by David Keck
The Patriarch grunted, but gave the others a nod. And so, in a bright constellation of sliding broken bones, the three men rolled Durand onto a litter and lugged him from the castle.
AFTER A JOLTING age of delirium, Durand recognized a web of high, naked arches swinging above his bearers: the wreck of the high sanctuary. A slanted light poured through.
Knight, skald, Patriarch, and leech grunted along until they reached the head of the old nave where the three rolled Durand out once more—they might as well have dropped him over a harrow.
“Don’t worry,” said Hagon, “the hard part’s over.” He grinned at the others. “I always tell them that. It won’t hurt a bit. Or me more than you, anyway. Eh?” Durand saw the blind man’s teeth. “Don’t worry, close your eyes and breathe. You’ll have your wind back soon enough.”
Durand grunted.
“Durand,” said Sir Kieren. “This pigheadedness is going to kill you. There’s an army riding at Lamoric’s back. What’s one more man in all that? If anything goes wrong there’s no one but old men here.”
“Unless one of them can catch the army and turn it back, I must go,” Durand managed.
Hagon turned his face to Durand. “Now, you’ve been told there may be a price to pay for all this, have you?”
Durand didn’t answer.
A smile flickered. “All right. I am no court master of physic, but I’ve worked two winters for every one you’ve been breathing—and there are too many folk too battered for any of the masters to attend you. So, you and I will work the Sunwheel through, dawn to dawn, friend Durand.”
“A day . . .” Durand pictured the army tramping west, a step farther away with every heartbeat.
“Keep breathing. It’s always this way with ribs—should be a year. As it is, you’ll see men spell me, I think.” The man had set a satchel at his side, and now his long fingers plucked pots from its depths, breaking seals and peeling back lids. “Some fine remedies here. Best I’ve had my hands on.” There were herbs and organs and Heaven knew what else. “And your high sanctuary is the best place for this sort of work: holy ground, I hope. Even now.”
“Don’t stray far from the altar, leech,” muttered the Patriarch. “The Wards of the Ancient Patriarchs are falling, one end of Errest to another. The Strangers march upon the Bourne of Jade. The Banished are restive in the shadows. Some dark hand is on the move. Soon, the trembling realm will be given over to the Banished and the fiends. The oaths of ten thousand lords will scatter like breath on a winter—”
“But here, yes? It’s holy enough. So we’ll see what we’ll see,” said Hagon. The blind man turned to Durand.
“Now, you’re certain you want this? I’ll make these three lug you back if you’re not. I don’t mind.”
Durand blinked up at the pale empty Heavens beyond Oredgar, Kieren, Hagon, and the skald, feeling that the army was rushing away from him like a tide—thinking that Lamoric had a knife to his back and didn’t know it. Some man in Lamoric’s host had struck his lord down. “Hagon, if there’s only you, I’m grateful.”
“Fair spoken,” said Hagon, “for a man with a battered head. So, begging Your Grace’s pardon, I’ll get started.”
Patriarch Oredgar stood. The hem of his saffron robes was black with ashes. Knight and skald shook their heads. And Durand was left alone.
Hagon’s pale features settled below his blank blue eyes. He lifted his long hands. “Sorry, friend, but I must know the lay of the land.” And the strong fingers pressed deep—not pleasant. “Eye, cheek, nose, jaw, teeth, collar, ribs, ribs again.” The hands lifted. “Now, you just try to get some wind in you. Hang on. Breathe.”
Durand did nothing but try to get air in his lungs.
Hagon’s hands worked over the scattered pots. Heremund left a fire, and Hagon sang. “Bone to bone, blood to blood, limb to limb,” he chanted. He called upon the Host of Heaven. He warned the agents of decay. “As Heaven’s Champion thrust his lance in the earth that he might not fall, so may these bones stand fast. As the Warders of the Bright Gates knotted iron coats of nails to fight at Farandell, so may these limbs lock and link and grow strong. May you worms of darkness drink deep of disappointment. Bone to bone, marrow to marrow . . .”
