by DeadMan
“Gathrid? Would you hate me if I ran away?”
“No. But I wouldn’t be very proud of you, either.”
“We could go together. If we started tonight... “
“No.”
“I’m scared.”
“I know.” For the first time in her life, he thought, she faced a situation she could not somehow control. It had to be cruel, to have the world suddenly turn around, to stop being the golden one everybody spoiled, to find all the exits locked and nobody listening to your pleas.
She released his hand. In a small voice, she said, “Good night, Gathrid.” Her shoulders slouched as she walked away.
He stayed awhile, watching the villages burn, the comet carve its silver slice from the sky, and the Mindak’s men pursue their nocturnal duties amongst the galaxy of their campfires. The Great Sword, he thought. Why would Ahlert pick such a bizarre casus belli? Just to establish a demand impossible to meet?
He gave it up after a while. Nothing made sense anymore.
The Dark Brigades marched and countermarched all the following day. Their execution was flawless. Gathrid heard Belthar mutter, “If they’re trying to intimidate me with skill, they’re doing it. They’re damned well trained.”
The youth surveyed his father’s fief. His brothers and the Safire were out gathering stores, and having little luck. The peasants had taken everything with them.
Belthar’s men and the Dolvin’s company were trying to make the approaches to Kacalief less hospitable. Gathrid suspected the trap-building was make-work. Belthar wanted the men too busy to brood about the coming battle.
The day passed. There was no word from the Dolvin. There was no sign of help from King or Alliance. Faces grew longer and longer. Gathrid did not hear a word from his mother all day.
The next day was worse. Hardly anyone spoke except to growl or snarl. And still there was no word from outside, nor any sign of help.
Gathrid slept only in snatches that night. Several times he went to the wall and stared at the ominous comet. The sentries passed him silently. Usually they had a word or two for the youth they considered a sort of mascot. Now they pursued their rounds in a dark dream. Once Gathrid found his father on the wall, watching the Ventimiglian camp. He stood beside the tall man for a few minutes. Neither spoke.
For a while battle morn looked like just another day. The easterners did nothing threatening immediately. The Safire took time to feed his garrison a good breakfast, then had the arsenals opened. Fires crackled under the big water kettles. Women and children moved to the central keep. Gathrid had a terrible argument with his father. The Safire cut it short by snarling, “Belthar, take the pup to his mother.”
The master-at-arms seized Gathrid’s collar and escorted him to the Safirina, where he received another vigorous tongue-lashing. It left him feeling shamed by his handicaps.
Anyeck sat with him, holding his hand. She was pale. Her hands shook. He started to brush her off, then realized she had to do this for her own sake.
Seconds dragged on into minutes. Finally, one of the guards left to the keep descended from its parapet, said, “It looks like they’re coming.”
Wearily, Gathrid rose. Leading Anyeck, he climbed to the tower’s top.
He was surprised to find that it was barely midmorning. Hours seemed to have passed....
The Ventimiglians were drawn up in their brigades, facing the border. Directly opposite Kacalief were Nieroda, the Toal and a man who could only be the Mindak himself. Two hundred soldiers waited in loose formation behind them. The Mindak surveyed his host. Apparently satisfied, he spoke to a bugler.
A horn squealed. The brigades surged. Drums struck a marching beat. Behind the attackers, camp followers began torching the army’s winter quarters.
“They’re not even coming at us!” Gathrid said. “They’re heading toward Hartog and Katich.... “
Every brigade headed for Gudermuth’s interior. Only the one small group remained facing the fortress.
That much contempt irked Gathrid. Two hundred men to attack a fortress held by nearly four hundred! His father’s men were not professionals, but they had to be better than that.
“Oh!”
Gathrid spun. His mother had fainted. She could no longer convince herself that the Mindak would not defy the Alliance. The truth was too much for her nerve.
“Take her to her bedchamber,” Gathrid told the guards. “Tell the women to look after her.”
Anyeck grabbed his arm. “They’re coming, Gathrid.” Her grip was painful.
Nieroda and the Twelve Dead Captains crossed the border, walking their horses. Their soldiers picked up their arms and loafed along behind them.
