Ordination

by Daniel Ford

  Her guardsman, similarly dirtied to the tops of his calf-high boots, proceeded rather more slowly behind her, dragging an even dirtier shape behind him on a length of rope; once or twice he paused and aimed a kick that sent the bundle of muddied robe perilously close to the edge of the tiled walkways and the roaring waves beneath.

  Evolyn led them down the warren of hallways, turning with an unerring sense of place and direction. She paused at the end of a corridor of thick stone, still lit with the thick stubs of white wax candles.

  “Wait here. If I call for you, come, and bring the beggar. If I am to be given to the waves, Ismaurgh, kick him into the surf and flee.” She stepped closer to him and her cheeks colored faintly. “You have been a good servant.” She turned, her hand lingering on his arm for a moment, and entered the heavy, iron-banded oak door they had stopped a few paces from.

  And you’ve been a fine lay, Ismaurgh thought, but I ain’t about to say that. Touching how she can make her cheeks color like that, though. He leaned against the wall, idly toed the tied-up shape that had fallen to the ground in front of him, and launched a swift kick into its ribs.

  Once inside the door, Evolyn continued down a shorter, slightly darker corridor and knocked at a similar door. It opened without a word—filling the doorway before her was the Choiron Symod, dressed as usual in his robes, his amulet of office sparkling in the light of a three-sconced candelabra clutched in his left hand.

  “Marynth Evolyn. I understand that you come before me a failure.” Symod’s voice, as always, rolled through her body with a profound force, and she found her eyes lowering toward the stones beneath her feet. He stepped out of the doorway and she stepped quietly into his private chamber.

  “Not entirely a failure, my lord choiron,” she said, albeit meekly. “I have brought you valuable information.”

  “You were meant to bring me Coldbourne in chains. Or confirmation of his death,” the choiron said, drawing out the sounds of his last few words till they hung, resonant, in the stone walled room.

  “I know that, Choiron. I have failed you and failed the Father of Waves. Yet the information—”

  “I have all the information I need! The man is dangerous. His Goddess is dangerous. She must not be allowed to bring her paladins into this world. I have found the text I sought. You do not understand the ruin this could mean.”

  The Marynth lifted her gaze to his and swallowed once, widening her eyes a bit to appear, if only slightly, vulnerable; few men she knew could resist such a look, even a man like Symod. Notwithstanding, she was afraid. Afraid of what she had seen. Afraid of the eyes that had stared at her through the man he condemned as he wrapped those hideous bonds around his wrists.

  “Choiron, this Goddess already has brought Her paladin into this world. I saw him. I saw his powers. I saw him crush a giantkin’s arm as a child might squeeze mud between his fingers. I saw him crush out the life of the men I hired. I saw him heal wounds. There is no doubt, Choiron. A paladin walks this world again. And yet.” Evolyn tried not to smile, kept her head down, tried to seem contrite and thankful for the opportunity to speak. “I think I know how he may be overcome. I think his Goddess has left him vulnerable.”

  The choiron’s face stiffened into a mask of anger, his lips compressed, his cheeks taut. But his eyes were cautious, wary. Even a bit afraid. “What else have you brought me out of the disaster you have made?”

  “I brought the one we sought to be our instrument.”

  “He lives?”

  “Indeed.” Evolyn closed her eyes and thought deeply for a moment, about the man outside. He was repulsive in many ways, and yet he was lean and strong and skilled with his hands. In many ways. After their hasty coupling two nights hence, she could still touch his mind. Come in. Bring the priest.

  There was a knock on the door, and then it opened inward with Ismaurgh’s leather-gauntleted fist on the end of it. He shoved the rumpled shape to the floor and pulled back its hood, revealing the mud-spattered, glassy-eyed face of Rede.

  “The paladin was merciful, I see. He is a fool,” Symod said, as he bent forward and held the candelabra lower to examine Rede. The former priest, like most, shied away from the choiron’s gaze, but Symod reached out a thin, strong hand and drew his chin up as he continued, “Rede. Eye of the Mother. We have much still to discuss. If you would save your life, you will make yourself useful to us. Your brother in faith may come to regret his mercy.”