The Heavens rolled over Durand’s head, Heaven’s Eye lancing through high clouds. A squall tumbled in from the mere, washing Durand and the city in cold rain. He woke from crawling nightmares only to learn that the creeping sensations did not vanish when his eyes opened. Hagon’s chant drifted through the Noontide Lauds, the Plea of Sunset, and the Last Twilight. The Heavens filled with stars, and the waning Sowing Moon glinted like a new-honed blade.
Blind Hagon chanted on, cursing and praying, binding and damning.
In the dark, battles shot through Durand’s memory: the amazement on spattered faces, the dread of sudden wounds. He remembered Sir Waer on the cliffs of Tern Gyre; Sir Gol on his back in that Hellebore Road; Cerlac: a man like him at Bower Mead—all dead.
He could feel his mind coming adrift under the pressure of Hagon’s leechcraft. For a time he was back on the cobblestones at the gates of Castle Acconel, blind with blood and astonishment.
Suddenly, Hagon’s voice was a cheerful whisper. Durand lay on his back with the man looking down on him, ruddy with firelight. “All right,” the leech said, “I’ll just take a moment to tend the fire then. There’s some of this is better hot, they say. It can’t be long, mind you, but I understand these things, eh? No one can say I don’t.”
“What?” Durand winced in bafflement.
Hagon stepped away, and a bright garden scent filled Durand’s nostrils—and there was Deorwen, her face swaying in the firelight just beyond his nose. The dark glitter of eyes searched his face. Almost, she touched him.
“Not so bad?” Durand tried.
“Your hair,” she said. Then, her fingertips touched the bare scalp Durand hadn’t noticed. The leeches must have sheared him to make their stitches.
“You’re out again. At night,” he said.
“I liked the curls.”
“You are better?” Durand marveled up at the black shimmer of eyes, and she laughed—just a flash—before looking up where the moon hung.
“You’re going to follow him,” she said. “It doesn’t occur to you that it might be madness?”
Durand wet his lips. “Have you slept? Does it let you sleep? Finding them?”
Again, the merest flicker of a smile. This one came nowhere near her eyes. “Do you remember that I spoke of my brother? I’ve found many of the others. But he is still there. One call rising as the other voices fade.” Her eyes flickered toward Hagon’s fire. “Twisting in darkness, Durand.”
Durand tried to shake his head—there was pain. “Not dead.”
She cast her glance west across the charred bones of the sanctuary. “He hangs in”—she made a grasping gesture with both hands—”a ribbed blackness. Bound there. They are cackling round him. He can neither fight nor flee.” She took a quick breath. “That is the dream I have of my brother.”
Durand’s mouth was open before he spoke. “They’re not all omens, Deorwen. Even these dreams of yours. These are grave days, but they’re passing. No surprise he’d be in your mind. We’ll do what we must. We’ll set it right.”
“These wise women . . .” She glanced from the firelight to a gaggle of women scarcely visible beyond the rubble. “They say that I’ll do the most good here. That nothing can come of a wild journey to God knows. That a woman understands what must be borne and bears it, what can be mended and what must be suffered, what can be kept and what we must give up.”
“We’ll find Lord Moryn. Fix Radomor. The king, he’ll come round.” He gripped her hand hard. “When it’s over, we’ll have a chance to think and breathe.”
Deorwen glanced back to Durand. With a twist, Durand made out the women watching from beyond the sanctuary flagstones. A few had shovels in their muddy hands.
Deorwen bent very near. “When
this is over,” she breathed, and she pressed a kiss hard against Durand’s snapped teeth. All of this madness, and Durand wanted nothing more than this woman. He pictured a small hall somewhere where he could be master and she his wife. Her hands ran over his broken face, clutching and caressing.
A hot tear struck his neck.
She caught her breath.
And, in a moment, she was bidding Hagon good fortune.
IT GOT WORSE. There were times when he couldn’t help but twist and arch against the ground—the pain as bad as the Rooks’ grip. He’d drop from consciousness as though he’d never lived. He’d wake sweating or desperate. Hagon held him like a wrestler or wrote upon his skin or smeared his limbs with reeking fluids. Leechcraft was madness.
Past midnight, Durand became conscious of a new sound rising beyond Hagon’s chanting: a hollow knock upon the flagstones of the sanctuary floor—and another. Tock . . . tock. . . . The stone’s chill touched his heart, for he knew the slow rhythm: a staff’s brass heel, closer and closer with each empty rap on the stones.
