The other two recognized that truth as he did, and he looked from Durande's grave face to Thomas's contorted one, his own hardening to stone.
'Lord Hélie, my liege, let me defend you!' Thomas demanded hoarsely, reaching out a shaking hand.
'How dare I trust you again?' he asked bleakly.
'Hélie, you do not believe—dear Saviour—Hélie, I am your kinsman!'
'Did you forget that, or remember it too well?'
'Remember?' he repeated in bewilderment, and then understanding threw him back against the damp, mossy wall, under the guttering torch that reflected redly from his staring eyes. Twice he opened his lips and dumbly closed them, before he could achieve speech.
'As God is my witness,' he whispered helplessly, 'I never dreamed—never desired—never even thought to succeed you, Lord Hélie! You—you cannot—'
Hélie considered him, and knew his anguish was unfeigned. He spoke the truth. The bitter anger slackened its hold, and the sword's weight tugged at his hand, sinking until its point grated on stone. Durande nodded once. He extended the hilt to Thomas, who received it like a holy relic, lowering his eyes in shamed gratitude.
'My thanks,' he murmured, and descended a step, taking up the post he would not quit while his hand could lift the blade. After a moment he glanced over his shoulder, almost shyly. 'My lord, I—I—'
'Did but set your judgement before mine,' Hélie finished with a wintry smile. He peered past Thomas's shoulder, but the witches still held off. Rohese had been the heart of them. Dark shadows flitted indistinctly about the largest gap, occasionally revealed by the flashes. Those came fainter and fewer; the storm had exhausted its fury. Even the hammering rain had subsided to a steady downpour. He heard a mutter of argument. They waited tensely for the inevitable attack. Durande cleared the litter of dead sticks and jackdaws' nests from under their feet, heaping it out of their way on the narrow landing above. Returning, she inspected her husband's hurts stern-faced, but they were all superficial except his broken hand, and she had too much sense to meddle with that when he needed all his remaining strength unshaken.
'Gino?' she asked flatly, knowing already.
‘Dead.’
Thomas cleared his throat uncertainly. ‘What did you do with Hermeline, my lord?’
‘Sent the little fool safely home with scorched ears. You followed her?’
‘My mind misgave me—and you bade me watch her,’ Thomas growled without turning his head, the familiar note of grievance in his voice so that Hélie's lips twitched involuntarily. ‘You running loose at odds with all—I was watching the storm in the bailey when Lady Hermeline and that wench climbed over the wall. And I reckoned to rouse the guard would make the devil's to-do and worse scandal, so I followed. Lost them in the dark. Then I came on that hut in the thicket.' He glanced over his shoulder, his voice slowing in reluctance but dogged. ‘I ask your pardon, Lord Hélie, and—and I am mortally sorry about your Italian—'
The witches came in a scurry and clatter of swift feet over the cobbles, the masked man clopping at their head. The trident's points glinted at the stair-foot, probing up; the blank yellow eyes glinted beyond them, and the curving back-sweep of horns. Despite his resolution Thomas flinched. Then he swore a scorching oath and smote savagely. The sword clanged with hearty goodwill at the trident's head, dashing it against the newel so that sparks leaped. Faces shifted pallidly beyond the goat-mask and shining leather shoulders. A spear's point wavered under his arm and jerked back.
The trident was a wretched weapon, over-long in the shaft for such cramped scuffling, ill-balanced and clumsy. Oliver de Collingford jabbed and poked, and behind him the spearman prodded hopefully at every glimpse of Thomas's person, but Thomas had every advantage of position. The torch, above him and to his right, lit the first turn of the stair to reveal every move his adversaries made. He suddenly dropped a couple of steps and hacked shrewdly at the arm behind the trident, but it was too long for his sword to reach home. The masked man skipped back. Stones clattered against the newel and rebounded from the wall, but Thomas had sprung back unharmed, uttering a bark of mirthless laughter. Hélie, clenching his left hand on his dagger, would have given Trevaine itself for a sound right hand and a sword to fill it, but he ungrudgingly acknowledged that Thomas was making better use of his blade than he could have done himself. He leaned tensely forward, following every orange-gold flash of its steel, and his wife whom another man defended stood by his shoulder.
