In a Time of Treason

by David Keck

  “Durand!” Deorwen caught him by the shoulders, pitching Durand into a splash of icy water.

  The shock of the water on his half-broken bones was like falling flat off a high roof. Durand wallowed back out of the water.

  “Lord of Dooms!” Durand spluttered.

  Deorwen was pointing upstream. Through the glassy shimmer of clouds on the water, Durand picked out something pale: a long shape, and then another and another. He made out the fork of legs.

  “Hells,” he said.

  Deorwen sat on the bank with her knees up in the boy’s long hose she was wearing. “Someone’s tied them into the rushes along the streambed: bodies.”

  Durand watched open hands trail like swimming fish below the surface. “Hemlock’s dear and dead men cheap.”

  Deorwen didn’t shrink. “There was a woman in my brother’s lands. Her man’s family had a well behind their house, still they made her walk half a league to the village to draw water. Then their sow had a litter of piglets. She strangled them, one by one, and plopped the little things down the well. Moryn had to hang her.”

  Durand squinted from the gray corpses to the gray skies ahead. “You must go back,” said Durand. “I must catch Lamoric. I must reach the River Rushes before the day’s out.” He couldn’t carry Deorwen into this nightmare.

  Deorwen stood very straight despite her sopping blue cloak, her hair running in strings. “We are five leagues from my husband’s city, Sir Durand. Will you send me back on your Pale, here? Or shall I walk? You have ten leagues to cover by nightfall, I’d guess.”

  Durand blinked at a momentary vision of arriving too late—finding a scorched field of sprawled bodies. Banners trampled in the earth. “Madness.” He could not leave Deorwen; he could not abandon Lamoric.

  “I will not be wise.” She had sat by her mother’s side. She had tracked her fool of a husband. She had taken care of Almora and the laying of the Lost. “Not yet.”

  At that moment, Pale tossed his head, nodding a rolling eye. A low shape shuttled along the track behind them. “Lord of Dooms. They’ve trailed us,” Durand said.

  Deorwen followed his glance. Her mouth opened. “But they are dogs.”

  “It is too much. I cannot think. We must go on,” said Durand.

  He sprang aboard the warhorse, whisked Deorwen from the track, and together they crossed the ford of corpses.

  _________

  SOUTH AND EAST, they pushed on, Pale jogging through narrow places that the wary army they followed had avoided to gain a pace or two every league. This was, in part, the country where Durand had ridden with Captain Gol and Duke Ailnor—very likely the last ride old Ailnor ever took. Now, as Durand clung to his saddlebow, he recognized very little. The people had been driven off, their store houses burnt, and everything lost.

  This would be the legacy of King Radomor if the devil won.

  He ached over his decision to bring Deorwen. She’d been mad to ride into this mess on a donkey; a boy’s costume would hardly have saved her. But he could think of no way to turn back and no safe place to set her down. She must come with him.

  Behind him, Durand saw further signs of the silent pack on their trail. Once some great brute slouched atop a high ridge. Later, flowing forms loped across a scabbed hill’s flank. Durand wanted to tell Deorwen that he would save her, even if it cost the army and the kingdom both. He wanted to carry her to the Dreaming Lands or the Shattered Isle beyond the Westering Sea. He wondered whether he could still work a sword.

  And Deorwen clutched him tight. From time to time, her grip on his ribs had him gasping—though he worked hard not to let on. “Wolves will stalk an army,” she said. “They saw it on Hallow Down. Like gulls after a fishing boat. Looking for scraps. The wise women speak of it.”

  The things on the hillsides leered. They kept pace through burnt gorse and torched field.

  “Scraps is right, I’m sure,” said Durand. “These will be strays. If they’re used to butcher’s bones, they’ll be hungry now. The roads must be full of strays between mere and mountains these days: men and beasts.” He tried a blithe smile. “The country’ll be teeming with folk making their way to distant kin.”

  At that moment, he glanced up to find the first pack of curs ahead of them. The things curled round some lump on a nearby hill, a good stone’s throw off the road.

  “Lugging their tools to new towns,” he continued. “Prince Eodan and the king growling at each other.”

