Stillbright

by Daniel M Ford

  His heart hammering with a terror it had never known, Allystaire rushed to the boy’s side, extending his left hand and skidding to his knees at the side of the prostrate youth.

  He felt the lad’s heartbeat, strong and steady. There were no wounds, no disease, no poison crowding his veins. How he knew these things he could not have said, and there wasn’t time to ponder.

  Idgen Mar—

  The thought was only halfway out before she leaped out of the air before him. She held a knife in each hand, though one of the blades was snapped off a few inches above the pommel. Blood flowed from a wound upon her cheek, and she favored one ankle.

  Allystaire lifted Gideon in one arm and held him out to her. He didn’t bother to use words, for thinking was simply faster.

  He is unhurt. I saw him kill one of the things and drop after absorbing its energy. Then, without knowing precisely how, he shared with Idgen Marte his impression of what he’d seen; the sickly, bilious yellow outline that had hung in the air for the briefest of moments. Take him to the Temple. To Mol.

  He felt her angry reply. That color…the villagers. Allystaire! The same sorcerer!

  “Go,” he said aloud, already running for the parapet. The Mother’s Song sang in his limbs like it never had before. In his mind he beheld a picture of a family farm turned slaughterhouse, of bodies lying gutted and quartered upon their own table, of a family’s blood splashed upon their own hearthstones.

  He heard once again the weeping of the Goddess, felt it tearing at him like barbed hooks.

  That sound propelled him up the stairs.

  The first one he reached was struggling with a wounded Raven over the black-mailed mercenary’s spear. Allystaire gave it a contemptuous backhanded swipe with his hammer and sent it careening over the edge. He paused, hurled his hammer straight down at the Battle-Wight as it struggled to rise.

  The heavy iron-and-oak maul was a blur in the air. It crashed straight through the darkly gleaming top of the monster’s head and crushed its spine.

  Allystaire didn’t think for a moment about the loss of his weapon. He did not need it; his mailed fists would do.

  He found himself facing a third that had crested the wall, the one Idgen Marte had thrown over. He reached out and grasped its wrists, stepping to the very edge of the wall. With his unarmored left palm he felt the unnatural hardness of the thing’s limbs.

  The Arm of the Mother closed his hands into fists and squeezed, and the Battle-Wight’s steel-and-bone arms were crushed through his fingers like a handful of sand.

  Allystaire seized the thing by the neck. With his other hand, he punched through its chest, shattering bones and bits of iron and steel grafted to it.

  He lifted the thing off its feet, felt it struggling against him, flailing its useless arms. One of its legs kicked his chest, thudding hard against his armor, but the steel took the brunt of the blow.

  Gritting his teeth from the exertion, he bent the Battle-Wight, pressing the back of its covered head towards its heels till he tore it in half. The metal shrieked; the bone splintered. He tossed the lower half over the wall, and brought the other down, helmeted skull first, atop a pointed timber on the parapet, once, twice, a third time, again, then flung it high in the air over the wall, screaming as he did.

  “Sorcerer! Coward!” he bellowed, his voice rising over the sounds of struggled and booming through the air.

  “I AM ALLYSTAIRE, THE ARM OF THE MOTHER,” he screamed, his voice going raw, the skin of his throat hurting with the effort of it. “AND I DO NOT FEAR YOU. COME AND FACE ME!”

  Allystaire realized then that, canny fighters as they were, the Ravens, Renard, and Keegan’s lot were doing their best to herd the remaining Battle-Wights towards him, luring them his way at risk of wounds or worse, or gathering with a mass of weapons and shoving one of the monsters, inch by inch, across the parapet towards him.

  He waded into them, punching, elbowing, kicking, using his armor and the force of his anger, the Strength the Goddess had given him, to hurl them across the wall, snap pieces of them off, and send them flying.

  All the while the sound of Her weeping. The blood on the hearthstones. The promise he had made.

  I will tear apart the world of men to find the man who has done this thing in your sight, he had said. To find the man who has made you weep.

