by David Keck
Durand was pleased to cause the devils some indigestion. But the Champion crashed down among the rolling bones and a blow sent him sailing once more, his temple brushing the crisscrossed ribs of the aisle vault. He landed at the crushing end of the creature’s throw with bone heaps bursting around him. He heard the Rooks curse, and his sword rebounding from the flagstones, rippling like a ribbon in the air.
This time, the Champion swarmed over him. Lashing with its clattering tail. Spinning him with its talons, the raging monster tossed and smashed him like millstones. And all the while, souls spun through the air, blinding him, choking him. Durand saw Moryn hanging beyond the Rooks. He saw Deorwen—so small and pale—high upon the pillar’s flank. Mad. He saw the great shadow of the Champion now prowling near, shivering with darkness. Coming slow. Weeping. Raging.
Durand hoped the Rooks were choking on the stray souls he’d scattered. He hoped Deorwen had got her knife on Moryn’s bonds.
His fingers slipped round the grip of his sword, and he began the long climb to his feet before the prowling horror—at least he would try to meet death standing. But the thing that had been Ailnor rushed in with a sound like a thunder of dry scrolls—
And stopped a breath from Durand’s chin.
Durand wavered where he stood with his gorge rising, and peeled his eyelids open.
“Champion?” called one of the sorcerers. “What is this now? Finish him.” There was a gulping sound from the man, a belch—choking, Durand prayed. “Do you know how many pots you have upset? Kill him, by God. Now!”
Wings of shadow were folding up around Durand. He couldn’t tell whether they were the Rooks’ doing, or artifacts of the battering his skull had taken. He looked up at the Champion.
The monstrous thing loomed over him like a wall of bones. Its stench filled his throat, but he could see the iron band of the thing’s eyes. “Ailnor,” he said. Maybe it was because he was on the verge of death himself, but Durand could only think of the old man, still there and as trapped as Durand and Moryn or any of them. “Ailnor. Moryn must be freed. His father holds the Host of Gireth to the flame of your son’s armies. If we are destroyed, the kingdom will fall. It will all be like this hell. Rot and madness. From the mountains to the sea.”
Shadows slithered over the Champion like black flames, like Ouen’s sending. Teetering on the edge of death, Durand understood what he saw: here was soul upon soul bound to these dead bones, all stinging to drive the monster on. An eddy in the dark flame drew Durand’s eyes to an unusual shape within woven bones. Beyond the cobweb banners and rusted finery, he saw a tiny bundle swaddled tight in rags. Right at the heart of it all. The great distorted head of the Champion swiveled, staring down upon Durand.
“Please,” said Durand.
Somewhere one of the Rooks spluttered in frustration. “Oh, how tedious!” The sorcerer reeled into view, literally bulging with the load of souls Durand’s throes had scattered. The sorcerer’s hand leapt up, and the soul-fires blazed upon the Champion’s bones, standing like the hackles of a mad dog.
But Ailnor scarcely moved.
Durand’s eyes darted between the swaddled shape at the heart of the monster, and the iron mask that bound Ailnor’s dead face. He remembered finding a bit of bone at the heart of Ouen’s sending, but this wrapped shape was no fragment of some man’s shin.
The necromancer’s bloated face soured, and his fingers curled. The baby’s sob whistled out on the air, and Durand saw the swaddled bundle twist. The soul-shadows blazed now, standing a yard from the monster, sending spines of ice through the slime upon the floor.
Durand closed his eyes, setting the brittle points of his teeth together.
But Ailnor spoke: “Not for blood. Not for one child only.”
The bearing of the old duke transformed the monstrous shape, the frame of bones rising despite the blaze of souls on its kindling limbs. Durand saw the blood of kings in the distorted figure. And the slot of the ruined visor stared level into Durand’s eyes. The monster’s arms began to open, the baby screamed in the midst of the black flame. Bones popped like firewood in an agony beyond endurance.
Meanwhile, the swollen sorcerers struggled with their creation, flies darting loose with every grunt. Durand wondered how many dead men one sorcerer could contain. He wondered how many had been bound up in the spell that gave life to the Champion.
Durand looked up at the old duke’s mask. He saw the swaddled child. And he drove his sword home.