  As they passed below, Durand made out the cocked angle of a limb where the brutes were working: a horse lay curled on its back. The dogs worried at its bowels. Saddle brass winked.

  “Errest must be patient with strays for a good long while.”

  What might have been the torn shape of a rider—something in blue wool—sprawled nearby. It couldn’t have been dogs.

  “They might have found him that way,” Deorwen tried. But, at her words, the whole hilltop pack raised its muzzles, all leering down on Pale and the two fools on the big stallion’s back.

  Durand set the spurs.

  REAL DARKNESS SPREAD over the wasteland.

  Durand rode, knotted around Pale’s saddlebow while the pack closed in all around. Deorwen told him: “Breathe.” And it was all he could do to manage it.

  The brutes ranged down hollows and flowed over ridges in numbers far larger than ever prowled around one gallows tree. As Durand bullied Pale onward, he saw mastiffs with cinder muzzles; staghounds and boarhounds and butcher’s dogs—some whip-lean, others as thick as bulls. Every one ran with a hitched gait, as if their bones had been joined by a loom-maker. Durand no longer doubted that these ghouls could snap up a mounted man if the mood took them. Deorwen pointed out packhorses, scraps of tack, and even an iron helm trampled in the road to prove it.

  Deorwen clung to his back while, beyond the clouds, the Eye of Heaven failed.

  “Do you hear that?” said Deorwen.

  “Huh?” He peered around, hearing only the click and thud of paws on stone and roadway. “I hear nothing.” The long line of the pack swept like great wings closing over them as the last light ebbed away. “Deorwen, King of Heaven. We must make our stand.”

  “The devils are whispering!” Deorwen pressed.

  Durand blinked. And he heard it. Another sound hissing up like waves upon a shingle beach—a whisper that swelled into life, alive and scrabbling before the pack. “Like the Rooks,” Durand said. It swelled around them.

  “I can almost make it out,” Deorwen said.

  Durand spurred Pale into the blackness, sure that teeth would flash from the dark at any moment. Long shapes flickered beyond shocks of gorse and bracken as the dogs swarmed over every rise and bounded on every side.

  Durand could stand no more. He thought of throwing himself down—stealing Deorwen a few extra heartbeats before Pale stepped in some hole—when Deorwen shouted out, pointing over the hillocks to a pale shape cut out of the darkness. “There! Durand! A bell tower! A sanctuary!”

  And they charged through a place of walls and dark lanes for a high white tower. There was a gate. With the pack all around, they pelted through and rode for a black door in the tall sanctuary wall. Durand threw himself tumbling down. He flung his shoulder at the door, but the thing was standing wide—a trick of light—and he plunged through with Deorwen darting in behind him.

  They were on holy ground in the house of Heaven’s King and the road was behind them: safe!

  But no sooner had he breathed relief than the first dogs shot through the door to bowl him backward into the sanctuary.

  “Deorwen!”

  In the dark, Durand struck some immense and hidden timber. The animals struck from every side, filling the dark with teeth and flashing pain while the sky gaped open above the sanctuary—the ruin.

  Then the timber at Durand’s back gave way.

  In a heartbeat, a tower’s weight of rafters, trusses, and beams plunged down on Durand’s neck, battering him and the first curs senseless. He tho
ught of Deorwen. Then, with a lethal flicker through the dark, a great solid shape plunged after the debris. Its impact—hard on one edge and a breath from Durand’s fingers—rang a fierce pure note shuddering through Durand’s skull.

  The sound—the clang of a stout bronze bell—shot through the pack, knocking the devils sprawling, hoisting the things from their feet, and blasting their whispers into the high darkness.

  Durand staggered, pitching over the broken timbers to roll in clenched rigidity. He wanted to find Deorwen, but he couldn’t even say her name.

  Someone crouched over him. “Breathe, Durand!”

  He felt the warmth of her as her boy’s cloak opened around them. Around the room, he saw that every icon had been toppled. A few white shapes stood headless.

  “Oh, God. Try to breathe,” said Deorwen. “Where is that flask of Hagon’s?”

  Durand tried to get his hands down underneath him—to fish for his blade.

  But even as Deorwen’s fingers darted over him for the leather bottle, Pale was already shrieking outside. The whisper of the devil dogs was pressing in once more.