The masked man drew back, his breathing harsh as tearing cloth in the hush. Thomas wiped his sleeve across his brow and waited. A couple of spears tentatively poked up, and more stones banged against wall or newel and rattled back down the stair. Thomas took half a dozen steps in one bound, his left hand snatching at a spear-shaft, the sword slashing above it. A horrible yell filled the stairway, and he skipped calmly back, fending off the trident's lunge with contemptuous ease, and tossed the spear to Durande's extended hand. The yell broke to a wail that skirled above the scuffle of feet, the spatter of curses and crash of stones. A vengeful rush came at them. The sword clanged, beating back the opposing points. A man lunged under the engaged blades and up by the wall, a long knife swinging up and in. Durande kicked him in the face. He tumbled backwards, fouling his confederates' weapons, and Thomas leaped after him and drove home into a hairy throat. Blood jetted over the steps. Thomas dodged back from another volley of cobbles. The wailing had ended, but women were screeching like scalded cats. They heard a bumping and slithering as bodies were dragged clear.
In the respite Durande, highest on the stair, flung up her head, the light red on her listening face. 'I heard a horse whinny!'
‘Ours, I reckon,' Hélie answered flatly, and she nodded composedly. It had not been hope; none of them had any. They would last just as long as Thomas could hold the stair, and take what witches they might to attend their dying. 'Unless Sir Ranulf sends to investigate those fire-arrows,' he murmured almost to himself, and then shook his head; fire-arrows could be no new portent, and all the neighbourhood must be well-schooled against meddling with the power of darkness these many years.
Durande mounted a couple of steps higher to peer through the ivy-masked arrow-slit that lighted the stair in daytime, moving from the torchlight to become part of the darkness. Hélie gazed anxiously after her, bitter rage and remorse filling him that he had brought them all to this wretched and unworthy end by his folly. Then the trident’s triple prongs came thrusting up close to the newel, seeking Thomas’s legs. He grinned direfully and waited, the red streaks drying on his blade, for the masked man to venture further. Two spearheads advanced cautiously beside it, glinting a brighter red as the torch guttered. The ale-wife's harsh voice snarled curses. The bitches of this pack were fiercer than the dogs.
Hélie heard a slight scuffle above him. Durande cried out, and as he whirled her spearhead glimmered dimly, thrusting up. A triumphant howl rang down, and the mass of sticks and debris crackled under trampling feet. Durande backed a step, stabbing desperately upwards, as other spears jabbed round the newel, trapping them for the kill, and a wild yell of gloating laughter filled the dark hollow.
Without conscious thought Hélie sprang for the torch, dropping the dagger to grab it from the bracket. He lunged up, shouldering Durande aside, and the flame flared on grinning greasy faces, steel points and gripping hands, glistened on sodden cloth and shaggy wet hair crowding down from the little landing. He thrust the spluttering torch deep into the dry rubbish that cumbered them knee-deep. It blazed instantly into a roaring rage that leaped roof-high in that narrow furnace-shaft. He had one brief glimpse of vengeful glee smitten to panic terror before the flames obliterated it, and turned his back on the appalling screams and struggles at a yell from below.
Thomas had glanced up for one disastrous moment. Gytha’s spear was through his calf, and as Hélie leaped to him he fell outward from the newel’s protection. His elbow struck the step and the sword spun from his grip. The masked man squal
led in triumph and swooped to snatch it up. The ale-wife ripped her spear free and swung it back to pin him to the stone.
