Crowlord

by Michael Wallace

  She told him everything that had happened up until they reached the banks of the Vestanovul, at which point she held back. Until she was more certain of Andras’s story, she didn’t want to talk about the strange presence she’d felt across the river, as if waiting in ambush, or about the decision to deliver the weapons to Balint’s lieutenant instead of handing them over in person.

  “I’m not sure what to tell you,” Andras said. “Only when I close my eyes I can feel Skinny Lad.”

  “What about the other dogs?” she asked. “Do you have the same connection with them?”

  “No, only Skinny Lad.”

  “Hmm.”

  She was about to press for more, maybe even propose a test to see if it were true, when Brutus let out a loud groaning bellow. He came to a complete stop and tossed his head in a stubborn gesture that she recognized all too well. Gyorgy grabbed one horn and tried to drag the goat forward, with little effect.

  “Come on, you stubborn fool,” the boy urged.

  Brutus gave another bellow and threw the boy loose with a vigorous shake of the head. While Kozmer fell back to see if he could help, Narina took the opportunity to study their surroundings. They’d descended somewhat during the morning, and the higher hills were to their right. The canyons, gulches, and wooded promontories above seemed like ideal hideouts for bandits of all kinds, and it was a wonder they hadn’t yet been set upon. But she supposed there were plenty of desperate sorts fleeing through the area, and those intent on robbery had ample targets to choose from. Wisely, they have decided to let the bladedancers pass unmolested.

  “Brutus is sick,” Kozmer announced.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Gyorgy asked.

  “His aura should be evidence enough. Can’t you feel it? No? Well, then look at his tongue. What have you been eating?” Kozmer added as he moved around back to prod at Brutus’s belly.

  Something had occurred to Narina. “So,” she told Andras, “you’re expected to go back to Balint and report?”

  “He only wants to know why you didn’t cross the river. Why didn’t you? That was your plan, wasn’t it?”

  “I sensed something on the other side I didn’t like. And the plains are torn with war—it didn’t seem the place to linger. There’s not much more to it than that. Not much reason, in fact, for you to go back and risk your life, either. Why don’t you stay with us until Hooffent, at least?”

  Andras’s brow furrowed. “I have my duty.”

  “Your duty is to Ruven and your dogs, not to some crowlord. Balint is used to throwing away lives—he’ll throw yours away, too, and it won’t cause him a moment of self-doubt or guilt.”

  “He’s not like that, not like the others. He’s loyal to his people. When there were brigands. . .” Andras’s voice trailed off. “It doesn’t matter. Look, I don’t like how we’re dangling out here. Shouldn’t we find somewhere safer, less. . .I don’t know?”

  “More defensible?”

  “Yeah, less exposed.”

  “We’ve got too far to go before nightfall to retrace our steps.”

  “What about the sick goat?”

  Narina dismissed this with a shrug. “Brutus ate something funny. Some poisonous weed or other—he does it often enough. He’ll groan and complain for a while, but he’ll keep going. By night, he’ll be feeling better. Anyway, this place is defensible enough if it comes to it. A few brigands aren’t going to hurt us.”

  The ratter looked troubled. “Oh.”

  “If you’re ready to run back to your master, go ahead. But if I were you, I’d stick around and keep you and yours safe. Whose land is south of Damanja’s? If Hooffent’s no good, maybe you could rat down there for a while until this war plays out.”

  Without warning, Brutus flopped down to the ground with a groan. When Gyorgy and Kozmer tried to get him upright, he kicked his hooves and caught the older man in the thigh. Kozmer cursed and gave Brutus a thump on the head with his staff.

  “Get up, you miserable, worthless piece of—” He bent over, wincing, and rubbed at his leg. “When did my reflexes get so slow? Damn near broke a bone.”

  Working together, elder and student finally got Brutus back on his feet. He stumbled forward, protesting every step. His tongue hung out, and it had turned a deep shade of purple Narina didn’t much care for. Something looked wrong with his eyes, too. Soon, he was swaying, and his angry grunts had turned into feeble protests. When he plopped down a second time, nearly falling this time, Narina gave up.

