*
The sun was a straw-pale disc in a chilly azure sky, and King Rynert sat on a camp-stool at the crest of Embeyan Hill with banners around him rippling in that accursed wind. Not a shred of fog remained, and his troops could move and fight like sighted men rather than blind ones. So could Kalarr’s.
It was almost noon and though they had stood down for their midday meal they remained in formation, neat and purposeful. It wasn’t much reassurance. Lord Santon’s host would have looked equally neat before catastrophe wiped it out.
Dewan ar Korentin stood a little farther down the slope, wearing a close-fitting Imperial helmet distinctive among the peaks and wide neck-guards of Alban war-helms. He was rapping his cavalry-commander’s baton against one armoured knee, but the jerky lack of rhythm showed how this uneventful waiting was eroding even his iron nerves. Rynert wanted to get up and talk to the man, ask him a needless question, do something, do anything, to end the annoying, irregular tap-tap-tap.
It stopped. Several of the other lords and officers on the hill glanced sideways at the sudden silence, then heard the distant, hollow muttering like faraway thunder that had caught Dewan’s attention. They shifted their gaze to the ridge north of Radmur Plain as he cleared his throat and moved his baton in a long, slow arc taking in half the northern horizon.
“Places, gentlemen,” he said. “Here they come.”
As if in response to ar Korentin’s cue the distant ridge went jagged with the helmets of a rank of men advancing at a pace measured by the sullen thud of drums until the skyline was clear. They stopped, spear-points twinkling in the weak sunlight, and another rank followed. And another, and another, and another, like the ripples of an incoming tide, until the slope was dense with men.
No, thought Rynert. Not men, not any more. Just puppets of dead flesh pulled by the strings of a necromancer’s will.
There was a blare of horns, their sonorous bellow thinned by distance, and the ranks closed into steel-fringed wedges faced with scarlet shields. Groups of horsemen moved up alongside. The Alban drums and bugles sounded a response, sending couriers galloping down from the generals on the ridge as each regiment shifted into close order against cavalry they could kill or open dispersion to avoid the traugarin they could not.
From any lower vantage-point the enemy formation was a straightforward frontal assault, but Rynert’s advantage of height meant he could see movement at the rear flanks that might be a planned encirclement. First open engagement, then stab in the back, they were tactics well suited to Kalarr’s reputation.
The drums boomed again, the horns wailed and the red shields began to lumber forward. Ar Korentin, mounted now, waved his baton towards Lord Dacurre’s cavalry and unleashed them against cu Ruruc’s horsemen. It gave the haughty, hard-to-control kailinin a chance to do something useful, because the likelihood of their doing something stupid increased the longer he held them in reserve.
Arrows flickered between the riders as they closed, then the Albans returned bows to cases, twirled out their long spears in the same movement, hefted shields high and ploughed into the enemy with a great howling crash. Men on both sides were unhorsed or skewered as the two galloping ranks passed through one another with the bugles on both sides already sounding recall.
Rynert tried to remain dispassionate as a general should, but he was all too aware of his racing pulse and sweaty hands. Other commanders had already given way to their excitement with shouts and waving batons, standing in their stirrups for a better view or hammering iron-clad fists on armoured knees. The King raised his own baton to the signallers. It was time his foot-regiments fell back, and concentrating on their disciplined manoeuvres would force the drama of the cavalry duel to the back of his mind.
Then he heard someone swear harshly and looked around to where a troop of Kalarr’s horsemen galloped headlong towards Embeyan Ridge. Lord Dacurre’s crack household troops were hard after them, bows drawn again and shooting as they rode. The Alban kailinin were clearing saddles at almost two hundred yards, and they weren’t doing it fast enough.
Because these mercenaries were coming for the King.
*
A swirling cloud of green foxfire hung around Ykraith’s uplifted point, mingling with the shimmer of the Echainon stone to give eyes accustomed to the gloom enough light to see by. But only just. After Aldric stumbled for a third or maybe fourth time he glanced irritably at the feeble glow. “Can’t you do better than that?”
