Stillbright

by Daniel M Ford

  “Only a little over four turns.”

  He nodded, which he quickly found a mistake. The muscles of his neck wrenched and tightened in protest.

  “Cold, but you wake up uglier and more painfully than most men die.”

  He laughed, but that caused him to wince and press a hand to the new wound on his stomach. It was healed, but the skin was raw and the muscles not entirely mended. “Listen a moment,” he slurred. “I need to apologize. I should never have gone by myself. It was vain. Arrogant.”

  “Also foolish,” Idgen Marte replied. “Stubborn. Naive. Short-sighted…” She lifted a fist and began counting points with her fingers.

  Allystaire rolled his eyes, and was slightly astonished to find that it didn’t hurt. Much. “Still,” he said, slowly, “I knew what would happen. If it went bad, and it did, I knew you would come.”

  “You were already free when I found you.”

  “Not the point. The point is you found me. I owe you my life more times than I can count—”

  “Well, it’s not quite more times than you’ve got fingers.”

  “Enough with that. I cannot laugh for fear of bursting a rib.” He took a slow breath. “I should not rely upon you so casually.”

  “Allystaire,” she said, pushing herself to her feet and then wiping her hands against her trousers, “shut up. You’re meant to rely on me. She told me as much.” She walked to him, extended her hand, and helped him to his feet.

  “Always behind me?”

  “Always,” she replied, with a slight nod. “Even when you’re an idiot. Cold, especially then.”

  They stood, awkwardly, for a few moments, not much space between them, after Idgen Marte pulled her hands from his, till the creaky opening of Torvul’s wagon provoked them into turning quickly apart.

  The dwarf emerged from the boxy interior of his wagon, already dressed in his traveling gear, a fresh array of full pouches clipped onto the many rings of his hooded jerkin. His eyes darted to Idgen Marte and Allystaire, then rolled skyward. With a shake of his head, he muttered loud enough for them to hear. “Will you two just get it over with?”

  “You haven’t ever learned when to shut your mouth, have you dwarf?” Idgen Marte scowled while Torvul grinned.

  “No,” he said, “and I never expect I…”

  He was soon left speechless as Idgen Marte seized Allystaire’s head with one hand on either cheek and pulled close to him, kissing him hard on the mouth. Allystaire’s eyes widened and he let out a wheezing moan of pain. Then she stepped away, Allystaire winced, and Torvul’s jaw hung slightly open.

  “Like kissing my brother,” Idgen Marte said, before wiping her mouth with her sleeve. “Now put that thought out of your head.”

  Torvul slowly turned towards Allystaire, who placed a hand to his neck and rolled his head around on his shoulders. “Like kissing my sister,” he agreed, “only it hurt more. Now. Where have my gambeson and armor gotten to?” He plucked at the bloodstained and torn tabard he still wore.

  The dwarf grumbled in his own language, ducked back into his wagon, and returned with armfuls of steel. Allystaire walked to the side of the wagon and accepted them piece by piece, carefully untangling straps and buckles.

  “Might not be best to wear it today. You might need some time to recover,” the dwarf said, as he handed over the last pieces.

  “I have slept, twice now. I will eat. And I would feel better wearing it than not.” He gathered up the pieces and wandered several paces away from their little camp. He pulled the tabard off his back—first having to rip it free from where blood had dried it to the skin of his stomach—and knelt.

  Idgen Marte had woken the boy and Bethe, and both sat up, now watching Allystaire walk off. When he removed his tabard and revealed the scarred geography of his back, Bethe turned away, but the boy simply tilted his head to the side, curious.

  “He has been hurt a great deal,” the boy said. “Injured. Stabbed, burned, arrow-shot, and such.”

  “Aye, as has anyone his age who has been at his trade for so long,” Idgen Marte replied.

  “He said as much when my master was trying to divine the nature of his power.”

  “The dead sorcerer isn’t your master anymore,” she said. “But what do you mean?”

  “Well, he did not say so, exactly. Every time my—Bhimanzir—used his sorcery to reach into him, which invariably causes great pain, he would just talk about the pain. About how he’d felt it before.” The boy paused, then walked towards Idgen Marte to accept a hard biscuit she’d taken from a sack and held out to him. “It was very odd.”

