In a Time of Treason

by David Keck

  The barons finished their conference and scattered to play captain to the men of their own lands.

  Durand swallowed against the straps of his mail hood and stared up. Over the dented helmets of the infantry, he could see the first rampart, steep, gray-green, silent, and topped with stone battlements.

  This would be worse than Acconel. Bloodier for the men of Gireth. They would be breaking walls, not holding them. It would be murder.

  Deorwen could easily have been swept up. No one was to be left back.

  He prayed that she’d found some spot in the rear—perhaps behind that red-capped fool with his boar spear: Braca. A man that size could, at least, stop an arrow or two for her. She was no fool.

  Durand twisted once more—only to find Deorwen peering up at him from the back of a dun pony. Her chin hardly came to his belt.

  “Host Below!” rasped Durand. Lamoric was only a few paces away.

  “There is nowhere to hide,” she replied evenly. She clutched Braca’s spear: the thing seemed heavy as a fence post. Her face was pale.

  “You can’t be here,” said Durand.

  “I have had enough cowering. Where will I be safer than caught up in Lamoric’s guard?”

  “Have you ever met your husband? Safety has not been among the man’s priorities.”

  A few horses forward, Coensar twisted for a look at the source of this chatter.

  Durand gave the man a nod.

  Coensar only blinked and stuffed the azure helm down over his head.

  “Deorwen, this is more than courage. They’ll fill the sky with arrows. They’ll fight like devils for every step. You think blue wool and linen will turn a blade?”

  “I must either be with those men about to storm the wall, or with the mounted men back here. If it makes no difference where I stand, I’ll stand where I choose and not where I’m driven.”

  Lamoric rode out before the army on his brother’s tall gray, drawing every commander’s eye.

  “Don’t worry,” whispered Deorwen. “I’m not mad. I’m no tiltyard hero to face an army on my own.”

  The hours of darkness had allowed battalion-large raiding parties to scour the countryside for timber and provisions. Though there had been little enough to find, rough siege ladders jutted from the ranks of infantry. Breath boiled in the chill.

  “I can ride, I’ve hunted a thousand leagues, slipping branches,” she said. “I’ll make them work to take me.” Durand wondered whether he had time to haul her from the line.

  But Lamoric stood in his stirrups, hauling his blade from its scabbard. The entire host leaned toward Ferangore.

  “Durand,” said Deorwen. He didn’t want to argue. He would watch her as best he could. It was madness, but there was no time.

  “Durand!” she pressed.

  She was looking down; the sopping grass under their feet moved.

  Then, with a shriek from the horses, the plain came alive—worms and rats, mice and wood lice. All the vermin of a city spilled down the ramparts of Ferangore, spreading like wine over a bare floor, sliding over the hooves of the horses.

  Lamoric fought to control his big gray.

  Then, with every man eyeing his boots, a call rose from the heights above them. The blackened spire of the high sanctuary seemed to twitch as the army’s glance found it—black to bone gray—and every man realized that the old tower was neither stained nor scorched: it was the roosting place of every carrion bird for a thousand leagues. An infinite maelstrom rose over the city—beyond the flocks at Acconel, beyond anything seen in Errest the Old in all its two thousand winters: a high and rising storm of carrion birds to empty forests beyond counting.

  All across the front, Conran’s Ash Knights threw their arms wide, braying out prayers that once more filled Creation with a boiling cedar wind. The storm broke over Lamoric’s lines, diving in waves like a plowman’s scythe.

  But flocks split above the army like waves against stone as the Holy Ghosts roared the wrath of Powers.

  “Lord of Dooms!” shouted Lamoric. He wrenched his helm from his head, snapping every eye back to the fight. “Enough! It’s past time. Let us drive this fiend from his lair!”

  With the wind snapping in his mantle, Lamoric stabbed his blade high over the army and—with a headsman’s downward slash—unleashed the howl of three thousand voices. Gireth’s infantry charged, ladders bobbing like straws on a flood tide. A storm to answer the storm of crows. Durand fought to hold Pale back. The ranks of horsemen all around him clutched at their reins as that tide of foot soldiers rushed out.