  No going forward, that much was clear. But if anything, they were more exposed now, on a grassy hill next to a broken, abandoned cart. Horse bones lay bleaching in the sun, together with smashed crockery, partly buried in the soil. A few feet away lay a human mandible.

  It really was a terrible place to stop, but Narina didn’t see a choice. In any event, she wasn’t particularly worried about Brutus. The goat had eaten strange things in the past, things that would have killed a human, but he had a strong stomach and would soon pass whatever had laid him low.

  It wouldn’t be long, she was sure.

  Chapter Six

  Miklos had expected the fight to go out of Zoltan’s fiefdom with the crowlord’s death. And yet several thousand men had broken off from Miklos’s command and maintained their defiance of Lady Damanja’s invasion. Two thousand of Zoltan’s loyalists took refuge in the delta, where they pinned down a third of Damanja’s army. Three hundred riders abandoned the northern front, rode south, and looted a supply caravan. Another force even crossed the swamplands and burned several villages in Damanja’s territory.

  Most worrying of all, the garrison at Belingus continued to defy calls to lay down arms, and the town kept the River Lornar open, which allowed the interior to be supplied with men and supplies sufficient to keep up the fight.

  But why?

  Not only was the crowlord himself dead, but Miklos had sent assassins to the coast, where they murdered Zoltan’s wife, killed his sons, and sent Zoltan’s cousin fleeing the fiefdom; he’d slipped away on a merchant ship sailing south for the Azure Islands. Hard to say if he’d fled into permanent exile or meant to work mischief from abroad.

  Several of the crowlord’s most able captains had fallen in battle already, and Miklos himself had killed Captain Rokus, who tried to thwart plans to throw the battle in Damanja’s favor. So it was a surprise that so many of Zoltan’s leaders remained to make a fight of it.

  After Miklos’s pact with Lady Damanja, he’d intended to lead her troops north to push Lord Balint’s invading army into the river. Make a jump over the Vestanovul and assault Riverrun itself. By the end of the month he’d have subdued a second fiefdom, and the real battle could commence.

  Instead, Lord Balint remained unopposed in the north, where he was no doubt strengthening his army with the bladedancer weapons. Most likely, he had a sizable force on the south bank of the Vestanovul already. He’d be difficult to dislodge.

  Thankfully, Damanja didn’t panic at these unfortunate developments. She moved cautiously to bring engineers down the Lornar to the delta, where the Zoltan loyalists still held fortifications wherever there was high ground.

  Most of her force then marched south beneath a cloud of screaming crows to tighten the siege of Belingus. Miklos soon joined her, within sight of the city walls.

  It was morning, and he’d been summoned to a rendezvous with Damanja and her lieutenants. He was picking his way through the camp, trying to work out how to get his war plan back on track, when a pain stabbed into his chest like an invisible spear. He fell to his knees and tore at the straps holding his sword in place. It fell away, and he thrust a hand into his tunic and clutched at his chest.

  The flesh beneath felt like ice. Like a corpse. No, colder. Demons, was he dying?

  “General?” came a worried voice from behind him.

  It sounded distant, weak. A woman’s voice, but not Lady Damanja’s. One of her female lieutenants, then, of which she had several. He tried to answer,
but it felt as though an icy saw were cutting through his heart and lungs. He couldn’t catch his breath through the terrific pain. He coughed, and his mouth was filled with blood and ice.

  Demons and demigods, this is the end for me. I’m not the sword saint, only one of the failed sohns. I’m going to die.

  Anger rose within, a bitter regret and hatred that almost rose above the pain and fear. And then, just when he felt himself losing consciousness, the pain on his chest eased. His skin was still icy cold, though, and something moved beneath the flesh.

  He stared down at his chest, dumbfounded. Something that looked like a shard of blue ice burst through the skin, trailing blood. Long and slender and delicate, it eased out and fell to the ground in front of him, where it gleamed faintly with its own light. The light gradually faded. With it, Miklos’s pain disappeared as well. He reached out a finger to touch the thing.