Hagon rocked and mumbled, seemingly as deaf as he was blind. But Durand flinched at the course of the man’s muttering. “By the Traveler’s whisper that cast a Power onto the roads and set Creation in the hands of the created, I set bone to bone and marrow to marrow!”
With this for a fanfare, a being stepped across the flagstones in a great swirl of chill air—a being huge as a gallows tree with a wide pilgrim’s hat caught as high and dark as a black moon. A fist of bone and twine clutched a forked staff.
Durand ceased to breathe.
The giant loomed at Hagon’s side—and high above—while Hagon mumbled on without a glance or shiver. Durand struggled, too shattered to move as, with a creak like a ship’s rigging, the giant began to bend. The black moon of its hat swung low, blotting out sanctuary and Creation and the Heavens beyond. A breath like winter ditchwater flowed between the peg teeth in that void.
At the wink of one bright-penny eye hardly beyond Durand’s nose, Durand tumbled from the world.
HIS NEXT VISITOR came as dawn’s twilight first touched Heavens. Durand heard wings—feathered landings. A twist of his head brought him a look across the plain of moonlit rubble where thousands of dark birds tumbled from the air, hopping and twitching just beyond the broken walls.
At first, he thought of the Rooks and their minion birds, but these were small, jittering creatures. The chatter that rose from their tumbling clouds was incredible: clicks and trills and whistles like a whole forest poured into the streets. Starlings. Starlings like storm in the beacon tower. Like the flock that pitched Lamoric into the Maidensbier.
Durand cursed the morel and poppy in his skull. Something was looking in on him—on all of them. Something wanted to see what Hagon was doing in his circle of firelight.
_________
“I THINK THAT’S done it,” the man croaked. “The Sunwheel right through.”
Durand lay for several heartbeats on the cold stones with Dawn red on his eyelids, and he set the night’s madness behind him. It was time to put Hagon’s work to the test. Opening his eyes, he took a few thoughtful breaths, stretching the long moment before hope met whatever the truth must be.
He levered himself up.
“Right. You can move,” said Hagon. The breeze played with the white thatch of the man’s hair. “Slow.”
Durand worked his shoulder, and, amid pops and winces, he rolled onto a pair of very numb feet; it had been days. He took a deep breath. He lifted his bad arm and worked the hand. He turned his head and flexed his jaw. It all took some gasps and hisses, but it would serve. He could move.
With a fierce grin, Durand took Hagon’s shoulder. “Hagon, sir, I am grateful.” He swung his arms, wincing and puffing when he had to. “Truly.”
With a fierce nod that he regretted, Durand started toward the castle.
“Here!” said Hagon. “You’d leave a blind man behind in all this?”
26. A Leopard by the Tail
Gunderic’s Tower seemed like a house of spirits, empty but for the groans of the sickest as Durand tramped back to collect his things. Heremund called him mad and wished him luck. Kieren could not leave the business of the struggling city. And among the sleeping bodies crowding the passageways, Durand could find no sign of Deorwen.
He pulled together his few belongings, found Pale tethered in the yard, and rode out, hoping that a lone rider—battered but determined—could overtake an army. His head was still spinning.
Finally, Durand rode up to the pitted tooth of marble that marked the border. Beyond, he could see the rolling country of Yrlac. Behind him were the hardscrabble Warrens—and scarcely a single soldier between his back and the Painted Hall. Unless Durand could catch and turn Lamoric, the Host of Gireth was lost—and every life in the dukedom with it.
Durand took a pull from a skin of drugged claret Hagon had given him and then urged Pale on, gritting his teeth at the big brute’s jarring gait.
As Pale set foot in Yrlac, Creation shuddered. Durand clung tight as the big brute shied. A knock was rolling through the sky above and around them. Before his eyes, the Heavens curdled. “Hells,” said Durand. Low clouds knotted, squeezing the light out of the world.
Durand gripped the big stallion and watched as this false twilight settled on the Yrlac.
“Get up,” said Durand, and they rode on.
HE TOOK ANOTHER long pull an hour later when great sheets of rain dropped from the sky. Every step had the big horse lurching to get his feet free of the rutted muck. Durand’s bones wouldn’t last long. Durand snarled, “Midnight at noon.” And smeared water from his face, trying not to notice the tremor in his hand. “We’ll pick up the pace.”
