by Brian Daley
The remnants of the expeditionary force went by. There were Paladins of Ur-Had-Bon, Kassa and his Masterless Swords, Knights of Onn, the Thieves’ Troop, gladiators of Mu, a company of Bow Maids, and more. Many bore a wounded comrade; more than one had carried home the body of a close friend rather than leave it to the carrion eaters.
Combard watched them all solemnly but without comment, deeming no other reaction worthy of a lord of one of the Singularity’s Elder Houses. Sandur kept rein over his emotions with some effort. Bint was too shocked and frightened to react. Willow, hating what she saw there, turned her head away. Her gaze fell on Crassmor. With each passing moment the younger Tarrant son grew more appalled.
A ranger of the Woodsmen of Lyrr fell from his saddle as he drew even with the group. He hit the ground and lay still, dead. Others of his band wearily stopped to drape his body over his horse and continue. A cry escaped Crassmor, at the sorrow of it. Combard turned a scathing glare on him, disapproving any show of weakness when all strength would soon be needed. Crassmor fought to keep emotion from his face. This, only because he wished before all else not to displease his father, not from any shame.
Then Crassmor marked someone he recognized, watching the dire parade from the other side of Fey Passage. The man was tall, gaunt, black-skinned, and had a haunted look. He wore whiteface makeup and was dressed for mourning in black silk top hat, frock coat, and dark glasses. His chin was bound closed with linen as if he were a corpse. He was Baron Samedi, Loa of graveyards and burials. Crassmor had seen him before, on the night the younger Tarrant had danced the banda, one of the many indiscretions that had earned Crassmor Combard’s displeasure. The baron was a perfect example of personages in the Singularity better left undisturbed. His powers might have been of great help in the coming war, but such creatures cared little about mortal conflicts. So great was the danger posed by the likes of Baron Samedi that Ironwicca and the other Singularity leaders chose to let them go their own way as long as they caused no harm in the Charmed Realm.
Combard broke the silence. “Enough; there is much to do if this grievous review is not to be repeated.” He put a hand to Sandur’s mailed shoulder. “I shall ride directly to raise up men in our southern grants, among the sworn of Gwall and our liegemen in the lands all around. You go through the uplands. Call up the levies of Hinn and all the others in those provinces who owe me fealty; they know you and will flock to your banner.”
He turned to Crassmor, who waited eagerly for a man’s task. “And you, young man: see the Lady Willow safely home, then get you to House Tarrant and assist in getting things prepared against our absence. Help put all things in readiness.”
Crassmor was crestfallen, understanding the implication. Though he was well known and welcome throughout the Tarrant holdings and much of the Singularity, it was as a singer of songs, harper, boisterous if modest drinker, and, if a wastrel, then an open-handed one. Combard was as much as saying that he doubted that fighting men would rally to Crassmor.
The old man turned to Willow with a kinder look; he loved her as he would his own, in great part because of her own wisdom, humor, and spirit, but in as large a measure for the fact that she was betrothed to Sandur. Combard held her especial for the love he perceived between the two.
His voice held an unaccustomedly husky note. “I am sorry that this preparation must be for war instead of for that grand day when you two will be one,” he declared. “Yet that day will come, I swear it. We’ll see to that, your father and I.”
Sandur started guiltily, shaken out of his preoccupation with the defeated troops. He and Willow shared a look that Combard presumed to be the sadness of delay in their marriage; the old man courteously looked the other way. Crassmor knew differently. This was the sort of tragedy seldom treated in the sagas and great dramas. Good friends, admiring and liking one another, Sandur and Willow simply didn’t love each other and never had.
Combard was blind to that. He was about to say on, with the sort of promises he’d taken to making lately, of a wedding without compare, lavish gifts, and grants for the newlyweds and the offspring he presumed them to want as much as he. Sandur, long grown uneasy with such talk, almost tormented by it, shifted the subject.
“In the Beyonds, Crassmor comported himself well. He was shield brother to me. He’s earned a good place among us, sir.”
