The Iron Hound

by Tim Akers

  “I have trouble believing,” Bourne rumbled. “Any of this.”

  “If it’s any comfort, I believe that House Adair did what they did to protect Tener, not to harm it. And I think we, the church, have much to learn from them. Or at least I hope so.”

  “They are dead, and their hope with them,” Bourne answered. Then he turned and marched to a near door in the walls, disappearing from view.

  “We should have cut him down,” LaGaere hissed. “Trying to strike the high inquisitor like that. It’s little wonder the north is choked with pagans and their demon gods.”

  “That would have gotten us filled with arrows,” Lucas said.

  “Why didn’t they fire?” Horne wondered. She peered up at the rows of arrow slits that looked down on the courtyard. The shapes of archers could be seen beyond them, bows ready, quivers full. “When Bourne attacked, and it looked like we were going to overwhelm him. Why didn’t they shoot, to protect their master?”

  “Because they honestly believed their master could kill us all,” Lucas said. “They didn’t think it was necessary. They didn’t think he needed protection.”

  “Idiots,” LaGaere muttered, then he joined the caravan. He swung up onto his horse, falling in with the few able-bodied knights in their company.

  At Lucas’s side, Sir Horne sighed deeply. “He would have gotten us all killed,” she said. “It’s good that you’re here to keep him on a leash.”

  “If someone’s going to get us all killed,” Lucas said. “I would rather it be me.”

  He signaled for his own mount, waiting until the last of the caravan wound its way through the Reaveholt before he took to the saddle and rode out. On the walls behind him, the massive shadow of Sir Bourne watched them leave.

  11

  THEY STIRRED FROM where they lay on the cold stone. The horses stood nearby, cropping from the grasses that grew in the forest’s verge. Elsa’s face was scored with a dozen slashes, and her armor and clothes were scratched. Fragments of wicker lay all around them.

  “What happened?” she asked, pushing herself into a squatting position, staring down at her hands.

  “A little brotherly feud,” Ian said. “Night was trying to play the role of death, and big brother figured it out and came calling. He came to collect his due.” He stood and went to gather their horses. “The whole realm fell apart. Old gods don’t like to give up their territory.”

  “I don’t even begin to understand that,” Elsa said. “Death collecting his due? We weren’t dead.”

  “No, we weren’t, though we were on our way,” Ian said. “There were others. Soldiers of House Thyber. Looks like they got trapped, just like us, and never found their way out.” He brought the horses back to Elsa and started to gather the things that they had dropped during the night. His knife, his sword, the scattered remnants of Elsa’s armor, cut away in preparation for a fight that never came. He talked while he worked. “I figured out what the old guy was doing. Tricked him into surrendering the bodies. I didn’t think Eldoreath would like that. Just didn’t think he would be so… violent in his response.”

  “Eldoreath?” Elsa asked. She finally stood and took her horse’s reins. “Where did you get that name?”

  “I don’t… I’m not sure,” Ian allowed. “Maybe the old guy said it. Maybe it’s something I remember from the legends. I don’t know.”

  “The names of the gheists, the old names… those were purged,” Elsa said. “Not even the inquisition kept a record that I know of. Gods have names. Gods deserve worship, but gheists— unnamed, unknown, mad and feral… gheists we hunt.”

  “I thought we were hunting Gwendolyn Adair,” Ian muttered. Elsa didn’t answer, but she didn’t disagree. She plucked a folded cloth from her armor and laid it on the ground. It was spotted with blood. Ian had seen her with it before, whenever their way was unsure or their pursuit close. He assumed it was some sort of token. After a few moments of frustrated prayer, the vow knight refolded the cloth and returned it to her armor, near her heart. Her face was slick with sweat, and she looked slightly nauseous.

  “What is that?” he asked.

  “A trick. One that is failing me,” Elsa answered. “When Gwen was first in our company, Frair Lucas bound her blood. In case she tried to escape. I’ve been using it to find her trail.”

  “And she just happens to be going to the hallow?”

