by David Keck
When the plunge met its crushing end, Durand was left to gulp at the bottom of an inferno. He blinked up into the rippling complexity of flame where timbers twisted like the wicks of candles.
In another instant, he would have died. But a tug at his hand brought him to his senses. Deorwen. And, if she was alive, he could not lie down. He heaved with the last of his strength, feeling the heat peel away as he pulled them all into the street.
And straight into kettle-helms and the backs of armored men. This was the army of Mornaway, and every soldier twitched back from Durand as if he were a fiend who’d burst from the earth.
“Get me up,” said Moryn. “By Heaven, get me on my feet.”
Durand wrenched Moryn upright. Something devilish had happened to the man’s shoulder, but he stepped among the soldiers. Horror and bewilderment warred in the men’s expressions. Durand struggled to wedge himself between Deorwen and the uneasy mob. None of this was safe. “This is Lord Moryn,” he said. He could see the pack of baffled soldiers cocking weapons. He caught one man’s tunic. “Let us—” and a gauntlet knocked spikes through his jaw.
Durand tore the man down, snatching a mace from the fool’s hand before he fell. The mob erupted. With a grunt, Durand had Moryn’s weight on his good shoulder and the mace was flying. It skipped from helmet and shoulder, cracking collarbones and crumpling helmets. He used its spikes like claws to climb. He drove, bulling men and boys aside with Deorwen lost behind him as he bludgeoned anyone who wouldn’t move. “Moryn! Moryn!” he screamed, fighting against the thrashing undertow as he hauled the heir of Mornaway into the mass of his kinsmen. Flesh and bone slid under his soles.
He would maul every knight of Mornaway if it would get him to their bloody duke.
Finally, a flash of blue diamonds rippled above the heaving line: the duke’s standard. Durand had almost reached the man. He swatted one man down and found himself staring into the grief and despair of old Duke Severin of Mornaway himself. The frail duke sent an unthinking blow whistling from his tears, but Durand parried, roaring Moryn’s name loud enough to open the duke’s eyes. At first, revulsion wavered over old Mornaway’s hollow features. Durand couldn’t know what the man thought or saw.
“Father!” said Moryn and tore himself free from Durand to stand, gaunt and bloody, before his father. Apprehension dawned on the old man’s ravaged face, and in that instant among those grim soldiers, every bond that held Mornaway’s host in Ferangore flew apart.
RADOMOR WAS NO fool: he knew that a reluctant ally needed watching. And so, to lend his borrowed host teeth and backbone, the Duke of Yrlac had set fierce squadrons of his own men in the van and rearguard of Mornaway’s host. Now, the men of Mornaway unleashed their rage and shame on these startled men, and blood flew.
Durand launched himself like a thing of teeth and talons. He couldn’t think, or he would stop or die. Against the gates, the battle was slaughtering Gireth, and so Durand tore into Radomor’s men like a true savage, armored in rags. He opened a path with cruelty, smashing throats and hammering joints and faces. He stole shields where he could, fighting under one man’s colors and then the next as wood and leather split before the driving battalion. He hardly recognized the attempts of knights to yield. He swung from agony, sure the time was slipping from them.
From the battlements, a man might have seen the shape of the fighting, but in the midst of it, there was nothing but smoke and the press of screaming faces. There was a thumb in his eye and a blade slick against his ribs. But somewhere ahead, Berchard and Guthred and Lamoric and all of the Knights of the Painted Hall were at the heart of the mauling. Durand could do nothing but claw onward.
Finally, they tore through the last of Radomor’s vanguard and the battle seemed to fly apart. Startled and overwhelmed, the mercenaries under Radomor’s leopard blazon scattered before the gateway. And soon, all that remained of the army of Yrlac was a bloody ring of Radomor’s fiercest liegemen hunkered under in the very teeth of the gates.
And the sound of one last scuffle.
Durand tottered out alone between the armies. By some unspoken signal, the combined hosts of Gireth and Mornaway had stopped. The ground was slick under Durand’s bare feet and the fires snapped among the rooftops. Before him, the faces of Yrlac’s last knights shone with sweat and soot and blood—and from beyond their ring, Durand heard the clang and stamp of the last duel in that tortured city.
