In a Time of Treason

by David Keck

  At first, the slit eyes and slack skin bore little resemblance to anyone Durand had known. But he climbed among the slithering shapes, taking that cold face in his hands. A blond beard jutted. He felt the massive bones of his friend’s face. His teeth glinted cold between his lips.

  “Ouen.”

  After a moment, Durand stood while the two muddy fools cowered. “If I see you again, I shall leave you as you left him.”

  The men hesitated, too frightened to move.

  Durand skidded down the bank, slapping the white side of the gatehouse for balance.

  He heard an order, and a guard touched his shoulder in time that the great portcullis in the gatehouse slammed down without killing him. Rooks—only a hundred now—croaked into the sky below the towers.

  Durand stepped into the barred gateway, seeing, through two grilles of oak and iron, green surcoats and red leopards massed outside. Radomor’s tourney knights stood in the market before the gate. “Summon old Abravanal! Duke Radomor of Yrlac wishes to parley.”

  Finding a stairway close at hand, Durand pushed guards aside and climbed to the parapet above the street. Seven fathoms down, Duke Radomor sat on horseback in the midst of his men—and in the midst of a great crowd. His head bobbed like a duck’s egg. If there had been a stone loose on the parapet, Durand could have smashed that skull. He judged by the retinue’s laden pack animals that Yrlac’s liegemen had already struck their tents and quit the castle for good.

  At a scuffling on the stair, Durand turned—fist on the misericorde—and found Duke Abravanal clambering up the steps. Abravanal did not so much lead the knights as he was borne along like driftwood on the wave of them. Behind the duke, Lamoric gave Durand a haunted glance. The men nearly pitched Durand over the wall as the press made its way to the gatehouse.

  Abravanal leaned over the parapet. “You have left before the Feast of the Bull,” he faltered. “It is unlucky.”

  Radomor’s answer was a leopard’s rumble. “Yours has been a treacherous hospitality, Abravanal. I will not suffer it again.”

  Duke Abravanal blinked his wide blue eyes. “This has been a grim time for my family.” He tensed. “Why do you summon us from our grief?”

  Radomor cocked his head. “Half the kingdom grieves under the yoke of that fool in the Mount of Eagles. The business of living men cannot wait on a dotard’s moaning.”

  Lamoric lurched forward. “Radomor! This is the house of your wife’s people. How have you come to this?” He pointed down on them. “You are the vilest in a menagerie of horrors.”

  Radomor’s tall horse jigged between his heels. “You are quick to speak, child of Abravanal!” He twisted blood from the warhorse’s mouth, and the beast shuddered still. “And behind stout walls, you are brave.”

  The air shivered, hot, from the bald duke’s skull but he did not shout. “I will have what is mine. Your brother has learned, and now you all must learn. I will have what is owed me. It might have been a surgeon’s cut, but now you have forced my hand.”

  Radomor jerked his horse around, and with his men bulling the crowd from the way, he spurred for Acconel’s Gates of Sunset and the road to Yrlac.

  Abravanal turned from the wall, about to say something to the son who had always been at his right hand. When he found Lamoric instead, he faltered. “My barons. We must send riders. They must have warning.”

  Lamoric stood blankly, shaking, then nodded “yes.”

  17. The Shadow of Black Wings

  Two-score desperate messengers galloped over the roads of Gireth, hoping to reach the halls of every baron in the dukedom—and any court in Errest the Old that might send aid to Acconel.

  But despite the demands of sanity, there was a feast in the Painted Hall of Castle Acconel that day.

  At the high table, only Almora moved—from Deorwen to the duke, the others sat in silence. Durand looked down the empty benches. The great host who had populated the tiltyard had fled in a thousand directions. While the few dozen who remained stared in the hall, the knights in the outer yard were striking tents and slinging their belongings over their horses. The hollow-eyed men who remained cringed and twitched in the long silences.

  Burghers filled some of the empty places; men who brought their wives and elder children. These were guild masters and citizens; they could not flee. The tiny children wondered at the constellations of beeswax candles turning in the huge wheel chandeliers over their heads. The oldest pretended not to notice.

  When a deeper hush flowed down the half-empty tables, Duke Abravanal stood before the skeleton crowd, his voice like a leaf’s dry flutter.