  The Battle-Wights were not what he wanted. He wanted the sorcerer’s throat in his hands, like Bhimanzir’s, one moment to swing a mailed fist through the craven sorcerer’s face, to snuff out the bilious light that burned within. That very man, the man he had sworn to Her he would find, was out there, somewhere, sending monstrosities to do battle in his place. The Battle-Wights, horrors though they were, were only a diversion.

  But for now they would do.

  Then they were gone too suddenly, torn apart, thrown over the side, ripped to pieces, and he was screaming with raw and inarticulate fury. The Strength had not left him, and he searched for another enemy, peered beyond the wall at the gathering gloom hoping to see a flash of yellow, thinking for a moment of leaping the wall and running in search of him when the Shadow appeared at his side.

  “Allystaire,” she said, her voice cutting through the veil of rage that fogged his features. “The wounded need you. We have won this moment.”

  He took several long, ragged breaths, prepared for the Goddess’s strength to flee, gripping the wall.

  Her song remained in his mind, his limbs.

  “He is here, Idgen Marte. Here. And I will have him.”

  “You need to see t’Gideon,” she said, shoving hard against one shoulder. “The attack is done for now.”

  “The danger is not passed,” he rasped. “Her Gift has not left me.”

  “Then we’ll keep an eye out, but there’s men’ll die if you don’t get down there,” she snapped. “Now.”

  He took a deep breath, trying to calm the fury that called within him like a hunter’s horn. Gideon. “Aye,” he agreed, then stumbled down off the parapet with a backwards glance over the wall.

  “The boy has not awoken?” He asked her the question as he carefully descended. The Strength still suffused his limbs, and as he closed his hand on the rough wooden railing, it cracked.

  “Wounded first. He’s not dyin’, just gone,” Idgen Marte murmured. And indeed there were men who were closer to death than not. She paused to finger the crack that ran along the railing where he’d touched it, and added, “Mind you don’t speed ‘em on.”

  There was one dead Raven, and another whose arm hung by a thread. Ivar knelt next to him, pressing a dressing to the wound which slowly and weakly pumped blood. The gap-toothed, black-mailed Raven captain leveled steely eyes at Allystaire as he approached. The paladin ignored her, laid his palm as carefully as he could on the man’s wound. The mercenary, a round-faced, broad-shouldered stump of a man named Donal, groaned weakly. His voice rose in volume and pitch as the wave of the Mother’s Healing flooded into him.

  First, the bleeding stopped, then the bone righted itself with an audible snap. Donal cried out still louder, a dry scream, then sagged against his captain as new flesh sealed the wound and all trace of it, save the rent in his mail and the pallor of his cheeks, vanished.

  Allystaire rose without a word, though he felt Ivar’s eyes boring into his back as he moved to Keegan’s side, who squatted low near one of his own. The archer straightened up and shook his head as the paladin approached.

  Allystaire knelt by the man anyway. His shoulder was completely smashed in, his arm in tatters, and there was a flat patch of his skull where it had been nearly crushed. Either wound alone would kill a man for certain. He felt only the faintest beat of life. He tried to feed it, gently, as he might blow on a spark in a lantern.

  The man’s life steadied, and held on, but that spark did not catch. Allystaire tried to pour the Goddess’s Gift into the
man, but found his flesh already dying around him. Not knowing how, he could feel the man’s panic, could sense the spirit within him flailing blindly in fear.

  Her words, heard so long ago, came to his mind then. Comfort the dying, she had said.

  Allystaire thought, for a brief moment, of the men he had seen die on the battlefield, or after it. Thought of his own father, the hardest of a hard lot of men, dying with a leg lost, the way he’d been reduced from an invincible giant to a shriveled man gone old before his time, and he seized upon those moments, those memories, tried to imagine what it was like for those men who were facing a final battle they couldn’t win, and the vast unknown that lay beyond.

  Those memories made a bridge to the man Allystaire knew he couldn’t heal, and he reached out to the dying spirit that quailed and raged in its fear and pain. And he remembered then that this man had spent time—months? years?—as a Chimera, a pitiful half-man, half-animal, mad with the rage of the senile God of the Caves.

