by David Keck
Landast fixed his blue stare on Radomor alone. “Where is your toast?”
Radomor’s eyes glinted, as did a few teeth. “What is your reason?”
“Prudence.”
Radomor spoke without humor, drawing each word as deliberately as a sword. “An old woman’s word.”
Landast blinked slowly.
At Durand’s side, there was a whisper on the tablecloth. Coensar’s hands had disappeared.
Durand shifted his weight onto his toes.
The duke continued grimly. “I do not deal in pretty snares of language: you are the heir of a duke who has two sons. I, myself, am a duke. A duke with no sons. Who risks most?” Landast blinked slowly, unmoving. “Are you a spoiled child who fights only when defeat is impossible?”
Lady Adelind stood, collecting Almora and leading her from the hall. The little girl looked like she wished to stay, but knew enough to submit. Her feet crunched on the reeds.
“You must draw what conclusions you will,” Landast said, eyes flat as turquoise.
Durand saw Kieren’s hand restrain Lamoric.
Disgust tied knots in Radomor’s jaws.
The second Rook hopped right onto his bench, his cup in the air. “To Landast then. Astonishing is the blood of Gireth. It has bred a fantastic creature. Never before has the world seen one who is, at once, both a man and his grandmother. To Landast, who—”
“Stop!” Lamoric was on his feet, slipping Kieren’s grasp. “I will accept your challenge.”
The Rook atop the bench quirked his head. “But, Milord Lamoric, you have not been challenged.”
Lamoric fixed his attention on the little man’s master. “Radomor, I am the man who upset your plans at Tern Gyre. Me and my men. And I saw what you are. I name you faithless. I name you murderer. I name you traitor. Now, it’s my blood you threaten. I accept your challenge. You will find that I’ve no chain of duties to keep me from your throat.”
Durand watched as Radomor hesitated. There was no advantage in fighting the younger son. A Rook leaned close to his master, pouring a thick whisper into the man’s ear. And Radomor sat, eyes on Lamoric, expression slowly hardening.
“A wager then.” Radomor’s voice rumbled up from the foundations.
“You wish to risk more than your life?” asked Lamoric.
“Best me, I will remain within the bounds of Yrlac for . . . a year and a day.”
“And what must I hazard, besides my life?”
“If you are bested—and live—then you must do likewise.”
“In Yrlac?” said Lamoric.
Radomor nodded, slow.
“I accept.”
The duke let one dry puff escape his broad nostrils, and stood. He nodded the shallowest bow over the candlelit table, and then led his company from the room.
Lamoric remained on his feet until the last green cloak snapped out the door, and then he too marched from the candlelight.
Durand found himself staring into Landast’s face, far down the hall. The man’s eyes fixedly ignored his brother’s angry exit and his father’s worry.
Big Geridon’s eyes never moved from the direction of Yrlac’s departure.
WHEN THE TABLES were down and the torches out, Durand and the others found some good, big pallets and circled the embers in the midst of the Painted Hall with the scores of loyal men who guarded the line of Gunderic. Each slept round his sword.
Though Durand was bone-weary, he stared up into the painted vaults where the smoke curled. With luck and daring, Lamoric had bested Moryn Mornaway, but Radomor was something else. They would be carrying their lord back in a shroud.
“I hate a late feast before a tourney.” It was Badan’s voice in the gloom. “Now they’ll start first thing.”
“Better than an early one,” said Ouen. “You ride on a full belly, it’s all cramps—and Heaven help you if someone catches you in the guts.”
“I thought Lamoric had him there,” Heremund said. “Trapped him.”
Berchard answered, “Took him aback.”
“But that man of his. The one with the grins and whispers, he had something. Neither of those creatures seemed to mind. One brother was good as the next to them.”
Straw crunched around the circle as men shifted.
“Hells, it doesn’t bear thinking about,” Badan grumbled.
“What are they planning?” Heremund said.
Badan levered himself up on one elbow, his voice hissing from a faceless silhouette. “I’ll tell you why that bald bastard doesn’t mind. It’s simple: he’ll win, and he knows it. You’re as stupid as our bumpkin here.” He gestured to Durand.
