In a Time of Treason

by David Keck

  “There are many eyes upon a king.”

  Durand gestured to Deorwen that she should stay where she stood—resting against a pillar—and stole toward the voices, silently closing the gap like some back-alley murderer as the nearest Rook pressed on.

  “The common man must see strength if he’s to believe it. Radomor is not a complete fool.”

  “Eyes. Many eyes . . .” The wet clicks continued.

  As Durand limped closer, the nearer Rook came in sight, standing, his fingertips playing over one mound of skulls as he chatted below the altar’s ruin.

  Durand reached the flank of the last squat pillar, wincing as the wet floor popped and sucked at his toes, unable to keep memories of the paralyzing touch of the fiends from his mind. What would become of Deorwen if they caught him? They had pulled the life’s breath from helpless men before his eyes, but Durand had no choice. He must find Moryn.

  “The preparations are complete?”

  Durand leaned from his hiding place and spied the second Rook perched on the flank of the greatest bone heap in all the dark sanctuary. It mounted up beyond the ceiling to the ruptured sanctuary floor. With a slender knife, the perching Rook worked upon one wet skull. A last flick of the blade’s tip finished his work and he held the bone—eye to eye. “What shall we do with them all? An army? Radomor’s poor Champion? What can we not do, brother?”

  “Perhaps our Whisperer will tell us soon. We have come so far at his behest. He must greet us before long.”

  Durand scowled at this. He wondered who could have summoned such creatures into Errest.

  Meanwhile, the carver fished two fingers of ruddy clay from a pot and smeared blobs into the eyes and nose of the skull before him. “There. What do you think?” he said. He had to swat away one of the storming crows. “Bold things!”

  “The life’s breath bound in death. It is a pretty vessel, brother. But His Highness rides to battle, naked but for a coat of iron.”

  “Yes, yes. You nag like our poor mother. I will only be a moment, and what would we do without these pretty vessels, eh? I can scarcely keep up.” The sorcerer finished briskly, flipping the skull, nicking his finger, and letting a fat drop tumble inside.

  “An embarrassment of riches sealed in heart’s blood. We have been greedy.”

  The carver answered his brother with a splattered grin and a wet kiss on the skull’s yellow teeth. “The purest madness.”

  “Madness. Yes, I begin to wonder, my brother. Now, on to His Highness.”

  And the two nodded into motion. Before Durand could flinch, the carver had snatched a gulp from a bloody ewer while the second Rook popped the plug from one wet skull. Out from the hideous container poured a sudden swarm of flies. They boiled into the air, flapping the heavy wings of the Rooks’ cloaks and flickering through Durand’s hiding place to force him back into the shadows. It was all he could do not to bolt, but he steeled himself, thinking that the Rooks were not his business: he must only find Moryn—lost somewhere in the acres of this reeking hell—and escape this place of death and flies and crows.

  But no sooner had the necromancers filled the dark than they were pursing their lips and sucking down the bizarre swarm. And the flitting things spun in. In swirling eddies and ropy clouds, they darted down the necromancers’ throats until the chests of the two men had swelled like balloons and the crypt was empty of the darting things. And the two men grinned and drooled like boys eating berries.

  Is this what had become of so many dead men?

  “Ugh! Too many,” croaked the carver Rook—a few flies escaped his lips.

  “Let us begin,” was his brother’s grunt.

  Now that they had decanted the raw material of their trade, the pair raised their spattered hands. “Life to life we bind you,” they said. “Heart to heart and marrow to marrow.” Now, the viscous swarms spooled from their mouths once more, but weaving and climbing, not wild. “Blood to his blood, bone to his bone, we knot and join you. Your life to his life!” They spat to clear their lips.

  Durand’s glance followed the swirling flies and shadows up the crypt’s old pillars and up the mountain of skulls until they churned through the ruptured vaults and into the sanctuary above.

  And as Durand looked into the choked and lofty dark, he saw a white figure suspended among the shrieking crows high above. “Oh, no. It cannot be him,” breathed Durand. The Rooks had stretched a man across the great east window of the sanctuary—binding him pillar to pillar, strung up like some desecrated icon from thongs knotted at his wrists. The insect things were marching upon him. Marching up the thongs. And Durand knew the face when it looked down, though a long winter had passed since he had seen it last upon the fields at Red Winding and Tern Gyre. When the gaunt and ravaged face looked down, Durand knew the eyes that found him: this was the Lord of Mornaway.

