Guilds & Glaives

by David Farland

  That evening the Lady Etelinda, Duchess of Clifftor, joined her husband at dinner. Dark as he was fair, with hair of rich mahogany, full lips, and brown eyes that sparkled with warmth and intelligence and humor, she alone of the court did not flinch at her first sighting of Dval. She extended a slender hand to him in welcome. I like her better than her husband, he thought, and touched her hand lightly with his lips in the manner his master had taught him.

  He reached out with his mind again and sensed warmth from her, and light. Or was he just imagining it?

  Seated several places along the head table from the duke, between his master and a knight presented to them as Sir Marin, Dval consumed the rare flank of beef with gratitude but could only pick at most of the feast. Many of the colorful vegetable dishes would have sickened him; even their aromas twisted his stomach.

  The hearth behind them was banked low that night, and hunting hounds lay beside it, yawning and waiting for bones.

  Sir Marin, a middle-aged knight, inquired in a tone more amiable than Dval had expected, “I hear that you’ve come to investigate the murders? The Duke has placed me in charge of the matter. How can I help?”

  For the next few minutes he divulged a few details of the victims, telling how they had been found, and where. He peered at them and then quickly glanced down to his food. Slipping a sidelong glance at Dval, he murmured with sincerity, “I wish you well in searching out this horror.”

  Dval glanced to the Despatcher for his reaction, but his master remained silent.

  Should I push for more? Dval wondered. But he felt sure that this was not the time or place.

  Search for the darkness, Dval thought, and he tried to reach out with his mind. He felt it here, in the room, but it sought to conceal itself. He felt it to the north and east, in the isles of Haversind. And he sensed a great darkness still farther to the east—the monstrous Toth.

  We live in a world filled with more dangers than we know.

  He felt quite unsettled. He looked again to his master and the Despatcher nodded ever so slightly.

  After dinner, the duke’s chamberlain greeted the Despatcher and Dval graciously outside the high double doors when they left the feast hall. “Rooms have been prepared for you. If you will come with me.”

  Dval stepped to follow, imagining with relish a feather bed up off the stone floor, not a tick filled with scratchy straw and fleas and the stale sweat of previous sleepers.

  His master stopped him with a firm grip on his shoulder. “We are truly thankful for your lord’s kindness,” he told the chamberlain, “but we must be on the hunt tonight.”

  “Oh?” The chamberlain arched dark eyebrows.

  “We are investigating the deaths of the two young women,” the Despatcher said.

  “Oh,” the chamberlain repeated, not as a question this time. To Dval’s curiosity, he leaned nearer to them, peered gravely from one to the other, and whispered, “Blessings upon you in your search.”

  * * *

  The Despatcher headed north into the wilderness, as if to challenge the darkness. In two more days’ travel they pressed through some deep redwood forests and then climbed some rolling hills to reach a giants’ village on the border of Toom. The village had no houses or inns, merely a cluster of thirty or forty brutish lean-tos made of gray stone slabs on the leeward side of a large hill. The stones were splotched with lichens in shades of metallic green, gold, and crimson. Sheep and donkeys grazed the rolling slopes beyond, on rich grassland spotted with stands of wild apple trees and natural hedges of blackberry.

  “Hill giants live there,” his master had told him the day before. “You have met one of them, Sir Bandolan.”

  “Yes.” Dval had met one. On the hillside where the queen’s carriage had crashed, when he had been accused of it, the giant had pinned him to the soil with a massive foot, nearly cracking his ribs. Hours later they had fought a Toth queen together and Sir Bandolan had pulled him out from under its massive carcass after he felled it.

  “Our king,” his master said, “employs dozens of them in his armies as mercenaries, mainly up here in the north. We are seeking Bandolan’s brother, Dalmodir. He is a sage, of sort—a master at sensing the shadows that surround us and battling them.”

  They found him in late afternoon, apart from the village, seated in a shelter at the edge of the forest and carving intricate patterns into the six-inch wings of his massive bow. His blade seemed too small for such great hands, but he wielded it deftly. In the summer’s heat he wore only a kilt of gray-brown donkey hide. Colorful stones tied into his full beard clicked softly together when he lifted his head.