  Coensar shouted, “Hold!” For heartbeats, the vulnerable army sprinted at an empty rampart.

  Then, with the whole rushing throng under the battlements, Radomor’s archers stepped into every embrasure over their heads, hundreds strong—snapping lethal arrows down with strong bows of yew and sinew. Soldiers curled around sudden arrowheads, their ladders crashing to the turf.

  The men in Lamoric’s guard hissed and swore.

  Finally, ladders slapped the bank, blackening the green earthwork with swarming men. Arrows flickered up and down. Gaffs threw ladders back. Axes split helms.

  Pale danced in Durand’s fists.

  “Hold!” shouted Coensar.

  At the crest of the rampart, knotted duels rose, struggling over the crowd. The two armies seemed ready to lift each other above the city with the force of the struggle.

  Finally, the stalemate broke and the foot soldiers of Gireth poured over that lowest rampart into the streets beyond. Horns brayed. And the army of Gireth vanished over the ridge.

  Durand looked from side to side. For an instant, the cavalry were alone on the plain. Some men made the Creator’s fist and fingers as best they could in the iron bags of their gauntlets. Durand glanced at Deorwen, her eyes shut. Then, with a return of all the cacophony of battle, the lower gate of Ferangore flew wide. Every knight surged forward.

  AS THEY TORE their way inside, Durand clung to Lamoric’s flank, hacking his master’s way through the ebbing throng of the enemy, and hoping to tear a broad enough wake for Deorwen to follow, riding sidelong into enemies. But after a few minutes of savagery, the men of Yrlac showed their heels, leaving the street empty.

  Durand watched Coensar give chase—and found himself at Lamoric’s side in an abandoned street between one rampart and the next. This was all there was: one street, one step on the way up Ferangore. Shops stood on either side.

  Pale and Lamoric’s big gray nipped and kicked at each other. The street was as noisy as a horse market. And every storefront along the road was crowded with men and beasts taking cover.

  “What is this?” Lamoric wondered. Storefronts stood empty, and above their rooftops you could see the top of the next tier and the empty parapets atop it. “Can it be that we’ve beaten him?”

  Durand had been kicked and punched and horse-bitten, with his breath coming in gasps and blood spinning from the tip of his sword. At a glance, he could see a dozen men writhing out their last breaths. Comrades hauled some into shelter.

  “Radomor beaten? I would like that,” said Durand, and earned a glance from Lamoric. He had to switch Pale around to get Deorwen under cover.

  “Right enough,” Lamoric began, smiling, “but it’s—”

  A torrent of black wings dropped from the storm above the rooftops, bullying every man against his horse’s neck. Some of the creatures bounced to a landing among the dead and dying, while the rest tumbled and brayed for mad heartbeats over the street and then vaulted back into the storm.

  On the heels of the devil birds came the first arrows and stones from above the rooftops. Stones clattered into the street. Almost as soon as this weird rain had begun, a bolt smacked from the brow of Durand’s helm.

  “They’re pulling themselves together. We’ll be safer under these shops,” Durand said. Riders up and down the street were pulling their horses out of the road; the archers above couldn’t see past the roofs right below them. Durand set his spurs
and Pale bulled Deorwen and Lamoric’s animals under cover of a potter’s shop.

  “Tie the horses here, Lordship?” Durand squinted past the crowds and up a littered road, fouled with the gory wreckage of the route. “Whatever comes next, there’s no room for wild charges.” He watched Deorwen hop down beyond the horses. “Radomor should have pulled these things down. A roof makes a better shield than a man could carry on his shoulder.”

  “It’s not like him,” Lamoric muttered and slipped from the saddle, watching for Coensar. Durand dropped painfully into the roadway.

  A few paces away, a raven peered into a man’s eye and rasped, “Ha!”

  And Deorwen began muttering. “Queen of Heaven,” she said, plain as day. “What is this place?”

  But Coensar was already charging back through the mobs and wreckage, trailing Sallow Hythe and bluff Honefells. As the pack of them barged under the narrow cover with Durand and the others, Coensar dropped from the saddle. “Lordship, they’ve fled—a full rout—through the gates and up into the next bloody tier. Swanskin’s trying to force the gates.”