  “Her brother,” Durand said.

  The Rooks had wrapped Mornaway in their hooked script and now Durand could see the shadow-things teeming up the knotted tethers and spidering over every figure among the maze of sigils on the man’s jutting bones. It could not be good.

  Had Durand only looked up, he might have plucked Mornaway and fled without setting foot in the crypt. Now, they were deep in the rotten place without reason. His head pounded. He turned to catch Deorwen’s arm.

  And found her already on her feet and stepping from her hiding place. She had seen what the Rooks had done to her brother and, already, the Rooks had noticed her.

  “What is this?” said a Rook.

  “By Heaven, it cannot be! Lady Deorwen?”

  Whatever Deorwen had intended for that moment, Durand threw himself in the way. He would rush the devils, his sword swinging, and see what evil they could work in bloody pieces.

  As Durand lurched from the shadows, the nearest Rook laughed. And, with a deft sweep of his hanging sleeves, the fiend summoned the whole storm of the carrion flock battering down through the broken ceiling. They packed the air in Durand’s path, crashing through the riven sanctuary and striking Durand like a herd of stallions that bowled him backward over mounded skulls.

  He tumbled and righted himself with a clank of his big sword some two dozen paces from the grinning Rooks. It felt like he’d just fallen from his damned horse again. And, as Durand spat maggots and feathers, the fiends took up courtly postures, half bowing in mockery of Durand’s lady.

  “Sons of whores,” Durand snarled.

  “Marvelous!” said the carver Rook.

  “Her brother. Her lover? And the lady herself. Oh yes!” said the other.

  “Were we quite finished with our little bit of magic before we were interrupted, by the way, brother?”

  “I think,” began the carver, “that we were very—”

  As Durand steeled himself to rush the devils once again, a hollow thunk and a shout sounded above their heads. An arrow jutted from Moryn’s naked ribs. There was even a drop of blood. The gleaming point stood as though the shot had come from the wall or the perfect panes of the window. There was neither space nor place to have shot from.

  “I had been ready to say ‘very nearly’ but it seems that we were quite finished, brother.”

  “And thus, Ladyship, we see the merit of sorcery for all that it is decried by skalds and priests!” said the second Rook, peering up.

  “Monsters,” said Deorwen.

  “His Highness would have been little pleased by that unkind dart,” said the carver.

  Durand saw Deorwen’s posture shift—as though she would launch herself on one or other of the Rooks. And, once again, he charged to save her from herself and the fiends.

  This time, the Rooks’ blast caught Durand like a broken dam. His feet left the floor and he tumbled amid wings and claws, kicking in space until he crashed down, not in the crypt, but sprawling in the sanctuary nave. His blade skidded and clanged, and he felt his knees smacked near to breaking.

  “Enough of this, I think,” chattered a Rook.

  “Come now.�
� As he fought to breathe, Durand heard slithering where the great gulf lay in the nave. He set his hand on the great block of some old tomb, struggling to his feet and daring the flocking crows to steal a glimpse through the gap. Shapes moved upon the sliding heap of skulls: the Rooks were climbing—while above, Moryn jerked at his bonds, tied and living still.

  Durand gritted his teeth and tottered on through the churning birds. Deorwen was mad and half-blind and down with the fiends.

  “Hurry,” nagged one Rook to his brother. He had to shout against the storming feathers.

  “Has it ever helped to rush me?”

  Durand found his sword once again, wrenching the blade from the slime. Creation spun with the devil birds and he could scarcely see.

  Between one flock and the next, Durand saw that the two sorcerers had plucked up skulls; their arms were full. Moryn kicked against his bonds, having seen this before. “Carefully,” said the tidier Rook. And while the birds shot past, the Rooks raised the skulls to their lips like oyster shells, tipping treacle-shadows down their throats.

  Durand fought forward like a sailor in a gale.

