by Sarah Remy
Everin hunted Crom Dubh by the screams of his victims. On hands and knees beneath the smoke, or crouched to peer at the sky when a singular gust briefly cleared the haze overhead, he crept in pursuit. He had no strategy in mind other than to get as close as possible and then somehow draw the monster’s ire. He stopped once to change out of desert garb and into a villager’s togs, once again stripping a dead man of his garb. He drank water from a vineyard aqueduct running in a ditch toward the sea; it tasted of salt and made him gag. He was wondering if he dared climb to the top of one of Whitcomb’s ancient pine trees despite their proximity to the fire when the solution came within an arm’s length of running him down. Through the wind and screams he didn’t hear the riders until they were on him.
“Blood of the Virgin!”
“Look out, soldier!”
“Fuck me, another one! Friend or foe?”
They halted about him in a circle, six Kingsmen astride six gigantic coursers, lance and shield pointed his direction. Their faces were guarded by helm and visor, their armor dusty with soot. He rose slowly upright, hands up, pommel loose in his fingers.
“Friend,” he said clearly.
He could guess what he must look like, yellow desert eyes above a flatlander’s sharp nose. But yellow eyes were not exclusive to the desert—that blood had mingled long ago. Silently he thanked the dead villager for the gift of his clothes. If he’d still been wearing kilt and snakeskin, they would have cut him down immediately.
“Are you escaped from Whitcomb, man?” One of the soldiers leaned in for a closer look, lifting her visor. The device on her shield and breastplate belonged to Wythe, though her five companions wore Low Port’s cresting wave. Everin recognized her stern features and the king’s favor glittering below Wythe’s insignia.
“Aye, Countess.”
“You’re one of just twelve, then,” the king’s constable replied grimly. “The rest, as far as we can determine, are dead. What are you doing away out here on the dunes? Get back toward the garrison if you want to live.”
“I’m tracking the monster.” Everin jerked his head at the sky. He thought dawn must be near by the change in the smoke from black to gray. “I mean to kill him.”
The Kingsmen laughed.
“Fine chance that,” one said, bitterness plain even through his closed helm. “It eludes our best archers and steals our lancers from the ground. My infantry, bless them, broke and ran before it. Wyrms are meant to stay in nursery rhymes. I did not expect a live one to come ahead of the desert on a cold wind.”
“No wyrm, that,” Everin told the constable. “That’s sidhe. The dullahan, called Crom Dubh, Black Crom for his black heart. Iron will kill him, if only I can tempt him close.” He looked pointedly at her lance. “A strong, iron-tipped spear through the flank might drop him.”
He’d piqued her interest. “Sidhe, is it? Sidhe do not frighten me, even though they sham a wyrm’s form. Sidhe are killable.” She smiled, fierce. “I have impeccable aim with the lance. I’ll do better than the flank, I’ll take the murderous bastard through its breast.”
“I fear even impeccable aim will do little good unless I can draw him close.”
The constable’s fine brows rose beneath her visor. “And how,” she asked, “do you plan to do that?”
“I had not decided,” Everin confessed. “Before you near ran me over, I thought to climb that tree.” He indicated the old pine. The needles on its lower branches were beginning to smoke. The soldiers, following the direction of his gaze, chortled. Any moment and it would go up like a torch. He sighed. “I’ll admit I’m not at my best, my lady. Nevertheless, I need to draw his attention.”
Wythe’s expression softened. “Neither are we at our best, man. And we have not immediately suffered the loss of our home.” She crossed herself, shoulder to shoulder and brow to groin. “The people of Whitcomb will not be forgotten. What are you called, dragon slayer?”
“Everin, my lady. After the king that never was.”
“Well, Everin,” the king’s constable said, looking around at her companions. “As luck would have it, I believe we have just the thing you need.” She reached down a gloved hand. “Come aboard. Keep your head down. The sand snakes are generous with their arrows.”
“Elephant gun.” Countess Wythe walked a circle around the wagon, removing her helm as she did so. “Roue’s first ship, Fine Lady, made port yesterday. The wind blew it in ahead of its sisters. Unfortunately, the wind also keeps it from tacking into the bay, what with waves tossing to and fro. Lapin and Chama managed to get this one on dry land by use of a fisherman’s barge.”