  “He’s very odd,” she said, handing a biscuit to Bethe. “But that sounds like him.” She tossed a biscuit towards Torvul. Scowling, he made no effort to catch it and didn’t watch as it hit the ground.

  “Does pain bother him so very little?”

  “Of course it bothers me,” Allystaire said while pulling his gambeson over his head. “As it bothers any man. I have just grown used to it.”

  Idgen Marte whispered to the boy, “It bothers him less than any man I’ve known. It’s uncanny and bizarre and if I were you, I’d learn better than him how not to get hurt.”

  “I see,” the boy replied. He lifted the biscuit to his nose, sniffed, and said, “I think the first step to not getting hurt is not trying to eat this.”

  “Got to eat something, and these are mostly what we’ve got,” Idgen Marte replied.

  The boy sniffed at it again, set his teeth to its edge, then wrinkled his mouth in distaste and held it at arm’s length.

  “C’mere,” Torvul said, poking his head out of his wagon door. “I can fix you up better than that.” The scent of bacon wafted out of the open door.

  “How can you have a fire in there?” Idgen Marte said, even as the boy and Bethe began drifting over. “It’s not safe.”

  “Nonsense,” Torvul said, pointing to the chimney in the rear of the wagon. “Every dwarfish wagon has its stove. Stones, I can make a fire in here that’d melt your sword.”

  “Show me,” Idgen Marte said, moving towards the wagon.

  “Tch,” Torvul replied, shaking his head and letting the door shut behind him. “Nobody in here save me. ‘Sides, you’re all too tall. Except maybe the boy.” The dwarf tilted his head and addressed the boy now. “How about Urbrinchithaschurtingmal. One of my uncles was named that.”

  The boy frowned, crossing his arms over his chest defiantly.

  Allystaire hauled on another piece of his armor. “If we are going to use family names, well…” He sized the boy up, chewing on his bottom lip. “Gideon. It was my grandfather’s name.”

  “I like that better,” the boy said. “Who was your grandfather?”

  “First of our line to be lord of Coldbourne Moor. Dead before I was born, but, by all accounts, as stiff and frightening a son of a bitch as ever walked this world. It is quite likely he began his life as a peat digger on the land he came to rule. Earned his title with his sword, during the early part of the Succession Strife. Back when all this nonsense began.”

  “Do you mean that the people here have been fighting this petty war since your grandfather’s days?”

  “I would not call it petty,” Allystaire said with a faint frown, cinching a vambrace tight around his left arm with his right hand. “Not to people whose lives it has ruined. Not to its dead or its living victims.”

  “My master always called it petty,” the boy went on. “He said that Keersvast alone could conquer the baronies if it wished, to say nothing of the Concordat.”

  “Keersvast could buy the men for a season,” Allystaire said. “Yet it could never hold on very long. Besides, an invasion that threatened all of the baronies, or at least a handful of the most important, that would put new grudges in the back of the mind, and bring old alliances to the fore. As to the Concordat—”
Allystaire began to shrug, but his words were suddenly cut off.

  “They could conquer the baronies,” Idgen Marte put in quietly. “And hold it. Or burn it all, if they chose. Trust me.”

  “Enough of all this hatschinlzaft,” Torvul suddenly put in, frowning. When everyone stared at him he went on with a shrug. “Dwarfish term. Means, ah…” He struggled for a moment, waving a hand in the air, “Means ‘fourth flagon of the evening talk.’ Things you only talk about when you’re drunk or getting drunk. It’s certainly not proper before breakfast talk, which should be limited to ‘what is for breakfast,’ and ‘when is breakfast.’ “

  “You have just made that up,” Allystaire said.

  “Old Dwarfish is an ancient, nuanced language that is not easily rendered in your barbarous northern twaddle,” the dwarf said with a sniff. “And if you live in hope of bacon you’ll not insult it again.”

