by T. O. Munro
“You saw Rugan and Quintala in battle?” Thom frowned. “Hepdida saw them both in the castle.”
Kaylan gave a grim nod. “I thought as much. Quintala opened a gate to flee the battle. Rugan followed her through it before the magic was dispelled.” He frowned and looked to the blazing fortress. “They are both there, you say. In that?”
Hepdida found she was shivering, shaking her head, sniffling uncontrollably. “I tried to get him out. I wanted to get him out. But he was so dreadfully hurt and I could not lift him and then the roof exploded.” Here safe within Kaylan’s protection, the constant stress of fight and flight at last receded and left her beached by delayed shock and grief. “He saved me from Quintala. She would have killed me, she was killing me, throttling me.”
Elise reached out to reassure the trembling princess, but the thief was quicker pulling her close within his arms. Words formed and died unspoken on his lips, he glanced at the ruined funeral pyre of the half-elven and shook his head. “I’m glad he kept you safe, my princess.” His voice was thick, heavy with regret. “I will always be in his debt for that.”
Hepdida shifted within his embrace, burying her tearstained face in his chest. They stood in a moment’s impromptu silence for the fallen prince. Then Kaylan gently eased Hepdida back. “Come, we must get you away from this place and you can tell me what insane mystery or mischance carried you to Listcairn.”
She gulped and nodded her agreement. As she turned away Kaylan caught sight of the fourth member of their party. Haselrig had pressed back against the parapet when Kaylan first drew near, keeping his face down, eyes fixed in scrutiny of the uneven cobbles of the bridge’s roadway. However, as Hepdida turned he had looked up and the moonlight had illuminated his face.
Recognition exploded on Kaylan’s features, followed at a hair’s breadth distance by vengeful fury. “You,” he cried, his sword already half way out of its scabbard. “You bastard!”
For all Haselrig’s penitent humility, the thief’s hostility still drew an instinctive backward step from the ex-antiquary. The man’s face was pale with fear at the sword raised to smite him.
Elise stepped between the two. Kaylan’s desparate adjustment of his aim to avoid the sorceress threw the thief off balance. “Step aside,” Kaylan barked. “This man must die.”
Elise shook her head.
Kaylan roared incredulously. “He was the Dark Lord’s lieutenant, his treachery the foundation of all the disasters that have befallen us.”
“He will not die.”
“He will and he must. Have you forgotten the trap he lured the queen and I into, the tortures his plotting subjected us both too. He showed me no mercy, I mean to show him none in fair repayment.”
Elise held up her wizened hands, shook her white hair free. “Have you forgotten the lifetime of suffering his cursed plotting inflicted on me? Have you forgotten my dead sister, my murdered father, my mother forced to be bedslave to a depraved master? You have no right to strike him down before I do, Kaylan, and I do not choose to do so.”
Kaylan shook his head in bafflement. “He must be punished, he must die.”
“Punished yes, but not put to death.” Elise laid a hand on Kaylan’s arm. “Enough people have died already.”
The thief swung his gaze on Hepdida. “What say you, my princess? Is this man fit to live?”
Hepdida pursed her lips. She had stabbed the outlander axeman to save Haselrig; she still did not quite know why. “He has served us well tonight, without him we could not have even got in, let alone achieved what we set out to.” She smiled uncertainly. “My father trusted him too, and he discharged that trust.”
“Were our positions reversed, there is no minion of the Dark Lord who would give a second’s thought before extinguishing the forfeited life of a traitor.”
“But we are not minions of Maelgrum,” Elise said. “Isn’t that why we are fighting?”
Still shaking his head, Kaylan slid his sword back into its sheaf and began to lead his horse back towards the eastern end of the bridge, where a detachment of nomads had been clearing the bodies of the crossbowmen. After a few yards he stopped and growled over his shoulder, “Well come on then.”
Hepdida looked at Haselrig. The man’s expression was pale, wide eyed. He had borne the prospect of imminent death with fortitude, but the experience of mercy had quite scattered his wits. He looked from the princess to the sorceress, his mouth working in a fruitless bid for speech. Hepdida ventured a small smile of reassurance to ease his distress. Great fat tears suddenly sprang from Haselrig’s eyes, rolling down his cheeks and his face crumpled into a lachrymose ruin.
