by Daniel Ford
The paladin seized him by the back of his jerkin and pulled him back. The other hand seized the seat of the man’s pants and with no more trouble than a man might lift a small child, pulled the warrior off the ground, lifted him over his head, and hurled him toward the camp; he crashed into another mercenary standing by a pile of weapons and arming himself, and the pair of them, with a clatter of metal and cracking of bones, rolled into a tent.
“Rede,” Allystaire called out, in a voice hoarse with rage, “end this madness. Come forth to me yourself and no one else needs to die.”
Allystaire strode into the camp, ripping tents from their stakes and tossing them aside. Beneath each one huddled forms; two of them large, powerful, bearded men; some of them badly beaten young men; and two of them bruised, sobbing girls. One, he was sure, was the one from his vision; her wrists were closely bound in iron, the manacles joined by three stout links. With the strength of the Goddess still flooding his limbs, he knelt beside her and seized the chains. The girl wailed in fear but did not move, instead sitting tense and afraid. His hands wrapped around the cuffs and ripped them apart as easily as wet cloth. He slipped his glove off, wrapped his left hand around her wrists, and when he lifted it away, the deep red welts the cuffs had left vanished behind new, unbroken skin. Gasps—from the girl, from Torvul, and from beaten and surrendered men—filled the air.
Then, his face grim, his grey armor spattered with blood, the paladin stood and looked down at the girl and asked, his voice heavy, “Lass, will you tell me which one put these upon you?”
With a small, defiant lift to her chin, she pointed to one of the men Idgen Marte was now herding into the camp, the one whose arm Allystaire had snapped with his shield earlier. He gave a brief nod and stalked over to the man, the chain dangling from his hand. Idgen Marte, her eyes wide in her dark and sweat-streaked face, was shaking her head lightly side to side.
Allystaire shook his own head in response and held up the chain. As though it were argument enough, the swordswoman stepped aside.
Holding the chain up for them all to see, Allystaire, his voice hoarse but resonant, said, “These—when placed upon a man, a woman, a child, who has done no wrong, as a tool of rape, of murder, of theft and terror and horror—these should mean death.”
He turned his livid countenance upon the man, who cradled his broken arm in front of him, and reached up with his free hand to toss off his helmet. The man, already in pain, looked upon the face of the paladin, saw the judgment there, and fell to his knees, a dark wet stain spreading across his trousers.
“Yet you,” Allystaire said, looming over the man. “You do not get to die. You get to wear these for years until your death, unless mayhap you find a smithy who can remove them.” The paladin seized the man’s good hand and fit one cuff around it, then the other, wrapping his hands around the cuffs and squeezing. The man screamed and vomited and would have fallen forward had Allystaire not been gripping him; there were more gasps as bones cracked. When Allystaire lifted his own hand, the cuffs had been fastened so tightly around the man’s wrists that their hinges, lock and pin, were simply gone. Each was a single, smooth, seamless band of metal, ground deeply into the man’s skin.
“I’ll die. I’ll die from the pain m’lord,” the man screamed, as Allystaire let go and he fell forward. Then, wrapping his left arm around the man’s wrist, the paladin shook his head.
“No.” With his left hand, he touched both of the man’s arms, his eyes slipping closed, his face smoothed of its rage. When he lifted his hand away, the man was still pale, still breathing raggedly. He lifted his chained hands, piteously, eyes wide in disbelief.
“They still hurt, m’lord,” he gasped.
“Aye,” Allystaire replied coldly. “And they will. I did not lie when I said you would wear them for many years to come.”
CHAPTER 29
The Shadow’s Curse
As Allystaire bellowed into the camp and mercenaries fled all around him, a woman in long, sea-green robes sat for a moment, fearful and startled in a tent nestled in the hidden lip of a hill not two hundred paces away. She could hear his voice, a distant echo; moreover, she could practically feel the panic his strength had instilled in the men below.
She could feel the panic in her own body, too, in the heartbeat that crashed against her chest like storm-driven waves. The Marynth Evolyn was not a woman easily panicked, and she gathered herself more quickly than the hired rabble below her. The strong smell of salt and a feeling of cool dampness on her feet jarred her back from the edge of alarm. She sat upon a small, folding camp chair; a bowl of water had been resting upon her lap but had fallen and wet the hem of her robe and her boots. Visions had danced in that bowl until she had been frightened out of them. Frightened because the men whose eyes she peered out of died.
A guard to her side—a tall, hard-eyed man in green leather roughly the same color as her robe—bent to retrieve the bowl, but she stopped him. “Leave it.”
“Are they all dead, Marynth?” The man’s voice was hard, rasping, and respectful, without deferring overmuch. He stood, uncoiling to his full height, which was considerably above hers. A crossbow dangled from his right hand with an almost contemptuously competent touch. The entire weapon was elegantly carved to resemble a dragon: its wings the curve, its scaled belly the stock, its spear-pointed tail the butt, and the very front from which a bolt would fire, its open, toothy jaw. His fingers curled around it loosely, possessively.
“All those I can water-see,” she replied, grimly. “That or pissed themselves so I can see no longer.”
“Did you learn what was needed?”