  “She was, but the binding is failing, either because the hallow has hidden her, or perhaps she has died. Or something in between.” Elsa pressed her hand against her breast, where the token was hidden. “No. She’s not dead, but something has happened.”

  “Then we’d better hurry,” Ian said. “The sort of questions I want to ask the huntress, the dead will not answer.”

  “Speed is out of the question,” she said, rubbing her mount’s flank. “We will have to walk the horses today, and pray that we are not pursued again. Not until we reach the hallow.”

  “Do we have far to go?” Ian asked.

  “The trail isn’t as clear as it was. Not as clear as it should be. We must be close, but last time I was here it was with the huntress. She had to lead us by the hand that last day, because of the wards. Now that the hallow has been unlocked and the Fen Gate overthrown, I hope those wards are banished.”

  “What if they’re not?”

  “Then you and I are going to spend some time wandering in circles,” Elsa said. She finished loading her armor onto the horse. “First, we need to cross this river.”

  “The land descends to the north. You mentioned a river that bordered the hallow. Might this be it?” Ian asked.

  “Perhaps. We won’t know until we try to cross it.”

  “Because you’ll recognize the land beyond?”

  “Because the river will try to kill us,” Elsa said. She took her horse’s reins and turned north. “Come on. I’m not anxious to spend another night among those trees.”

  * * *

  The river at the bottom of the ravine was, in fact, the Glimmerglen, but when they reached its banks, Ian and Elsa discovered that it had lost the strength it needed to kill. Though not the will to try. The currents shifted unnaturally around Elsa’s boots, sucking at the metal and crawling up her leg in cold, murky coils, but she was able to cross. As they approached the far bank, Ian lagged behind.

  “What are you waiting for?” Elsa asked.

  “There’s something in the trees.”

  Elsa turned to see that he was right. Deer, wicker thin and dressed in stone, grazed nervously at the forest’s edge. Elsa drew her blade, but the creatures spooked and disappeared with hardly a sound.

  “This place has changed,” Elsa said. “There is less anger here.”

  “Gwen carries its rage now,” Ian said. He took the horses by the reins and led them across the water. “Whatever may have become of her?”

  “That’s what we’re here to discover, isn’t it?” Elsa said. She kept her sword drawn, but lowered the tip to the ground. The blade was cracked, a lightning stroke of dark metal that ran along the runnel, thin forks notching the edge. “Let the horses graze here,” she continued. “If it’s safe enough for those creatures, it’s safe enough for our mounts.”

  “It’s getting close to night. Do we want to set up camp before we go wandering through the hallow? Gods know what we might meet.”

  “Whatever is waiting for us inside, it’s no safer in light than it is in darkness,” Elsa said. “We might as well get this over with.”

  “So anxious to die, Sir LaFey?”

  Elsa merely snorted, then led the way into the hallow. The trees were larger than she remembered, their bark older and more gnarled. It was as if the witches’ hallow had aged generations in the space of weeks, or perhaps its age had been artificially restrained in the presence of the Fen god, and had now caught up with its true antiquity.

  A regal autumn had settled in, and seemed unwilling to fade away. The canopy was alive with the million jeweled colors of the season
, and the air smelled like plowed earth.

  “The leaves are strange,” Ian noted. He reached up to a low branch and plucked at a stem, pulling it down. The leaves on it glittered translucently, like stained glass, their colors shifting and liquid. When he released the branch, it chimed with crystalline song.

  “Everything is strange,” Elsa said. “It’s a strange place.”

  * * *

  Ian smiled at his companion’s manner. Their trip out of the Fen Gate had been awkward at first. They were here for different reasons, after all, reasons that might set them at odds. Ian wanted to find Gwen in order to learn more about her family’s heresy, to find out if perhaps abandoning the old ways of Tener had been a mistake.

  In his days with the witch Fianna, Ian had seen things he didn’t understand, including a manifestation of his family’s totem spirit. He hoped that Gwen would have the answers that he sought, even if they led to heresy.

  Sir LaFey hunted Gwen in order to kill the god of death that the huntress had ensnared. Perhaps Elsa also hoped to deal with the autumn god the huntress freed from the witches’ hallow. What she would do to Gwen, however, remained a mystery.