Thom wrapped an arm around the ex-antiquary’s shoulders and Haselrig clung to him as they walked eastwards.
***
The first fingers of dawn were stretching across the plain and the east wind was fresh against her cheek as Niarmit cantered down the eastern edge of Coln Forest. She could feel the trickle of fresh blood beneath her punctured armour but she was too tired to attempt a healing spell. The effort would drive her into sleep and this was not the time or the place for such luxury.
Something had put out the flames, for the trees on this side were unmarked by fire. She scanned the forest edge, searching for signs that some of her men or Johanssen’s had survived the night’s terrors and made it through to the forest’s eastern edge.
“There, Niarmit.” Thren had made better use of the evidence of her own eyes than she had, though his brain might be less fuddled with fatigue than hers. The king had seen a flicker of flame on the edge of her vision, a thin plume of smoke rising into the pale blue sky of morning.
She urged her horse forward, closing on the makeshift camp, a circle of soldiers grimy with dirt and ash, binding each other’s wounds. Heads turned at the sound of her approach. Two of them struggled up on weary feet, spears in hand and one delivered a hoarse challenge to the newcomer emerging from the north-western gloom. They recognised the Helm before they heard her reply.
“Your Majesty.” Fatigue drove them to kneel their obeisance, but she waved them up.
One she recognised had ridden with her from Nordsalve. She nodded a greeting. “Eriksen, isn’t it?”
Recognition brought a glow to his face despite the dull light and the grim times. He hurried to introduce his colleague. “This is Corporal Raskstal, your Majesty.”
The corporal wore a tattered infantryman’s tabard. Niarmit allowed herself a faint smile that at least a union had been achieved between her cavalry and Johnassen’s rearguard, but how many of either division remained hale and whole?
“Is this all there is?” Her eyes scanned the little encampment taking in no more than a couple of hundred survivors, albeit all of them just about fit enough to shift for themselves and hold a spear.
“There are others, your Majesty, seven or eight hundred all told,” Raskstal answered her. “Captain Carlsen led them away in search of the main body about an hour or so ago. There were many grievously wounded amongst them and the captain thought to find priests in Lord Torsden’s command who could heal their injuries.”
Niarmit glanced in the direction of the corporal’s eastward flung arm. In her head she pictured the map of the seven counties with herself in the middle of a fluid triangle. Colnhill lay at one vertex nine leagues to the west of her, abandoned and now doubtless overrun by the enemy. The other two corners would form on the divisions lead by Pietrsen to the north-east and Torsden to the south-east, the former marching hard to join the latter. Carlsen’s limping detachment of mixed survivors of the troll attack would be stumbling east somewhere between the two forces. She could not guess which of them Carlsen would happen upon first but neither would have many priests, nor much time and leisure to effect healing. Once they had linked up, the priority must be to continue their flight eastwards. Even with the disaster that had overtaken the trolls, the northern lords would have far too few to stand against the horde of Maelgrum which would soon be at their heels. It w
as folly for any to sit and wait.
“Why did you not go with Carlsen, Corporal?”
“The captain said we should stay, see if anymore survivors came out of the forest, or if anything worse came out,” Raskstal said.
“The trolls are all gone,” Eriksen said. “Burnt to a crisp, along with more than half the forest.”
“And a good many of our people too.” The corporal shuddered as a memory danced behind his open eyes. “There’d never have been any gap between us and them, if those bastards hadn’t have kept stopping to feed on the fallen. But even so, the fire outran the trolls and took a good few men as might otherwise have made it out.”
“The fire didn’t stop? It chased our people down too?” Niarmit half closed her eyes, the better to glare at Eadran in the Domain of the Helm. The Vanquisher gazed back from his white throne with no more apology than an insouciant shrug. With a scowl she wrenched the Helm from her head and thrust it in her saddle bag. She shook her hair free in the early morning breeze, feeling a little more tired and little less tainted with the Helm stowed behind her. “What killed the flames?”