  Runestones like the ones my master gave me? Dval wondered. Very different from the rat skulls woven into Sir Bandolan’s beard.

  Dval felt no darkness in the giant, only a soft burning glow, as if he held a hidden fire.

  Dalmodir assessed them through coal-black eyes from beneath his craggy brow. He was as silent as a Despatcher himself. He slapped the flattened turf before him in an invitation to sit, with a hand that could have spanned Dval’s chest.

  The giants of Toom could not speak like normal men. Some oddness forced them to speak in rhyme, aside from the odd exclamation. Once Dval explained what he sought, Dalmodir’s eyes flashed in anger and his voice grumbled like a thunderhead approaching over the mountains:

  “Welcome, welcome, have no fear,

  Though one must beware

  Of all out here.

  Though pirates roam,

  The woods are home

  To things of darker nature still.”

  Dval wondered what would be darker than the pirates’ hearts. Magic, he decided. He had heard stories of spirits in these woods, malevolent creatures summoned by sorcerers. He shivered where he squatted at the thought of pirates dealing in the ancient arts. Maybe there are other creatures, too. Maybe even a Toth sorceress.

  At times, the past few days, Dval had thought that he could sense unseen … essences, spirits.

  Dalmodir cast him a critical stare as if sifting his thoughts, but Dval held his tongue. The giant said, “Hmph,” applied his knife to his bow once more, and rumbled what seemed to Dval to be a mournful song.

  “Two maidens died not in one night

  But each when the moon gave its fullest light,

  After it grew wan and dim

  And waxed to fullness once again.”

  The girls were killed a month apart, under the full moon, Dval realized. The moon is waxing again. There could be a third murder in another two weeks. He shot a glance at his master.

  “Where do the pirates land?” Dval wondered.

  Dalmodir did not glance at either of them, but rumbled:

  “Search for tumbled rocks and trees

  Where cliffs cast brooding shadows upon the seas.”

  The Despatcher bowed in gratitude and pushed himself to his feet. “We have a night’s work to do,” he told Dval, and started eastward.

  Yes, Dval thought. I can sense the darkness there. He felt eager to greet it. He fell silent as they rode through fen and wood, where gray squirrels barked warnings from trees and jays ratcheted.

  Four or so miles on, the crash of heavy surf reached Dval’s ears. In another mile, brine and fish scented the air, stronger than in the graaks’ abandoned aerie, and the pastureland dropped off the edge of a cliff more than one hundred feet high.

  They skirted along the coastline for some distance, peering over often while the sun sank gradually behind them, until they came upon a cove where a section of cliff had fallen away. In the deepening blue at its foot, Dval distinguished tumbled boulders and windswept pines stretching for the sky. “There,” he told his master.

  There was a beach in the inlet, a tiny spit of sand where there had not been one for miles. Dval recognized that of course it could serve as a natural harbor, where none other existed around here.

  His master nodded approvingly.

  Even bearing all his weapons, including his sword a
nd warhammer, Dval found this descent easier than his midnight climb weeks earlier. He led the way in the darkness and found cover behind mounded rocks at one side of the crescent-shaped beach.

  He could sense a rising darkness out over the sea, even though he could not see it.

  The moon rose, half full, and climbed. It passed beyond the cliff’s top, darkening their ambush still more. Finally, through the shush of waves spilling up the sand, came a lap of oars and muffled voices. Two boats appeared from the gloom, visible at first only by a torch held aloft in each.

  Voices fell silent before their owners slipped over the gunwales, scarcely disturbing the water, to haul the boats to shore. Dval heard the paff, paff of feet, the hiss of keels on wet sand, and counted the black-clad shapes. Eighteen, counting the torchbearers.

  His master touched Dval’s arm for his attention and shaped soundless directives with his hands: “Cut them off from their boats. Torchbearers first, then kill them all.”