  They moved deeper into the hallow. There was something wrong with the trees, he thought, even those crowned in all of autumn’s glory. Veins of ash crept up their trunks, and several had fallen to the corruption, tumbling to the ground to melt into the loamy undergrowth. Elsa moved carefully, the damaged blade of her sword at the guard, Ian trailing behind.

  “What was this place like?” he asked. “Before.”

  “I will never know,” Elsa answered. “I came to the hallow in crisis. The wardens were already dead, and their bound servants were fighting off Frair Allaister and his cadre. Gwen seemed to indicate that we changed this place just by being there, Lucas and I. So what it was like before shall remain a mystery.”

  “And the huntress?”

  “You knew her, didn’t you?” Elsa asked. “She was about your age, and of noble Tenerran blood. Surely you met in your youth.”

  “Only in passing. She wasn’t bound to the common path, even for a child of Tener,” Ian said. “My sister found her a bit wild, and Nessie has never met a storm she didn’t like. But I never knew she was a heretic.”

  “No. I suppose not. None of us did, though Frair Lucas suspected it.” Elsa paused and glanced back at Ian. “Why these questions?”

  “If your binding is right, she’s already here. I’m just curious what sort of person we’ll find.”

  “You saw her at the Fen Gate. What she was capable of doing,” Elsa said, casting her gaze at the trees, the sky, the setting sun. “Gwen’s no longer here. Or if she is, she is greatly changed. Greatly diminished.”

  Ian pointed down the trail. “Was that here, when last you visited?” Elsa’s attention snapped to the forest ahead of them. There was a clearing, and beyond it a hill. The clearing was ringed in cairns, and bright flowers wafted slowly in the breeze.

  “The wardens have been returned to their graves,” Elsa whispered. “I thought the river washed this place away.”

  “Someone must have put it back together.”

  “Yes.” Elsa crept forward. “But who?”

  The clearing was alive with color. The ground was carpeted in flowers of every type and season, from lilies to sunflowers to spiny mums. The cairns that ringed the clearing, where the wardens of the hallow were buried, crawled with vines and moss, their stones swallowed whole by lush greenery. The air was light and warm. There was another monument at the center of the clearing, its stones wrapped in shadow.

  “Yes,” she said. “This has changed. The river spirit destroyed all of this when it killed Frair Allaister. Someone came and rebuilt these. I wonder if the bodies are still here, as well.” Elsa tarried at the edge of the circle, pausing as she faced the center. “And that,” she said, pointing to the shadowed form. “That was not here.”

  The monument was made of stone, though of a lighter hue than the cairns. A pillar rose from the ground, and against the pillar rested a sword. It was draped in braided leather cords, each hung with an icon of the pagan faith, representing dozens of different spirits and lesser gods. Elsa went to the pillar.

  It was her sword.

  She held up the mundane blade that she had brought from the Fen Gate, its steel pitted and scarred from channeling the vast power of Lady Strife, the leather wrapping of the hilt burned where Elsa’s fingers had wrapped around it. With a shrug, she tossed the weapon aside. When it landed, the cracks that had formed in its blade flashed once, then shattered. The fragments of the sword bled ash, the steel turning black before crumbling into nothing.

  Elsa drew the bloodwrought sword from the pillar. The corded icons clattered like sleet against the steel, slithering against her forearm as she raised the weapon in front of her. Elsa stared with wonder.

  “We were expected,” she whispered.

  “Or hoped for,” Ian said. “What are the icons?”

  “Dead gods,” Elsa answered. She flicked the blade, an expert motion that gathered the cords along the blade. The weight of the icons pulled the cords against the sharp edge. With a breath, Elsa flared the invocations that lined the blade, drawing Strife’s power into the weapon, a gentle glow that bled from the runes that ran the weapon’s length.

  The cords broke, the icons clattered to the ground.

  “Dead by my hand,” she said. “Dead beneath this blade.”

  “Surprising the pagans didn’t try to destroy it, if it’s killed so many of their gheists,” Ian said.

