The Red Sword- The Complete Trilogy

by Michael Wallace

  That was hardly true. If anything, Markal had put them at greater risk. He’d allowed the barbarian paladin to enter the gardens, and then, when she set off to kill the sorcerer, had failed to stop her.

  “Look at these people,” Memnet continued, gesturing at the keepers working on the wall and in the courtyard. “They trust you.”

  “They trust you, Master. If you hadn’t still been alive, I don’t know what we’d have done. We were all waiting for your return, trying not to get killed until that happened. By the Brothers, you know I don’t have the magic to defend the gardens against a sorcerer, and neither do any of the others.”

  “Oh, nonsense. Anyway, I know your limitations, and they don’t trouble me. Your time will come. Might take a century or two, but it will happen.”

  “That soon? How comforting.”

  “Let me ask you a question, Markal. If you were going to overthrow the king, how would you do it? Armies? Magic? An invasion of nomads from the desert, an assassin in the night?”

  “Is this hypothetical?”

  “We can’t do it from here, that’s for certain.”

  “I have the curious sensation that you’re about to send me off on some business or other. Where to, Marrabat? You want to enlist the sultan in our fight?”

  “That would certainly help.” Memnet rested a hand on his shoulder. “But there is a small matter of a magical sword to settle first. Nathaliey is back—this is a task for the two of you.”

  #

  The next morning, Markal and Nathaliey led two horses laden with supplies and passed through the north gate. The red sword had been wrapped in a leather apron and tucked into its own saddlebag. Layered spells kept it hidden from prying eyes, both physical and magical.

  Markal was still aware of its presence, sleeping, waiting. Would those incantations keep it from reaching out for the enemy? He didn’t know.

  Memnet the Great accompanied them as far as the bridge. He whistled and hummed to himself, sometimes strolling into the clover-filled meadow before returning to the road. Markal had presumed that the master had something to say to the two travelers or he wouldn’t have left the gardens, but apparently he just wanted a walk. Nathaliey caught Markal’s eye and raised a questioning eyebrow, to which he could only shrug.

  The horses hesitated at the bridge, confused, and Markal and Nathaliey had to coax them onto the stone path and up to the height of the arch as it curved over the gurgling waters of Blossom Creek. The water level was lower than Markal had ever seen, but it was still flowing for now.

  Memnet stopped them at the top of the bridge. “Stay south of the Tothian Way. Avoid Veyrian scouts, and most of all, don’t let the marauders spot you. I don’t know what they are, or the extent of their powers, but they have magic about them, perhaps equal to your own.”

  “Understood,” Markal said.

  “Jethro has been digging in the library for information. If he finds anything, I’ll seek a way to get it into your hands.”

  “How will you do that?” Nathaliey asked. “We’ll be hidden, and we’re leaving Aristonia behind.”

  “There’s nothing west of here but army camps and bandits,” Markal added. “And in the mountains, griffins, giants, and other dangers. You can hardly send word by mounted courier.”

  “If it’s necessary, I’ll find a way,” Memnet said. “Now,” he added, clapping them each on the shoulder, “I bid you best wishes. Find the order of paladins. Get the sword into their hands and make sure they know its lore.”

  He left them. As he came down off the bridge on his way back to the gardens, something glittered in his hand with reflected light. The orb. Was he playing with it, or had he started to rebuild his magic?

  “Well then, here we go,” Nathaliey said when she and Markal had led their horses down the other side and off the bridge. “Say goodbye to soft beds and hot meals. To feet that don’t ache and to uninterrupted sleep.”

  “It could be worse,” Markal said. “Last time you crossed the bridge you were running for your life.”

  “And I’m with you—that’s an improvement over my former company.” She grinned. “And by that, I mean, thank the Brothers that I’m not traveling with Chantmer.”

  “Imagine a journey of three hundred miles with Chantmer as your only company.”

  “Imagine it? I’ve done it!” Nathaliey said. “Well, maybe not alone, but close enough. We went to Veyre three years ago, just the two of us and a pair of acolytes who were well cowed and stayed out of his way as much as they could. That left me to suffer Chantmer’s attention, such as he granted me.”

