your puissant skill at arms, you have no hope if you stand alone. You will have ruined keeps, burned towns, and crude altars to the Sea Dragon built upon your bones.”

  “And that,” the dwarf went on, sticking one boot onto the table and leaning forward, “doesn’t even take into account the sorcerer they’ve bargained with. You’ve not seen the foul magics they can work, raising your own dead into twisted Battle-Wights. Imagine fighting the corpses of your friends, your sons, your daughters. Imagine what it’d do t’your people, even if you did find a miracle and best them somehow.”

  Torvul cast his eyes around the table. He felt a slight twinge of regret when he saw the open-mouthed horror on Landen’s face, but only slight. He looked down at the far end, to where Hamadrian Innadan sat, withered and bent in his great chair, his mouth pulled into a thin line, his good eye flat and cold in the dawn light.

  The alchemist noted the decanter at Hamadrian’s right hand; cut crystal, rather than metal. Not one that had been at the table before the Baron Innadan had arrived.

  Torvul had only a moment, but he thought he saw the ghost of a smile on the old man’s lips before he went on.

  “Lords and Ladies,” the dwarf said, dropping his voice, “the miracle has found you. Yes, you hate him. Yes, likely enough he hates you. You’d be happy enough to shorten him by a head, I suspect, but after what you’ve seen this morning I Freezing dare ya t’try it. And that, my good gentlefolk, was not him at his worst. Nor his best, depending on what side you look at it from. In the end, you can be with him against a common enemy and live to sort it out later, or you can make him your enemy in the balance and hope the Gravek get to you first.

  “Do you want to be with or against the miracle? A paladin walks among you, and he’s put himself at your service, but you’ve decided t’try and make yourselves his enemy. The light of the sun can bathe your walls and your people in warmth and safety, or it can put a hammer into his hand to smash all you hold to rubble while saving them. Put your names to the agreement now,” the dwarf finished, “or be destroyed. It’s that simple.”

  He hopped down off the table and reached out a hand. Andus Carek pushed through the guards around the table and stuffed a handful of parchment into the dwarf’s hand.

  “The agreement, well, I’ve taken the liberty. It freezes all borders where they are for two years, lays out a timetable for negotiation of redress and remuneration. It binds the lot of you to taking no aggressive action against another Barony for the same two years, and the rest agree to come to the defense of one who is so aggrieved.”

  The dwarf started passing out sheets of paper; Andus Carek followed in his wake, setting down pens in front of each Baron, their nibs already wet from the inkpot in his hand. The bard then quickly produced a stick of sealing wax, a candle, and one of Torvul’s fire-sticks, which he struck against his thumb to light the candle.

  Torvul himself carried down one of the sheets to Hamadrian Innadan. He had the grace to offer a sheepish grin as he handed the old man the blank sheet. The dwarf cleared his throat and adopted a conspiratorial whisper.

  “I made them a tad more receptive, but they’re signin’ o their own will.” Hamadrian turned to face him with his good eye, and the dwarf shrugged. “Mostly. You fill in the details as I laid ‘em out after they’ve signed, sealed, and collected, and it’ll be perfectly legal.”

  “What’ll it cost,” Hamadrian wheezed, “to get you to become my chancellor, dwarf?”

  “Alas, my Lord Baron,” Torvul said with a faint bow, “I am already employed at a wage beyond measure.” He smiled, straightened, and said, “I would hurry, though. They’re only likely t’be like this for less than a quarter of a turn.”

  “What’ll Allystaire say?”

  “There’s very little o’what happened here that he’ll need t’know,” the dwarf said. “The paladin defeated the treacherous priest and in his wisdom, granted mercy. We know that Braech’s army exists thanks to Varshyne’s word, and the noble Barons have been awed by the righteousness of the cause.”

  “Is that so?”

  “That’s what the songs’ll say,” the dwarf said, nodding towards Andus Carek. “I’ll see to it.”

  CHAPTER 42

  Maps

  Allystaire had spent the turns since his duel studying what maps he had access to, figuring the routes from Standing Guard Pass to the Valdin River valley, on the border of fallen Vyndamere and nearly-fallen Varshyne.

  “I do not envy the Varshynners their position. Caught between the tundra, the Gravek, Delondeur, and Oyrwyn. They were always Vyndamere’s weaker, smaller brother at best. When Vyndamere fell, we all assumed they would as well. They just kept withdrawing and withdrawing, leaving their towers without garrisons, the towns undefended. There is something left; we know that now. But what, beyo
nd Pinesward Watch, if anything?”

  “I don’t know why anyone would want to live in that godforsaken country anyhow,” Idgen Marte drawled, leaning over to look at the map. “What can they even grow that far north?”

  Allystaire dropped the edge of the map he was holding and glared up at her. “Rocks? Ice?” He took up the edge again and said, “Our most direct route would be to take the trails straight up into Oyrwyn and then across the width of it. Yet the main part of what we can bring to bear now is going to be heavy horse. Might be faster to head back through Thornhurst and up over the Ash.”

  “You can’t go to battle with just the Thornriders,” Idgen Marte said. “Two hundred knights in pretty red dresses against an army of Islandmen foot in a country of hills and ice? You’d be mad.”

  “They are what I know I will have,” Allystaire said. “Along with whatever foot the Barons have brought with them.”

  “Provided they agree to serve.”

  “Well,” Allystaire said, “seeing as how no fires have started and no battles have been joined, I am assuming that Torvul has them well in hand.”

  Idgen Marte was silent as she studied the map, chewing on her lower lip. “D’you know which route you mean to take?”

  “Well, assuming we are heading towards Varshyne, probably both.”

  She raised a brow. “Split what meager forces you expect to have? That’s a nightmare to manage.”

  Allystaire held up a closed fist, then extended the first finger. “One: we have no supply trains in place, so a larger concentration of men is going to strain the resources of the land they pass through. If we split up, we give the quartermasters a better chance to catch up.” The second finger. “Two: we need to gather more men. I presume that Hamadrian can send pigeons, as can the other Barons, but the main of our force is going to be what we bring from this congress, and what we can gather in Oyrwyn along the way.”

  “You’re counting on a lot regarding Oyrwyn,” Idgen Marte said.