Crusade

by Daniel M Ford

  She felt the words pouring out of her like wine from a forgotten bottle found in a cabinet. Not a great vintage and not a beautiful vessel, she thought, but it’ll do if you want a drunk, I suppose.

  She saw the uncertainty on Garth’s fair face; his features hid very little of his thoughts or emotions.

  “Garth, Allystaire would tell you to have faith. Faith in the light or the sun or somethin’ noble-sounding like that. I’m of the Shadows, not the sun, so I can’t. But I know there’s no sun, and no shadows, on the very bottom of the sea. And that’s where Symod’ll put us if he’s given the time.”

  She could see him make the decision moments before he nodded. “Fine.” He twisted in the saddle, shouted orders. She barely heard him tell his commanders about separating the mounted men from the foot, about taking what food they could carry and nothing else.

  Now how do I get them there any faster? Gideon, boy, you’d better have an idea.

  * * *

  “And you are certain,” Landen said slowly, “this’ll work?”

  “Seems like cowardice,” Unseldt rumbled.

  Allystaire pressed his eyelids tightly together. “I tire of answering these questions, Baroness Delondeur and Baron Harlach. Yes, we will need to refrain from giving battle tonight and most of the next day at least. The Will assures me he can help arrange this, and the arrival of fresh troops. Have faith in Gideon and Torvul. In me, and in yourselves,” he added. “No go to your camps and inform your men. We have work to do.” He stopped short of dismissing them outright, but as he stood, packing the map away in its case, they understood, and trickled away.

  Allystaire had spent turns while the sun set going over the plan with the Barons, assuring them it would work, and working out disposition of the men along the top of the hillside, counting their losses: almost fifty, mostly Innadan Thornriders and Harlachan.

  After walking amongst the guards that had been set at intervals surrounding their camp, including one man from the Order along every station, Allystaire found Gideon sitting quietly with Torvul, the two of them arguing in lowered voices. The alchemist’s small shuttered lantern threw just enough light to make out their forms, Gideon, standing, hands at his sides, the imploring teacher, and Torvul sitting almost dejectedly, chin down on his chest.

  “I’m tellin’ ya, boy, ya ask the impossible. Not only o’me, but o’yerself.”

  “It might be that nothing is impossible for me, Torvul,” Gideon replied, “and certainly not this. As for you—”

  “There’s no more song for me t’sing out o’the stones. None. It has passed from this world.”

  “And I punched through the Barrier, Torvul. Well, I gouged a hole through it with a chisel more than I punched. The metaphor is imperfect,” Gideon said hurriedly. “The point is that the power is there for you to shape, if you’ll but have the faith to do it.”

  “Even if it were, I’m but one voice,” the dwarf protested more feebly.

  “And a man singing into a large enough horn can be heard across mountains,” Gideon replied. “There is no larger horn in this world than the one I can give you.”

  Allystaire remained watching the darkened scene in silence. He did not understand why, exactly, but the words of the Goddess when he’d prayed in the Temple before leaving Thornhurst came back to him then.

  You must carry the light of My sun within you through all storm, all darkness. It is a heavy thing, My Knight. I chose you because I know you will carry it.

  Looking on them, lit only by the light of the dwarf’s lantern, which Torvul stood and collected, Allystaire wondered if this night was what she had meant. The Braechsworn were camped below them, but showed no signs of trying to climb the hill to displace them. He suspected that their numbers had swelled in the night, but without Idgen Marte to venture a closer look, he couldn’t know. Should never have sent her away with Gilrayan, he told himself.

  “Shut up with that word,” Torvul finally grumbled, as he shut off his lantern. “We’ll try it as y’say. Go on, then. I’ll try and make what preparations I can.”

  The dwarf stood, stumping away in the dark, leaving Allystaire and Gideon alone. The moon was dark, whether under cloud or new, Allystaire couldn’t tell offhand. He’d never paid much attention to its phases. Starlight was all there was, and none too much of it, so he supposed it must have been cloud.

  “I could just sweep them away,” Gideon said suddenly. “I could reach out to them with my Will and tear their essences from their bodies. I did it this morning.”

  “You could,” Allystaire agreed, “but you are not going to.”

  Gideon was silent a moment, staring straight ahead at nothing in particular. “For a moment I felt their fear, Allystaire. The Gravekmir. We call them brutes and monsters, and that we are set against them in this fight is not something we change tonight. But they were so terrified of me, and in truth, I don’t think they know what they were fighting for, or why. I doubt the average Braechsworn is different.”

  “I do not doubt the truth of that, in a general way,” Allystaire said. “The Dragon Scales are another thing altogether. And do not forget that the Braechsworn below us will gladly butcher us all if given the chance, for glory and plunder. They already have burned villages and farms in Delondeur this spring, and taken thralls back to their homes. Whatever misery they live in, it is not the fault of other poor men and women, and when they seek to raise themselves by raiding and pillaging, they become my enemy, Gideon.”

  The boy raised a hand. “I know that. I am not suggesting we can get them around a table to talk peace. We could barely do that with the Barons, and they had vested interests in it. I am saying that I could end this war now, today, in this moment, if I were willing to.”