  He heard the sorcerers’ voices as soul after soul slid past their teeth and they bloated with the effort, their skins shining like drowned men’s. “We must begin,” croaked the carver. Their necks ballooned with dead men, bulging at the blades of their jaws. “Too many. Too much.” Their chests swelled their robes. “Before it is too late!” And with a spasm like vomiting, both men poured out thick souls. Shadows splashed into blowfly droplets; they flew high under the vaults. And the birds flew.

  Durand batted at the hell before his eyes. Could he but reach the devils, a single thrust might have burst them like bladders, but the rising storm of black feathers threw him on his hip and flipped him on his shoulder. The birds moved with new purpose. As the sorcerers conjured, the flocks shot across the nave like pouncing fiends. Under Durand’s hand, a tomb jerked into motion, caught in a mass of claws; and across the sanctuary slabs shrieked under the mauling of the lunatic birds; long stones swung high or slid like shearing blades. The birds stormed, tearing up webs and winding sheets to pluck the dead from their resting places. Under Durand’s knee, a basalt lid pitched up.

  In the depths of this wild storm, Durand knew they were finished. He was caught; it was too late for Moryn. He could only hope that Deorwen had the sense to fly while the devils had their minds elsewhere.

  Talons snatched up corpse after dry corpse, sweeping them from their niches and spinning the flying fragments toward the Rooks.

  A pitching Durand fought the birds and caught glimpses of the Rooks heaving like stricken drunkards in the grip of their spell. He saw corruption flop from their mouths, bursting into flies and maggots. He saw the dead’s dry limbs spinning around the men, caught up by the crows and ravens in a frenzy that saw bones weaving in the air.

  In the midst of it all, a figure took shape. At first, Durand perceived a tall man, stooped in a flapping coat of mail: a sad and half-familiar form. But soon the hail of long bones tangled in the space about it—clattering. Copper wire spun in black beaks, knotting bone to bone. Durand watched as birds and bones plucked up and dismembered that sad man, spinning his limbs and ribs and a multitude of rags until the lonely, wracked figure was torn and lost within a greater frame more massive than a team of oxen. Limbs woven of a hundred limbs bore the monstrous weight. A tail of a thousand bones lashed out the brute’s pain. The helm of the stricken man burst around great tusks and swung over a beard of cobwebs—until, finally, the stooped figure had become the Champion of the Painted Hall: a hundred tombs upturned in a storm that left a monster.

  With a silence like an ebbing sea, the carrion birds alighted. And now, in their breathing stillness, the Champion seethed, rocking like an anchored ship as its iron mask turned—turned toward Durand. And Durand knew the terror of the mouse in the den of a tiger.

  Once more, the Rooks took up courtly postures, now poised comfortably behind their creation. “This is marvelous indeed,” said one. “A fitting doom. We stand on the cusp of destroying the truculent Host of Gireth. And you, Sir Durand, Bull of Gireth, are here at the last to face us. And the Champion of Yrlac.”

  The storm had left Durand alive with a blade in his fist. An army was dying in the streets; Moryn must be freed. To reach the Rooks, he would have to cover sixty feet. And pass the Champion. Durand resolved to let the devils bait him. Let them gloat and threaten. While they talked, he would ravel up the distance to their throats, step by step.

  It was as he moved the first careful inch that he spotted motion beyond the Rooks: a pale shape darted behind one of the pillars near Lord Moryn. Deorwen had left the crypt. Durand staggered the next step not knowing whether to curse or sob.

  “It seems a shame to end it, but we must move on,” said a Rook.

  “Yes, brother. And, in time, this whole struggle will seem little more than the fanfare that announced the arrival of King Ragnal.”

  “My brother has a poet’s soul,” explained one of the stinking necromancers while the rhapsodizing Rook favored his brother with a sly smile. “It is possible, you know. There have been so many.”

  Durand fought not to let a glance or look from him betray Deorwen’s movements. He wondered whether she had recovered her reason; the crows and their cargo of souls had nearly finished her. But now, somewhere, she had found a knife. Durand tottered nearer, limbering Ouen’s sword. It took a great effort of will to fix his gaze only on the sorcerers. The Champion creaked as tight as some engine of war, ready to obliterate him.