Lapin and Chama, Everin assumed, were either the two sober soldiers guarding the gun or the large oxen tethered near the garrison’s well some few feet away. The soldiers were Roue men, wearing brightly colored enameled armor and true gold around their wrists and in their ears. On his back one carried a tightly woven, narrow lidded basket. The oxen also wore gold—on the tips of their pointed horns.
“There were two,” one of the men told Everin in, precise, unaccented king’s lingua. “Two guns, two barges. The waves took the second barge down into the bay, the crate of cannon shot and my tools. Lapin was fleet enough to retain his.” He indicated the basket on his companion’s back. “Captain Shal, she decided better to wait until the wind passes rather than risk sinking another. The admiral, he will be quite angry as it is.”
“There are more coming,” Lapin added quickly. “Two more ships, five guns. And soldiers.” He shifted, peering past the garrison, abandoned but for three stone-faced Low Port infantrymen keeping guard over the wagon and its contents, at the growing inferno beyond. “We are too late, I am afraid.”
“Or mayhap just in time,” Wythe said, tapping her fingers on her thigh. She gestured Everin close. “Well, what do you think?”
Excitement ignited Everin’s grin. He paced his own circle around the wagon, admiring the gun. It was much larger than the small cannons ranged on Wilhaiim’s battlements, bigger even than those he’d seen shipboard in Low Port. The cannon had one long iron barrel, secured by way of great metal bolts to the cart and then bound together four times with bands of copper and more iron. The cascabel at the rear was as wide in diameter as a wine cask, and opened by way of a complicated set of levers.
“Powerful, is it?” Everin asked, daring to stroke his hand along one side of the barrel.
“She would shoot down the moon, if we asked,” Chama agreed. Beneath his enameled breastplate his chest puffed in pride. “Had we cannon fodder at hand, this one gun alone might clear your kingdom of rebels.”
“If I contrive the cannon fodder,” Wythe said. “You’ll need not reach quite so far.” She pointed over Whitcomb at the killing shadow coiling in and out of cloud and smoke. “There.”
The two soldiers appeared unimpressed by Crom Dubh’s bloody rampage. “Wyrm,” said Lapin. “Not since my grandmother’s time has a wyrm dared plague Roue. The smoke,” he added regretfully, “will make it difficult. To kill a wyrm, one must pierce its eye.”
“Just bring it down,” Wythe said. “Leave the killing to us,” she barked at the watching infantrymen. “Iron shot! Now! Spear head, dirk, the meat knives from your belts. Bundle and bind all you can find, tight, with the leather from my stirrups.”
“Scrapshot, Constable?”
“Exactly! Be quick!” Somberly, she eyed the standing oxen. “We’ll need to be right beneath the ugly thing. Will yon fancy oxen pull toward fire?”
“Of course. They are trained to battle, the finest from the Rani’s stables.”
“Bless her.” Wythe clapped her hands together. “Chama, hook them up. Let’s go! I want Black Crom’s black heart for my trophy room!”
Everin wondered what Drem would have made of their gambit. The dullahan was hardly a beloved figure in barrowman history. Crom Dubh, like most of elders, spared no kindness on his lesser cousins. He did not think Drem and its kin would mourn the dullahan’s loss. Far from it
. He suspected rather that they would dance on the monster’s corpse, given half the chance.
Lapin and Chama were not braggarts. Once harnessed to the front of the wagon the oxen plodded placidly forward, pulling the elephant gun out from the relative safety of Low Port’s garrison into chaos. Wythe and the remnants of her cavalry rode in a loose oval about the wagon while Lapin and Chama stood balanced on the running boards. The blades they wielded were long and thin, more rapier than broadsword, and enameled on the pommels.
Everin crouched in the wagon behind them, hastily securing what sharp iron the soldiers had managed to collect into a solid bundle.
“Not much larger than that,” warned Chama. “Divide it into two, I think. Two barrels, two missiles. One load, at least, will hit him.”
“The god willing,” said Wythe as she struck out with her lance, smacking a tribesman on the side of the head as he came barreling their direction out of the smoke. The sand snake tumbled from his pony. A Low Port lancer finished her off as she fell, deftly driving his spear through her ribs. Everin recoiled. His regret was short lived. Four more warriors followed her out of the haze, howling as they fell upon the wagon. Flaming arrows struck the running boards, bounced off Lapin’s armor, broke beneath wagon wheels, and struck one of the Kingsmen in his shoulder.