  “You would become a monster, Gideon. I have struggled, and fought, and killed. It has been the work of my life, to my shame,” Allystaire said. “I sent men to their deaths and the deaths of others. But I could not bear the weight of the deaths if they happened as you described. The men I have killed have either been trying to kill me or the men under my charge, or they had earned it with their actions. So I hope. But that much death, so indiscriminately? No. I could not do it. I will not ask it of you.”

  “I know. It would turn our own against us, anyway,” Gideon replied. “I would be a monster in their eyes. And in truth. And all the Baronies need ownership in this fight. A common enemy gives them something to unite against, makes them feel like countrymen again. Just like a king would,” he added, turning his face towards Allystaire for the first time.

  “One crisis at a time,” the paladin replied, shaking his head. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “I just want it to be clear why I won’t do that. And to start thinking about what to do after we win the battle, with the enemies who survive.”

  “Do not plan too far ahead,” Allystaire warned. “We cannot lose sight of the next step. Can you do this? Bring the reinforcements here?”

  “Torvul and I together,” Gideon replied, “are going to make a road.”

  “There are roads already.”

  “We are going to make a road through the mountains,” Gideon replied. “Straight through. Instead of snaking through trails and winding under impassable peaks, they’ll ride straight to us. The road won’t last,” he added, “it’ll collapse almost as soon as they pass through it. But it will hold.” The boy looked straight up, and sniffed at the air. “Braech’s priests are going to call the rain, bring the storm. It will only serve our purposes here even better.”

  Allystaire’s mind reeled as the boy went on matter-of-factly about the coming rain. “Road through the mountains? How?”

  “Torvul is going to ask the stone to step aside. I am going to make sure it can hear him and respond. It’s quite simple really.”

  “Go to it, then,” Allystaire said, “and may the Mother guide you. And Gideon,” h
e added, extending one hand to the boy, “I am more proud of you than I know how to say.”

  Gideon stepped forward as if to take Allystaire’s hand. Then, impulsively, the boy stepped close and threw his arms around Allystaire.

  “There is so much I could do to shape the world, Allystaire,” Gideon said, his voice a murmur with his face pressed against the paladin’s armor, “that it frightens me. How will I know when and where to stop? Promise me that you’ll never let me become a monster. If Bhimanzir had had the power open to him that I do, or Gethmasanar—”

  “You chose not to be them, Gideon. You chose that for yourself even though it looked like throwing power away. I do not have to promise you that, because you will never let it happen. I have faith in you.”

  The boy hugged himself close to Allystaire for another moment, with one of the paladin’s arms around his thin back. When he tugged away, he was entirely composed again, using one hand to smooth the dark blue tunic he wore.

  “I must go find Torvul, then,” the boy said.

  * * *

  Torvul was kneeling with his hands sunk deep into the mud of the hilltop, trying to get a feel for the earth and the stone here. For its age and how it had been worked, for what had been asked of it and what it had yet to give.

  He heard nothing.

  His master Ochsringuthringolprine had described the first stirrings of the Stonesong not so much as a distinct note as a buzz, a drone, so deep it was felt more than heard. When Torvul had briefly reached out to the earth through the mchazchen crossbow he’d so briefly held, the songs had seemed to explode in a riot of colorful noise, a high thin trickle like those coaxed from a fiddle.

  Yet there had been few of them, too few for him to do much more than distract the sorcerer. I gave the bastard something to think about, Torvul reminded himself, feeling pride’s brief bloom in his chest.

  “Torvul,” Gideon said, having crept up on him unawares, for which the dwarf inwardly cursed himself, “not here. Come with me.”

  Before the dwarf could protest, the boy had placed a hand on his shoulder where he knelt, and Torvul felt himself reeling upwards from his body into the vast dark of the sky.

  At first he quailed in fear, wanted to revolt against the Will’s easy mastery of him, but Torvul grew accustomed more quickly than he could have imagined. Beneath them the earth was nearly featureless in the dark, just shapes of hill and mountain, the valleys and ravines lost in pools of deeper darkness.

  Just sing, Torvul. Gideon’s voice played in his mind, and the dwarf gradually realized that it was only his mind, his essence that was flying above the mountains along the Oyrwyn-Varshyne border, that his body was safely back on the outskirts of the camp, with Gideon’s wild-eyed guard of bowmen practically invisible around them.

  Sing, and let your own song guide you. I need to speak to Idgen Marte.

  Back on the grass of the hillside, Torvul’s voice rolled from him as a barely audible rumble in his throat. In the realm of pure Will through which he and Gideon flew, it was the blast of a great horn.

  * * *

  Idgen Marte chafed at how slow the men and horses moved, even though it was dark. The road was steady and level and the mountains much closer than they had been when she’d found Garth’s men in the afternoon, but she was only going to be able to egg them on so much longer. And the mountains, starting tomorrow in late morning, would eat the turns away.

  It will be two days at least before we can link with Allystaire, she thought ruefully. At least. Three, more like.