A nervous arrow arced out, fell short. The Safire cursed the bowman. Gathrid saw his father turn to Plauen, heard him tell the Brother that now was the time to do something. If he could.
The Dead Captains spread out, encircling the fortress. Fifteen to twenty soldiers accompanied each, remaining just out of bowshot. Nieroda remained near the Mindak.
Ahlert produced a white scarf and rode forward. He halted below the Safire’s post. He shouted, “Will you yield Daubendiek now?”
Gathrid could not hear his father’s reply. He supposed it was suitably defiant. The Mindak stiffened, turned his horse, rode back to Nieroda.
The Toal swept forward. Arrows whistled from the wall. Even the best-sped ricocheted off the Dead Captains’ armor.
“They’re ensorcled!” Gathrid snarled. “We can’t touch them.”
Nieroda galloped toward the fortress. A shower of arrows did him no harm. The Dark Champion bore a javelin in one hand. He hurled it at Kacalief’s wall.
There was a tremendous flash. The Ventimiglian soldiers sent up a chorus of battle cries. When Gathrid’s sight returned, he saw easterners rushing the fortress. The Toal were at the wall. They swarmed up its naked stone face with the ease of flies. Several fell off, washed away by kettles of boiling water. They got up and came back for more. The heat did not bother them.
“Look!” Anyeck said. “There!”
Not far from where their father had established his command post, where Nieroda had hurled the javelin, the wall was breached. A Toal was through and slaughtering everyone within reach. It wielded a huge black blade which sliced armor and swords the way a sharp knife cut soft Savard cheese.
Plauen and the Safire attacked the Toal with the puny spells at their command. It ignored them.
Nieroda stepped through the gap. The courtyard tableau froze. Then a second black blade joined the slaughter.
Now there were Toal atop the wall. Ventimiglian soldiers tossed up grapnels and joined them. Attackers poured through the gap opened by Nieroda. Here, there, a hard-pressed Toal simply pointed a finger and men fell, torn apart from within.
Anyeck whimpered, “Gathrid, we’ve got to get out of here.”
He had never been this frightened. He thought the end was near. But he snapped, “Control yourself!” He turned and started downstairs.
She followed. “Where are you going? Don’t leave me.”
“To find myself a sword. Father can’t stop me now.” Brave words, he thought. He hoped his voice hadn’t trembled too much. He turned away and limped down into the cool inwards of the tower that had been his home.
The keep gate exploded inward. Oak beams flung about like straws in a gale. A woman screamed. Gathrid’s palms were cold and wet on the leather-wrapped hilt of his great-grandfather’s sword.
Men flung through the broken gate. His father’s men, fleeing, dragging their wounded with them...
“Here they come!” Gathrid shouted. The keep guards crouched behind a barrier of overturned furniture. Ventimiglian soldiers popped inside, keeping low behind their shields. The retreating Gudermuthers scrambled over the furniture.
An older man dropped beside Gathrid. “Belthar! I thought... “
“I’m a tough old buzzard. You did all right here, boy. Your mother and sister upstairs?”
“Next level. Father?... “
“I don’t know. Hang on here. I’ll get the women. We’ll break out and run for the hills.” The old soldier darted away.
A Toal came striding through the shattered gate, a dark tower against the light. Someone hurled a boar spear. It missed. The Toal gestured. A bolt of power blasted a gap in the furniture wall. Ventimiglian soldiers sprang forward. Blades darted and clashed. Men cried out. The Toal came on like something out of nightmare.
Belthar thundered orders. A boar spear smashed against the Toal’s breastplate. The Dead Captain staggered. “Go!” Belthar roared. He slapped Gathrid’s shoulder as he passed. The youth threw a clumsy stroke at the nearest Ventimiglian, joined the rush. His mother and sister were beside him, eyes huge with terror.
The Toal flung an arm around in a hard horizontal arc. People toppled like wheat at the stroke of a scythe. A black mailed fist smote Gathrid’s chest... and a darkness closed in. And then it went away, he knew not how much later. But enough later that he was left alone with the dead. He wept for his mother, who lay within his narrow field of vision.