Hélie went berserk. He leaped over his cousin’s squirming body and onto them, striking up the trident with his right arm and never feeling the pain of it, beating at the goat-mask with the flaring torch. Light and darkness whirled crazily in huge black and orange circles. The witch lunged at him, and he sent her spinning, scorched and screaming, with one slash of his fearful weapon. Smoke filled his nostrils, the spurting flame half-blinded him, his shout of ‘Durande!’ reverberated in the stair and drew an answering yell from above. His weight and fury drove Oliver de Collingford down and back, reeling with his goat-mask singed and smouldering, down to the stair-foot and the shrieking rabble in the ruined undercroft. He did not hear Thomas shouting for him to stay, but drove on, naked and shining, laying about him with his spitting fiery flail. The masked man, his goat-beard alight and shrivelling, recoiled snarling to clear his trident for a thrust. Hands clawed at Hélie's arms, snatched at the tight-gripped torch, but he bellowed defiance, throwing them off as a baited bull hurls off the dogs.
A new shout answered his above the tumult, and the torchlight glanced ruddily on mail and helmets as armed men stormed into the undercroft. A woman screamed. The grappling hands loosed him so abruptly that he staggered. The witches wavered away from their masked Master. The newcomers checked, crying out in horror and fear to see the Lord of Hell manifest in hooves, horns and tail. He swung up the trident to plunge it into Hélie’s belly. A running man split the wavering throng and rammed a sword through his back. The red point jumped out of his leather tunic. The trident clattered sideways, its shaft striking Hélie's shoulder, and as hands gripped him from behind and hauled him back, the goat-mask bowed forward and toppled at his feet. He stared incredulously into the grinning dark monkey-face of Fulbert of Falaise, who coolly twitched the torch from his slackened grasp and shoved it into its original bracket by the stair-foot.
Hélie found himself sitting on the second step with no very clear recollection of how he had reached it. Thomas was swearing disjointedly in his ear, and Durande knelt before him, her arms tight round his shoulders, weeping hot tears down his bare chest. In fact they were entwined in a three-fold embrace; Thomas was sharing his step, an arm supporting him against his own broad body. He roused to set his sound arm round his wife and kiss her sodden hair, too stunned by thankfulness to look beyond the unbelievable fact that they were alive.
Durande gulped, sniffed and resolutely lifted her head, sitting back on her heels and scrubbing her sleeve violently across her eyes. He looked into her streaked dirty face and closed his hold on her as though she were his hope of salvation, his heart thumping against hers. Beyond their half-lit shelter he heard a curt rap of commands, Gytha’s curses, scuffling and blows and oaths as the witches were overpowered. Some whimpered and pleaded in retribution’s bleak face. He pulled himself from Thomas, who was trying one-handed to deal with his leg and botching the task. 'Stephen—and Gino—’ he muttered, and for a heart’s beat hated Thomas for being alive when Stephen and Gino were dead.
Durande silently and methodically tore strips from her smock, but when Fulbert of Falaise stepped across the goat-man’s body to her side she ceased, to watch him warily, her hand not exactly reaching for her spear but hovering in its vicinity. Hélie marked his fallen sword, within reach of a lunge.
'She is my wedded wife, Sir Fulbert,’ he informed him coldly.
The mercenary grinned. 'And if I tried to widow her she would sink steel in my guts. I will slink hence gnashing my teeth in thwarted fury.’
Instead of slinking thence, however, he set his foot on the goat-man’s back and his hand to his sword-hilt. 'Oliver de Collingford?’
'Who else? And he admitted he poisoned Robert—which you knew.’
'I knew I had not.’ He wrenched his blade free and wiped it on the leather tunic.
'And you let an innocent lady be suspected so you could profit—’ Thomas declaimed in outrage.
'A poor mercenary cannot afford scruples,’ he replied with unabated good humour, 'and my only profit so far has been a grievous belly-ache.’ He pulled off the scorched and battered mask that no man would ever wear again, and they stared at the dead face, empty of all evil now. 'If I had known this! he said soberly, turning the mask over in his hands, 'I think I should have found some.’ He threw it down in sudden loathing.