  “Narud isn’t such great company, either,” Markal said. “Not unless he spots a bird with unusual plumage or some unknown insect, and then he won’t shut up.”

  She grinned at this, and he felt a flood of affection for her. So much had changed between them, from Nathaliey’s growing power to Markal’s supposed elevation to the rank of wizard, but their easy familiarity had not dimmed.

  “All right then,” Nathaliey said. “On we go. Griffins and marauders and who knows what else await us. Should be delightful.”

  And with that, Markal and Nathaliey continued up the road, on their way to the barbarian kingdoms of the west. The gardens of Memnet the Great receded in the distance behind them.

  -end book #1-

  Book Two: The Black Shield

  Chapter One

  Early spring, four months before the slaying of Bronwyn of Arvada on the king’s highway.

  The paladins were two miles east of the village of Gronhelm when Sir Wolfram spotted the dead animal in the road. Or rather, his horse did. Wolfram was riding next to his sister at the head of the company, and had been squinting at the sky so intently that it was a surprise when his mare pulled up, shaking her head and balking.

  The villagers had warned of griffin riders in the hill country, and so the paladins had kept their focus on the sky, eyes drawn to every crow, hawk, and eagle. They had nervously cleared their throats and eyed each other whenever the wind shifted and the slate-colored clouds began to drift lower. Perfect cover for griffins.

  “Well,” Bronwyn said as she and Wolfram eyed the dead animal. “That isn’t a good sign.”

  There was so much blood and carnage that it took a moment to identify the carcass as belonging to a horse, and not a cow, goat, or sheep. Its throat was torn open, and its innards lay in a sloppy mess outside its belly. Blood had drained out and collected at the bottom of cart ruts, where it had yet to congeal, and there were few flies. No crows or other scavengers, either. The kill was fresh.

  A saddle lay to one side, the leather bloody and shredded, and Wolfram eyed the scrub country surrounding the road. No sign of the unhorsed rider. A glance overhead. No circling griffins, either, thankfully.

  Bronwyn motioned for the others to hold position behind her. “Crossbows,” she told them. “If it’s a lone beast, you fire your bolts and drive it off. If it has a rider, let him see your arms, but do not fire at him or his mount.”

  “And if we’re attacked anyway?” Wolfram asked. “Do we fight to kill or to drive them off?”

  “These griffin riders are brave enough, but they’re not suicidal. A lone rider won’t attack a company of twenty armed paladins.”

  “It’s not the lone griffin that worries me,” he told her. “The Gronhelmers said the griffins have been attacking eight or ten at a time—slaughtering entire flocks of sheep.”

  “We’re not sheep, Brother.”

  “They’ve killed people, too.”

  “Herders and farmers, the lot of them. Anyway, they might be exaggerating.”

  The road was already rising toward the mountain passes, and Wolfram looked east, to the snow-covered peaks of the Dragon’s Spine. Three years had passed since the first griffins were spotted flying over the hill country of Eastern Eriscoba, and now the mountains were infested with them.

  Whatever had driven them from their homelands had also brought wolves—starving packs fro
m the northern mountains—followed by giants and other strange beasts. And it wasn’t only the icy wastes of the north that were in upheaval. Packs of gray marauders came pillaging and killing, and only Captain Bronwyn and her paladins were capable of resisting them; anywhere the paladins were not, the marauders slaughtered at will. More terrifying still, a dragon of the vast southern deserts, as big as a house and huffing smoke, had flown the length and breadth of Eriscoba. Thank the Brothers it had vanished again over the mountains.

  Meanwhile, the griffin riders, while not exactly numerous, had settled into aeries all throughout the central portion of the massive mountain range that divided the Free Kingdoms of the west from the decadent city states of the eastern plains known as the khalifates. While they’d strangled travel through the high passes, they didn’t usually descend this low, and the paladins hadn’t made open war with them as they had against the marauder bands.