  * * *

  Baron Lionel Delondeur rode at the very tip of his vanguard, green banners with the sand-colored Tower streaming above the mass of men. A small knot of knights and officers formed his retinue, but as was the baron’s habit, a troop of common soldiers rode along with them. Some ferried orders and dispatches back and forth from his retinue to other lords and commanders scattered among the two thousand that strung along behind him, but others were simply given the honor of accompanying the baron home at the end of the campaign season.

  One such soldier, wearing a green tabard over well-scoured mail and doubled-green-and-white bands tied around his left arm, rode just behind the baron’s party, competent if not entirely comfortable in the saddle. A few wisps of blond hair escaped his tightly cropped coif, which made his fine-boned face seem younger and more delicate than it was. Unlike the other soldiers and the knights, he was silent and sober as sloshing skins were passed around him. Lightly armored riders pounded up along the column to call out that Luden Thryft had turned for his home along with his levees, or that the Sixes and Sevens or the Copper Halves were turning aside and wished to pay the Baron their compliments on his wages and wish him luck in the winter. When each warband was named, the men around him cheered or rattled gauntlets and vambraces against the edges of their shields. He dutifully raised his voice with the others, though with little enthusiasm, letting it blend into the din.

  Lionel turned in his saddle and waved the mailed, blonde soldier to his side, and the ranks of knights parted to let him pass. As the soldier reached the baron, Delondeur urged his white charger ahead a bit, forcing the soldier’s lesser bay to work a little harder to keep pace.

  “Bannerman-Sergeant…?”

  “Chaddin, my lord Baron Delondeur,” the young man replied. “And it is only Sergeant.”

  “It’s Bannerman-Sergeant if I freezing well say it is, eh?” The baron turned in the saddle—for all his age he was still the model of a horseman, able to ride with both hands occupied, using just his knees—and flashed a brilliant smile full of straight teeth at the younger man. Chaddin respectfully inclined his head to avoid meeting the baron eye to eye.

  “What post would you like over the winter, Bannerman-Sergeant Chaddin? You’ve earned the right to ask.”

  “I’d prefer to stay in the city, my lord,” Chaddin answered. “Guard the walls, command a patrol of Greenhats, perhaps.”

  “That’s not glorious work, lad,” Lionel said gruffly. “Even so, it needs doing, and a willing hand is a welcome one. I cannot promise you a posting in the Dunes itself,” he went on, raising a hand and waving it indistinctly in the air.

  “Londray itself would be all I would ask, my lord,” Chaddin replied, his words careful and slow, his eyes still respectfully low.

  They were interrupted by the approach of a rider wearing the light Delondeur green and the soft leather cap and short sword of a messenger. “M’lord baron,” he called out. “The Long Knives send their compliments and their respect and desire their release be made official ‘pon your Lordship’s word.”

  Delondeur shared a brief, toothy grin with Chaddin before turning to the messenger, shaking his head with its great mane of greying blonde hair. “No, no lad, I think not. You tell Captain Tierne and his men that quartering the winter in Londray would see them well supplied with the weight to hold up the bars and keep the girls bow-legged. I may have work for them before the winter’s out, eh?”

  Chaddin
grimaced but swallowed the expression as quickly as he could, recovering the professional calm of his features as the messenger knuckled his forehead, sawed at the reins to turn his small and nimble mount, and dashed off.

  “Might not be an easy fortnight of it if you do command some Greenhats, Bannerman-Sergeant,” Lionel remarked drily. “Not with the bulk of the men all waiting it out with drink and dice and women. Fistfights mostly, but a few yards of steel get wet every year. Ah, but what am I saying? You’re a soldier, you know the way of it.”

  Chaddin remained silent, and Lionel heaved a deep breath. The road had long since turned their direction northwest, and now topping a small rise, they got their first glimpse of Londray Bay; the city that was named for it squatted over it like a gargoyle. Commanding the best passage from the coast to the rolling hills and brief mountains of its interior, the city was curtained by towered walls rising over the pebbly cliffs along the coastline.

