Ordination

by Daniel Ford

  “Ikthamaunavit,” Torvul said, raising the bottle for them to see. “Not alchemy. Just distillation. Dwarfs have a bit before they go into a fight. Figured if we’re keeping your hideous human turns we might as well keep one of my traditions.” He flicked the cork out of it with his thumb and downed a generous belt before holding the bottle out.

  Allystaire came over and took the small bottle, sniffed, suddenly wished he hadn’t, and then swallowed a small measure anyway. The smell, harsh and unforgiving, was nothing like the taste, which was pure and smooth, hard and gleaming on the tongue like a sword in the hand or a morning in the mountains. He wanted more, and he stared for a moment at the dwarf in admiration, then handed the bottle over to Idgen Marte. She sniffed at it, wrinkled her nose, and took a swallow, immediately brightening.

  “If I’m to die today, at least I’ll die with a good drink. Many thanks, Torvul,” she said, capping the bottle and tossing it back. He caught it, cradled it carefully, a smile like a proud father’s on his face, and set the bottle by his feet.

  “We’ll save it for victory.”

  “Bright thinking,” Idgen Marte remarked.

  Allystaire, meanwhile, had started to retreat from himself, from conversation, from the camaraderie, watered by the dwarfish spirits, that was budding between them. When his helm settled over his hair, its cheekpieces resting against his skin, he had ceased to talk. He moved methodically, mounting Ardent, who pawed restlessly at the ground as he sensed his rider’s fixations.

  “About half a turn’s ride. Then we walk,” Idgen Marte said, pointing with her thrust chin westward. “The hills won’t be kind to the horses nor the wagon.

  Allystaire simply nodded and pointed west, and off they went, the horses trotting and the wagon rumbling.

  * * *

  Anghem was tired of the watch. It was boring, it was a little cold, but a man who takes the link must do what he’s paid for. Unless he can kill the bastard what gave ‘im the links n’just take ‘em all, Anghem thought. It wasn’t proper cold, though. This wasn’t the tundra or even the taiga, and Anghem missed the real weather, brought by the spirits of the sea and the wind to teach a man what he was.

  He leaned listlessly against a tree—just because he had to do the job didn’t mean he had to do it well—and waited for the rising sun, which he saw just beginning to lighten the eastern sky. The sun meant he could go back to the tents to eat and sleep. He wasn’t sure which held more appeal, but he was thinking of both intently when he suddenly felt a blade across his neck, curved and so sharp that he felt it slicing stubble from his skin.

  “Open your mouth, sailor, and I’ll have your balls. Understand?”

  Anghem nodded, the movement very stiff and controlled, made mostly with the chin.

  “We’re going to stand here and wait for my friend,” continued the voice. He realized, sleepily, it was a woman; with a sudden flash of anger, he flattened his back against the tree to buy space, lowered his chin, and reached out to his left side, where the blade was held.

  By the time his hands had floundered into empty space, the blade was back at his neck, held from the other side.

  “Sailor, you couldn’t catch me if you were sober and awake and hadn’t shagged aught but a sheep for three months. You want to ever shag another poor ewe, you’ll stand still and wait until…here he is,” the husky voice said, and a sudden piercing ray of light stung Anghem’s eyes as they were drawn to two approaching figures, one significantly taller than the other.

  Soon the figures resolved into a large man, armored and imposing, and a beardless dwarf wearing some outlandish leather shirt strewn with pouches. The armor that the man wore over his chest, shoulders, upper arms, and legs was a drab, functional grey, but somehow the light seemed to attach to it—every time Anghem tried to focus on him, he had to shy away from the intruding brightness that dug sharply into his eyes.

  Casually, without apparent worry over the axes at Anghem’s belt, the man approached and reached out to wrap his gauntleted hand around Anghem’s neck. The still unseen woman’s blade slipped down to the very tip of his chest, above his mail shirt.

  Anghem’s hands started toward the haft of one of his weapons, and the dwarf suddenly lashed out with a heavy stick, smashing his fingers between it and his own weapon. Before he could even cry out, the armored man had wrapped his other hand around Anghem’s mouth and clamped his jaw shut with a grip like an iron muzzle.