“I learned, Ismaurgh, that a paladin walks this world. That is enough for one day.”
“And now?”
“Now, you fool, we flee,” the Marynth answered, and she felt her heart threatening to pound its drumbeat against her ribs once more.
* * *
With the mercenaries disarmed and the half-dozen captured village youth freed, Allystaire finally sank to his knees as the thrumming, sunlit music that fueled his strength drained out of him. He felt, almost more than heard, Idgen Marte’s steps behind him, and a thump as something heavy was tossed onto the churned, blood-spattered grass, followed by a light, mournful whine. Torvul, meanwhile, kept a wary distance from the exhausted paladin, a hand resting on his crossbow.
With a deep breath and a gathering of his will, Allystaire stood upright—a movement protested in every muscle of his body—and turned to face Idgen Marte. The sound he’d heard was Rede, in a mud-spattered, grass-stained robe, being thrown to the grass.
“You,” Allystaire practically spat, his voice raw and hoarse. “Account for yourself.”
Rede huddled on the ground, refusing to look up, to meet Allystaire’s gaze. When Idgen Marte toed him with her boot, he simply moaned.
“I will not waste time bandying words with you,” Allystaire said, shaking his head and bending to one knee, inwardly grateful for the chance to relieve at least one painfully stiff joint. He stripped off his gloves and reached out to take the man’s head between his hands; the former Urdarite slapped ineffectually at the paladin’s blood-slicked armor, but inexorably his head was drawn to face Allystaire’s.
“Where,” Allystaire said, gritting his teeth and pushing his will through his weary arms, through his aching hands, into the mud-spattered man before him, “where did you get the money to hire these men? And why?”
Rede convulsed and cried out almost piteously, a cry that became a scream, and still Allystaire did not relent, though he felt a crackling, tingling energy between his hands and Rede’s skin; it suddenly burst and danced up his arms, dissipating.
“A priestess of Braech,” Rede said, “a woman. She brought me a letter from their choiron in Londray.”
“What did this letter say?” Allystaire was able to relax now, and he felt the muscles of his body rebelling
against even the slight effort needed to stay upright, but forcing the truth from Rede was, at least, no longer a struggle.
“It said that the Temple of Braech in Londray was prepared to recognize the Church of the Mother, under ME as her priest, if sufficient gold could be found to raise a temple there; with their recognition the priests of Fortune and the Urdarites would surely fall into line and the Mother’s Church would not be relegated with the Temples Minor or the Elven Green.”
“Why in this or any world would the Mother need Braech’s recognition? And where did they find you? Surely Mol and Renard would have run them out of Thornhurst.”
Rede’s eyes flared suddenly and Allystaire looked at him without the haze of anger; he appeared thin and manic and feverish, though the skin under Allystaire’s hands was cool.
“As they did me. All I asked was to preach and to lead! It was mine! No more than I was owed! The Mother touched me. She gave me sight and set weaker vessels like you and your whore and that ghastly child to test me so that my sight would become pure!” Rede raved and writhed in Allystaire’s grip, spit foaming lightly at the corners of his mouth.
“You speak of what you are owed, Rede? About your right to lead? This proves beyond all doubt that you have no capacity to understand what serving the Mother means. She did indeed return your sight to you, as you say. And She gave you a task, a small one, but one that I could not do, nor could Idgen Marte, nor could Mol. And had you extended back to Her the faith She showed in you, then, perhaps, Rede, perhaps then you could have served. Preached. Even led. Perhaps, had you bowed your head and sought ways to serve—not so much Her as Her people—you might have become what you say you are.” Allystaire felt the strength and the rage drain completely from him; the mud-and-grass-stained figure with his mad eyes, his pale skin, his knife-edged cheeks, his flesh burned away in his madness, became less hateful, and more worthy of pity.
Yet pity did not move the paladin to cease his questioning, though he did relax his hands, letting their tips press but lightly into the thin, drawn skin of Rede’s skull.
“When did you leave Thornhurst?”
“Less than two weeks after you.”
“And where did you go?”
“I preached in Bend and then between it and Londray. Baysend, Tark’s Point. When I got to Londray, they were waiting for me.”
“And where is their letter?”
“My tent.”
“What did you preach in these towns?”
“The coming of the Mother! The time for the poor and the wretched to rise and be heard, to claim the justice so long denied them.”
Rede had ceased to fight against Allystaire’s questions, against the compulsion of the Goddess through Allystaire’s hands. With a heavy sigh, Allystaire let go of him and stood. He looked down upon the man lying in the mud with anger, tempered just enough with pity.
“Rede, had you listened, one day you might have walked in this world as my brother in Her service. Instead, you have done evil in Her name. And that bears a price that must be paid.”
Allystaire’s eyes flitted to Idgen Marte, and his hand lifted to his sword. She rolled her bottom lip between her teeth and then suddenly shook her head and waved him off. She knelt over the robed figure and spoke in a rapid susurration.