  Calm, Jeorg, he thought, not knowing how he knew the man’s name. You need not fear. The Mother waits for you.

  Jeorg, the man’s weakening spirit answered. That…that is my name. I am a man. I am a man and not a beast. Allystaire had impressions of the man’s life all in a flash: a peasant in Barony Innadan working the vineyards gone for a soldier. A soldier who broke, one day, and ran, with no more choice in it than breathing. A deserter, yes, but not a coward.

  Yes, Allystaire reassured him. You were a man, and you died a man, and if you look for Her in the next world, the Mother will ease the pain of your passing and soothe the suffering of your life.

  Jeorg. Died a man.

  The thought was so faint Allystaire barely understood it, but he felt the fear melt away, the panic dissipate, replaced with the impression of warm sunlight on acres of vines, of a tidy cottage, of sand-rimmed Innadan lakes. Allystaire sensed a distant brightness hovering beyond the man, and then his spirit faded as well.

  Allystaire stood, popping quickly to his feet. “I am sorry, Keegan. He was beyond the Mother’s Gift of healing. I could only comfort him on his way.”

  Keegan nodded faintly and sighed. “He hadn’t spoken since ya saved us. None of us knew him from before. He spent a long time as a beast—maybe the longest of any of us. Not sure he understood why he was fightin’.”

  “His name was Jeorg,” Allystaire said. “And he was much the same as the rest of you, and I mean that as no insult. He remembered who he had been.”

  Keegan nodded, then tried to clasp Allystaire’s forearm. The paladin shook his head. “I dare not, Keegan. And again I mean no insult. Her Strength fills my limbs. I might break your arm.”

  The rangy man grunted, scratching at the side of his head. “If ya say so. I’m happy t’be yer man in this fight, Allystaire, or Lord Coldbourne or Arm or Lord Stillbright or what’er yer name is now. I’d rather not die in it, though, all the same.”

  “I do not want anyone to die in this fight, Keegan,” Allystaire replied, before turning to go. He stopped then and looked back. “Stillbright?”

  The man shrugged. “Just somethin’ goin’ round last night after that first skirmish. I didn’t pay it much mind.”

  Allystaire turned towards Renard and his militia, but the bearded man waved him off. “None bad enough hurt here. Go’and see t’yer boy. We’re gonna need him before this is done.”

  He looked over the militiamen. As Renard had said, none of their wounds seemed all that threatening. The wounds of their flesh didn’t, at any rate. Allystaire had long since come to know when fear threatened to overwhelm a man’s good sense, and he saw it in the wide whites of their eyes, in the skittish movement of their feet and hands.

  Luckily for him, Renard saw it too and turned, bellowing orders. “Right. Enough standing around for you lot. Back up on the wall and a weather eye for those things. The Arm’s got better things t’do than stand around nursemaiding the Mother’s own fighting men, eh? He’s not the only one around here can kill some manky corpse, right? Let’s prove it.”

  Despite himself, despite the battle and the rage, Allystaire grinned as he listened to Renard work. The man is an artist, he thought, as he set off for the Temple, feeling the Goddess’s strength flooding his limbs with every step, turning over the battle and thinking on the army beyond his walls as he walked.

  Chapter 35

  The Feel of Gold

  “Well,” Nyndstir said, crouched in a copse of trees with the rough wooden walls of Thornhurst in the distance and a half dozen other swords-at-hire circled around him, “I wouldna want t’fight that bastard.” The bastard in question was standing atop the wall in glittering armor, screaming, as he ripped apart one of the sorcerer’s monstrosities by hand.

  “What’s this? Our bold, bearded Islandman boaster a craven?” That from one of the southerners with his curved sword and fancy words.

  The Islandman turned, spat, and clouted the southerner so hard with a balled-up fist that he wouldn’t have been surprised to see blood trickling out of the ear he’d struck. The man gave a cry and tumbled over.

  Nyndstir spat again, on the man for good measure. “We may be brothers o’battle for the time being, southerner, but some words don’t get said to Nyndstir Obertsun, and craven is one o’them. Now pick yourself up. We’re t’report back.”