  Allystaire rolled his eyes, but he kept his mouth closed. At least till the boy offered him the biscuit he’d rejected. With a shrug that clanked pauldrons against cuirass, Allystaire reached out and took it, bit off a hunk with his back teeth, and crunched contentedly.

  “Gideon,” the boy said. “And your grandfather was a laborer who became a lord?”

  “Well,” Allystaire said, around a mouthful of dry biscuit, “a laborer who became a soldier, then a bannerman, officer, knight, and finally lord, as the family lore would tell. There was a portrait of him among the family gemmary. If you can tell anything about a man by his profile in carnelian, he was hard. The worst my father would say was that he was forceful. Nothing more.”

  The boy listened, then nodded faintly. “I think I will try Gideon. If you find a name that suits me better, please tell me.”

  “Pick a name that pleases you, lad,” Idgen Marte said, as she dribbled grease from a rasher onto a broken biscuit, perhaps in the hopes that it would soften the hard, twice baked bread. “Not one of their dusty old grandfathers or great uncles or bastard sons,” she added, gesturing towards Torvul and Allystaire, before fitting bacon and biscuit into her mouth.

  The dwarf was oddly unresponsive, simply chewing and not saying a word. Allystaire quickly swallowed.

  “I have no children. So far as I know,” he said.

  “So far as you know, eh? Not the answer a paladin ought to be giving,” Idgen Marte said.

  “I have been a paladin for but a few months. I was a soldier on campaign for the best part of twenty-one years,” he shrugged.

  “There’s a story there,” Idgen Marte said, suddenly inclining her head forward, eyes narrowing.

  Allystaire’s eyes flitted briefly, but meaningfully, towards the boy. “Another time, perhaps.”

  “I spent the last few months watching my former master tear the entrails and the wombs out of screaming women to help him tell the future,” the boy said, suddenly, aware that he was being talked around. “I am not delicate. You do not need to avoid saying things around me for fear it will offend me.”

  The boy’s voice took on a shade of heat for the first time in their hearing. Allystaire straightened up, startled, eyes widening. “I apologize, Gideon. I expect you have grown up as fast as any of us. Faster, mayhap.”

  “I have,” the boy insisted, and Idgen Marte and Torvul offered muted apologies. Breakfast passed in silence from then on, though at one point Idgen Marte eyed Allystaire and looked about ready to question him again. He silenced her with a quick shake of his head.

  When the food was gone, the braziers, blankets, and stone disks packed away, the fire out, the animals saddled, and the wagon pronounced fit for travel after much fussing by Torvul, Allystaire climbed into Ardent’s saddle and gave the horse a gentle nudge with his leg and began to trot back to the road. Behind him, the wagon slowly rumbled forward, its great thick wheels rolling over the lightly frosted grass.

  When the small column reached the hard packed dirt of the road, Allystaire turned one way and the wagon turned another. The paladin wheeled his destrier around and saw Torvul’s head appear from over the top of his wagon.

  “Where’re you headed? Road to Thornhurst is this way.”

  “I am not going to Thornhurst,” Allystaire yelled. “I mean to make straight for Bend. Besides, Thornhurst means going straight over the Thasryach, and it could be impassable any day now.”

  “Straight for Bend means we go right past barony watchtowers and some of Delondeur’s most loyal lords. What’s in Bend that’s worth that?”

  “My enemy,” Allystaire replied.

  “You don’t know that,” Torvul said. “And even if you do—”

  Allystaire trotted his horse a few yards closer to the wagon and shook his head. “I know. I am sure of it. That idiot of a would-be baron likely broke his Oath, and Symod went to enforce Braech’s will.”

  “What has any of that to do with you,” Torvul said, and then tried to go on before Allystaire could reply. “He brought it on himself. Let him suffer—”

  “He is not the only one who will suffer,” Allystaire shouted, leaning forward in the saddle. “There is a town full of folk who will pay a steep price for Symod’s rage and Windspar’s pride, who will suffer for a feud they have no part in.”

  The dwarf took a deep breath. “Allystaire, you can’t save everyone. We can save two souls who’re with us now. Right here.”