It was as close as he’d ever come to questioning his father. Combard made a sour face as the topic changed from a most favored one to a least. He pursed his mouth, gazing at his younger son, then nodded. “That is no less than true. Wait at House Tarrant as I have instructed, Crassmor. When I go to the settlements at Kurn, your standard will be next to mine.” He sketched a smile. “Let these traits continue, son. Do what is right; do what is brave. You’ll win high honor.”
Crassmor lowered his head in a modest bow, as was expected. His heart leaped, however reluctantly this compliment had been given to him, and with what qualifiers. “Thank you; I shall try, father.”
The old man grunted, eyes sliding away from his younger son. He touched Crassmor’s shoulder in salute, not the comradely grip he’d given Sandur, but his hand lingered there for a moment and squeezed gently a time or two.
The moment ended; the hand fell away. “To work!” Combard commanded. “Our paths divide here; we reunite at House Tarrant in two days’ time. Good fortune, all!”
Then he was off at the gallop, Bint and his armsmen clattering behind. The Lord of House Tarrant was erect in his saddle despite his years. He looked no more upon the defeated men and women he passed. The other three did, though, long after Combard had vanished from sight. There seemed no end to them, the beaten and wounded and dying who came with no hope in their faces.
Sandur said in a grating, low voice, “If I were granted one wish, it would be to stop all this.” He looked to Crassmor. “If I had only taken the medicine wand! I would trade off this bloodshed for single combat, gladly!” The moment’s fervor faded from him. “But I failed in that as well; I let the opportunity pass.”
“You did what you had to do,” Crassmor told him with complete conviction. “You did what it was your oath to do.” Willow was watching them, not understanding the details but sensing the nature of the exchange.
“I let the opportunity pass,” the Outrider repeated sadly. “I’ll regret it all my life.” The words were a physical blow to Crassmor.
Sandur leaned to Willow and kissed her cheek, then her hand. She reciprocated, then told him, “Good fortune, Sandur.”
His regret yielded to a brief, bittersweet smile. He traded forearm grips with Crassmor, making the younger man feel as much an ally as a brother. Spurring his horse, Sandur departed. Crassmor’s attention went back to the ruined army. The moment’s elation had ebbed. The scene drove everything but despair from him.
A hand covered his, at his pommel. Willow didn’t attempt fake bravery or affected cheer. “It does no good to stay here,” she chided him gently. “Our tasks are set now. No one can stave off this war.”
He didn’t look away from the suffering before him. “One man might,” he said, “given the chance.” Do what is right, his father had said. Do what is brave.
He ignored her questions. All at once he’d brought his horse around and was galloping back along Fey Passage without another word. Soon he was lost to her sight.
Chapter 5
FORTH
The lizard riders’ new bivouac was much closer to the Charmed Realm. Crassmor began encountering their patrols almost as soon as he’d left the Singularity.
The barbarians were confident, though, and by nature not much given to diligent scouting or careful route riding. They were even less so now, flushed with double victories over the broken cross and the King’s first expedition. More, Crassmor had stopped and retrieved Kort from the granary at Lateroo; the horse’s splendid speed and endurance were major factors in his penetration of the invader’s lines.
The encampment was even larger than before, swell
ed by the warriors who’d been off fighting during Sandur’s stay. To make himself go on wasn’t as difficult as Crassmor had feared it would be. It was, in a curious way, easy, when he remembered Sandur’s expression back on Fey Passage, Crassmor found himself with few doubts or second thoughts. For Sandur to have come back out here without the safe-passage guarantee of the Warlord’s medicine wand might have been tantamount to suicide. Ravager would not be bound by an offer already refused, nor would he be obliged to renew it. The Warlord would be free to have the knight cut down on the spot or remanded to his torturers.
But if Crassmor, who considered himself of no consequence to Ravager, were to present himself and offer to serve as courier, the Warlord, from Sandur’s stories of him, might very well repeat the challenge and send forth the wand. Ravager’s reasons, as Crassmor calculated them, would be twofold: he hated Sandur and wished personal revenge; and he’d already made the challenge before his men. Crassmor did his best not to think about what would happen if the Emptier of Lodges did not happen to see things the same way.