  “And the villagers might not be exaggerating,” Wolfram said. “What if we have to face an entire flock of the beasts?”

  “If it’s a flock, we make them pay dearly. We’ll wipe them out to the last beast, the last rider. That is our way. Am I right, Sir Wolfram?”

  Her voice was firm, and she was no longer speaking to him as a brother, but as one of her paladins, and he responded in kind.

  “Yes, Captain.”

  When Wolfram was a child, his sister had given him affectionate nicknames: Wolf Cub, when he was a scrappy boy, the youngest of six; later, Wolfie. The name carried affection, but also dismissed him as a child, someone coddled by his parents and his hard-fighting older siblings.

  “Someday, you will be a wolf,” Bronwyn used to say when she was a knight in training and he would carry her breastplate and shield, “but for now you are only my little cub.”

  That had changed when he’d joined the paladins, and changed again when his older brother, Randall, fell to a gray marauder wielding the red sword. Bronwyn was captain now, the red sword hers and hers alone, and he’d become Sir Wolfram. But he wondered if she still saw him as her little cub.

  Now he felt a twinge of his old pride and love as she turned about in the saddle and waved the others forward with a gloved hand. She sat strong and confident in the saddle, her face severe and yet beautiful at the same time. There was a painting of Mother in the great hall of the keep that looked like that. Their mother, a warrior queen of the small kingdom of Arvada, rising in the saddle, a sword in hand.

  They were brave and proud, the barons and baronesses of Arvada, and sometimes hard and unyielding. Too much duty, and not enough tenderness. His mother shared that trait, as did his father, his uncles and aunts, and his older brothers and, of course, his sister, Bronwyn.

  On the surface, Wolfram was much the same as the rest. Strong and tall and a ferocious swordsman in combat, even at the young age of twenty-three. But sometimes, he wanted to be Wolfie again.

  Bronwyn ordered him to remain by her side as the two led the company of paladins onward. Abandoned pastures lined the road, shaggy with knee-high grass and six-foot saplings that would soon turn the meadows into forest if the shepherds and their flocks didn’t return. A stream flowed by, but its millrace was empty, its windmill still and silent. A few minutes later, they passed a pair of crofter’s huts with collapsed sod roofs and a sad, abandoned air.

  A bony dog exploded onto the road, barking furiously, and Wolfram flinched at the unexpected racket. A woman’s furtive voice hissed at it from a copse of trees growing atop an old burial mound, and the dog went slinking back to its hiding place with its tail tucked between its legs.

  “Should I dismount and collar the owner of that dog?” Wolfram asked.

  “To what purpose?” Bronwyn asked.

  “To question her about what happened here.”

  “Seems obvious enough.”

  It wasn’t though, when the possibilities might include everything from griffin riders to gray marauders. Maybe nothing more than bandits, taking advantage of the collapse of law and order.

  “There are more than twenty of us,” Bronwyn added. “I have Soultrup”—she dropped a hand to touch the hilt of the massive two-handed sword strapped to her saddlebags—“and the rest of you are a match for whatever enemies face us on the mountain passes.”

  Suddenly, a frown crossed her face and she gripped the sword hilt more tightly. She studied the surrounding terrain with narrowed eyes. Her lips pulled into a tight line.

  Her reaction alarmed him. “Sky or ground?” he asked.

  “Ground. Prepare arms, Sir Wolfram.”

  Wolfram lifted a hand and gave a sharp chopping motion. Paladins drew their swords and unstrapped helms and gauntlets from their saddlebags. Shields came up next, with their gleaming array of painted fists, crossed swords, sunbursts, and other symbols of the baronies, earldoms, and free kingdoms from which they hailed.

  Bronwyn glanced over her shoulder, gave an approving nod to see the fourteen men and six women of her company armed and ready for combat, and pulled her horse into the lead. She loosened her sword in its sheath, but did not yet draw it. She raised her shield, which had the same silver moon painted on its gray surface as Wolfram’s, and placed her helm on her lap to get it in position to put it on in a hurry.