  “On this night we feast the honor of Heaven’s King. His Champion. The Warders at the Bright Gates of Heaven . . . Lords of Heaven’s Host.”

  The old man stared out over the hall, his eyes fixed on some faraway point. When his silence had stretched long enough to start eyes shifting down the table, Patriarch Oredgar touched the duke’s sleeve. “ ‘We remember. . . . ‘“

  “We remember,” Abravanal said. “Yes. We remember though it was Gunderic who . . . who rebuked the beast of the mere, that it is only with Heaven’s strength that we may defy the darkness. His victory was the Creator’s victory.

  “It is in this knowledge that I repeat the old words: ‘You defy Heaven at your peril.’ ” It should have been a roar. His tongue ran across his lips. “While the Silent King reigns, this land . . . this land is ours.”

  The faint syllables died in silence.

  At the bleat of a tardy fanfare, straining servers wove into the hall, pallbearers for a platter and the hairless, steaming thing it supported. Durand marveled; it was a monstrous, muscular head. Horns curled from a mighty brow—the head of a bull, seared bald. Rashers of bacon curled in semblance of a forelock. Its eyes suppurated with candied fruit.

  Abravanal sank into his seat.

  As the platter skidded heavily onto the high table and its burden glared over the room, it could not have looked more like Duke Radomor.

  AS ONE COURSE followed another, Sir Kieren appeared at Durand’s side, swinging his legs over the bench. The man seemed very small.

  “Sir Kieren,” Durand acknowledged.

  “Do you know where I’m from?”

  Durand frowned. “We went to Arbourhall more than once when I was your man.”

  “Arbourhall is my wife’s, really. Abravanal arranged it for me when we were both young men. A young widow. I’m a Garelyn man. My father had a patch of ground under the mountains.” His foxtail mustaches jumped. Both men knew of Durand’s own ancestral home hard by the mountains. “And no room for his youngest son.

  “We’d go down to see the duke at Bederin. The castle’s right on the Deep. There’s the gate, like a chain of silver towers. There are mountains before and behind you. It was me talked that old Duke Aymar’s son into sending a daughter to our Landast. They say our Adelind raced a water-horse on the dunes by the Deep. Outrode it. And she beat an heir of Beoran in the tiltyard.”

  And now she’d be entombed in Acconel.

  “A good foster-mother for poor Almora, I thought. When the little thing’s own mother passed. Now, the girl seems to have attached herself to Deorwen.”

  Serving men and pages came to take a course away. Durand could not have said what it was.

  “I deserted you,” Durand said. “I’d sworn an oath to serve you.”

  With a smile under his mustache, Kieren said, “I would have let you go. You are a young man. What else could a young man do?”

  Durand stared at the wreckage of the seared bull, recalling Radomor’s great rage.

  At the high table, the solemn marshals of the tournament were speaking. Every year, they scattered honors among the men for valor and skill. What would they do for riot and murder?

  “Even without you, I made it home,” Kieren said. “Lost a good horse getting down from your father’s hall. We will have to make certain that whoever holds Gravenholm tends those woods.”

  Durand sni
ffed a laugh. Gravenholm, his onetime patrimony, seemed very far from Castle Acconel. Someone on the dais said Durand’s name.

  “Durand!” Berchard hissed, his good eye darting. “Durand, you ox. It’s you.”

  “What?”

  Kieren was swiveling. “I was on the point of warning you.”

  Coensar slipped out and stepped to Durand’s side.

  Everyone had gotten to their feet.

  “You’d best get up,” said Coensar. They marched up the hall to the high table where the Patriarch, the old duke, and his surviving family sat: Lamoric, Deorwen, and Almora. Durand felt the eyes of the company squeeze like deep water as he reached the table’s edge.

  Coensar whispered from behind him. “They’ll expect a bow.”

  Durand nodded low, eyes on the duke, while one of the marshals gave the old man a medallion. The thing dangled from the duke’s fingers on a bit of ribbon.

  “He was in the stable,” declared Almora.

  Lamoric stepped in for his father. “The voice of the company has spoken. For your actions on the field this day, my father names you the Bull of Acconel, highest honor of this feast day.”