  “We’ve treed the devils,” said Honefells. The stubble on his chin glittered like a dusting of glass in the blood gleaming there.

  “I’d never have guessed he’d give us the first rampart so easily,” Lamoric said.

  “They’re marshaling upstairs. They may like their chances better with us bottled up in this—” Coensar gave a sharp glance Deorwen’s way. Rather than keeping out of the way, she had begun tottering in small circles—that threatened to take her out under the eyes of Radomor’s bowmen.

  “What is wrong with the boy?” said Coen.

  “Here,” said Durand, and he dared a step out of cover to play shepherd. “Under cover.” But Deorwen was murmuring, “No, no, no.”

  “What’re you thinking?” he whispered, but as he brought Deorwen in, Durand caught sight of something on the rampart above the street: a hooked black smear between one building and the next.

  Lamoric was speaking, “If I could have saved the boys this, I would. It’s more than anyone should see.”

  Durand picked out black smears both on the wall above them and on the inner face of the rampart they’d already conquered. The outlines of what might have been strange symbols seemed to shift in the shadows between the shops, high and low.

  Honefells grinned and wiped some blood from his chin. “The lad’ll be fine. It’s not every day a boy rides against a walled city. And on a pony! When other pages squint through their fingers at the crash of a good tiltyard bout, he’s won his first battle. At this rate we’ll have Radomor drawn and quartered by noon. Maybe he’ll give in—save a few of his men.”

  “Lordships,” said Durand. “What do you make of these markings on the ramparts? I swear, they’re nearly moving.”

  “Friend,” said Honefells. “You have a morbid turn of mind. I—”

  “No,” said Coensar. “What do you see?” The captain—the Champion of Gireth—closed his eyes, then tried to follow the direction of Durand’s gaze.

  But, just then, the whole city moved: a jolt in the roadbed shook crows from a score of corpses.

  Around Durand, blades flashed up. And every man scanned the roadway.

  “Those were boots,” purred Sallow Hythe. The sound came from beyond the streets. “Men on the march.”

  “Aye,” said Coensar.

  “Sounds like bloody battalions,” said Honefells.

  They could see nothing but sky between the buildings across the road—across the killing ground. But Durand thought the shop’s upper floors would make a better vantage point. “Here,” said Durand and put his good shoulder through the latched door and led the others up into a dark third-story bedchamber that seemed to look out over the plain.

  As each man reached the unglazed windows, he stuck there like a fly in honey. Durand was last, or nearly. Crows and rooks and ravens sailed past. But, between two buildings leaning across the road, he could see down over the city wall. An army swarmed over the wasted acres beyond the battlements. They had come down from the north, fording the Bercelet, as the men of Gireth had forded the Rushes from the south, and now they trooped in to block the only escape from Ferangore. There was no way out.

  “It is six to one, at least.” Honefells scarcely breathed the words in the stolen bedroom.

  “Where have they come from?” Coensar murmured.

  Through the screen of burgher’s roofs, they saw hundreds of knights in mail—more men than Durand had seen at any tournament—perhaps more than two thousand men in the saddle. Beyond them marched nine thousand foot.

  Sallow Hythe set his long fingers on his face, his tone was marveling. “There are not so many men fit to bear arms in all of Yrlac. And no man could hire so many. There is not coin enough in the whole kingdom. Where has he found them?”

  Durand stepped into the window, closing his fingers over the raw wood of its mullions.

  At the front, the men wore the even green of Yrlac. Toward the rear, however, the battalions lost their uniformity, breaking into the party-colored confusion of any host among the Sons of Atthi.

  There were so many.

  Then, in the midst of it all, Durand saw a broad banner he recognized: at the head of Radomor’s new army floated blue and yellow diamonds. Durand remembered the bewildering pattern—he knew it from fights at Red Winding and High Ashes and Tern Gyre.

  “The diamonds . . .” he said.

  Faces darkened, squinting. A voice breathed, “Host of Heaven . . .”

  Then, Durand heard Deorwen speak. “It’s Mornaway,” she said. One by one, the men turned to face her, the blue hood of her cloak now down about her shoulders.