  “You are working with Rede, who calls himself the Eye of the Mother?” The man’s voice was deep and distant and, Anghem thought, strangely cold. For the first time in months, he found himself shivering. The fingers relaxed enough for Anghem to mumble, “Aye,” his jaw almost numb, too dazed to wonder why he answered the question so easily.

  “How did he hire you?”

  “Wi’ silver up in Londray, said he needed guards for the road, he was an iter…inter…itiner…a rovin’ preacher.”

  “Where did he get silver,” he heard the deep, but feminine voice growl from his right. He turned his eyes to try and catch a glimpse of her, but he saw only the shadow of the tree he sheltered against. Yet still he felt that sword against his neck.

  “Got an answer for that?” The eyes that were peering at him had flicked to the right and then back.

  Anghem simply replied, “Never thought t’ask. Work is work n’silver is silver.”

  “And what work have you been doing?”

  “Roustin’ the shit-diggers and dirt-clawers and tellin’ ‘em to listen smartly to Rede. The Mother’s work, he calls it.”

  Before he knew it, the man’s other gauntleted hand had balled into a fist; pain exploded over his right eye, a bright white bloom that was shocking in its suddenness.

  “You know nothing of the Mother’s work. Do not let me hear you say that again, or you will learn how much harder I can hit you,” the man growled dangerously. “Have you harmed the folk of these villages? You or any of your band? Theft, rape, murder?”

  “We take hostages an’ if a few of ‘em wind up in our beds it’s o—” The armored man’s right hand drew back but a few inches; Anghem had a brief instant of clarity, realizing that he no longer felt compelled to answer the questions put to him. The moment lasted until the iron studs that lined the armored man’s leather gauntlet exploded into Anghem’s temple and he knew no more.

  The back of the guard’s head bounced off the tree so hard that bark exploded in a shower of chips around him, and he sank into the ground in a boneless heap.

  Allystaire knelt and pulled the axes free of the fellow’s belt and tucked them into the back of his own. Torvul squatted by the fellow’s head and held his hand out in front of his slack face. “Still breathing. Barely. Likely to have a scrambled skull when he wakes.” The dwarf stood and spat into the grass. “That was just about the least useful questioning I’ve ever seen,” he remarked to no one in particular.

  Allystaire fixed his hard blue stare on Torvul and said, “There was nothing else I needed to hear from him. Ending the conversation probably saved his life.”

  Then the paladin turned and started stalking heavily in the direction of the camp proper, clanking as he went. Torvul found himself shivering in the wake of the indelible impact of Allystaire’s voice and stare.

  * * *

  With Idgen Marte flitting in and out of his vision as she moved from tree to tree ahead of him, and Torvul puffing and trotting to keep up but still falling a few paces behind, Allystaire strode into the clearing in which Rede’s mercenaries had made camp, with, as he had hoped, the sun rising behind him and its rays riding upon his pauldrons like shouldered spears.

  He surveyed the clearing and found the camp within it poorly organized. Several scattered fires smoldered in front of tents organized haphazardly without an apparent central command and no clear lanes of movement. Weapons were, he noted, in abundance, carefully maintained, and e
asily reached, most piled carefully at the mouths of low-slung tents. A few figures moved, mostly squatting in front of guttering cookfires.

  Allystaire paused more than a dozen long paces away from even the nearest man or tent, tugged his hammer free of its ring, and rapped the heavy black head lightly, three times, against the metal rim of his shield. The noise rang out across the otherwise still morning, and a dozen or so birds took flight from the nearest trees. He drew a deep breath and projected his voice as far and as wide as he could, beginning with a single syllable.

  “REDE!” Allystaire’s voice roared across the camp. The men jumped from their fires; tents were thrown open and men stumbled, blinking, into the morning light.

  “REDE. If you make me call you a third time,” he went on after his initial roar had died down, his voice still booming and filling the small, trampled clearing with its demand, “I will start killing your men. Come and speak to me now and we will avoid bloodshed.”