  Deorwen looked on. Reading a gesture of the young lord’s hand, Durand crossed to the duke’s side, kneeling for the duke to dangle the medallion high. The face of a bull winked from its loop of silk. This was the sort of thing that champions of Coensar’s ilk won after long summer’s days in the lists.

  Durand shot a look at Lamoric—a ribbon for riot, a medal for murder.

  “I had to make a decision,” he said. “Who else?” But there was Ouen, now dead. And Lamoric himself. Both had done more.

  The duke lowered the medal over Durand’s head, and then seemed to master himself. The blue eyes blazed like moons, and he brought Durand to his feet.

  As the new Bull of Acconel turned to face the assembled company, every knight raised his blade in a somber salute. He had left one friend to die while he saved a man he betrayed.

  Here was a hollow glory.

  AFTER SEEING THE feast out, Durand abandoned the Painted Hall, stalked through the inner courtyard, and into the muddy yard beyond it. The shadows had crept from the cracks and filled the field. One last group of knights was checking saddles and preparing to take the road. In a few hours, two hundred men had folded up their shield-bearers, tents, and grooms. Every coward would be leagues away by morning.

  He eyed the bank where the crowd had watched. He remembered the spears and the screams. Near the gate where the bodies had lain, a row of tall carts stood under the eyes of murmuring priests. Each cart leaned heavily under sheets of gray canvas that obscured its load.

  Durand felt the Bull medallion thump against his chest. He could hear the sounds of men loading horses across the grass. The light that had left the yard would soon abandon the sky as well.

  Durand took the bull from his neck and walked to the carts. Eventually, the priests allowed him to search for his comrade. He pulled the medal over tangled hair and knotted beard, then muttered a few words to the Host of Heaven.

  Eventually, a voice interrupted: “A man shouldn’t stand too long in the night air. Especially here.” Durand turned to see Coensar hitching through the gloom toward him. His head was bound. “There’s a spot by the gate,” he said, indicating a sentry’s stone bench in the shadows.

  There was a long sigh as he sat down. “How old are you, boy?”

  “I’ve seen twenty-one winters.”

  “As many as that?” Coensar said. “Twenty-one winters’ve passed since I won my spurs, I think.” He swept his blade, Keening, from its scabbard, and Durand could hear the high, eerie song of its shadowy blade on the night air. “I won Keening the first moon, and fought seven years thereafter to catch the eye of the old Duke of Beoran.

  “And the very next moon.” He clapped his hands. “It was Cassonel of Damaryn on the stairs at Tern Gyre and down I went. Fourteen years since—fifteen, now.”

  Durand tried to picture a lifetime of night watches, wild tourneys, and campaigns in the south. He had been a knight less than half a year.

  “Ah, watch now,” Coensar said, suddenly. Coensar gestured with the singing blade across the dark grass where shadows stirred like ink in the ruts and pockmarks of the yard. They were too thick, stretching with stubborn viscosity, seeming so dark that there must be traces left in the morning.

  Durand raised his fingers in the Heaven’s Eye.

  “Do you see?” And, noting the fist and fingers, he answered his own question: “You must. Death and soldiers. You can’t help but see after a time—they are Lost souls,” said Coensar. “Jealous for blood. Berchard or your Heremund would tell you more. A conjurer will dangle a bowl of the stuff under their noses.”

  “Host”—a convulsive ripple passed through the strange forms as though the word were salt cast over leeches—”of Heaven,” Durand finished.

  And Coensar chuckled as the the slack shapes knotted, long gaping to break like rings of smoke.

  “Will we end up like this?” Durand said. His head swam with the shame and longing of the past days.

  “Who am I to say what a man will lose? It’s a long road we’re on.”

  Durand jerked the hem of his cloak free from one sniffling spirit. “King of Heaven.”

  Breathy screams whispered, and Durand realized that they must soon be breathing dead men. Some of the packhorses across the way were nodding now, sensing the Otherworldly crowd.

  “They are only the dead, Durand. Few who’d grovel at our feet could do us much harm. The strong take; they don’t plead.”

  What sort of life did these things have, slinking the ditches, starving; trapped in the seams of Creation while whatever made them human wore away?