  “Moryn of Mornaway rides under those colors,” said Durand. He remembered the Rooks taunting him about “friends and enemies” back on a boat on the Bay of Eldinor. Here was Deorwen’s lost brother, found at last in the worst of places.

  Lamoric came adrift from the window and the war. “How have you come here, Deorwen? Now, at this, of all moments?”

  “Lord Moryn would not do this,” said Sallow Hythe. “He is his father’s son.” Durand remembered old Duke Severin, Moryn’s father. The venerable Duke of Mornaway had lived seventy winters without a broken word, and Moryn would be no different.

  “Moryn did not come to the Mount of Eagles,” said Durand.

  In a dead tone of impossibility, Honefells murmured the only conclusion, “Mornaway has turned against the king.”

  Deorwen was still. The little room had a sturdy bed. The walls were primrose yellow.

  “What are you doing here?” said Lamoric. “I don’t understand.” He looked at his wife as though he had never seen her before. “We must get you out of this place. We will throw ourselves on Radomor’s mercy. He would not kill you with the rest of us.”

  Deorwen took a step, setting a hand on her husband’s face.

  And Durand looked away, dizzy.

  He saw gray slices of the rampart stone between the shops and houses. He had seen these before, but now, with height and distance, what had seemed like smears became the tall letters of a barbed script that ran in chains behind the buildings, all very easy to see for a man who didn’t care much about the army beyond. The brushstrokes circled the whole ring of Ferangore’s walls, above and below that seemed uncannily like an audience of taloned shadows circling them round.

  Something creaked on the stairs.

  As the whole room twitched around, Conran ducked through the low doorway. “They’ve marked out this city in heart’s blood,” he rumbled. “Carrion crows snatch at the gasps of the dying. The streets drink our lifeblood. Only now in all the years since the Cradle landed. Only with the old wards in tatters could this be done! Radomor has brought the Hells into Errest.”

  “No,” said Lamoric.

  “We are upon his altar and the fires are lit, My Lord.”

  Lamoric looked to Deorwen. She had set her hand upon one bedpost, standing straight but small. Th
ere would be no parlay with a man who would turn his city into a shrine of devils. No mercy for any.

  Sallow Hythe stepped from the shadows. “Lordship, there remains one avenue of escape.” He was neither stroking his narrow beard nor tenting his long fingers, not now.

  “What chance do you see?” pressed Lamoric. “What chance has you swallowing and avoiding my eye? Speak its name.”

  “Your wife. She is Mornaway’s daughter.” He glanced, for an instant, to Deorwen.

  Lamoric’s face was chalk, but Sallow Hythe was no coward. He pressed on.

  “I am not proud to have conceived the notion; however, it must be said, a bargain might yet be struck. We have his daughter. The old man could refuse us nothing.”

  Lamoric looked from the baron to his wife. “We would hold her hostage? I would send my herald. Sir Durand, perhaps? He would tell Duke Severin: Free us from this snare, or His Lordship, Lamoric of Gireth, will kill your daughter? My lady wife?”

  Sallow Hythe bowed another fraction.

  Lamoric stepped closer to the baron, moving closer with each word. “Durand could carry her ear as proof that she was with us. Or we might dangle her from the battlements as Durand made his announcement.” He turned from the man. “We are not beaten. We have come through Acconel. Before this ends, it will be Radomor who feeds the crows!”

  He turned on Sallow Hythe. “And Deorwen is not here. Do you hear? Not with such talk already on your lips. I will kill the man who speaks of her, do you understand? We will roast bloody Radomor on his own bloody altar and be done with the devil once and for all!”

  28. The Tiers of Ferangore

  Lamoric charged into the street, howling, “To the upper gate! To the upper gate! With our bare hands, we’ll take them!” And the army rose from its thousand resting places, charging up the street.

  The fiercest men of Gireth surged forward with great axes flashing over their heads—though torrents of scalding water and great stones shuddered down from the battlements. The street seethed, and Lamoric’s liegemen staggered for footing on the flesh and bones of their fallen comrades. The lords of Gireth roared commands, and storms of Gireth’s arrows lashed the teeth of the upper battlements, rebounding over the crowd, splintering against stone, or catching in the flesh of Yrlac’s men.