IN THE HIGH passes beyond Durand’s native hall, there were winter days when whole white mountainsides might slump from their stark heights to fill Creation with ice and thunder. At the touch of some traveler’s staff, a whole village might vanish but for fragments to be found in the moons of springtide.
The touch of Durand’s blade was like such a traveler’s staff.
In the moment when his point found the Champion’s swaddled heart, the whole of Creation came down.
Souls beyond number burst from their bonds while the bones of dry generations flew like a hundred storms of arrows, rattling from the ceilings of the old sanctuary.
The hellish explosion threw Durand flat and battered him into some dead man’s tomb. As he scrambled in that stone socket, dark shapes raked the air over his head. He heard screams fit to stiffen the blood. And then the place was silent.
Deorwen had been out there.
He burst from his grizzly shelter into a soft rain of feathers. Every candle was out. Every heap of bones, upturned.
He found the broken shape of the old duke at the heart of the destruction. The withered form of the old man clutched the broken bundle to his hollow chest. Both figures were as dead as the winter moons should have left them and—
Durand hoped—gone to the Gates of Heaven.
Something moved beyond the gray wreck of the old man. Still weak, Durand stole through drifted feathers to find a splayed shape of blue-gray flesh. As he approached the broken thing, he slowly made out its shape: here were cocked arms, here bent legs. Between these features, however, Durand found flesh, both white and blue. One of the Rooks had been blown open to his belt and laid bare to his ribs and chine. Small bones crunched under Durand’s feet. Already, worms teemed upon the carcass.
He left the thing and called, “Deorwen?” stalking over crackling bones to the space beyond the high altar where Moryn had been hung.
A cool wind thick with pitch and timber stirred the feathered wreckage. Durand imagined the girl thrown from the pillar and crashing down. But the first motion he saw was a small dark bird.
“You are not one of ours,” wheezed a voice.
Durand rounded a pillar to find the second Rook sprawled upon his back and torn as though a pack of dogs had caught him, his fingers chalk white against the blue loops of his bowels. The bird bounced near his pale skull. It was a starling, jittering and iridescent.
The sorcerer seemed not to see Durand at all.
“How long have you been among our flocks, looking on, eh?” The Rook spoke to the bird. “Are you one from our Whisperer? To see how we progressed?” The starling hopped, its brown eyes flickering like flint chips, as the Rook reached vaguely toward it with one bloody hand. “We’d been expecting . . . we’d expected to hear more. We had come so far—” A fit interrupted the sorcerer. His dark eyes rolled and his tongue scrabbled at his lips.
Already, pale worms were crawling over him. Thick clots teemed. “Ah well,” he said, and the trailing wheeze of his final breath spluttered out as the first of the worms went in.
Durand made the Eye of Heaven and shook his head.
A few moments later, he found Moryn in a heap beyond the altar. The impossible arrow still jutted from the man’s bare shoulder, but Durand ducked close enough to see that the man’s lungs still labored. There was no sign of Deorwen. Through the shattered east window above, Durand could hear the clangor of the fight in the streets. He smelled the fires. Men were dying every heartbeat, and he’d found Moryn.
&nbs
p; He turned back into the darkness, shouting, “Deorwen!” desperate.
His voice rang down the length of a silent sanctuary where black feathers still sifted down. The place needed priests—Patriarchs. Legions of Holy Ghosts. And somewhere in the midst of it all was Deorwen, unable to answer him. Durand could hardly breathe with the dread of losing her.
“Deorwen?”
He hunted frantically among the columns on either side of the altar, and then his glance fell upon the chasm in the sanctuary floor only a few paces farther on.
“Hells,” Durand said, and hurried over crackling bones to the stairs. He left Moryn and the clash of the battle behind.
At first, the stairs were blocked; Durand had to heave the lids of a dozen tombs aside to scramble down. Finally, he reached the putrid dark. Without even the sickly candlelight, he could only feel his way between the pillars by memory.
He prayed. He named every Power in Heaven, begging that he not be parted from Deorwen. That she was somewhere in the dark, safe. That he would not lose her.