Durand thought about cracking Badan another rap in the teeth. The fool still had a few left.
“Surely,” Heremund agreed. “But even given he’s likely to win, why pick on younger sons? He gambles his life for nothing.”
“It’s no gamble if—”
“Hostages,” Ouen declared. “He must be jealous of old Ragnal’s collection.”
Heremund began, “We must watch—”
“Enough. All of you.” This last voice was Coensar’s. The man’s eyes were twin winks of steel—and fixed on the doorway arch.
Lamoric was walking down the hall.
The young lord walked through the sudden quiet, a pallet hung like a corpse over his shoulder. Deorwen trailed after him. He chose a spot on the floor and the two lay curled in the fire’s glow.
“I’m due some luck,” Lamoric said, finally. “Maybe I’ll get the bastard.”
No one spoke from then on.
LONG AFTER THE others subsided into the tidal breathing of sleep, Durand watched the embers glitter in the stare of Lamoric’s wide eyes—and in Deorwen’s.
14. Death and Dreaming
Durand realized he was lost.
He didn’t know where he was or how he’d come there.
His chest ached. He was blind. He tasted metal and dead leaves. But he drifted, cold as the Gulf of Eldinor.
And there, in that clouded deep, he heard a strange mutter, muffled. Someone whispered, and the shape of the words churned the frigid murk around him, pulling at the gloom as an oar hauls the water. His lungs ached. He could not breathe.
Durand felt himself gripped in the strange eddy.
The sound was a call: a summoning. He felt something stir in the impossible depths below him. There was moaning: a horrible moaning that shot through him, cold and shivering. The thing heard the pulling words, and the darkness moved with its coming—roiled with the great churnings of its alien bulk.
It came, roaring its despair.
And Durand could not move. He could not breathe.
And when its chaos shuddered past he could have cried for relief—until the wake of its passage seized him, catching hold as surely as any jaws. And he was drawn as the lamenting titan surged for some impossible surface.
WAS THERE A single gulp of air?
IN ANOTHER PLACE . . .
He looked over the circle of sleepers by the hearth’s embers: men-at-arms by the score, sleeping light.
But he was not in the Painted Hall—not with them. Again, his lungs ached—pressure bulged.
Had he died?
He hung in space not an arm’s length from some arrow loop in the wall of Gunderic’s Tower. There was a crust of bird shit. Pavilions spread below him, dark wheels, but he hardly looked—a shape hovered at the neighboring slit: a man of smoke and threads, somehow more real than the whole Creation around it. And caught in the webs of its chest hung a fragment of bone, pierced like a whistle and filigreed with alien marks. The bone was a man’s.
Mute and paralyzed, Durand shuddered.
This was the black thing from the deeps, knotted to the world.
The figure’s slender arm—wisps, ink, writhing threads—groped through the slit-window and into the warm gloom inside.
Against Durand’s will, he followed, drawn in and pulled behind.
He and the billowing thing swarmed t
he passages of his onetime home without false turnings, deeper and deeper, twitching and flowing. There were regions of blackness. His chest ached as though an ox stood on his ribs. He began to dread their errand, whatever it might be. Passing moonlight or fluttering torches, he tried to glean hints from the drifting horror’s limbs. There might have been robes. Passing a whitewashed wall, a vial winked in the writhing curl of one hand. Light glittered through glass and a blood-dark fluid: wine?
The thing lashed and swirled up a spiral stair to pause before a chamber door. Durand tried to call out, but felt his lungs trapped and struggling. He did not know the door. In the shadow’s fist, the handle turned. And the spirit flinched inside, like ink spilled in clouds. Just within, the big, square face of Geridon the Champion glowed dimly in a brazier’s fading coals. He slept against the doorpost. Durand made out the draped planes of a four-post bed. Again, he tried to call around whatever clamped his lips. An ember winked in the vial as the shadow crossed to the bed.
It parted the curtains on the intimate space above the cov-
erlet. Durand followed, entering that close cell of warmth and human smells.