He saw the men he knew, exhausted among the soldiers of Gireth: Guthred, Berchard, even Coensar. All of his comrades; all of the men he’d fought with—all but one.
Through the screen of surcoats and armored limbs, he saw two figures circling under the gates. He saw snatches of Gireth’s crimson and Yrlac’s green. Here were Lamoric and Radomor, fighting on.
“God,” Durand said. Nothing was finished; Lamoric was still trapped with the monster, Radomor.
Durand shook the cobwebs from his skull and threw himself upon the heavy ring of Radomor’s last knights. He swung his stolen mace, beating shields and shoulders.
But they sent him staggering back. And not one man of Lamoric’s host joined his attack.
Durand saw glimpses of Lamoric. The young lord leapt and scrambled as the hunched duke lashed with his blade, his beard jutting round a purple scowl.
Durand looked into the faces of Lamoric’s army. Their eyes glittered. Weapons hung in slack fingers. He gaped in astonishment, in fury. Someone was saying, “Durand.” But Durand would not hear, and he launched himself once more at the barricade of Radomor’s soldiers.
Beyond reach, he saw Lamoric’s shield twitch and spin like a curl of parchment under the mighty strokes of Radomor’s blade. The powerful duke threw himself into every attack, sometimes spinning and leaping like a fairground tumbler, carving every hope of attack and escape from Lamoric’s world. Durand threw men aside.
After a hundred narrow escapes, Lamoric staggered, his sword wavering high just as the circle broke under Durand’s fists.
Durand saw Radomor lunge inches beyond his fingers—only an instant too late.
And in that instant, the duke shot a straight and sudden blow through Lamoric of Gireth. The broad point punched through mail and surcoat to stand in the fabric between Lamoric’s shoulders right before Durand’s eyes and had Lamoric’s own blade wavering over their heads.
Creation had stopped and the blade hung there, glittering in the flames.
Durand had been too late only by heartbeats. He’d climbed the city, he’d swum its wells, he’d fought the devils in its churches, but he’d been too late—too late by moments.
Hands caught at Durand’s tunic. There were blows. But he thought only of Deorwen in his arms and how he’d stopped to hold her while the army burned in the street and the man who’d brought him from starvation fought for his life. Durand had prayed to have her, and now Lamoric was dead.
Back in the street, Radomor crouched with both fists still on the skewering blade. Lamoric’s sword wobbled over his head, trembling to the last beats of his heart. Lamoric could have seen no friend.
But as he tottered there on Radomor’s blade with his last strength giving way, a final spark of resolve caught light in him. Before Durand could blink, the man’s slack fingers clamped tight on his sword, and in a single mighty spasm, the blade flashed down.
Radomor was without defense. What could he do with his sword trapped?
Blood sprang from the steel, and the Duke of Yrlac pitched. The two lords were falling together. A piggish eye widened in astonishment, seeing God knew what. Lamoric swung the gleaming edge a second time, but it did not matter. Radomor of Yrlac and Lamoric of Gireth fell to the bloody street.
NOW, RADOMOR’S MEN relented. Durand was freed to skid to Lamoric’s side and to throw the duke’s still-heaving corpse from his master’s body.
“Lamoric! Lamoric!”
For an instant, the young lord’s eyes only drifted darkly, but then they snapped around, and the man managed a tight smile. “Durand!�
�� he marveled, grunting the name.
“Aye, Lordship. God. I tried to reach you. Moryn is free. Deorwen lives. This war is finished. I—”
“—You saw. You saw. You must have!”
Durand wrestled with the man’s surcoat, thinking that he should shut up and do something.
“You saw?” Lamoric gasped, trying to catch Durand’s wrists.
“I did,” Durand admitted. He probed the gash in the iron mail.
“I could have had him that first day.”
Bright blood welled from the wound, filling the folds of his surcoat. Radomor’s blade had caught one of the vessels in the man’s guts. Durand pressed his hands into the mess.
“I could have had him,” Lamoric repeated, wincing.