It was all so silent as he hunted through the blackness that the sound of the battle seemed to follow him—a nagging whisper haunting him as he fumbled deeper through that charnel ruin. But he could not leave her even as he felt the time rushing away from him.
Finally, on a third or fourth passage through the dark pit, he heard the whispered edge of faint breathing. The sound caught him like the touch of lightning. “Deorwen?” he called, and he clawed his way to a place under the high altar. Skin and linen glowed against black feathers, and Durand skidded to the woman’s side on his knees.
“They’re dead,” he said. “The Rooks. And the Champion. Moryn—your brother—he’s alive. Deorwen?”
He couldn’t hear the breathing. “Aw, no. No, no.”
He searched the girl for obvious wounds. He lifted the girl’s head, looking down on her eyelids, but it did no good.
He bent close enough to kiss her, even as smeared with death as he was. He had to feel her breath; he had to know. He had seen plenty of men knocked from consciousness, and knew that it might mean anything.
“Host of Heaven, don’t take her from me. Let her be with me.” He was not sure she was breathing.
“Deorwen? I am begging,” he whispered.
The girl’s eyes fluttered open. “Uh.”
“Deorwen? Oh, God.” With a grip that had killed a dozen men, he squeezed her for being alive. And the touch of her stirring in his arms overwhelmed every oath he’d taken, pitching him into great, deep, gulping kisses that forgot everything in Creation but the girl and the feel of her living body in his hands and the traitor’s joy in his racing blood.
FINALLY, DEORWEN HAD to convince him to let her go. “They are gone,” she said. “The Lost. The birds.”
“Yes.” That much, at least, was true.
When he crashed into the stables, sweating and shaking with strain, he found a bony gray nag that kicked for the ceiling at the death-house stink suddenly in her stall. But Durand couldn’t carry Deorwen and her brother both, and he gave the horse no choice.
“And now the ramparts again,” murmured Deorwen. Durand lifted her—light as a rabbit—behind his saddle and hauled her gaunt brother over the horse’s withers.
“Your father must see his son,” said Durand, and he spurred the horse into the courtyard. The last man who’d passed this way was Radomor himself, but Durand was almost drunk with elation.
As the citadel gates swung into sight, Deorwen caught hold of Durand’s tunic. “What do you mean to do?” She was waking up as he drove for mighty grates of oak and iron and stone turrets higher than the walls. “They’ll never open!”
But Durand’s blood sang. He kicked the gray to greater speed. And saw the gatekeepers boggle at a rider coming from the citadel. He pictured himself stained and hunched and black and scarred—all in rags and storming from the sorcerers’ citadel. A few shards of teeth glinting, the flash of eyes. “Durand!” Deorwen demanded, but Durand only gritted his broken teeth and hoped the whoresons would think “devil” or “messenger” and get out of his way.
The men scrambled as the stolen gray sparked the cobbles and they careened for the portcullis. But the gates flew wide, and as they plunged into the empty alleys beyond, Durand thanked his creator.
They stormed another gate that same way, and then the smoke was thick in the streets and they were bearing down on the ramparts where Gireth and Yrlac fought for the wall.
He swung the gray toward what should have been a mighty gatehouse, shut fast against an army and packed with soldiers. What he found, however, was a gate that gaped wide—like the mouth of a forge packed with the black shapes of Radomor’s men. The Duke of Yrlac had thrown the doors open and leapt into his own blazing trap.
Durand blinked at the smoke as the nag danced. Only in these fires would they find Severin of Mornaway. Somehow he must crash through the rear of Radomor’s army and win through to Mornaway’s lines. His heart hammered. He pictured a wild leap. The horse driving. Hundreds of men, startled—maybe. He tightened his grip and squared the skittish gray, ready to spur for the gates.
But caught him.
“Durand! What are you thinking?” she demanded. “I think you’ve done enough plotting for one day. Get down.”
Durand boggled, pointing through the gates. “Your father’s through there. If he sees his son, all of this is finished.”
“That’s Radomor’s army you’re waving at. Get down, damn you.” She caught his sleeve and, leaping down herself, hauled him staggering from the saddle.
“That’s not the way,” said Deorwen.