“Yes, I can,” said Gemmel. “And I won’t. The better we can see, the better we can be seen.”
Aldric didn’t argue; the silent darkness had been playing tricks on him, creating footsteps inside his head and shapes from light reflecting off quartz, drops of water, even his own eyelashes. He’d been along this tunnel only once before, fourteen years ago, and what little he recalled reminded him of the Cavern of Firedrakes. The memory was enough to make anyone uneasy.
The passage turned a sharp corner and ended in a wall of rough-hewn granite blocks - some no larger than bricks, others six feet or more across.
“Your move, I think.” Gemmel held the Dragonwand aloft, letting power flow into it until the foxfire swelled and grew, driving back the shadows. “Where does this open? If it’s a guardroom, I’d like to know now rather than find out later.”
“It’s not.” Aldric didn’t expand on the reply. Instead he studied the wall for a moment, then pushed against a stone no different to the others until it sank a handspan into the wall. With a muffled rumbled of counterweights, one of the huge slabs ground slowly open.
“I was afraid that might have rusted solid,” he said, more relieved than he probably intended, and made for the doorway. Then he laughed, an odd little sound, and gestured Gemmel through in a bitter show of manners. “Gemmel-altrou, I bid you welcome to my house.”
Old supply-bins lined the chamber beyond, their lids thick with long-undisturbed dust and a shroud of cobwebs. The foxfire had died back again, but there was still enough to show faint traces where footprints, one set large and one small, had gone out and back again. Aldric stared at them.
“My feet, years ago. And my father’s. When he showed me this route.” He cleared his throat and walked away as if leaving the memories behind. A fine grey cloud rose in his wake and drifted again without a sound, blurring the older footprints and the new.
The door at the far end of the chamber opened with only a slight creak from its hinges. Aldric hesitated on the threshold, lowered his head in the ghost of a bow and made a curious little gesture Gemmel didn’t understand until he was inside. Then he too made the small salute of respect to honour generations of Talvalin dead. Their tombs filled the crypt, some elaborately carved, others merely polished and inscribed. More recent burial markers were pillars for cremation ashes not coffined bodies, and he caught up with Aldric beside one of them, guessing without being told whose was the frail-featured pretty face etched into its surface.
“My mother,” Aldric said. There was a barely discernible catch in his voice. “She died when I was born. My father’s place should be at her side. It isn’t, because…” The words faltered, he blinked in the soft, pale light, and Gemmel saw one emotion harden into another. “That’s why I’ve come back.”
*
Rynert stared at the enemy riders surging inexorably up the slope towards him, feeling like someone taking refuge from the spring tide atop a sandhill. Being out-thought and out-fought by a better general was one thing, but this was ridiculous. Death-or-glory charges went out with the Clan Wars, personal challenges and single combat, and weren’t what he expected from mercenaries who knew the cash value of staying alive throughout a battle.
The king tucked his baton through his belt, flinching from contact with the tsepan dirk alongside it, and laid hand to the hilt of his sword. He wasn’t afraid. Fear should have been a natural reaction to the imminence of death, yet all he felt was indignation at being cut down by an outdated tactic from the past.
Then the threat was gone.
Dewan’s personal troops, the Bodyguard cavalry, had been in their usual position behind him, drawn up Drusalan-style knee-to-knee and four rows deep. Rynert had asked none of them, junior kailinin of good clans, what they thought of being put under Imperial military discipline, but he was glad of it now. As they surged forward the troop opened just enough to pass either side of him, then closed again into a solid mass of armoured men on armoured horses pouring down on Kalarr’s men with the irresistible shock of a flash flood.
The impact broke what little formation remained to them, swept them away in swirling disarray, hurled them from their saddles and pounded them out of existence.
The savage little battle-within-a-battle with its clangour of weapons, its war-cries and its screams took place less than a hundred yards away, and Rynert forced himself to ignore the ragged spaces being torn in the Bodyguard’s formation. Instead he sent out more commands to his infantry, grouping some to counter another cavalry charge, dispersing others away from the futile assaults of sluggish traugur wedges that would roll right over any regiment they could engage.