He dropped to one knee and took Hélie’s wrist, holding his hand to the light. He jerked on the fingers so suddenly and agonizingly that Hélie reeled against Thomas with a harsh gasp, only half-aware of the cool voice in his ear. 'Two bones broken above the knuckles, and your little finger. Your sword-play may in future be less stylish, but this day the Saints have been hard-pressed on your behalf. And I misremember ever before serving as Heaven’s emissary.’
'What did bring you so timely?’ growled Thomas sourly, wrapping his leg with the bloody hose of which he had divested it.
‘Fire-arrows and natural curiosity,’ answered Fulbert without looking up. He and Durande were carefully binding Hélie’s hand to splints of small sticks. ‘You might claim some responsibility; the horses you loosed returned to Whittleham, and the rest of my troop rode in haste to succour me. And if you ask what brought me back to Warby, my ardent desire is not extinguished by—er—'
‘By buckthorn in stolen ale,’ Durande finished for him grimly.
He stared, and then dissolved in chagrined laughter. ‘Under our very noses? Lady, my regrets sharpen; only a routier could value you at your worth! My guts gripe yet—and my poor knaves squatting in Whittleham with their entrails melted and their thoughts set on death and Hell-fire!’
‘Rare and salutary thoughts in mercenaries,’ Durande retorted acidly, fastening the last knot. Hélie fetched a couple of deep, shuddering breaths and braced himself to acknowledge their debt. It had come to him that Fulbert was being granted scant courtesy for the boon of their lives, let alone his skilled surgery.
‘We are—most truly grateful,’ he said unsteadily. ‘Later I can thank you—more fittingly—’
Nothing so far had embarrassed Fulbert, but thanks did; he flushed darkly, and his ready tongue failed him. He was rescued by one of his ruffians, who poked his head round the entrance to report the prisoners all fast. ‘Trees here too light for gallows-timber, captain. Down by the road?’ he inquired.
Hélie gathered his strength to assert his authority. ‘No! Public trial, as my lady’s fair fame requires! Deliver them to the Sheriff!’
‘It is your right to dispose of them,’ Fulbert instantly conceded. He turned to survey Oliver de Collingford, sprawled in his disguise. ‘Best leave this for the Sheriff, too,' he decided, grimacing. ‘A man of his breeding—our tale will need all the proof we can offer.’ He stooped and fumbled, and laid Hélie's amethyst in his hand. With his odd tact that resembled a jewel of gold in a swine’s snout, he stepped round the corner to issue low-voiced orders to his subordinate while Hélie slid the loose ring on Durande’s finger.
Returning, he flung a dry cloak round Hélie's shoulders.
'Entrust all else to me, Lord Hélie, and we will get you to Warby and a bed.'
'Trevaine,’ Hélie corrected him firmly.
'Now, lad, you are not fit for such a ride, and the road neck-deep in mud!' Thomas reproved him. 'Moreover, you cannot in courtesy raise the devil in Warby and not explain it in person to Lady Hermeline!'
Outrage heaved Hélie to his feet, sick and shaken and bone-weary and savagely resolute. 'Too late for courtesy between Hermeline and me. I can sit a horse, and my wife shall not enter Warby!'
Fulbert's wicked monkey-grin lighted his face again. 'Accept my services as your herald, Lord Hélie. It shall be my office to console the lady.’
‘What?’ rasped Thomas.
‘If I cannot reach my desire, I must desire what I can reach,’ he replied, bowing to Durande. 'Since my rivals have one way or the other eli
minated each other, I must snatch at opportunity's fleeting skirts.’ He grinned at Hélie, and echoed words he had used once before. 'You have your heiress, Lord Hélie; you will not grudge me mine?'
'On the contrary, I wish you all success,’ Hélie told him sincerely, and held out his sound hand.
Power of Darkness Page 24