Durand pressed, doubling over. “I’m certain.”
“While the cities stood. And all—” he winced. “And all the banners were flying.”
The hopeless gush came warm over Durand’s wrists, and Durand shut his eyes. He wondered how much death a man could stand.
He felt Lamoric’s hand bat at his jaw. Then the man’s bloody gauntlet dropped. His face was white and still as wax and his breath rattled out into the empty air above Ferangore, safe now from Rooks and ravens.
There was not a sound in that city of armies but the crackling of fires.
29. Homecoming
Among the prisoners, the barons of Gireth could find no greater lord than a red-haired youth called Leovere of Penseval to offer the surrender of Radomor’s followers. Penseval had fought in the last knot of Radomor’s liegemen, standing in the ring that had kept Durand from Lamoric’s side.
Before the man could stammer submission, Durand pushed into the mob and joined the silent men already gathering the dead—keeping far from those who knew him as the smoke of the day gave way to the chill darkness of the night. He had no wish to think or speak. And he could not see Deorwen. Not then.
The gruesome drudgery of the work pushed Durand beyond thought and pain and exhaustion. Through the evening, he dragged cold, slack men beyond the walls. And, in the darkness thereafter, he fumbled at the rigid absurdity of stiffened limbs.
Durand spoke to no one. Men found barrows and stretchers, but mostly they carted the dead by ankles and armpits, shuffling without words through gates and into the dark.
Badan had died. Durand learned that as he dragged another armored man through the gates. Shuffling backward past a scrap of torchlight, he saw a gleam of bald forehead and lank red hair hanging behind. Durand wasn’t sure which of them felt more numb as he brought the body to lie among the others.
For much of that night, he was scarcely more than hands and eyes.
AT DAWN, A hundred carts waited in the clay below the city gates. It seemed that the dead were not to be left behind, and so Mornaway’s men had ransacked a hundred leagues and pillaged every farmer’s cart. Durand and the rest of the mute laborers had simply turned to the task of sliding their chill comrades high between cart rails.
And when Durand could find no more bodies waiting on the field, he climbed aboard the cart where he’d laid his last corpse—thankfully, there was room on the bench beside the driver. Rain fell and the carts labored away from Ferangore in a column that seemed to straggle leagues along the River Rushes. Oblivion snatched at Durand as he rocked beside the driver. The horse’s head nodded under the jumbled tomb of the lurching cart before them.
AS THE KNIGHTS of Ash intoned the Eventide, the column curled into a broad basin by the Rushes. Durand’s driver slipped down without a word and freed his horse to crop the sparse valley. Already, men had kindled fires against the grass some distance from the gray muddle of carts.
Durand watched men settle around those fires—feeling no great longing to join them as the darkness settled quick and cold and dim expanses stretched on every side. Mornaway’s men trundled barrels from their supply wagons and the serving men had pots and tents ready. The camp looked like an island of color and firelight in the gloom.
Where Durand stood, peeping like a stranger at a window, he could see the long shadows thrown by the men at the fires. And a familiar movement in the dark where trenches and potholes brimmed with the living shadows of the Lost. The things shivered to life all around, opening like midnight flowers into Creation and swimming over the turf to sniff for blood and life. It had Durand thinking of the dead behind him.
And so, Durand flinched when a voice called his name. But this was not some utterance from the Otherworld. Not far down the row of charnal carts, Deorwen hurried from the firelight; she had slipped from her family. She looked no taller than a child as she struggled through the wet grass.
“Where’ve you been?”
Durand avoided her touch. “Here.” He couldn’t stand to have her so close, and now she hugged herself tight—cold and alone only a step away. He held his ground.
“My father, he has been walking,” she said. “All these leagues since Ferangore. He’s cropped his hair with a dagger’s blade and will wear neither shoes nor mantle. ‘Not a man of Gireth is to lie under the sod of Yrlac,’ he has said. And now we must cart the bodies. There is ice in the ruts until noon and he has seen more than sixty winters, Durand.”
Durand only nodded, a coward among the shadows.