  “Radomor’s men have defiled the shrine,” said Deorwen. “I wonder if there’s still a shrine standing in Yrlac. These will be the Wards of the Patriarchs, picked to thread.” All to clear the way for the Rooks’ midnight labors. “Durand, you must give me your sword.”

  Durand bared a few broken teeth in misery.

  There was a clatter at the door. Black Pale stumbled in while the pack churned in deep circles around the yard, edging nearer and nearer as its courage built.

  Now, the mad words of the whispered chorus were plain. “Beyond the empty Hall of Heaven, Heaven’s Queen rankled at the silence, her king gone to his Creation while she stayed behind. Nearly she relented, but one of her own people stole upon her from the outer darkness: the Hag, hungering now with the small souls, vanished away. ‘Where have they gone, cousin?’ simpered the Hag.”

  “The Book of Moons,” croaked Durand, astonished. It was a story from the beginning of the world: the Queen of Heaven betraying her King. It was hardly spoken of.

  “In the mouth of dogs,” said Deorwen.

  One great mastiff stepped over the threshold, pausing to leer up at the ruined walls. Its stink cut the air. Another dog slunk into the sanctuary, and another. They moved with the misjointed hitch of puppets.

  “ ‘Where have they gone, cousin: the bright souls, the small ones?’ ” came the shivering whispers. “ ‘So dim is the darkness without them. So alone are we now. I would see them once more. Where have they gone?’ ” This was the Hag’s part as she wheedled the secret of Creation from Heaven’s lonely Queen as she pined for the Creator King who had gone to dwell in his Creation.

  Deorwen plucked a rough cudgel of charred timber from the floor, squaring with the worst of the brutes. There was no way they could fight the things off—not with Durand on his back, not with so many.

  His eyes found the bell and a few new words from the Book of Moons cast around its waist: . . . come hale the new day. He fought to force his thoughts in order.

  The leering brutes poured their flat whispers rattling into his skull. Greenish light flickered in their eyes. “ ‘This dream of his. This Creation. It is a plaything that has taken him from us, your King, your Consort.’ ” This was the Hag wheedling favors from the Queen of Heaven. “ ‘He has gone off with the small ones and left us to the darkness. Where have they gone, pray tell me, O Queen?’ ” The Hag was hunting souls. She was bringing death and the Creator’s treacherous Son of Morning to Creation.

  “And the Queen of Heaven knew jealousy. In that moment, she turned to the Hag, the Devourer, and revealed Creation.

  “ ‘And this is where he has taken them? Well, it will warm my heart to see them once more,’ said the Hag, and she smiled.”

  He would not let the dogs have them. To start, Durand plucked his old belt dagger free and—just as the devils made to leap—rang the pommel off the bronze letters.

  The dogs flinched from the brazen note. And, although the creatures had moved only a few steps, Durand took hold of this slim chance. Devils didn’t like sanctuary bells. Despite the wreckage of his ribs and shoulder, he surged onto his feet. Deorwen wouldn’t die here with him on his back. Blinking back the flashes in his eyes, he wrenched the old bell right off the floor while one big cur leered up at him. Durand heaved the great bell straight into the pack.

  By the time the bell had clanged and clattered through its wild carillon of bounding notes, the fiends had all lurched from the yard.

  IN THAT DARK place, they clung to each other. Durand found space where he could crush the dark from his skull, pulling and tearing at Deorwen’s tunic and leggings, pressing her to the floor of that ruined shrine.

  He did not want to let her go. He did not want Creation to move another moment forward.

  FAR TOO SOON, the whispers returned, and the two fled into the night, Pale dragging the bell from a bit of rope lashed to his saddle. The scrape of stones and the bounce of the clap-per seemed to make enough sacred racket to keep the dogs off, though the fiends were forever on the move. Only Deorwen’s murmurs kept Durand alive.

  Somewhere in the black of night, he felt the chill of the River Rushes boil up in the darkness before them. He heard Deorwen trying to work out some way to keep the bell ringing with both of them asleep, but there was nothing to do but press on.

  “We will come through this. We will smile at the thought of it. And when we reach the other side we will be together. Moryn too,” she said.