  All? By myself? Dval considered how to do it. Sneak up and kill the torchbearers first, leaving the narrow inlet in darkness, and then take the men. If this was a test, it would not be a hard one, he decided. With his night vision, he did not need torches to defend himself, but his victims would.

  Dval answered with a curt nod, nocked an arrow to his bow, held a second in his teeth, and rose like a shadow from his cover. The first torchbearer flew backward with an arrow through his throat, blocking any outcry. Wet sand doused his flame and his counterpart whirled. Dval glimpsed the whites of wide eyes a heartbeat before his second arrow pierced the man.

  A shout rose as blackness swallowed the cove. Night-blind, the pirates drew swords, staggered into one another. Dval traded bow for longsword and danced in among them, slashing and lunging. Most felt the swift tip of his blade at their throats, but two he shoved hard, impaling them on their mates’ swinging swords. The tide, already receding, couldn’t reach all the splattered stains, like iron-scented ink, to sweep them from the pale sand.

  Dval executed them in moments and stood with heart hammering, staring at their corpses. He’d had to kill men before, but never in such numbers.

  He felt for the darkness and found that its source was gone.

  As Dval retrieved his arrows, then cleaned his blade and the arrow points, the Despatcher leapt down from the rocks onto the beach and said, “A good night’s work, that, but I fear our task is not yet finished.”

  Dval weighed his master’s words and knew that he had done something wrong. He’d been sent here as a test and he had failed it somehow, or only partly succeeded.

  * * *

  For days Dval and the Despatcher stayed in a small village, both of them awaiting some unheard signal. Then one day, Dval woke and knew it was time to head south. Three days later, Dval and his master stood in Duke Hamid’s audience chamber. The air was fresh with the scent of mock-orange blossoms strewn upon the floor and the Duke seemed to be in good cheer.

  “We have slain the pirates who ravaged your northern coasts, my lord,” the Despatcher announced. “There will be no more maidens stolen from your lands.”

  As proof, the Despatcher threw down a bag filled with the dead pirates’ rotting ears.

  Duke Hamid smiled, smugly Dval thought. He noted the gleam in the man’s eyes when he said, “I am forever grateful for the assistance of my brother the king’s Despatchers. Let me reward you. We shall feast!”

  The Despatcher only bowed courteously. “Alas, we cannot. We have far to go this night. Our king still fears that more Toth might beach this summer and so we must refuse your graciousness. It is time for us to turn south to the Courts of Tide.”

  “At least let me reward you,” the Duke suggested. “I’ll give you some fine horses to help hurry you on your way, and silver so that you might dine at the finest inns. The Stag and Brew is sixteen miles down the highway, but with good horses you could easily make it by nightfall.”

  Dval hoped their job done and felt happy with his reward. But six miles down the road from the castle, the Despatcher cautiously guided his horse and palfrey into the trees, into the duke’s private hunting reserve, and began to circle back toward the northeast. No village stood within the preserve’s wooded boundaries, Dval knew. No place of refuge for fleeing prey, when the moon rose to its full. Only groves of scrub oak and pine, interspersed with barren fields of wheat burned white by the summer sun.

  To Dval’s surprise, as they reached a grove of pines, the giant Dalmodir met them in the bracken, beside a track made by the regular passage of many horses. At eight feet tall, he had to duck and stand between the lowest branches beneath the pines. He greeted them with an incline of his head, swung his warclub off his shoulder, peered about, grunted as if he had just made a discovery, and said:

  “Behold the dark and awful place

  Where the damsels’ hunters love to race.”

  Dval wondered. There is no way that the giant could have communicated with the Despatcher. Not a word, not a note. Yet the Despatcher did not seem at all surprised.

  They serve the same master, Dval realized, to his embarrassment, and they have been summoned here. Yet I did not hear the call!

  Something inside him broke and he let out a whimper, resolving to listen harder, to learn to hear his true Master’s voice.

  Then he felt it—bloodstains on the ground all around him. The blood seemed to rise up like screams that chilled his spine and made him tremble. He felt the killing field.

  Dval and his master dismounted and tied their horses in dense growths of oak a hundred yards away. Then they and the giant hunkered down on a hillock overlooking the forest to wait for nightfall.