  His first bellow had been met with confused stares, but his second, boastful proclamation met with a smattering of laughter and a few hoots of derision. One man separated himself from the pack, tall and rangy, with bare arms and a thick coat of rings over a fur vest. Standing up from a cookfire and seizing a long hafted axe with a heavy, curved blade balanced by a spike behind and one atop, he advanced on Allystaire till it became clear that his full height put him more than a foot taller than the paladin. As he advanced closer and closer, Allystaire’s gaze rose higher and higher until he realized that he was staring at a man nigh on two feet taller than himself.

  “Giantkin,” he heard Torvul pant from a few paces behind him.

  “You horse-loving lords from the mountains on down, you always boast, and none of you have the arm to make good on it,” the towering creature bellowed, spitting into the mud his boots churned. “Here is how a Gravekling boasts, horse-shagger.” The giantkin, for so the dwarf had truly named him, planted the haft of an axe as long as Allystaire was tall into the dirt and continued, “I will split you like wood for the fire, an’ you have the stones to face me!”

  In answer, Allystaire only nodded and rapped the head of his hammer against the rim of his shield again. Then he dropped into a loose fighting stance, his left, shield-arm forward while his right hand gripped the hammer slightly behind, a good six inches of haft protruding from the bottom of his fist.

  “This is a bad idea, boy. A rotten idea. No profit in fighting giantkin this way, a rotten idea all ‘round,” Torvul was saying, and Allystaire could hear him readying his crossbow, the telltale sound of the cord being yanked back.

  “No,” he said, simply, without taking his eyes off the approaching gravekling. There was madness in the giantkin’s grey eyes and an unearthly wildness in the high slope of his head and the matted curls of beard that grew from just below his eyes to his neck. The giant axe whirled in his hands with deadly speed, his long, sinewy arms twirling the axe’s head in the air and feinting with the spike.

  Allystaire wasn’t distracted by the spinning axe-head. Instead he kept his eyes on the gravekling’s feet, and when one of them planted forward with weight and momentum, Allystaire lifted his shield and crouched beneath it, his eyes rising just in time to see the axe blade descend and crash into the face of his shield.

  It was like being hit with a felled tree, and the impact sent numbing shocks up and down Allystaire’s arm, but training and will kept it locked in place. For form’s sake, he stepped up behind his shield and swung his hammer in a sharp, quick arc, but the giantkin harmlessly turned it aside with the haft of his axe.

  “Like wood,” the giantkin roared, and swung again, this time keeping the blade parallel to the ground, forcing Allystaire to catch it this time with the haft of his hammer, which he did, but he felt the haft-to-haft impact crackle along his weapon and feared he may have heard a tiny crack.

  Rather than risk another blow with his hammer, the paladin lowered his shoulder behind his shield and bulled straight at the giantkin, aiming all of his mass and all the force he could muster into the giantkin’s hips. Allystaire had, a time or two, sent small groups of stout armored men stumbling and falling to the ground with this ploy.

  The gravekling let out a rush of breath and danced back a step or three, but stayed on his feet and brought the very bottom of his axe-haft down upon Allystaire’s helmet, hard enough to dent it and stagger him. His vision blurred, Allystaire felt himself shoved backwards, and the ground rushed up at him. Stay on your feet, stay on your feet, stay on your FEET, his mind roared at him, but his feet ignored it and smashed together and he fell heavily to the ground, arms splaying to the sides. He felt his hammer tumble from his hand. He saw it bound away, dimly aware of Torvul cursing and yelling behind him as a crowd of other men in various states of dress, but armed, began to gather in a distant semicircle.

  The giantkin roared in triumph and leaped upon Allystaire, bending over and seizing Allystaire by the neck with one massive, hairy-knuckled hand. “No boasting, no stones, and probably no cock either,” he roared and lifted the paladin half off the ground. He slammed Allystaire’s head against the turf, laughing, spit foaming at his lips. “I’m gonna think about this, about crushing your skull, when I go and take my fill o’ that village lass in my tent again,” he roared. “Your women might yell and curse and beg but with a gravekling is the only time they know a man.”