He forced Pale south and east, splashing down sunken tracks. They skirted the looming wood where the duke had concealed his army and rode deeper into an Yrlac where loaded gibbets swung over every crossroads. Pale lashed his head. Each field and barn Durand passed was a charred wreck, and soot ran black in the roads.
In a bit of ditch-deep road, Durand caught sight of yet another creaking bunch of corpses, and hissed between his teeth, “Is this what the devil’s left of Yrlac now?” Again, he remembered those few long days in Radomor’s hall, and the impossible silence of the man’s fury.
This load of black shapes dangled from the gnarled elbows of a bloated beech tree, its foot hidden by the curve of the deep track ahead. Durand had visions of steaming ruins from Mornaway to the mountains, league after league hissing in the rain. Pale stamped.
“He’s burnt everything. These’ll be his own plowmen he’s hanged. What a kingdom he would rule!” But a more calculating part of Durand’s mind wondered just how Lamoric would feed his army. They couldn’t march far on smoke and ashes, and there’d been no time to load weeks of salt pork.
He winced at the hideous remains up the track. Despite the twenty or thirty rainy paces between Durand and the dark shapes on the tree, he could see plenty of blood. As Durand made to spur on past the gibbet tree, Pale balked, half-turning in the deep track. His ears had shot toward the rigid shapes on the tree where now even Durand made out a strange scrabbling.
Stroking Pale’s muscled neck, Durand got up in the stirrups to get a good look over the banks of the road at the beech’s swollen foot. Low shapes slunk around the tree.
They were dogs. A whole pack of lean-looking brutes slavered below the stiff and dripping toes of the corpses. One big devil hopped against the fat tree, straining upward.
Durand didn’t like the thought of bringing live prey through such a starveling pack. “We’d better let the buggers eat in peace,” Durand muttered—and spurred Pale up the roadside back into the field.
But, as Pale wallowed up the bank, the dogs swiveled their long skulls in his direction, their lips writhing back in a collection of very human leers.
Just as Durand froze there above the road, another rider splashed into sight. Coming up the track in Durand’s wake was a boy on a do
nkey. He wore a sopping blue hood.
Durand and the dogs spotted the stranger at the same instant. Every head swiveled, man and dog.
“Here!” Durand called. “This way!”
The pack was on the move, shooting down the track. Just as the first dog struck the donkey, Durand caught the wrist of the rider, hauling him out of the road.
With a twist that nearly sprung his ribs, Durand set the boy on Pale’s back and rode for it.
The pack snarled around the still-kicking donkey, pulling out of sight in a hail of kicks and lean bodies.
THEY RODE AT a ground-covering canter as long as Durand could stand it. Pale bounded like a bear. Finally, somewhere on the high back of a trampled field, Durand found himself lolling over Pale’s neck, rigid.
It hurt. He could hardly think or see.
Then the stranger’s voice moved at the nape of Durand’s neck. “Durand.” But it was Deorwen, her breath warm on his neck.
“You must breathe,” she said.
Durand flinched around. Suddenly, he felt every inch of the woman pressed against his back, his hips, his thighs. She’d thrown on a boy’s surcoat, cloak, and tunic. Beads of rain stood on her cheeks. Her lips. What was she doing here?
In the rolling country ahead, he heard some tributary of the River Rushes burbling. And the sound gave him something to catch hold of. “There. Pale will need water.”
And over the next rise, a shallow stream ran by the track, swollen with the rain.
Durand lowered himself from the saddle with as much speed as he could manage, then stood with his hands on his knees waiting for Creation to hold still.
Deorwen was moving around him, seeming nimble as a squirrel.
He reached out, catching her sleeve. “Why? Why are you here?”
“Who’s left for fool’s errands now?”
Her grin snatched Durand’s breath. “You must go back.”
“I’ve left Almora with the wise women. And I will learn what’s become of my brother.”
“You’ll be killed.” As Creation stopped spinning around him, Durand resolved to get a drink of cold water. He must think. Shining water ran over green reeds with a few flat stones to make a ford. He set his cupped hands into the mirror glint, and—just as the water touched his lips—