“Rede, the Mother gave you back your eyes and She will not take back Her Gift. Nor will Her servants take your life. Yet Allystaire is right. A price must be paid.” She reached down and laid the first and last fingers of her right hand upon his eyelids, pressing them closed. “Every day that ends without Her sun having seen you serving Her poor, Her weak, Her forgotten people—serving them, Rede—every day when you do not do this, you will spend that night remembering what it was to be blinded, and knowing what it would have been to live a life in darkness. Go now, and serve, and know that you have been given a reprieve, though you may deem it a dark mercy,” she concluded, and both Allystaire and Torvul, along with all the assembled villagers and mercenaries, felt the quiet, enduring power that flowed out in her rushing words, even if they could not hear them. She stood and stepped away—for just a moment the morning sun bent around her, somehow limning her with shadow and light.
The former monk stood shakily, blinking warily at the sun and at the paladin and the shadow confronting him, and turned and began to stumble away raggedly.
“Rede,” Idgen Marte called after him, and he stopped in his tracks, as if compelled by an unseen force. “When next you see me in this life, for good or for ill the Mother will retract this mercy. Remember that.”
With a wordless yell, Rede resumed his stumbling departure. Torvul spat out a guttural, “Freeze. You mean to just let him go?” The dwarf dropped to his knee and raised his crossbow to his shoulder, moving one thumb up along the stick and flipping up a large-faceted crystal set in a ring of metal and attached with a hinge. His hand selected a bolt, but before he could load it, Idgen Marte was standing before him.
“The Mother gave me the task of judging him,” she said; the tip of her sword dangled near the grass, the hilt held lightly and almost casually in her right hand. “And I did. Let him go.”
The dwarf spat again, unleashed one of his unintelligible, guttural words, and stood, letting his crossbow dangle from the strap around his shoulder once more.
The three of them watched Rede break into a hobbled trot before they turned their attention to the cowed group of mercenaries and villagers who had sorted themselves; the former tending to their wounded and dead, the latter, roughly a half dozen, bruised and frightened and watching Allystaire and Idgen Marte in quiet awe.
Allystaire, running on the very last reserves of strength, waved Idgen Marte to him and said to Torvul, “If you can, see about food and water for these folk. There ought to be something in this camp.”
Then he turned to the villagers, his eyes falling upon the bruised girl whose chains he had ripped off; her eyes, large and brown and scared, fixed upon him, and though he knew he was spattered with the gore of the men he’d killed, he approached her, trying to soften his face. She quailed at his approach, and he suddenly grunted as Idgen Marte’s fingers, iron hard, poked him in a tiny crease not covered by armor on the back of his neck.
“You’ll terrify her,” she murmured, and edged past him, shoving him away with her free hand as she sheathed her sword with the other. “Watch the rabble.” She drew the girl aside and spoke to her quietly; Allystaire strained to hear the words that passed between them, but could not, though he did see the fear written so plainly on the girl’s face melt away, leaving her, if not serene, at least less troubled. Idgen Marte soon returned, leading the girl mutely behind her, and jabbed her finger once, then again, at two of the milling, frightened, and disarmed mercenaries. Allystaire saw her mouth the words, Those two, and he nodded, his face settling into a grimace once again.
Extending one leather-and-iron-clad finger, he pointed to them both—men whose ages were hard to guess, but younger than his, he was certain. One taller and fairer, the other shorter and heavier, both wore the mix of mail and leather common to their sort.
“You two. Come forward.”
The two men stepped forward hesitantly; they did not move quickly enough for his liking, so Allystaire lunged forward and gripped one by the front of his collar and threw him forward, sending him stumbling and cursing toward the ground.
“Men like you, dogs like you, it is not enough to take the wealth or even the food common folk sweat for; you take their daughters or their sons.”
The taller, fairer warrior, the one Allystaire had thrown forward, landed hard onto his hands and knees and tried to scramble back to his feet, until Allystaire’s boot crunched into the small of his back, sending him back to the ground in pain with a yowl.
“Every man of you could die for a hundred crimes, I am sure. Yet forcing yourself upon bound folk who are little more than children is the crim
e you will die for today.” His words were punctuated by the rasping hiss of the heavy, two-handed sword drawn from the long harness that crossed his back. He circled to the side of the man, planted his right foot on the ground near his head and the left onto his back, as, once more, the man tried to rise. “Have you a last word? Kin for word to be carried to?”
“This ain’t lawful,” the man yelled, struggling to rise, Allystaire’s boot keeping him pinned to the ground. “I work for the Sea Dragon and ‘ave ‘is protection! I demand an assize.”
“A waste of words,” the paladin replied coldly. “It is justice, not the law, that compels me.” He stepped down more firmly on the man’s back and silenced his protests with one hard, downward swing of his heavy blade. Blood gushed into the grass and the mud, and Allystaire turned away, his sword held in both hands, a grim promise to the now panicking vanquished men.
The other warrior he’d singled out took off running, his squat and bulky form moving with surprising speed. This didn’t avail him, though, as Idgen Marte sprang into motion the instant he did, and as the man reached the shadow of the treeline a score of yards away, she stood before him, her sword extended forward at the height of his neck, and he ran straight onto it, a foot or more of its gentle curve extending from the back of his neck. She stepped back, withdrawing her blade smoothly, and he fell.