  It was a dragon feather.

  #

  Three months earlier, Miklos and his cousin had made a pilgrimage to Drake Lagoon, up beyond the twin peaks of Manet Siv. It was already spring at the Temple of Righteous Fury, the time of year when orange and gold tulips budded in the terraced gardens, and warbrand initiates delivered hammer blows to each other’s chests to test how their sowen had grown throughout the year. The ringing of tools in the forge rose above the waterfall that thundered with spring meltoff.

  It may have been spring at the temple, but snow had still covered the trail over the high passes, and the pair covered the last fifteen miles to the lake with snowshoes made of ash laced with rawhide.

  Normally, Miklos made the trek alone, preferring solitude as he walked onto the frozen lake to pray. There were no trees, no vegetation surrounding Drake Lagoon, only heavy snow in the dales, bare, windswept stone adorned with sheets of ice, and the lake itself. The lake was never silent, always heaving and groaning from the shifting dreams of the monster sleeping in its depth.

  But his cousin Gizella no longer trusted herself to make the trek alone. She was the eldest daughter of Miklos’s father’s older sister, and weighed down with twenty more years of life than he was. What’s more, she’d suffered wounds as a girl in the great upheaval that had briefly pitted the temples against each other and against the crowlords of the plains. She’d suffered deep wounds to bone and tendon and organ that even Gizella’s ferocious sowen hadn’t fully healed.

  The previous two years she hadn’t made her pilgrimage at all, but now, feeling stronger, had asked if she could accompany her younger cousin, a sohn at the height of his powers. He could shield her from unexpected storms, the greatest threat in the high mountains.

  Miklos had agreed, and never doubted bringing Gizella, though she slowed his pace. It left him more time to gather his thoughts, to consider Lord Zoltan’s request. The crowlord wanted weapons—as many as he could get—claiming that the bladedancers were supplying his rival, and that his fiefdom wouldn’t survive without aid from one of the other two temples.

  If Zoltan were telling the truth, Sohn Joskasef of the Divine School of the Twinned Blades had sold halberds, maces, spears, and swords to Lord Balint. A terrific hoard of them. If true, Zoltan’s concerns were warranted.

  The first step would be to travel down the post road to the bladedancer temple to meet with Joskasef and verify. Find out why. Then make his own determination. It wasn’t a thought that filled him with joy. He’d never visited the bladedancers, and it had been decades since one of them had approached the warbrands. They remained unknown to him, and he doubted they’d heard of him in turn. The whole situation would be awkward.

  He had visited the firewalkers once, as an initiate, but found their habits strange, even distasteful. Their temple in its volcanic fortress was certainly striking, with its terraced gardens among the basalt, and a shrine that seemed to be made of gleaming obsidian, but it was a strange, alien beauty. The place had left him unsettled.

  And their habits, more so. Firewalker students swallowed live coals to gain mastery, and those who failed their training or left the temple for any reason had their palms burned severely so they could never again wield a sword.

  Miklos had certainly never visited the plains, and never intended to do so. During the upheavals of his father’s generation, sohns from each of the three schools had died, and a permanent mistrust had grown between them, but it was dwarfed by the hatred warbrands felt for the crowlords and their pointless wars. Unfortunately, the people of the plains produced necessary goods, and the temples needed their coin. That meant selling them weapons from time to time.

  Manet Siv was the most impressive peak rising above Drake Lagoon, but all the mountains looked especially forbidding this year as the two sohns—one active, one an elder—removed their snowshoes and picked their way down a staircase cut into the bare stone to reach the bowl-like lake. Ice coated the stone stairs, and sometimes had to be chipped away with a pick he’d brought for that purpose before they could pass.

  His cousin moved with extreme caution from step to step, soon falling behind. Once, he had to hike back up to get her down a particularly treacherous stretch, and when he took her arm, she was trembling violently and complaining that her hands were numb. Miklos removed each of their wool gloves and rubbed her hands vigorously for several minutes to bring circulation back to them.