  She tried once again reaching out for Gideon, having heard nothing from him all the day. A voice of panic, a voice that threatened despair, had long since been bound, gagged, and locked away in her mind, but she fancied she could hear it yelling each time she reached for the boy and found nothing.

  And then there he was, not just his voice in her mind, but a vision of him floating in front of her, feet hovering a few inches from the ground, robes that glowed faintly, with his hood pulled mysteriously low over his eyes.

  “About time,” she muttered under her breath. Nice trick, she thought. What is the situation?

  I am not appearing only to you, Shadow. Gideon’s voice had an air of distraction in her mind, which she didn’t follow up on, because then his voice was booming audibly for all the gathered men to hear.

  “Men of Oyrwyn. Friends to Allystaire. The Arm of the Mother needs you and cannot wait for you to travel the roads men have made. I am going to prepare a way for you. It will be dark, but straight, and at the end of it will be dawn, and the paladin. I need you to have faith in me and I need you to follow it. That you are already on this road is testament to your bravery. I ask only that you maintain it for another few turns. Follow the Shadow; she will guide you.”

  Gideon, what is happening?

  Torvul and I are building a road. Sort of. Just keep going straight. All night.

  Another turn or two of straight and we’re trying to clamber over the southeastern arm of a mountain.

  Actually you’ll be going under it. Through it. Or possibly over it. Hard to say. Torvul will decide. Quickly now.

  She was conscious of the weight of hundreds of eyes watching her from behind. Garth’s pale face was easy to pick out for her eyes, long-since given over to seeing in the darkness almost as easily as the light. “You heard him, then. We’ll be the first to take a road built by the Wit and the Will of the Mother themselves,” Idgen Marte rasped, raising her voice to a familiar, affectionate shout. “We’re a bunch of lucky bastards. What are we waiting for?”

  Some residual magic of Gideon’s seemed to carry her voice down the line and the men raised a ragged cheer as they heard her words. The ranks rolled forward with renewed vigor.

  “I always knew somehow,” Garth said behind her, “that if I was ever going to live out some tale, that it would be Allystaire’s.

  “I think that’s how it’ll be sung, anyway,” she said, twisting her mouth in a wry grin.

  * * *

  Torvul was so startled when the mountain answered him that he almost stopped singing.

  It wasn’t the mountain, really, that did the singing. It wasn’t one thing, an entity with any kind of consciousness; it was the veins of ore awaiting a hand to work them, the geodes like eggs vibrating with the need to crack open to birth their gems cautiously into the world, the shifting piles of rock that, as such things were measured, seemed only to have been thrust against one another moments ago by the convulsions of the earth.

  Torvul felt these respond to his call, to the bone-deep ringing notes of the Stonesong, and on a hillside in Barony Varshyne, tears leaked from the corners of his eyes.

  He felt Gideon taking the power his voice projected and widening it, broadening it so that every stone in the mountain could hear. It was as if they began clamoring for his attention, so much so that it was hard, in the end, to simply move it all aside, just high enough for man and horse to pass under, just wide enough for two ride abreast, and to hold each part of it just long enough before letting the stones, the ores, the lattices of crystal and pools of water, reassume the shapes that seemed to them most fitting.

  Torvul sang for turns that night, but it felt like mere moments.

  * * *

  The Oyrwyn men stopped just outside the unnatural, yawning hole in the side of the mountain to light torches.

  Once inside, Idgen Marte almost wished they hadn’t. It was unnerving to see a long, smooth tunnel etching its way through the stone just a few paces in front of them.

  All the night they rode, and well into the morning, and never once did she allow herself to look back. Not after the first time she heard something that sounded like a door shutting behind them.

  CHAPTER 52

  Battle Joined

  Symod smiled grimly. Already he could feel the storms gathering above them, drawn by the prayer
and chanting of all the priests he’d gathered working to call the storm all that night and through the morning. The berzerkers would draw strength from it, if only in their minds.

  As he’d ordered, the servants had already prepared his scrying bowl. He laughed to himself, a grim triumphant laugh, as he bent over it, as he felt the prayers of tired priests join their will with his.

  His laughter became exultant when he felt, through the bowl, that the amulets of seawater planted in his tool were still there. He felt the idiot Rede stir to panicked wakefulness, blinking open his eyes and casting around himself in the dirt.

  The paladin hadn’t even caged him. His hands and feet were bound, and armed men stood guard around him, but his eyes and his mind remained blessedly intact.

  Symod laughed as Rede turned around, giving him a distinct view.

  The Barony army had moved camp in the night, dividing itself into threes and taking up positions atop three separate hills. Different banners flew on them: the Golden Sunburst in the center, with the Harlach Bear’s Paw. To the left was the Delondeur tower, the Damarind Manticore, the Machoryn Mailed Fist. On the right, the Innadan Helm with the Telmawr Fox.

  The men drawn up in ranks of gleaming mail and sharp spears seemed, to Symod, entirely inadequate. Perhaps some pitiful attempt had been made at earthworks or barriers of wood, but his Braechsworn and his berzerkers would swarm over them in torrent like the sea destroying a pathetic wall erected to hold it back.