  “Doubtless,” said Durand.

  Down the Valley of the Rushes they dragged their bell through night and day until the holy scrawl round its waist was ground to smudges and the devil dogs were sniffing close. Where the valley wall shouldered them nearer the river, they saw the great town of Penseval spread on the far bank.

  Durand focused his whole being on hanging on. When he wavered, the saddlebow creaked under his fingernails. If he fell, they were dead.

  Deorwen murmured at his ear. “There is a famous well in Penseval: the Well of the Spring Maid. And ten sanctuaries. My father took us before she was ill. The baron’s castle was red as a cockerel’s blood. They say the city has seen two thousand winters.” Before Durand’s eyes, its towers lay in heaps. Pale plodded past a bridge to the great ruin that stood in the Rushes like a row of broken teeth. And Durand began to think he should climb down. The horse couldn’t go much farther—he might walk farther with just one rider.

  “Don’t think of it,” said Deorwen.

  Somehow she had read his mind. “You’re twitching like a sleeping dog. If you drop, I will not go another step.”

  Overhead, the clouds had dimmed from pewter to old lead—and darker. The dogs’ whispers gabbled faintly under the scrape of the worn bell, and their lurching shapes were back on the move among the thornbushes and tall grasses along the river.

  “You are a contrary little thing,” Durand said.

  For the first time in hours, Durand turned and looked into Deorwen’s face. Even pale as ice, she dazzled his eyes.

  She raised a hand to wipe something from his face.

  “We are well matched,” she answered.

  And the whisper of the dog asserted itself. The things were now so near that Durand was sure they were playing games, filling the dark to watch the slow flight of their certain prey.

  “A person could grow tired of hearing these verses,” said Deorwen into the growing darkness, her voice hollow. “I’m surprised that the Queen of Heaven lets these devils ramble on. She cannot like to hear the old story told. Repeating the slip that looses the Hag on Creation. She must be livid. Incandescent. Though perhaps she suffers willingly. The shame of that old betrayal.”

  “Perhaps she’s hard of hearing?” Durand said.

  Deorwen laughed—just a puff of air at Durand’s ear. “It might explain a thing or two. The King of Heaven, silent. And His dear Queen, deaf. What can we expect of o
ur prayers?”

  Durand did not answer. They were rounding a gloomy shoulder of land that pushed them nearer the current.

  “Soon enough, poor Pale will falter and the bell will go silent,” she said. “These fiends will keep up their whispers. Perhaps I will lead us into the river—we will float away like the lady of the Maidensbier.” Drowning as sure as they were born. “Past Ferangore to the sea. I do not regret leaving Acconel.

  “My father’s hall is on the sea,” she whispered. Durand’s eyes stung. “Deorwen, I would give the world to see you away from—”

  Pale took another dragging step. Beyond the near shoulder of land, a valley opened: narrow, steep, and towering fifty fathoms above the river road.

  Three thousand wide-eyed soldiers glared down the blades of glinting spears and swords and axes. Some crowded the road. Hundreds more watched from the terraced walls. Durand saw stone tombs high among the ranks and campfires, step after step of a high necropolis like some giant’s amphitheater.

  The nearest men seemed frozen: fifty or sixty soldiers with their eyes wide and their fists creaking tight on their crossbows.

  Durand pried his crabbed hands from the saddlebow and raised them for the mob, knowing how easy it was to knock a crossbow’s bolt through a man. And soon he heard hoofbeats. A horse pelted down the terraces, flashing through alternating gloom and firelight until its cloaked rider could bull his way through the lines. At the last, Durand spotted Coensar’s blazon of white terns on blue. The man’s charger was dancing.

  “Sir Coensar,” Durand croaked. It was like a dream. Impossible.

  He mashed a stray tear from his eye, trying to remember his errand. He had found the army. Deorwen was safe. He blinked hard.

  “I must speak with Lamoric.”

  Coensar, new Champion of Gireth, stared down—the gleam of his eyes unreadable in the gloom. Beyond him, the fist and fingers of the Eye of Heaven sign spread among the multitude encamped in the valley necropolis. They knew Durand’s voice—and likely remembered how they’d left him: broken in the Painted Hall.