  “It’s going to be the devil getting out of the caldera,” Gizella said. “The air is so thin—I can barely catch my breath.”

  “I’ll help you up, don’t worry.”

  “If it snows, we might have trouble.”

  “The sky is clear—it won’t snow.”

  “It’s clear now,” she said, “but the dragon is dreaming. Can you feel it?”

  He couldn’t, not at first, but when they reached the bottom, with drifts of snow they had to push through before reaching the bare ice of the lake itself, he had a different impression. The ground was vibrating, and though there was no breeze, the air seemed to hum. Miklos’s heart kicked, and it wasn’t only the altitude.

  The lake was the home of the Great Drake, the largest of the three demigods who slept in the mountains. A dragon’s dreams were enough to pummel the mountains with snowstorms, and when they stirred, earthquakes shook the land. In reaction, demons woke beneath the earth and spewed lava and ash into the sky.

  “Not today,” Miklos said as they strapped their snowshoes back on to cross the final stretch.

  Gizella frowned. “What?”

  “People always think the demigods are waking, but they never do. Generations and generations, and still they sleep.”

  “They’ve been awake in my own lifetime,” she said. “What do you think started the upheavals?”

  “One stirred, and its head broke the surface, which is hardly the same thing as flying down from the mountains to ravish the countryside. One broken lake, and the temples flew into a panic and started killing each other. It wasn’t even the Great Drake, it was the Blue.”

  “The White Drake, actually.” Gizella rose to her feet and stomped her snowshoes. “I was there, I remember. Anyway, you think it was a panic that caused the troubles?”

  “Wasn’t it, though? If not a panic, why would an old legend about a waking dragon set everyone to killing?”

  “Someone was called, and he—or she—set off the struggle.”

  “Called to start a bloody conflict. Who was this fool?” When she didn’t answer, Miklos added, “If it were me, I’d have ignored it. If I’m called, you won’t find me starting anything at all.”

  “If you’re called, you won’t have a choice,” Gizella said. “You’ll start the fight, and most likely you’ll finish it, too. In the old stories, the one who is called begins the killing, and frequently stands atop the heap when it is all finished.”

  “And why a sword saint? How can you be called a saint when you leave a trail of bodies behind you? Why not a sword devil?”

  “You wouldn’t be jesting if you’d lived through the troubles.”

  “Fair e
nough,” he conceded. “It won’t happen today, that’s all I’m saying.”

  They reached the edge of the lake, which was anything but a smooth, unbroken surface. Instead, great blocks of ice had been thrust skyward over the years by the creature shifting beneath the surface. Snow had gathered in the hollows, while the wind had stripped the wider corridors. The sky was clear overhead, but a breeze stirred up a fine mist of ice particles that shimmered in the sunlight.

  “Do you want to go first?” he asked.

  “Go on. I need to catch my breath, and I’m going to wrap myself in my blanket and see if I can get the blood flowing again.”

  Miklos unslung his sword and took off his satchel. It felt good to get out from underneath the weight. Gizella carried her own bedding and a handful of supplies, but he’d carried any group items, plus his weapon, and while the altitude wasn’t beating him down like it was his cousin, he was still exhausted. A few minutes meditating on the lake above the sleeping demigod should replenish his sowen.

  He left his possessions with Gizella and picked his way onto the ice. It groaned and heaved beneath his feet, and he could feel the demigod’s aura beneath him. Not awake, but stirring in unsettled dreams. He hadn’t yet started to gather the creature’s aura, but could feel its strength already.

  When he found a sheltered spot between towering pillars of ice, he sat down and opened his sowen. The aura of a demigod was like a crashing storm, a thunder of ice and snow, and all he had to do was gather a fragment, and his sowen would fill. He would leave strong and powerful. The trip out of the caldera and back down the mountain would feel like dancing across clouds.

  He’d been to this lake more than twenty times, visiting every year since he was an initiate. A master sohn, in this case his father’s former pupil, had taught him how to collect the Great Drake’s aura without being overwhelmed. And yet he was unprepared for what came next.