  “Whether a definable soul actually exists is quite a point of contention among,” Gideon began, but quickly silenced himself when Allystaire’s hard-eyed gaze flicked towards him.

  “Please,” Allystaire said, biting the word off, “not right now.” The boy nodded and Allystaire turned back to Torvul. “Listen to me, Torvul. I know who, and where, one of my enemies is. There may be an angry baron at our backs now, or a city in flames, more sorcerers on the way and looking for vengeance, but the Goddess Herself said to us that She and Braech were destined to oppose one another, and right now, Symod is imposing Braech’s vengeance, with flame and fear, in the place where the Goddess first spoke to me. Windspar may be a fool, but his town is full of people the war drove there out of necessity.”

  “It isn’t the smart approach—”

  “And there, you are wrong. I have spent the better part of my life leading men into battle, and I won a good deal more than I lost, which is not something most of the war-leaders of the baronies can say. At the moment, we have but few advantages, mainly that we can move quickly, and that our enemies do not really know where we are. If we make for Thornhurst and sit and wait for them to come to us, we are done for—especially if Symod makes common cause with Lionel or a sorcerer or both.”

  “You might know battles, but I know the roads,” Torvul said. “And you aren’t sneaking past Delondeur liegemen between here and Bend. They don’t much care what goes on past that oxbow in the river, as you well know. But they treat their side of it like a border. We’ll be cuttin’ through the mountains one way or another, Ally, no matter how much you bluster.”

  Allystaire’s frown deepened. “You may be right about that much. These western plains are some of the best patrolled lands in the baronies.”

  “Snow we can dig through, or into if we’re desperate,” Torvul said. “You can’t kill an entire garrison if we’re spotted. Besides,” the dwarf added, spreading his hands imploringly, “who could possibly be a better guide across the mountains than a dwarf, eh?”

  “I do not relish the idea of passing the winter holed up in a snow cave,” Allystaire said.

  “Only because you’re the biggest and we’d have to eat you first,” Torvul teased. When Allystaire’s frown cracked into a chuckle, the dwarf seized his chance. “You say it enough, Ally, so I’ll say it to you. Faith. I know I’m right. Both roads are dangerous, but I know that one ends with us dead or in a dungeon. I know it in my bones. And if you get me to a high enough place, I can prove it.”

  “Fine,” Allystaire said,
throwing up his hands. “I relent, Torvul, so far as this. I will take you to as high a place as necessary. If we end up crossing the mountains, we end up crossing the mountains.”

  Torvul nodded, satisfied with his victory.

  Allystaire rode around the side of the wagon, where Bethe sat, with Gideon between her and the dwarf. “Bethe, I know that a long ride to Thornhurst is not what you might wish. We can bring you home, your old home or a new one, if you will trust in us just a while longer. I can promise you this: while any one of the three of us live, no harm will come to you. Aye?”

  The woman, the vacant and distant expression melting off her face, shook her head, vaguely at first. Finally, she cleared her throat, opened her mouth, and haltingly, as if searching for the words, said, “I’ve no home t’go back t’. I’ll go where ya will, just don’t leave me behind.”

  “We won’t,” Idgen Marte said, “not till we’re somewhere safe. With other folk who’ll welcome you home. Now,” she said, “if you two are done measuring tackle, can we get the Cold on with it?”

  * * *

  The rest of the day was spent in the silence of hard travel. The breath of horses and ponies steamed, and Allystaire and Idgen Marte were careful to walk their mounts at regular intervals. Night descended more quickly than anyone expected, and soon enough they were pulling the wagon behind a copse of trees. Mountains loomed over their camp, and more days of travel lay ahead of them.

  Torvul began setting out the campsite, producing warming braziers, blankets, and the like from inside his wagon while Allystaire stood beneath a tree that was slowly shedding red leaves and stared into the gloaming.

  “You’d think you were trying to look back to Londray itself,” Idgen Marte said, as she stepped up behind him.

  “Who says I am not? I want to know what happened when we left,” Allystaire’s eyes continued to search the distance. “How will the sorcerers react? What will Chaddin do? Did we start a war within the barony itself? What kind of support would Lionel have?”