  His mind was fuzzy, his vision blurred, and his strength all but sapped, but when the gravekling spoke of the village lass in his tent, an image suddenly filled Allystaire’s head of a bruised, terrified girl huddling in a pile of reeking blankets.

  And then the girl’s face became the Goddess’s face and her sobs changed, became a thunderous wind in his mind. His limbs filled with the Mother’s music, and he shivered in fear and delight. Fear at what he was about to do. Delight like a lover’s touch long wished for.

  Allystaire’s eyes opened wide, his vision cleared. His right hand suddenly reached up from the grass to seize the giantkin’s wrist, and closed into a fist around it. The gravekling’s gloating roar turned into a scream of pain, and everyone watching the fight heard his bones crack and crumble.

  Blood squeezed between Allystaire’s clenched fingers like water wrung from a towel. He kept squeezing till the gravekling’s powerful arm was a limp and shredded thing. The grinding and popping and the giant’s unnatural roar forced his gorge into his throat.

  His arm still clasped around the gravekling’s ruined wrist, Allystaire swung his shield up into the huge face above him, pushing aside the hand that had pinned his shoulder with casual ease. The rim of his shield met the bearded cheek and caved in the side of the gravekling’s face and he fell to the grass with a mighty thud. The paladin hopped to his feet, his body thrumming with the power of the Mother’s Gift. He spared a brief downward glance to the gibbering, sobbing giantkin.

  “May the Mother grant you mercy in the next world,” he said almost calmly. “I have none for you here.”

  He lifted his heavy boot and stamped down onto and through the giant’s skull, and the piteous, whining roar ceased. For a moment, eight foot of gravekling corpse twitched and writhed in the churned grass and then lay still. The sun broke upon the camp and lit the gold paint on Allystaire’s shield, and the scene exploded into the chaos of battle and terror.

  Most of the mercenaries stood in shocked silence for a moment, a stillness that Allystaire quickly broke. The song of the Goddess filled his limbs with a potent strength that burned like sunfire and begged for release, he let out a loud cry, crouched behind his shield, and simply charged at the nearest knot of them, swinging the round, iron-banded oak forward with a short, powerful burst. Men tumbled around him like pins knocked by a bowler, and Allystaire felt at least one arm, caught between his shield and the man himself, snap. There were screams he had no time for.

  He turned, eyes searching for a weapon; rather than his hammer, his eyes
settled on the long axe the giantkin had wielded against him. He shucked off his shield and bent, scooping the axe up in both hands. Meanwhile, he’d wasted precious seconds as a defense began to organize.

  He saw a man, shirtless, having just roused himself, kneeling in front of his tent thirty yards away, a crossbow drawn and loaded. Allystaire realized the man knelt in a patch of shadow, and smiled to himself as he turned to face an onrushing attacker. Before the shirtless crossbowman fired, Idgen Marte was suddenly there, next to him. Almost delicately, she reached out and pushed the stock of his weapon, just as he fired. The bolt flew straight and true and into the back of one of the three men who’d found weapon and courage enough to charge Allystaire. The wounded man tumbled to the ground with a cry.

  Meanwhile, as realization began to dawn on him, the crossbowman let out a strangled cry as he was expertly cut twice across the back, then a third time at his right elbow; bleeding, his arm dangled uselessly at his side and he fell, blubbering and begging mercy, to the ground. Idgen Marte’s long curved blade rose for a moment, and then she crouched, stepped forward, and vanished from his sight. Deeper into the camp he heard cries of alarm and the sound of steel meeting flesh.

  A warrior defiantly raising sword and shield to challenge Allystaire went quickly silent as the paladin, swinging the giantkin’s axe with his hands gripping its last span, brought its heavy curve of blade down through the man’s shield. It took off his hand at the wrist and cleaved through his collarbone and into his chest, and the man fell in a heap of gore. His companion, suddenly misliking the odds, stopped in his tracks and dropped his sword. Allystaire advanced grimly, without reaching for the sword on his back, and the man turned to flee.