  With that Nyndstir stood, wincing at the way his knees and back shot with pain as he moved. He leaned a little more heavily on his axe than he’d have liked as he walked, with no great relish, back to their little camp.

  It was a good hundred span north and forty span or so off the road behind a tangle of trees, and it was damned hard to see even for a man who knew it was there.

  In fact, as Nyndstir and the three other scouts he was detailed with drew near, he almost felt as if something was trying to twist his attention away from it. For just a moment, he stopped, staring at the bare-limbed trees and finding his vision sliding away from them, till he gave his head a shake and locked on the small clearing, the circle of ragged shelters, and the small fire burning.

  He did, for just a moment, wonder how the smoke from the campfires didn’t clear the treeline and why he couldn’t smell it till he was stepping within the circle of warmth. But he knew the answer lay with the remaining wagon and the men within it and that was not something Nyndstir liked to ponder overlong.

  Both sorcerers had brought their own crews, and met up just a few miles north of their current position, so there was still some sorting out among the hired men of just who was in charge. The men paying the links didn’t seem to care much; they issued orders to whomever was convenient.

  Still, among those who made their living with weapon in hand, there was some sorting out to do. An order needed establishing. Nyndstir didn’t much care for the yoke of responsibility, but when he looked around the camp at the score and a half of men who were pointedly ignoring the angry sounds coming from inside the wagon, he snorted and spat again. He was doing a lot of spitting these days. Even the men he’d pulled for his party, including the one he’d clouted, drifted away to their tents, their bottles, or just into the woods.

  “Well, I’m not gonna stand here watchin’ you lot holdin’ yer cocks like boys ain’t figured out what they’re for yet,” he growled, and marched up to the wagon, giving it a sharp rap with the back of his hand.

  The sounds inside ceased, and the tongue he didn’t speak and didn’t like the sound of broke off with a whispered hiss.

  “What?”

  “Back from the job. The, ah, attack. Didn’t go well.” When delivering bad news, Nyndstir thought, understate.

  The door flew open. The yellow-eyed one, Geth something, Nyndstir thought, glared at him from the dark interior.

  “Do you think we don’t know that, you great fool?”

  Nyndstir shrugged heavily. “Ya told me t’watch and report, so that’s what I’m doing.”


  “Well then,” the man said, his voice faintly ghostly, focusing those awful pools of glowing yellow that filled his eye sockets on the Islandman. “What did you see?”

  “I saw somebody in real pretty armor tearin’ your, ah, troops, t’pieces and tossin’ em over the wall like so much broken crockery. With his hands.”

  “We felt them destroyed. But no man can contend with a Battle Wight for strength.”

  “Well, I’m reportin’ what I saw, and I’m not one t’lie t’the man with the weight. He climbed up on the wall screaming his damned head off, picked one of them, and ripped it apart like fresh bread. Did a number on the rest of ‘em too.”

  “’Pretty’ armor?”

  Nyndstir shrugged again. “Bright silver. Could’ve seen it gleaming from twice as far away as we were, seemed like.”

  “And what was he saying?”

  “Ah, I believe he was askin’ for you to face him yourself. Had some comment on your willingness to do so.”

  The sorcerer opened his mouth as if to scream, and Nyndstir didn’t like, at all, the way that sickly yellow glow started to emanate from the man’s throat. But then it was cut off, as another voice—a voice that felt to Nyndstir’s ears like getting scraped over barnacles had once felt to his back—came from inside the wagon.

  “Gethmasanar,” it said, thrumming slightly. “Do not lose yourself in petty anger. All is not lost.” A string of links, gold and silver, flew with unerring accuracy from the darkness of the wagon and landed at Nyndstir’s foot. “You have done good service, Nyndstir Obertsun. You will continue to do so. Wait for darkness. Organize some men. Move forward and retrieve the pieces of the Battle-Wights the man in the pretty armor threw over the wall. Can you do this?”

  Nyndstir eyed the links, but didn’t bend to pick them up. “I can.”

  With that, the wagon door was shut as the sorcerer withdrew, and Nyndstir found himself glad to miss the rest of the conversation.