He burned with shame. He wanted to tear free, but could not even struggle. Then the specter dipped toward the blankets. Durand wanted to shout a warning, but could not. It was so dark. A glass stopper came free like a clucked tongue; a vial’s lip clicked against teeth. Durand imagined the foul liquor pouring over lips and tongue.
Then there came a piping whistle: a human shriek.
A face leapt from the bedclothes; a woman’s eyes flashed wide.
And he and the assassin were smoke on the wind. A single gust threw them spinning down the spiral stair, through dark passageways and out the arrow loop window. And the shadow man was rent to tatters. The pale, sigil-carven bone tumbled from the window like a misfired arrow. Suddenly freed, Durand spun above the pavilions, and watched as the spinning bone dropped into the waiting hand of a Rook.
Radomor looked on, his eyes fixed on the Rook’s narrow shoulders, resigned and brooding.
DURAND WOKE WITH small hands on his shoulders.
“Durand!” A slap cracked against his cheek, and he filled his lungs in a single gusty breath. Deorwen’s hair feathered his face.
Then the dark hall boiled with curses.
Lamoric took Durand’s shoulder. “She said you weren’t breathing! I could see you struggling.”
Durand pitched himself onto his hands; the darkness flashed with every blink.
“I saw something. I—”
“Durand, you were moaning,” said Deorwen. “I heard it.” The hearth’s embers glittered in her eyes. Around the circle, he saw Heremund, Ouen, Coensar—all looking on. Nightmare memories spun in Durand’s skull, then snapped clear.
He grabbed Lamoric’s tunic. “Your brother, Lordship!”
The young lord looked from Durand’s face to the top of the hall. He broke into a run and Durand lurched after. Before the door of the bedchamber was a landing.
Stopped in the doorway, Lamoric swayed like a hanged man. He wrenched an unlit torch from a bracket on the wall.
Inside, the room was as dim as it had been in Durand’s nightmare: one brazier smoldering. Lamoric stepped over the threshold, hesitating as the stone crackled under his feet. Durand could see that the nearest of the bed curtains was down. Lamoric thrust his torch into the brazier, and the air came alive around him, twinkling. The floor where he stood seemed to be covered in crushed sugar. An impossible hoar-frost bristled from every surface.
By the wall, Geridon’s body lay crumpled, his eyes two more stiff wrinkles among the folds of his face.
Durand followed his lord, drawn on. Lamoric halted again at the torn bed curtain. Durand stepped close, almost past him. Landast and his wife were white effigies on the stone folds of a sarcophagus. Landast’s eyelids were shut: twin curls of icing. Adelind’s stood like fat pearls, still trained on the thing she’d seen alive under the canopy above her.
Durand’s tongue felt thick in his mouth. It would have been better if she too had not awakened. She might have seen him as well as the man of shadow in her last moment.
Lamoric was murmuring. “Durand, what did you see?”
Like filings around a lodestone, each needle radiated from Landast’s lips: fans and flowers of ice.
“I was dreaming.” The rest were making their way up the stairs. He would not hide anything anymore. “I saw it. A summoning, I think. Radomor’s man. Lordship, I saw—”
A small voice behind them spoke, bright and muddled: “It sparkles.” It was Almora, come from her father’s room. “I heard people.”
The two men turned, but Deorwen was there first, stepping between the child and the bedchamber. She caught the girl’s shoulders, saying something like, “Come away. This isn’t a good place anymore.”
Standing in that cave of frost as his wife and sister withdrew and the throng on the stair gazed on, Lamoric said, “I am heir to Gireth now.”
“There was no way to stop it,” Durand breathed.
“This was the whisper in bloody Radomor’s ear yesterday. What have I done?”
15. A Mortal Game
Coensar and Durand stood guard on the landing outside the duke’s chamber. “Keep those eyes of yours open,” Coensar said. “Whatever comes, do what you can.”
Inside, Lamoric paced with Heremund Skald while the duke sat on the bed. In the next room, wise women tended to the cold shapes that had been Landast, Adelind, and Geridon. Deorwen had Almora.
Heremund winced and scratched through his rumpled cap. “There’s a lot of them down there, all wondering what’s to happen. They’re bickering about whether there will be a tourney this afternoon.”