The thought of obtaining the medicine wand did nothing to cheer Crassmor, though; he knew anguish over the peril in which the duel would put Sandur. There again, a number of factors came into play. First was Sandur’s own declaration that it was his desire to take up the challenge. Second was the likelihood that, given the barbarians’ staggering numbers, their eventual victory seemed assured; there would come the day, in any event, when the Outrider would face the Warlord. Fought later, that contest would be little more than a closing note to the war, and the Singularity would not be saved. Fought now, it might mean salvation. The last was an unspoken matter; Crassmor suspected from Sandur’s words that he was mulling over the idea of returning into the Beyonds on his own. Crassmor meant to see that, if and when that happened, Sandur would at least have the protection of the medicine wand.
That the Outrider would win such a duel Crassmor never permitted himself to doubt. Sandur had never been beaten on field of practice or field of war. As Cup Bearer and the Outrider, he was counted among the best fighters in the Singularity. And in the end, the decision whether to meet the Warlord or not, once Crassmor had brought the wand home, would be Sandur’s.
Flamboyant prongs of the lance lay against Crassmor’s breast. The lizard mount stood directly in his way; Shhing was still in its scabbard. The barbarian picket, should he so chose, could hardly fail to kill Crassmor.
“You are too big to throw into the cooking pots and too young to fight,” the lizard rider scoffed, though he himself looked no older than Crassmor. The fluttering clan pennons and feathered war fetishes on the lance shifted in the breeze. As the lizard stirred, the barbarian’s ancestral pendants swung lazily; light flashed from his armbands and the beaten-gold mascles of his harness. “What shall I do with you, eh?”
Striving to hide his trembling, Crassmor held his chin high, replying, “Since I am here to see your Warlord, you may either get out of my way or escort me to him.” He pointed to the camp, Ravager’s colossal ziggurat-shaped tent rearing at its center.
The picket looked around warily but failed to detect any other enemy. “How have you come here?” he demanded. “Where is the rest of your war party?”
Crassmor showed irritation he half-felt. “A man rides into your camp alone, arms sheathed, with no attempt to hide. Are you lizard lovers so simpleminded that you can’t recognize a parley rider when you blunder across one?”
The young barbarian snarled; the needle-sharp tines dug at Crassmor’s mesh armor shirt. Sweat from fear trickled from the young Tarrant’s helmet brim, joining that already produced by the heat of the day. Other pickets and sentries were already converging on them, though. Their battle pipes were sounding, signaling an enemy. The decision to kill Crassmor or not had passed from the barbarian’s hand, and he knew it. With another deadly look, he drew back the lance head by a hairsbreadth.
The rest encircled him, horse and lizards eyeing one another with no more liking than their riders. There was a dispute among the naturally cantankerous warriors; more than one favored the idea of skewering Crassmor and taking him to their Warlord at the apex of a half-dozen lances.
One said, “You have no love of life; you will not have yours for long.”
“I am here to make a representation for Sandur,” Crassmor answered loudly. The lizard riders murmured among themselves in surprise. The tale has gone abroad among the hordes, Crassmor saw. That, at least, boded well.
“Sandur,” he shouted this time, “sends word to Ravager, the Bringer of Slaughter. If you’d prefer to do battle with one lone envoy, have at me. Luckily, I brought no companion, else it would require an entire clan to threaten me.” In the back of his mind he was saying prayers.
One rider backed his balky, tail-thrashing mount out of the way, returning the butt of his lance to its rest. Another did the same, then two more. In a moment they’d fallen in around Crassmor and he was on his way into the war camp of the lizard riders.
The enormous camp was under an odorous pall of strange foods, fires fueled by the odd plants and trees of this alien wilderness, latrines, incense, and human and reptilian stenches. There were no women or children to be seen, nor any other camp followers. The lizard riders slept in small tents or under fantastically embroidered awnings, in groups ranging between two and a dozen or so, which Sandur had said were family groups. There didn’t seem to be much booty in sight, though all the warriors were well armed and well equipped. Crassmor could see no herds or flocks. Here and there he spied empty boxes, bags, and containers of the kind used by the broken-cross soldiers.