Everin stamped out flame before the wagon could catch. The oxen lowed unhappily but did not stop their forward momentum. Chama left the wagon for the ground, blocking scimitar with rapier, feinting sideways and around and down, ducking another flock of iridescent stingers. A tribesman leapt from his pony onto the back of the wagon, swinging in Everin’s direction. Everin had his blade in his hand before he thought. The warrior lunged, scimitar flashing. Everin blocked the cut with the flat of his blade and pressed forward, backing the man toward the rear of the wagon. Smoke wreathed them both.
Beside the wagon a gorse bush went up with a whoosh, limning them both in orange light and a blast of heat.
“Erastos!” The tribesman gasped in recognition. “What are you doing?” He faltered in his surprise just long enough to catch Lapin’s rapier through his arm pit. Lapin, breathing hard, booted the dying man onto the dunes.
“Friend of yours?” he inquired.
“Nay,” Everin replied. But it felt as if it was his own heart Lapin had pierced.
A shadow fell across the wagon from above and for the first time the oxen wavered in their path.
“‘Ware!” Wythe shouted. “There he is! Here, stop here! Prepare the gun!”
Everin looked up. The dullahan dipped and dove overhead, playing hide-and-seek with the smoke. Crom Dubh’s hands and restless whip rained blood onto Whitcomb below, making flames spit. His empty-eyed helm turned this way and that, seeking, while his wings beat against the wind. He held a still-struggling Kingsman gripped in the squeezing coils of his tail.
Lapin and Chama prepared the elephant gun, retrieving their tools from the basket still on Lapin’s back. Emptying black powder from a heavy pouch into the butt of the gun, they added a quantity of wadded, dry grass and then Wythe’s scrapshot bundle. Together they rammed their provisional fodder into the bore, using a long, bronze, bulbous-nosed stick that had come out of Lapin’s basket in four pieces hastily screwed together to make the whole. Wythe and her Low Port lancers fought to keep an increasing number of tribesmen from the wagon. Everin stepped up onto the running boards and hammered the pommel of his sword against the muzzle of the cannon while Lapin used a flint and fuse from his basket to start the cannon’s vent, shielding the spark with his hands from the wind.
“Dullahan!” Everin screamed. “Crom Dubh!”
He did not expect to be heard over the sounds of battle, over the fire’s blistering draft or the wind’s ferocious tempest. He’d spent his long life overlooked and forgotten. He did not suppose that would change only because the world was burning.
But Crom Dubh hesitated midflight, rolled around, and swooped back across the pyre that had been Whitcomb. Behind Everin metal groaned as Lapin and Chama adjusted levers and cranked gears, aiming the gun. One of the Low Port lancers was sobbing as he lay beneath the wagon, a scimitar lodged in his thigh, his courser fled. Another plucked an arrow from his visor as he rode down a fleeing tribesman. Wythe clung to her saddle and her sword, breathing out curse words instead of air.
The dullahan swooped lower. His vacant gaze unerringly found Everin amidst the fray.
Little king, Crom Dubh said, silver bells in his head. Tell me, why should I spare you any more of my attention?
“Dullahan,” Everin said, and this time he did not bother to lift his voice. “You and I have a score to settle.”
The elephant gun went off, jolting the wagon backward, knocking Everin to his knees on the running board. The oxen braced against the recoil, bowing their heads, ears flicking back and forth as they waited for a signal to move again. Everin feared for a moment the cannon’s concussion had struck him deaf. Wythe bent over him, mouth moving, but he could not hear a word she said.
Chama discharged the cannon’s second barrel. Wythe yanked Everin off the wagon and forward over the supine bodies of sand snakes and Kingsmen. He stumbled, dizzy. Then his ears popped and sound and balance returned together.
“. . . saw it fall!” Wythe was shouting. “The second round, I think. Aug save you, man, don’t drop your sword now.” They were dangerously close to Whitcomb. He could feel the heat of the fire starting blisters on his face. Most of the burning buildings had fallen in on themselves; flames licked brick and stone and jumped from fence to tree to hedge. The smoke near the village was so thick they were forced to drop to their hands and knees and crawl in the sand to save their lungs. Charred corpses littered the ground but no other living thing dared come so near the pyre.