Durand blinked and pulled Moryn from the gray’s withers while the man groaned his agony. “Damn me,” Moryn said and tried to get his feet under him. “I know you from somewhere.” He turned the great baffled hollows of his eyes upon Durand’s face. “What is this nightmare? What is my sister—?”
But there was no time to chat, not twenty paces from an army where any of half a thousand men might glance and wonder at the strange trio in ragged linens.
“Brother,” said Deorwen. “Durand must carry you. Our father’s spilling half the blood of Gireth for your sake. We must finish it.”
“God. The fool,” Moryn said. “Damn him.”
But Deorwen didn’t wait to listen. She shot for the battlements—darting near the throng in the gates and scampering the steps for a look over the top.
“Durand. Get me to my father,” said Moryn. And Durand followed, lifting and dragging Moryn past the backs of an army. His eyes pulsed with stars. Finally, he joined Deorwen in an embrasure where they could peer into the blazing oven of the street below. Durand’s eyes were drawn to the battle at the gatehouse. A few dozen paces down the parapet, he could stand on the gatehouse, right on the heads of two armies. “Lamoric’s men will see us up there.”
“There are soldiers between—” Deorwen began, but Durand was off.
He heaved the Lord of Mornaway across his hitched shoulders, and staggered down the parapet. “Are you mad?” Moryn grunted. But Durand could not even grunt for fear of collapsing, and every instant down below was snatching lives away while they could stop it all. Durand rushed up against one of Yrlac’s men, bowling the devil tumbling into the fires. A second soldier fell the same way—no one expected to meet an enemy on the wall. “What will this achieve?” Moryn demanded.
“Duke Severin must know you’re free or there’s been no point prying you from the sanctuary. I left friends in those fires.”
Thousands surged in the press at the gates. Durand strained in the smoke. Pain was breaking him down. He must catch someone’s eye soon—without getting himself shot in the process. As he peered down and staggered nearer to the fight, he spotted the dark hair of a man in red and white and a sword sparking in the firelight. The glimpse touched him like a tongue of lightning. Here was Lamoric himself. The man seemed hard-pressed by some champion of the enemy. Durand wanted to leap the distance. He had to stop
the battle.
“Durand, no!” said Deorwen, but Durand was already shouting. With luck, he might be able to heave the man down onto friendly hands. He couldn’t be sure where Gireth ended and Yrlac began. “I have him! Lord Moryn is free!” ignoring a gasp from Moryn to wrestle the man above the parapet. “By the King of Heaven, I have Moryn!” But not a soul looked up from the deadly work in the street.
On the gatehouse itself, however, men heard him. In an instant, three dozen of Radomor’s wolves had spun in a flash of eyes and blades and teeth.
“Hells,” said Durand.
As Durand ran, half the gatehouse poured down on his heels. He blundered past a fallen guardsman and flinched under flights of Gireth arrows, catching Deorwen’s hand and pulling her into motion. He had to get her free.
A soldier appeared in their way, swinging a heavy spear, and all Durand could do was leap from the walk up to the high merlons of the parapet, hauling Deorwen in long strides over fire and empty space with a premonition of arrowheads pricking at his back. And he knew he was running away from every chance of turning the fight.
Worse yet, he could not run fast enough with a man on his neck. They would have Deorwen in an instant. He could feel the blades of a dozen soldiers swinging nearer. Twenty more soldiers vaulted the steps ahead.
“There,” grunted Moryn. “The banner!”
Through flames and shadow, Durand glimpsed the men of Mornaway hunkered in solemn lines, Mornaway’s blue diamonds flapping in the furnace—out of reach. And after days and hours of fighting, Durand stopped. Despite a hundred wild victories, the string of improbabilities was at its end.
Then he felt a tug from Deorwen’s hand.
They had only heartbeats.
She looked him squarely in the eyes, and Durand let Moryn’s feet to the ground. “It’s better,” said Moryn.
And the three leapt into the flames, vanishing from the battlements just as the charging men of Yrlac crashed together behind them.
THERE WAS A flying moment of flame and distant screams.
Then Durand’s heel struck some joist or truss high in a burning building. He managed a wild running step before the impetus of his fall pitched him into a breakneck somersault. Curtains of flame swung up around him and beams snapped at the touch of his hands.