“That cold blast did for it,” the corporal admitted. “Snuffed it out just as I could feel the fire licking at my heels, and smell my own hair singeing.”
“But what was that scream?” Eriksen shook his head. “I never heard anything howl like that. The trolls and the flames were bad enough, but I haven’t ever felt so scared to my bones as I was by that shout.”
“There won’t be any more survivors,” Niarmit said briskly. “Neither troll nor man. You should not have waited any of you.”
She glanced westwards towards Colnhill. As the dawn spread she could see the huge pall of smoke rising from the smouldering forest and drifting away towards the enemy. Perhaps the ash might stick in their craw, or water their eyes, but it would be unwise to rely on anything to slow the enemy’s pursuit.
“It was the captain’s orders, your Majesty.” Eriksen’s tone offered an apology more for his own obedience than for the absent Carlsen’s command. He made a pre-emptive twist of his shoulder in anticipation of an alternative order, ready to head east in pursuit of the captain’s convoy of wounded.
“And what were Constable Johanssen’s commands?” Even as she asked the question, Niarmit felt a sense of dread which was given full endorsement by the dark expression on Raskstal’s face. “Where is Lord Johanssen? Is he dead?”
“No, your Majesty.” The sad shake of the man’s head did little to reassure. “He is one of the wounded, one of the most grievously wounded, by flame and beast. It was on his account in particular, that Captain Carlsen was anxious to bring the injured within reach of a priest’s blessing.”
Niarmit gazed around twisting in her saddle to examine the slow brightening day. The night had been short but exhausting and there was so much still to be done. “Break camp,” she told the soldiers. “We march east.”
“Your Majesty,” Raskstal gasped. “You are wounded yourself.” He stalled between horror and impropriety one hand over his mouth the other reaching towards the queen’s side where the wound opened up by hard riding was leaking again. The horse turned, skittish at the corporal’s dismay and Eriksen chorused his own concern.
“It has gone right through.”
“It is nothing,” Niarmit assured them. “We must all flee east at our best speed.” She felt a little light headed, but she had to express her urgency. “We cannot trust to the enemy to delay in his pursuit,” she said through the leaden weariness of exhaustion and blood loss that had suddenly assailed her. “He could have been upon us by now.” Her head was heavy, her thoughts floundering in cotton wool. “The … The Goddess only knows what might have distracted him from striking.”
Then, as her horse shied away from the anxious corporal reaching for its bridle, Niarmit slipped insensible from the saddle into the mortified arms of Eriksen.
***
It was always coldest before the dawn, and never more so than atop the tallest tower in the highest fortress in the greatest mountain range of the Petred Isle.
The embers in the brazier were dark and cold. Odestus’s frozen fingers had conjured a stronger flame so long as the fuel lasted, but his orc guard were too wary to bring him more than a handful of coals at a time. They had, at Dema’s insistence he assumed, spared him an old stained and lumpen matress for a bed and a few rough blankets to keep the chill at bay, but little more by way of comfort. Thankfully, the air was too cold for rain and too dry for snow, so the finger numbing temperature was the worst that the weather had yet found to throw at him.
The orcs by contrast had indulged their habitual cruelty in the food they gave him. Whatever the means by which Maelgrum allowed Dema to observe him, neither the sounds nor the smells of Odestus’s imprisonment could have been passed on to her. The little wizard’s weight had fallen on a diet of meat so rotten the smell made him retch before the orcs had even brought it onto the tower top. They laughed at that, torturing him with the inedible, the only petty triumph that the peculiar circumstances of his imprisonment could afford them.
He had thought to ask why they tormented him so, but he knew it was a pointless question. His position was unenviable, the visible object of Maelgrum’s displeasure. One might as well ask the clouds why they rained, as ask an orc why it persecuted the weak.
Odestus shivered despite his blankets. It was colder than ever, unnaturally cold. Ice frosted his eyebrows, the tip of his nose was numb. His body, in the grip of imminent hypothermia, roused him from sleep. The details of some dream of trouble and distress fled his memory the instant his eyes opened, leaving only the echo of a fearful misery to fret his mind. And then he realised there was a more tangible fear to prey on his numbed wits.