When the Bodyguard returned up the hill they were already dressing ranks, and by the time they resumed their place at Rynert’s back those spaces had closed. But now there were only three rows of horsemen, and each row was only two-thirds its original length.
Dewan ar Korentin faced his depleted command and gave them a brief, sincere salute then swung down from the saddle of his big grey horse. Mount and rider were both spattered with blood but, from the easy way they both moved, it belonged to someone else. One source swung, dripping, from Dewan’s left hand. Rynert looked at the severed head, then at his Captain of Guards.
“Are you making a bad joke, Dewan? Or is it something from the Books of Years? Albans haven’t taken battle-trophies like that for centuries.”
“I’m not Alban, Lord King, and if it’s a joke, this bastard isn’t laughing. He’s not a trophy either.” He held the head up, so Rynert could see the jagged scar from brow to jaw that drew a chalk-white scrawl through the dark beard. “You wanted proof of Imperial involvement? Hartel Belareg wasn’t a mercenary when I last met him, he was Kortagor of Horse in the Kalitzim garrison. And I doubt he was a mercenary today. They wouldn’t have sent someone so well-marked unless it was deliberate.”
“Deliberate? A message?”
“If you know how to read it.”
“What about Imperial uniforms and colours? What about support?”
“Father of Fires, there was support enough! Didn’t you see what they did to the Bodyguard!”
“Yes, I did.” Rynert looked sidelong at Dewan’s angry face. “And I saw what the Bodyguard did to them. They’ll be rewarded for it when all this is done.” He studied Belareg’s severed head and its distinctive scar again. The heavy-lidded eyes were glazed and the slack-jawed mouth had nothing to say, but the tangle of matted hair still showed remnants of a neat military bowl-crop like Dewan’s own. “Do you think Kalarr and Duergar understood the message?”
“I doubt it. This,” Dewan glanced at the head a final time and dropped it onto the ground by his feet, “is how the Empire claims credit for success and rejects association with failure. Less obvious than a banner and more easily disowned. They’ve done it before. If Hartel’s men had won, he would have been Grand Captain of Alba after the Empire took over. Instead he lost, so within a week there won’t be anything to prove he even existed, and—”
A bugle from the plain interrupted him, no simple rallying-call or movement order this time but a frantic brazen yell for help. It blared again and again, cutting through all the other battle noises, and when Rynert realised what had provoked it he ground his teeth.
More than just Kalarr’s cavalry were human; one wedge of armoured infantry was living, breathing men. They looked no different to the rest of his army, and had moved at the typical slow pace of the traugarin until they got close enough to an Alban regiment, then charged home with unexpected, unavoidable speed. That regiment, now locked in combat, couldn’t manoeuvre to avoid the real, deadly traugur-troops closing in like so many wasps to a honeypot.
Worst of all, rather than abandon the solitary regiment to its inevitable fate someone – probably Lord Andvar, who had objected at noisy length to such a ruthless order – had sent four more regiments in support. It was no more a reinforcement than patching a broken tide-wall with a bucket of mud, because they were advancing straight into the jaws of the pincers. Gemmel had been right, Rynert had been wrong, and now his soldiers would pay the price of it by the hundreds instead of only by the score.
“Look there!” Dewan pointed as the cluster of vermeil banners along the distant ridge shifted position. “Isn’t this what he’s been waiting for?” A distant blare of horns and a hammer of drums confirmed cu Ruruc’s answer.
It was a stark and simple yes.
*
“There, Lord, you see?” said the mercenary captain. “I was right. It’s much harder to hold troops back than send them forward.”
Kalarr cu Ruruc’s steel-sheathed fingers opened wide like a clutching metal talon then closed to a fist. He rose in his stirrups and made a great sweep through the air with his flail. Drums rolled and all across the plain the uncommitted wedges broke, reforming in a crescent which moved forward to outflank the Alban host, to buckle its formations and encircle it before annihilation.
“Good,” he said. “Very, very good. Now here are your final orders.”
“Command me, Lord, and I shall see it done.”
“Those who oppose me are my sworn enemies. I need no ransoms. No hostages. No prisoners. Kill them all.”