It wasn’t over yet. He could hear it going on still, elsewhere in the castle. He tried to move. His limbs responded shakily.
Got to hide, he thought. Got to hide till I can get out and run to the peasants in the hills....
Chapter Three
The Savard
The smoke no longer rose from the ruins. The Mindak Ahlert had gone on to enjoy the rape of Gudermuth. But the Dark Champion and the Twelve Dead Captains remained at Kacalief. They searched tirelessly, their dead eyes burning angrily. If Gudermuth would die before surrendering Daubendiek, so be it. The Sword’s pommel would rest beneath the Mindak’s palm even so.
Gathrid crept through the ruins like a frightened rat. The Twelve were everywhere. How long before they flung him onto the mound of dead and tortured flesh growing in the main court?
Those who had fallen, sliced like sausages by the witchblades of Nieroda and the Toal, had been lucky. The wretches who had not perished were singing arias of agony for the Mindak’s questioners.
The screams were declining in number. Gathrid wished someone knew where the Sword of Suchara lay. The knowledge could be traded for swift, merciful death.
Gathrid was trying to reach the gap Nieroda’s sorcery had blasted through the wall. He was close enough to see stone that had run and lumped like tallow on the flank of a candle. He fought his impulse to jump and run.
There was no fight in him anymore. His only desire was to live.
His insistence on fighting now seemed like a childhood dream that had held no cognition of the horror of reality.
He could see the vineyards through the hole. Maybe he could risk the dash....
Ventimiglian armor clanked nearby. He froze. Dark greaves appeared beyond fallen, fire-blackened timbers. He tried to crush himself deeper into ashes and broken stone.
The Toal moved stiffly, jerkily. The Twelve had done so even in battle. Yet each had been a killing machine no mortal had been able to match. And Nieroda had been worse.
They said even the Mindak feared Nevenka Nieroda.
This one was hunting survivors. They never gave up.
The thing that wore the corpse of a man stopped a dozen paces away. It turned. Gathrid held his breath. The dead eyes probed his hiding place. A black gauntlet rose to point....
Gathrid sprang up. He hurled a fist-sized chunk of masonry, broke for the gap in the wall. The chunk hit the outstretched hand, wrenched the aiming finger’s point aside. The remnants of a stable shed coughed, collapsed.
Gathrid had just time enough to reach the hole.
His mixed luck held. He skidded on slippery puddled stone and fell. The Toal’s second spell-bolt chuckled in the wall. New-made gravel stung Gathrid’s face.
He ran blindly till burning lungs and leaden legs slowed his pace and quickened his thinking. He slowed to a dogged trot, turned toward the nearby finger of the Savard Hills. He and his brothers had played and hunted those wild slopes and valleys often enough. He should be able to disappear there.
He glanced back once.
A dark thing on a dark horse cantered from the ruins.
Gathrid increased his pace. It was a mile to the nearest cover.
He slipped into dense scrub a hundred yards ahead of his pursuer. On hands and knees he scooted through brambles like a rabbit. His heart pounded as hard as it had the moment he had met the Toal’s gaze.
Was the Dead Captain playing with him? It could have caught him.... Maybe the Toal wanted the amusement of a boy-hunt. Or thought he might lead them to the Sword.
Their search for the fabled Sword was baffling. But the Mindak and his wizard generals had shaken other fell and forgotten things out of the earth in their mad drive to revive the ancient sorceries. Among them were Nieroda and the Twelve Demon Kings from ages so eld even they had forgotten them. There were rings of power and amulets of protection the like of which had not been since the Golden Age of Anderle. They had recovered bows that could speed soul-devouring shafts the length of a kingdom. And swords against which little could stand. But none of those were Daubendiek, the Great Sword.
The pressure eased once Gathrid entered the tortuous and steep ravines of the Savards. The dark rider came on, but the advantage had shifted to the man afoot. Gathrid gained ground.
Late that afternoon, almost too exhausted to care anymore, he found a low cave mouth. It exuded no animal fetor. Too tired to worry about becoming cornered, he slithered inside and fell asleep.