Lamoric paced to an arrow loop, looking down on tents and tiltyard. He said nothing.
Heremund grimaced. “I reckon someone’ll have to speak to the buggers.”
A fierce voice echoed on the stairs. It was the Patriarch’s. “Kieren Arbourhall, you villain, why are all these people gathered? I’ll have your red whiskers if you don’t tell me why you’ve hauled me from the high sanctuary.”
Sir Kieren appeared at the top of the stairs. “Be still, Oredgar.” The Patriarch drew up as he reached the landing.
“What has happened here?”
“Patriarch,” said Lamoric, “we have decisions to make.”
“Who has done this?”
“Come inside,” said Kieren and led the Patriarch into the duke’s chamber. “It seems our Durand here had a dream. He saw an assassin of some sort—a shadow.” He explained.
Father Oredgar stood very tall. “Landast, Adelind . . .”
“And Geridon,” said Duke Abravanal. “And my Champion, Geridon. What shall I do?”
“The Wards of the Ancient Patriarchs are indeed weak when such a thing can happen in Errest the Old.”
“Radomor should hang,” said Lamoric.
Kieren grunted. “For treason to begin with.”
The Patriarch turned a skewering glance on Durand. “Boy, you saw nothing with your own eyes?”
“It was a nightmare. Others saw that I dreamt.”
But the Patriarch’s scowl only deepened. “Closed eyes do not a witness make. Neither law nor custom permits it.”
Lamoric threw up his hands. “What is the point of law? They wait for answers. All those men in the hall.”
“There is the tournament to consider,” said Kieren.
“There are the funeral rites to consider,” countered the Patriarch.
“Host of Heaven,” Abravanal gasped.
“I am no great admirer of tournaments either, Patriarch,” Kieren said, “but there have been games and bloodshed in Acconel on this day since Gunderic.”
“And I have challenged Radomor,” said Lamoric. “Would they understand that, those men? My brother’s dead, so I must withdraw? This Radomor likely killed him, and I’d like to reconsider? No, I will not ask. This is my doing, and I will see it through. It may
be that we will need no hanging. I still have my sword.”
The din of murmurs in the Painted Hall was clear.
Heremund winced. “That’ll be the buggers downstairs.”
Lamoric opened his hands before his father. “What will we do? These men want answering.”
“What can I tell them?” whispered Abravanal. “Landast is dead. Adelind was a second mother to my poor little Almora, since my Truda died. The only mother she’s known. How can I tell Duke Alret that his daughter is dead—in my home?”
“Alret of Garelyn’s locked in Ragnal’s Mount of Eagles,” said Lamoric. “Hells.” He sucked a good lungful of the sickroom air. “Don’t worry, Patriarch. There will be funerals aplenty by day’s end. Durand? Coen? Let’s take the news to that pack of fools downstairs. Radomor will have his little bloodbath. And if the Host of Heaven is with us, we’ll drown him in it!”
HERALDS AND CRIERS ran to every street corner of Acconel. There would be a tournament: single combat and a great mêlée to follow. The men in the Painted Hall flooded the outer yard, hunting their war gear. Horses needed saddles. Blades had to be ground sharp. For Lamoric’s men, there was a moment’s hesitation. Who among them had so much as a donkey to ride on?
As the hall emptied, Lamoric caught Durand by the surcoat. “My brother had horses. I remember he had a bone gray. Big bruiser. He’ll do me, I think. You and the others, take your pick.” What would it matter? Their ride into the mêlée would come after Lamoric tangled with the duke.
Coensar ordered the men into motion, setting Guthred in charge of the scavenging. Some shook out rust-clotted hauberks from the armory while the others prowled among old friends and bare acquaintances for serviceable gear. Durand sought out the stables, Heremund bobbing after. “You can feel it in the air,” the skald said. “The great ones’ll be leaning close now, waiting to see how Radomor’s dice land. It’s all happening now.”
A twist in the passageway led toward the thick smell of horses. Heremund stepped through an outside door. “Keep your eyes wide,” said Heremund. “I’ll be among the crowds.”