*
“Where is everyone?” Aldric whispered. “No guards, no retainers, no servants. Nothing.”
“All gone to the battle,” Gemmel replied just as quietly. “Cu Ruruc emptied the fortress. He wants to make absolutely sure this time.”
“He should have made absolutely sure that nobody would be creeping about behind him.” Aldric lowered Widowmaker from across his back and made her scabbard secure on his weapon-belt. “So where’s Duergar?”
“Somewhere with a lot of floor-space. He’s keeping thousands of traugarin on their feet. That needs a gigantic conjuration circle.”
“Then I know where to find him. The feast-hall. Follow me.” Aldric made off at a quick, stealthy pace, flitting through the dim, familiar galleries in his black armour like an ominous spectre from the citadel’s past. Gemmel followed at a safe distance, because respect for the skill he had helped to refine tempered any fondness for his fosterling and, if Isileth Widowmaker was suddenly unsheathed, he had no wish to be within the arc of the blade. He remembered thinking, when they first met, that this young man was frightening. Now he was sure of it.
Aldric stopped at the foot of a flight of stairs and nodded towards the door at the top. “Is he there? Can you sense anything?”
Besides the ferocity you wear like a garment, my son? “Nothing.”
“Not even a sentry to guard his back?” The shadows shifting within his war-mask hid Aldric’s expression, but Gemmel heard him let out a stutter of breath in what sympathetic ears might have recognised as a laugh. “I should thank him.” He went up the stairs three at a time and for an instant Gemmel thought he had put all sense aside and would burst straight into the hall. Instead he stopped short, listened for a second, and gently eased the door open.
Inside was dark, the daylight kept at bay by curtains over every window, and the air was heavy with incense. It tingled with enchantments, a shudder-provoking sensation that raised the hairs on Aldric’s neck and made him sweat. There was a sound of chanting from the lord’s dais at the far end of the hall, one sonorous phrase punctuated by the striking of a gong. After a brief flicker of greenish light and a pause while the threads of scented smoke grew thicker, the chant began again and the gong chimed its single note.
Gemmel recognised the spell. It held charmed Undeath in the tr
augarin, keeping their cold flesh from corruption, and it would shatter beyond recovery if Aldric’s mission succeeded. He swore silently at himself and made a sign to avert ill-luck. When he succeeded. When, not if. When!
Duergar’s unmistakable silhouette, outlined by half a dozen lamps, was a perfect target. Aldric drew the telek from his belt and released its safety-slide as he slipped along the shadows connecting each tall pillar to its neighbour. He had no scruples about putting a dart through the back of his unsuspecting victim’s head. Not this victim.
Still chanting, the Drusalan strode to one side of the dais and returned with a metal wand, using it first to strike the gong, next to sketch an outline in the air. Aldric tensed, moved a little clear of the sheltering pillar, levelled the telek and squeezed its trigger-bar. In that same instant the necromancer turned, his left hand thrust out and syllables of destruction tumbled from his lips.
The telek-dart flashed to dust in mid-flight and Aldric threw himself down and sideways as a jolt of power whipcracked through where he had been standing. Duergar looked down at the sprawling armoured body and grinned.
“Hate has a smell, Talvalin,” he said. “You stink of it.”
Aldric said nothing, trying to anticipate which way to roll before the inevitable second blast of power smashed him to a pulp. Then there was a flash like a midsummer thunderstorm and a monstrous detonation shattered every window in the hall. Burn-stench swamped the sickly incense odour and when Aldric raised his face from the floor there was a channel gouged into the stone dais. The basalt flowed sluggishly, like black honey.
“He’s no challenge, Drusalan. Why not test your skill against me?” Gemmel’s hard-edged voice was a verbal slap in the face and Duergar responded with a throwing movement of one hand. An invisible force wrenched at the smouldering curtains, and the door where Gemmel stood exploded into kindling.
Or rather, where he had been standing, for now he was yards clear of the target even though Aldric hadn’t even seen him move.
The Horse Lord (The Book of Years Series 1) Page 29