  “Yes,” Elsa answered, her voice quiet, almost reverent. “Surprising.” A moment passed, and then she sheathed the blade. When she looked back at Ian, there was something different about her face. Something lighter, as though the weariness of the journey had been lifted from her bones.

  She smiled. “Whatever we seek, it awaits us above,” she said, pointing to the hill that rose from the clearing’s edge. Ian went to stand beside her, gazing up at the summit. The hill was broken, and darkness poured out. The grass at the summit’s peak was blasted into tar, and raw stones lined a massive crack in the earth.

  “The place of young Gwen’s birth, and perhaps her death,” Elsa said. “Come on. Someone left this sword for a reason, and I mean to understand it.”

  The vow knight marched up the hill. Ian took one last look around the clearing, at its cairns and the wild, improbable flowers, like a nobleman’s garden that had been dumped into the forest and forgotten.

  As he started after Elsa, his foot dragged through the discarded icons that had ringed her blade. One clung to his boot, and he bent to remove it. The cord was still intact. He raised it to the dying light of the sun.

  It was a hound, forged in iron, teeth bared, jaws slavering.

  Ian looked from the icon to the retreating form of the vow knight. Then he tucked the hound into his belt and raced after her, his heart thudding in his chest.

  12

  THE PATH CURVED steadily upward. They were near the edge of the Fen, the limestone bluffs and swampy lowlands giving way to gentle foothills that rolled into the distance. From the ridgeline, they could see the far mountains of Hartsgard, Manson Dougal’s holding now that his father was dead.

  Gwen had no idea where they were, exactly. The girl who thought she had walked the whole Fen had never stood on these hills.

  “This place is warded,” she said. “It must be. Otherwise I would have been here in my hunting.”

  “Or perhaps you’re not as thorough as you believe,” Aedan answered. “We have tricks enough for the likes of you, without having to stoop to magic.”

  “Bullshit. Anyone else, maybe, but I was born to the Fen. My family’s blood runs through the waters, our dead are buried in its stone. I know the Fen, and it knows me.”

  “Well,” Aedan said, “perhaps not these stones, and perhaps not this water.”

  The ridgeline folded into a valley, the dirt trail they had been following slowly changi
ng. Cut-stone steps led them down, the way marked with shrines of balanced rocks and tiny braziers of clay and marble. There were ribbons among the trees, mingling with autumn foliage and streaming in the breeze. Two sounds reached Gwen’s ears. Bells hanging from the trees and singing the wind’s song, and the distant thunder of a river.

  Her pain had faded to the point that it was bearable. Each step reminded her, however, of the gheist that had been ripped from her body. It lurked constantly in the background. She fought through it.

  The trail became crowded. Gwen could see a similar road on the other side of the valley, its stone surface full of people in various garb. Some wore the green and black of her company, the familiar gear of druids on the hunt, but others wore bright reds and startling yellows, jewelry of silver and stone that flashed in the sun. It looked like a plume of autumn leaves flowing along the mountain.

  Both trails twined to the valley’s head. Blue and silver glittered from between the trees, flashes of light that caught Gwen off guard. As she allowed herself to be swept along with the crowd, Aedan slipped away into the forest. Gwen looked around for Cahl, but there were no familiar faces close by. She thought briefly of making a run for it, stopping between the trees while the river of humanity continued on.

  Still she continued, and all thought of escape fled when they reached the valley’s head. Jagged stone framed the deep blue waters of a pool, and a waterfall cascaded down the cliff face and into the valley below. The waterfall traveled the height of the valley, a long, thin veil of sparkling white foam that stretched like cascading diamonds between the trees. Mist clung to the foot of the fall, and the grinding thunder of its descent carried up the valley walls.

  A bridge crossed the river far below. The crowds were working their slow way down the trails, to stand briefly on the bridge before crossing to the other side. The tumult drowned out all other sound, but as they descended the valley, Gwen could see the druids pausing on the bridge to face the waterfall, sometimes with hands outstretched, other times with heads bowed. Several children dashed across, hands over their heads, while frustrated parents tried to hold them back.