  The nearest Rook raised an eyebrow at Durand’s stealthy progress. “But there has been preamble enough, I think. Doom cannot be delayed. A hero must face his end—and in its proper time.” The sorcerer glanced at his monster. “Let that time be now, Champion.” The little man stabbed a finger at Durand.

  Durand’s breath stopped.

  But nothing happened. He was not torn like a child in a bullring. The monster did not swarm over him. It did not move. Instead, thin words hissed from the ruin of its helm. “Free us-s-s-s.”

  The hiss was still in the air when Durand leapt for the sorcerers. Both Rooks sprang back. One of the creatures shielded his bald skull, but—in the instant before Durand could bring his blade down—the other snatched at the air: a crabbed gesture that jerked the Champion to life.

  The thing’s bony fist lashed out like the slap of a catapult’s arm. And Durand was torn from the ground. Yards away, he smacked a pillar hard enough to smack sparks into the darkness. He struck and fell to lie, winded, at the pillar’s foot.

  While he gulped, a Rook was speaking. “Do not tarry when we call, Your Grace. . . .” For the first time in Durand’s hearing, there was anger in the Rook’s voice.

  Who would the Rooks call “Your Grace”? He thought of the tall, sad figure at the heart of the monster.

  “Free me,” breathed the dead giant.

  “These sad entreaties ill-suit your dignity, Your Grace. You are ours. You have been ours since your deathbed. Ours as your bastard ‘grandson’ has been. Now, I direct you to recall the particular nature of your bonds; it seems to have slipped your mind. Recall that what pains are inflicted upon you must also be shared by the child. You are joined in this.”

  The mountain of bones writhed against the floor.

  “Poor mite,” said the second sorcerer.

  “For the sake of the child, Duke Ailnor, accept your doom.”

  And, even gasping for air on the brink of annihilation, Durand remembered tall Duke Ailnor of Yrlac: the sober lord he had met at the Well of Noontide among gray guardians, the son of kings who would hear no talk of rebellion, the old man who had commanded Durand to flee from the hill at Fetch Hollow. Who must have died in the hours thereafter—shortly after his grandson.

  Durand twisted, trying to fill his lungs once more before the Rooks blotted him from Creation. He spotted the sorcerers just in time to see one of the two men twitch his fingers in
the air. That was all: a twitch. But the howl that rose from the old bones as the sorcerer squeezed his taloned little hand stung the dark and sent the thing that had been Ailnor lashing fit to fly to apart.

  The Rook danced at a just-prudent distance and called over his victim’s howl: “If you had done as we asked, we might have stopped with you alone. But you were obstinate and your obstinacy has inspired this twist of poetry: treacherous father and bastard son bound forever.”

  A shrill wheeze wailed over the sanctuary: “A babe in arms,” the monster said.

  “And usurper, Your Grace. There was our master, stricken by betrayal—and you sought to raise his wife’s bastard above him.”

  A second note shot through the old man’s spectral howl: a piping cry that shimmered through the darkness, sounding for all the world like the wail of a child down some forsaken well.

  Durand could not stand to think. Deorwen was climbing with the knife in her teeth, working her way up a carved pillar to her brother’s bonds.

  Durand was hearing Alwen’s baby. It could only be that child. He remembered the cry from a tower room and a locked door in Radomor’s keep. Now, that same voice was somehow trapped in the sorcerers’ abomination.

  “You have been ours since you breathed your death rattle over my brother’s tongue,” one Rook was saying. “Save the child pain. It is time.”

  With his grandchild’s wail still in the air, Ailnor turned to Durand.

  And Durand caught up his sword. Only Moryn mattered. Only Deorwen and her knife; she could still save Gireth, so long as the Rooks didn’t look up and behind them. He would have to dance awhile to hold their attention. With a little luck, he might live long enough to see Moryn free and Deorwen running.

  The Champion sprang, and before Durand could step, the monster had snatched him from his feet and thrown him crashing into an explosion of heaped skulls. Black souls boiled free, flashing in visions of night and darkness as they leapt past his eyelids and fled for their vile masters.

  “Uh! Watch what you do, fool!” groaned a Rook.