But Deorwen stepped close and cornered him against the cart. “I won’t ask why you’ve hidden yourself here with the dead any more than I’ll ask my father why he works so hard to join them in the ground. I will not do these things, but neither will I pretend that you are a thousand leagues from me. Not now.”
What another heartbeat might have brought, Durand would never know, for another figure had left the firelight and come marching toward them, calling out. Durand thought he heard the girl’s name.
But she grabbed his cloak. “Durand. Lamoric is gone. My father is mad with the shame of his treasons. Please.”
But before she could say more, their new guest called out, loud and clear: “Deorwen!” The fellow had come close enough now that Durand could see the hitched way the man walked and how he clutched a long cloak at his throat with one hand. “Deorwen? By Heaven, where are you, sister?” Here was Moryn, walking despite his wounds.
“Moryn! What are you doing?” said Deorwen.
The man winced. Even in the gloom, Durand could see the man’s eyes shining with fever. “I realized you’d gone, sister. Walked off. This is no safe place.” Around him, the shadows were climbing the carts. “An armed camp at any time. And this.”
While Moryn had the girl’s attention, Durand stepped free, agreeing, “Aye. And the fires will be warmer than here, I’m sure. And hot food before long. His Lordship looks as though he’ll need a shoulder to get back. This is no place for any of us.”
And instead of offering his help, Durand left the girl standing there with her brother. She couldn’t follow, not with Moryn lame and feverish. Not her.
Durand hobbled through the death-carts toward an empty sweep of river. Here and there, he saw old Conran’s Holy Ghosts standing vigil, looking lonely as candles in their clean white gear.
Lamoric had deserved a better liegeman: one who could leave his master’s wife alone and keep the oaths he’d spoken. But, instead, Lamoric had been left with Durand Col who couldn’t master his heart, who delayed with lives waiting in fire and siege.
As he put the high walls of the carts behind him, he noticed the sky. Last Twilight glowed above a black valley, and the clouds were strange. They soared like a milky ceiling of ice—a remote, giant’s Heaven. And amid these strange clouds, Durand perceived great movements: folds that crossed the Heavens, curling into mighty eddies, distinct in their pearl edges and as clear and colossal. They hung in the distant north, two enormous curls, each like an upturned mountain.
And Durand had nearly stumbled into Conran. “The king makes war and we, his servants, are far from him.” The man’s voice was scarcely human; a cartload of dead men could have breathed on Durand’s neck. Now, the ancient giant’s single eye
held the light of those northern clouds and did not turn as Durand stopped.
In that valley at that moment, the king seemed very far away. “His brother,” Durand recalled: Prince Eodan of Windhover. Lord of the wood where their father, Carondas, had died.
“Eodan is nearly the king’s match in pride.” The man’s voice was like the creak of an oak. “He declares his lands free of his brother’s rule, free of Errest the Old. And here we are.”
Durand peered at the hanging mountains. They might have been stone or glass, they were so clear before his eyes—north, over the forests of Windhover. Durand’s answer was little more than a whisper. “What could you do if you were there with so few men to turn a great battle?”
“Our king sent my brethren and I from his side. He clutches fools and flatterers close and wages war upon his brother where his royal father died.”
At this, a light flashed—a light flickering beyond the clouds. But this was not a thing of the skies alone.
This was nearer at hand; Creation itself twitched.
And in the shocked moment afterward, Durand heard something on the move over Yrlac: a breeze careered through the land like the ghost of horses, sweeping down the Rushes to batter the light of a hundred fires against the valley floor.
“Another high sanctuary!” hissed giant Conran. “By the sea.” And there was a strange scent of salt air on the wind. Salt and fire. “It can only be Evensands. And now there is only the king’s high sanctuary in the heart of Eldinor.” Tendons leapt in the man’s neck. All around, it seemed that the shadows bulged. “And here,” he said, “look what watches. Soon they will be free.”
Where Durand had not noticed a tangle of blackthorns near the bank, now he saw crabbed figures with needle claws. The Lost moved in the long grass. And on the crest of the far valley, a figure as tall as a sanctuary tower slipped back into hiding.