  The company traveled for the next few minutes without speaking, although the jostling, tromping horses made enough noise that there would be no sneaking up on whomever their captain had sensed.

  The road ahead passed through a narrow defile tucked between two hillocks, which seemed a perfect place for ambush, and Bronwyn gestured for Wolfram to leave the road and circle up to the right while another young paladin by the name of Sir Marissa made her way around the obstacle from the left.

  Wolfram didn’t question the order. Bronwyn had an uncanny ability to sense danger from afar, an ability granted her by the sword she’d used to kill the marauder, Wolfram knew. Sometimes, Bronwyn had confessed one night over ale in a Vilsylvan tavern, it lied. Other times, it gave her bits and pieces of information without putting them together in a reliable way. Knowing this, and remembering the warning of the Gronhelmers earlier in the day, he kept glancing at the leaden sky even as his horse crested the hillock with the road below him on the left.

  The road dipped briefly toward a river channel flowing down from the mountains. A wooden bridge wide enough for a single cart crossed the river, but the center span had collapsed, or, more likely, had been torn down by marauders to keep people from crossing. A squat stone keep sat on the near side, where it had long collected bridge tolls, but it had been sacked. Its oak door hung from a single bent hinge—the other hinge torn out of the stone—and the thatch roof had burned off. The whole thing—bridge, ruined keep, and weed-infested road—had a sad, forlorn air.

  Ironically, the river was so low at the moment that neither keep nor bridge were necessary to accomplish a crossing. The bridge was probably sixty feet wide from bank to bank, but two thirds of its posts jutted from muddy ground, with only the middle, deepest third of the channel carrying water. It was said that drought had ravaged the eastern plains, and while Eriscoba remained green and lush, the river levels were all low as they flowed west from the mountains to join the Thorft running through the heart of Eriscoba.

  But it wasn’t the destruction of the keep and bridge, or even the low level of the water that drew his eye, but rather a huge figure sitting on its haunches in the middle of the river with its back to them. A blasted giant.

  The creature had shaggy red hair, not only on its head and beard, but curly and almost pelt-like on its massive forearms. It wore a vest made of deer hides and a necklace of skulls and other bones that clanked as it moved, and it had jammed the end of a crudely carved club into the riverbed, with the top half emerging from the surface of the water like a totem. The giant was eating something, tearing off chunks of meat with its teeth and grunting like a huge boar as it chomped and smacked its lips.

  But why eat in the water? Seemed a strange place for a meal. May
be the brute had clubbed its prey as it tried to cross and been too lazy or hungry to dress it and cook it properly, instead sitting down to eat it raw, even if that was right in the middle of the river.

  The giant tossed aside part of its meal, which splashed, bobbed up, and floated downstream, trailing bits of torn, bloody clothing. Wolfram’s stomach clenched as he realized it was part of a human. Most likely, the rider from the dead horse. A traveler, unwisely wandering alone in the lawless territory east of Gronhelm, had come under attack from a hungry griffin, who’d killed his horse.

  The traveler had escaped that attack only to be spotted by a giant, who had chased the tired, desperate man into the river and caught him where the water was deepest. A knock over the head, and the giant had his meal, which it was now enjoying.

  An hour earlier on the road and we’d have saved the poor fellow.

  Or been killed themselves. A giant of that size could tear a man’s limbs from his body as if they were the legs of a grasshopper.

  Wolfram slipped his left hand inside his tunic and touched the silver crescent moon on its chain, given to him by his father when he’d joined the paladins. It had two small bits of magic. One was to let the former holder of it—in this case, his father—know that its new owner was still alive. The second bit of magic whispered courage to its bearer. Wolfram heard that whisper now, and a small surge of confidence tightened his muscles and made his fingers twitch to grab for his sword.

  He glanced across the road to where Marissa was watching the giant silently from the opposite hillock. He waved a hand to get her attention and gestured back toward the company of knights. They turned around while the giant carried on with its meal, back turned, unaware that it had been spotted.

  A few minutes later, they were reporting to their captain. Bronwyn’s face hardened as she took it in.