  Shortly after the setting of the sun, the moon rose bright and full, though it was bloody red from the cooking fires of a port city to the east.

  They did not have to wait more than two hours past sunset.

  Dval heard the girl’s voice first, rising from the plains in the far distance, perhaps a mile away. Most likely, his master was not quite aware of it, for humans did not hear well.

  Dval heard shrieks high with indignity and fear, but not panic. No gibbering or blubbering; she still had wit enough to protest her capture, to demand, “Let me go! What crime have I committed?”

  The roar of a man’s laughter gave answer, vicious and unmistakably drunken. “Your crime, my bird?” he slurred. “Is beauty now a crime? No, unless it be flaunting your beauty in the market. … Yes.” Another deep chuckle rolled forth. “That is your crime, and fanning to flames my hunger for it. … Such piracy! For that you must pay me by satisfying my hunger when I catch you at the end of the chase.”

  Shock stiffened Dval where he stood. It was the duke’s voice! But he is a runelord. He has sworn fealty to his people, to use his endowments to protect them, not destroy. By such deeds as this he breaks his oaths.

  “My lord, do not this thing,” the unseen girl cried. “I beg of you by all that’s worthy!”

  Once again raucous laughter echoed among the trees. He heard the muted plod of hooves on loam and the duke shouted, “Strip her and release her! Hold fast the dogs.”

  The girl screamed again, still unseen at this distance. But soon, orange torchlight appeared, dancing between trunks black as cinders. The torches halted and wavered on a gust. Dval heard cloth ripping and the girl’s gasps and cries, outraged as much as frightened, and more chuckles at her distress.

  Jaw and fists clenched, he questioned his master and the giant with a glance.

  The Despatcher gestured toward the track below. “Wait for the maiden there,” he murmured. “We will see to this duke.”

  When Dalmodir nodded agreement, Dval sprang away and raced down among the trees. He ran fleet-footed and silently for two minutes, scaring up a pair of stags that had been grazing in the grass.

  He reached the trail. A limbless hulk of a long-dead oak leaned low over the track, forcing it to curve. His soft boots trod fallen leaves and twigs without a sound as he melded with the shad
ows of its hollow bole.

  On a thought, he released his cloak’s clasp at his throat, his long cloak with its deep hood, sewn by Sergeant Goreich’s wife to protect his white skin from the sun. It was black as night and offered perfect concealment, turning its wearer into a shadow. I have no need of it here, he thought, but this girl does.

  Her panting sobs reached his ears before he heard the hurried pats of her bare feet on the forest floor. The full moon’s glow made a ghost of her in the blue-black night, running on long legs with her arms crossed over her breasts and her loosed hair rippling behind.

  A shout sounded from the direction that she’d come and she cast a swift glance backward. Moonlight glistened silver from tears that streaked her face, but Dval saw determination in the set of her fine chin and the way her eyes searched the forest.

  As she drew even with him, he sprang, cloak stretched out like the sail of a small ship in a fair wind, and wrapped it snugly about her. She cried out, a startled sound muffled by the cloak, and thrust an elbow into Dval’s chest hard enough to take his breath. He gasped, but kept his hold. “Hush!” he hissed at her ear, and pulled her into the dead tree’s shadow. “I came to help you. Watch.”

  A horse appeared up the track, mincing ahead of the men who bore the torches and restrained the wolfhounds on their taut leashes. Ears flicking every direction, it snorted through extended nostrils and advanced in small jumps. When it drew near enough that Dval could see the whites of its rolling eyes and the drunken leer of its rider, the girl shuddered against him.

  Something man-sized hurtled from the undergrowth at the horse’s feet, spinning a cloak in its face. The beast reared onto its hind legs with a squeal and thrashed the air with its forehooves. The duke somersaulted from his saddle, arms and legs flailing. He struck the turf hard on his back as his mount wheeled and lunged toward the castle, sending the men on foot sprawling. Dval heard the crash of underbrush and the yip of a kicked dog as the torch went out.