He dreamed terrible dreams, of warfare and vengeance, of hatred and treachery in olden times, before the Fall, when Anderle’s reach had encompassed two-thirds of the continent and the Immortal Twins had ruled over a Golden Age. He dreamed of the winged tempter, Grellner, who had trafficked in whispers of unshared power.
He dreamed of mad, mysterious Theis Rogala, he of the quicksilver loyalties and golden, slippery tongue; he who had been esquire, servant and companion of the Swordbearer. He and Aarant had been more hated than the Tempter himself.
The Rogala of legend had claimed that Daubendiek chose its own master and cause. The question of treason was irrelevant. He was faithful to the blade.
Gathrid had never been so miserable. Even during the polio epidemic he had felt less distress. His muscles were coals of pain. His stomach was a nest of vipers. His bad leg throbbed. His mind... He feared he was no longer sane. Shock still absorbed him, but tendrils of hatred had begun trickling through the mist of unbelief. Every thought of Nevenka Nieroda initiated a promising, “Someday.... “
Such emotion frightened him. It could become compelling, could make of him a man as bleak and driven as the fabled Aarant.
He was too stiff to walk. He crawled toward sunlight. It blinded him briefly when it splashed into his eyes. Outside, morning birds sang solar praises, infuriating him with their indifference to what had happened at Kacalief. A squirrel chattered. For the first time he let his thoughts touch on his mother and sister.
The younger women had been spared. The Mindak had dragged them off to Katich.
Gathrid wanted to rend, to tear, to make the Ventimiglians bleed for Anyeck, for his parents, for his brothers and for Gudermuth.
His vision adapted to the light.
One of the Twelve, still as a statue of an ebony general, sat his dark horse not fifty feet beyond the brush masking the cave. A sparrow settled onto its shoulder, chirruped in surprise, fluttered to a nearby tree. It alternately scolded and cocked its head questioningly.
The Dead Captain’s head slowly turned Gathrid’s way.
Terror hit him like a blow from a giant’s fist. They could not be escaped! He scrambled back, scraped his scalp on the cave roof. He fled into darkness, crashing from one cavern feature to another till his reason returned. By then he was thoroughly lost. The more immediate threat of the cavern banished his fear of the Toal.
He wandered for hours, occasionally pausing
to indulge in a fit of tears. So many angers, fears, losses, frustrations. It was not fair.
The last time, after wiping tears with the backs of grimy hands, he noticed a pale, ghostly light ahead. With hope and fear writhing together like wrestling snakes, he crept toward it.
His fingers, brushing the cave walls for guidance, caressed scars left by ancient tools. They encountered beams supporting the invisible ceiling. He frowned. There were no mines in the Savards.
He stepped into a bedroom-sized chamber, manhewn from poor limestone. It contained two pieces of antique furniture. They were illuminated by a sourceless witch-light. One was a small, heavy chair. The other was an open coffin.
In the chair slept a gnarly, dusty dwarf. He was half-buried by a beard in which crawling things nested.
Gathrid wanted to believe that he had found one of the mythical creatures who, with trolls and elves and giants, supposedly haunted the forests and hills and night.
But in the coffin, on dusty cerulean velvet, lay a long black sword. Its edges were nicked and crusted.
Gathrid stood, one hand sealing his mouth, vainly trying to contain a cough. It all fit the legends.
His free hand strayed to the weapon’s hilt.
Sparks. Power flooded his arm. Pain and fear evaporated. His weak leg strengthened. The dead side of his face quickened and joined the other in an expression of wonder. The blade vibrated in his grasp. Dust danced off its dark gloss.
And the dwarf opened his eyes.
The gaze of a Toal was warmer.
“Daubendiek has chosen.” Theis Rogala spoke softly, chillingly, with a curiously jerky accent, like the sound of bones being crushed far down a long cold hallway. “There will be blood for Suchara.”
Gathrid tried to drop the Sword. His fingers would not open.
The question of which had been master and which tool pervaded the legend of Tureck Aarant. As the Sword, against his will, rose in salute, Gathrid suffered the despairing suspicion that it had been Aarant who had been the controlled.