Everin and Wythe met Crom Dubh on their hands and knees, found him waiting behind the burning village with the sea at his back. Shrapnel from the elephant gun had taken him several times through one wing, and several more across his muscular flank. Sidhe ichor fountained from his wounds, poisoning white sand. Where iron had pierced his body, dark scales folded inward, peeling away from flesh below. The scales dropped off, one by one, leaving ulcers behind. The contagion was spreading in fits and starts, down his long tail and up his broad belly.
The monster’s serpent-like body coiled and uncoiled painfully when he breathed. In the fall Crom Dubh had lost his chitinous black whip; he gripped instead a tasseled desert spear, made tiny in his sharp-clawed hand. As Everin crawled close, he saw that what he had taken for black armor on the aes si’s torso and arms and hands was in fact scaling, and what he had taken in the confusion of his wild ride so long ago for an empty champion’s helm atop Crom Dubh’s powerful shoulders was instead ridges of obsidian bone and chitinous flesh, part of his body.
The dullahan looked down on them, exhaling dry, pained amusement. He slapped the sand with his tail, tossing up grit and pieces of burned gorse.
“Well,” he said, out loud and in Everin’s skull. “Don’t sit there, choking on smoke and flame. Come and play. Together you make a gratifying entertainment. For that mayhap I’ll kill you quick above the ground, and you’ll be glad of it.”
Sighing, the king’s constable rose to her feet, lance pulled back over her shoulder as she took aim.
“Aye, then,” she said pleasantly, grinning all the while. “Let’s play.”
Chapter 23
Wilhaiim’s walls were breached. Mal could not see the rift from where he’d climbed atop the ruins of the Bone Cave. The smoke was too thick. But with his eyes closed he watched the encroachment unfold, an onrush of life over the northern walls. In his head the desert invaders were a luminous watercourse, pressed so close together he could hardly tell one individual from the next. They massed against gray stone in ever increasing numbers. He could not tell how exactly it happened, whether they went over or somehow through, but all at once they were in, Wilhaiim’s winding streets and open bailey overwhelmed, the castle engulfed.
His eyes snapped open. A chill gust of wind threatened to topple him from his perch. It smelled of autumn and of winter damp, and it whipped the smoke around him into an army of minuscule cyclones. The Automata gathered about the Bone Cave paid the weather no mind. Mal could not tell for certain whether they noticed it at all, whether they cared for anything beyond his next command.
In the end, he and Baldebert had managed only five ferric soldiers, but not for lack of trying. Their kindling took more bone and strength than Mal had first assumed. In the night he’d ravaged the lich yard, depleting every sack he’d found under the grass of its contents. But the charging of each Automata, even with the benefit of powerful lich bones, had left Mal shaken and feeble for hours after. Despite growing urgency, he’d been forced to rest between kindling, and the desert had come too soon—in the end Mal had simply run out of time.
He wished now that he had given in to necessity and stolen the strength he needed to birth all seven Automata. The rush of their creation had bolstered his pride even as it drained his body. But that incredulous satisfaction was nothing compared to the rush of potential he’d gained in subsuming the lives of one hundred warriors in their prime.
Remembering that rapture, he quivered. The luminous watercourse was a nagging temptation, even with his eyes wide open, and more difficult to resist now he’d had a healthy swallow. Another sip, he thought, would go unnoticed. And Wilhaiim would only profit from his strength.
The wind suddenly dropped to stillness. The sounds of a city toppling reached his ears: the grind of stone upon stone, the clash of spear against armor, the bellows of men and beast. Renault was there, barricaded inside the palace, safe for the moment; Mal would know if the wards worked into the palace wall failed. He could sense Avani, their link an arrested thread between them, expanding and contracting as the distance between them shifted. But he could not know her thoughts to guess how Liam fared, and he could not guess which amongst those bright pinpricks might belong to Baldebert and his crew, to Peter Shean who had been Siobahn’s friend, to the last of Wilhaiim’s children, or to stalwart Russel whom he had come, grudgingly, to respect. He would not let himself assume they had fallen to battle and he would not risk ending them by mistake merely to quiet his trembling hands or to fill the new hollow yawning at his center.