Maelgrum stood on the opposite side of the tower, his dark form a silhouette against the brightening eastern sky. Waves of vapour tumbled from his arms. The sound that Odestus had at first mistaken for a ringing in his ears, was instead the tinkling of tiny shards of ice as the vapour froze in its descent before striking the frost covered stone of the tower floor.
The Dark Lord stood waiting. Odestus shuffled himself upright and tugged at the edges of the blanket in a fumbling effort to pull it tight around his shoulders. He was shivering with cold more than fear, but he was determined to keep the ague from clattering his teeth within his jaw.
They faced each other, the little wizard gazing up into the glowing pits of Maelgrum’s eye sockets. The red light grew brighter, pulsing in impatience. The cold spread until all trace of moisture had been dragged from the air and made into a carpet of minute icicles which stretched from tower centre to every merlon and embrasure of the battlements.
Neither spoke until the spreading dawn gave some definition to the undead wizard’s face, beyond an outline in which two red fires of malice blazed. It was Maelgrum who broke the silence. “What isss thisss, Odessstusss, hasss thisss tower frozssen the curiosssity out of you? Do you not wonder what circmssstance hasss brought me here?”
Odestus turned one more extreme shiver into a trembling shrug. “I can guess.”
A blast of frozen air stung Odestus’s cheeks. He could not feel it in his nose or his fingers, a fact that some corner of his mind suggested should alarm him. “Ssso,” Maelgrum prowled round the battlement. “The ssstudent claimsss to know the mind of the massster.” He flicked his fingers, Odestus felt himself dragged forward by an icy shadow of the Dark Lord’s touch. “Tell me what it iss that you presssume to think you know?”
Odestus glared back, despair making him bold. There could only be one reason for Maelgrum to appear in such fury. A reason which brought no joy, just resignation to the little wizard’s spirit as he prepared to grieve again in what little time the Dark Lord intended to spare him. “I presume,” he began. “That Dema’s mission on your behalf has come to an end, a premature end. That she is now dismissed to meet her death in the past and your plans are all unmade.”
“One possssibility yes
ss,” Maelgrum hung his face a few inches infront of Odestus’s. Even the freezing air could not entirely stifle the stench of death that hung around the undead wizard. “Though isss it not equally likely that the lady hasss disssobeyed me and forsssaken you to your fate.”
“She would not have abandoned me, nor would I have abandoned her.”
Maelgrum sprang back with a snort of contempt. “Thisss weaknesss of attachment, thisss fondnesss for another, it isss and alwaysss hasss been the downfall of humanity.” He paced the tower, crunching the ice beneath his booted feet. “I have no need of it, I had no need of it. There isss nothing I care for, no-one I care for.”
Despite the freezing cold that slowed Odestus’s wits to a glacial pace, some oddity in the Dark Lord’s behaviour permeated the little wizard’s shivering senses. Maelgrum, for all the lofty arrogance of his assertions seemed to be talking more to himself than to Odestus.
“To care, little wizard isss to expossse yourssself to risssk, to the risssk of pain. I have isssolated and exsspunged that risssk over many long centuriesss. I do not feel pain. I cannot feel pain.”
“A life without such risk is not worth living.” At the last, Odestus resolved he would speak truth to power. There were things he would not leave unsaid in this world. “A life in which there is no-one that you value enough to fear their loss is no life at all.”
Maelgrum was silent, brooding within his veil of frozen mist while he glared at the little wizard. The glow of his eyes brightened and faded in a slow funereal beat. “You were a good ssstudent Odessstusss,” he hissed. “A quick ssstudy with ssskill enough that I could overlook a sssqueamisssh weaknessss in your character. Sssuch potential wasssted, and for what?”
“For a friend, and…” Odestus stopped himself. The thought of Persapha trapped somewhere in Grithsank, pursued perhaps by Galen, had risen in his fuddled brain. He swallowed the words ‘her daughter’ but not before Maelgrum had seen a hesitation on which to pounce.