A hungry army, he thought, from a used-up, hungry world. A dangerous enemy.
Their lances were sharp, though; their weapons bright. Their lizards split the air with piercing shrieks, as the barbarians blew on their silvery control whistles, the unheard sounds sending shivers through Crassmor. The reptiles, scenting Kort, straining to fight or prey on him, had to be restrained sharply, both with whistles and with the sharp lizard prods many of the invaders carried. This close, Crassmor could see that many of the riding lizards were afflicted with tiny parasites, like multicolored barnacles, clinging tenaciously to the joints of their keeled scales.
Barbarians turned out of their tents to line the way, which was hard-packed by the passage of many feet and claws. Shouts and curses and insults rose up; weapons were waved. Though there were no other domestic animals to be seen, the camp was populated by flying creatures the size of small birds or large insects, each having four green, translucent wings. As Crassmor watched, one of them left its perch on a tent pole, settling in a blur of wings onto the back of a stakedout lizard. The beast made no complaint as the flying thing began picking and prying at the tiny parasites among its scales.
The group came at last to the ziggurat tent. Sandur’s name was again invoked. Crassmor was ordered down off his mount. He left Kort, with a warning that nothing had better happen to him. The barbarians seemed unimpressed. The horse was rolling his eyes nervously, showing much the same emotion that Crassmor felt as he entered the tent.
The stuff of the tent, not beige silk but something very like it, admitted a great deal of the outside light; still, it was dim within. At ground level the interior had been partitioned off with hangings, awnings, and tapestries depicting scenes of battle, hunting, and celebration with surprising skill. Overhead yawned the upper reaches of the tent, undivided, supported by cleverly joined tentposts and taut guy lines.
Crassmor and his escort passed through several spaces that held nothing but armed, waiting, glowering men, some seated cross-legged on the rich carpets or among thick cushions, others standing. They thumbed their weapons when they caught sight of him, but held their tongues. A last drapery was drawn aside. Beyond it was the innermost chamber of the tent, a spacious place within gently wafting hangings. There were standards and totems of the lizard riders on their upright poles, and a number of the battle flags and gonfalons of the broken-cross sold
iers as well.
Crassmor found himself in the presence of the Warlord. Ravager sat before a brazier with dozens of his men, all of them arrayed in magnificent trappings and ornaments. All around the chamber their lizards crouched, reclined, or stood, tearing at dripping chunks of meat, hissing among themselves. Many of them were staked out with chains.
The Warlord looked up. His face contorted in fury when he saw Crassmor; Crassmor trembled. Then Ravager laughed.
“The little one!” he roared, slapping a thick thigh with his massive hand. “You hid like a sandmite, then stole Sandur from under my hand, you with your sudden appearance and spare horse!” He motioned to one of his conferees. “Bank the fires and heat iron for this foolish boy. There will be meat for our mounts tonight, tender and rare!”
Crassmor hoped that his quaking knees weren’t too obvious. “Would you care to hear Sandur’s words first?”
Ravager spat; the spittle popped and steamed among the coals of the brazier. “I will have them out of you anyway, once you’re roasting. You will tell me all I wish to know, not so?”
Crassmor considered replying with some brave defiance, but could think of none. The crackle of the ill-smelling fire and some streak of honesty made him answer, “Unquestionably.” The Warlord’s brows lifted a little at that candor. “But it will do you no good to hear my message when I’m basting.”
The Emptier of Lodges rose, crossed the carpet between them in three long steps, and stood peering down into Crassmor’s eyes with fists on hips. Close up, Crassmor saw that the Bringer of Slaughter had chosen to wear, as a token of victory, one of the decorations of his fallen enemies, a metallic cross enameled in black. The lord of the invaders was bigger than Crassmor had thought, bigger than Sandur, or even Ironwicca. He spoke in a calm tone. “Tell, me, then, frightened mite on your drastic mission, what is your message?”