  The knights and their uneasy packhorses were clopping near, ready to pass under the gates.

  “I saw what you did with that medal. And I tell you, watch how you tie yourself to the dead,” Coensar said. “Hate and grief and guilt’re binding things.” He narrowed an eye at Durand, ignoring the spirits’ coiling. “And don’t brood too long in the cold night air.” This last was a sigh.

  Above them, the party of knights had stopped. One of them was Berchard, leading a pair of saddle horses: a roan and a sturdy blue dun. He had an armory sword over his shoulder.

  “Now,” said Coensar, “I’d say that while Radomor’s ridden off, he’s hardly finished with us yet. I’ve spoken to Sir Kieren. We need a man to scout across the river toward Yrlac while we’ve still got a chance. You’ll cross the bridge with some friends of mine, in case you’re watched. Go and come back tonight with news. You must get back how you can.”

  Berchard nodded.

  THEIR BORROWED COMPANY left by the same streets the doomed bulls took the day before, and soon they were through the haunted Fey Gates, half sure the stone bulls were watching them. Durand followed Berchard’s lead and mingled among the others with their plain horses and rough gear.

  Rather than leaving by the docks, their company swung north for the quayside road, the lower city, and the north channel of the Banderol. The Dukes’ Bridge soon loomed under the fading Heavens.

  A light on the far bank threw shadows down the span.

  Berchard allowed himself to duck close. “You see them?” He nodded toward the far end of the bridge. A bowshot away, three statues towered over the road, tall as sanctuary towers. These were the Dukes, and this was where three roads—and three lands—met below the granite wasteland of the Warrens. Among the stone folds at the giants’ ankles, however, were bonfires and a cadre of armed men. “If the bugger’s got forty men down here, what’ll he have on Fuller’s Bridge upriver?”

  “Just as well we didn’t risk it,” said Durand. Only two spans could take a man to the Ferangore Road: the Dukes’ crossed down by Silvermere, but upstream, the Fuller’s Bridge led nearly straight to Yrlac. Anyone heading to Yrlac by either bridge must pass it.

  Berchard glanced at Durand. “Hunch over and try not thinking so
hard. We might still slip past them going north and then cut back for the Ferangore Road beyond the Fuller’s Bridge.” Berchard grinned and touched the patch over his eye. “Maybe I’ll tuck this patch under my collar. Best if we’re not the festival bull and his mate just now, I reckon.”

  The water gleamed heavily under the Dukes’ Bridge, the men muttered, and, slowly, the Warrens bank hove near. Durand made out crossbows and saddled horses—forty men in mail. Three great ways of ancient times diverged at the statues’ feet: the Acconel road lay behind the party, the road to Lost Hesperand to the right, and the road west into Yrlac on their left hand. Above them all towered the founding lords of Gireth, Hesperand, and Yrlac. They were comrades of Saerdan the Voyager. Durand knew Gunderic by the great bull device charged on his shield. Eldred of Hesperand wore the Peregrine Crown borne by his successors, and Thrasimund of Yrlac carried a curved axe long as a ship’s mast. Their hands met at a great fire basket above the road. It was three fathoms to their knees.

  Down below, Radomor’s men were sneering over two dozen crossbows. A twitch on any tiller would stamp a bolt through an armored chest. The fact that Durand had served Duke Radomor less than a year past had likely slipped Coensar’s mind.

  As Durand’s blue dun raised its hoof over the far bank, Coensar’s friend was already speaking with the captain of Radomor’s watchmen. They got a late start, he said. Someone had stolen a horse. They were traveling north to his brother’s land, a patch between Silvermere and the Warrens—a fishing village: Herons. They were taking the Hesperand Road before things cut loose.

  Durand reached the bank and felt Creation shudder. The patch of torchlit stones was a dungeon cell between the giants. The ground was ash, and the Warrens, walls of cinders. A lean man in Radomor’s leopards jammed a torch into Durand’s face, peering with yellow eyes and a thin-lipped grin.

  “I know you from somewhere?”

  Durand swallowed hard. His head filled with Ferangore towers and barracks halls, but he blinked and forced himself to give the soldier a bored shrug.