  “You can smell the sea even from here, eh Bannerman-Sergeant? I sailed it once, in my younger days. To Keersvast. Meant to go the lands beyond, south of the Archipelago. Other countries of strange folk and strange tongues, the Concordat. The fiercest of women and finest of minstrels, or so they say, in Keersvast. Never made it, though—the tundra called, with its giants and the elves. Still, I wonder: ought I have taken Delondeur to sea? Conquered other lands?”

  “Mayhap my lord,” Chaddin answered. “There seems plenty left to conquer here,” he added somewhat unconvincingly.

  They rode on in silence for a few more moments, then the baron reined in. “Is there, Chaddin? Eh? How long were we at it this time? Soon as the spring thaw, all through the summer. Five months? We could perhaps eke out a sixth if we wished, but that canny old bastard Innadan won’t give us a straight battle. And I’ve no desire to burn out vineyards all winter for fuel.”

  “Why not, my lord? Certainly that would starve Innadan’s coffers—”

  “Then what would we drink in the years to come, eh? Say what you will about those weak bastards, they make the best wine in this—”

  He paused on the verge of saying, Chaddin was sure, kingdom.

  “In this part o’the world. What have we conquered? Did we push the border a few miles? Could we push it a few more next year? At that rate my grandson might, when he is my age, ride in victory into that pile of rocks Hamadrian Innadan calls the Vineyards. Or Innadan’s grandson might do the same to the Dunes. “

  Chaddin frowned and swallowed once, buying time to think. This, he thought, was new territory. “Perhaps we could sue for peace over the winter, milord. If we sent an emissary under a branch of peace…”

  The Baron Delondeur thought on this a moment in silence. He kicked his horse back into motion, and slowly his retinue all followed suit, their bigger and stronger horses leaving Chaddin and his troop of soldiers behind; kicking into speed was an effective dismissal of the bannerman-sergeant.

  Lionel reflected, as he rode, about the bargains he’d made. About the man with the glowing fingertips working somewhere in the bowels of his castle. Working, Lionel? Is that what you call it? He wasn’t sure if the voice asking him that was his own, or his father’s. It made little difference.

  He thought again of the letter he had burned. Coldbourne’s arrogance choked him with anger. And bitterness—three times they had met on the field, army to army, with that broken-nosed, jumped-up peat digger leading the Old Baron’s host, and once with him at the head next to the Young Baron. Each time Delondeur had come away more bloodied than Oyrwyn. And here Coldbourne was yet again, making demands.

  The chafing arrogance of Coldbourne’s letter was so like him. And yet, what stories had come to the baron this fall, stories of his own lands, his own people…that was not like Coldbourne at all.

  “No other man ever got the better of me twice. And none four times. And none in my own bloody land!” Lionel’s words had begun as a whisper but ended a roar, and he spurred his horse to a gallop, leaving his knights and captains struggling to catch up to his anger-fueled haste while Chaddin and his soldiers fell further behind.

  * * *

  Waiting inside The Dunes, once more secreted in its deepest, darkest tunnels, Bhimanzir was again at work. The similarly robed, bald-headed youth stood beside him, handing him tools and attending upon the sorcerer’s commands.

  The youth no longer fumbled for the tools the sorcerer bade him fetch. Holding a knife carefully with his fingertips, he placed the smooth bone hilt carefully into Bhimanzir’s casually outstretched hand.

  The woman tried to scream. In fact, her mouth and her eyes were both opened wide and full of pain, but no sound emerged. A dark and shimmering red light hovered around her mouth, swallowing up all the sounds she made; similar lines of blood-dark light bound her to the table.

  Bhimanzir harrumphed quietly as he continued to cut, eventually peeling open the woman’s abdomen. He leaned over the spilled viscera, inspecting it closely.

  “The divinations agree,” he muttered. “The Mother. This is new, though,” he mused, as he probed at a rope of the woman’s entrails with the tip of his knife.

  Next to him, the boy flinched only slightly. His eyes, wide and slightly almond, were fixed on a point on the damp stone wall. Something in him forced him to turn and look at the woman’s face.

  She was not a particularly old woman, but her face bore a tale of hard work down the years. He watched her pant and scream silently as her innards steamed on the table. He forced himself to watch the pupils in her eyes contract and the light in them dim until it was gone.

  Bhimanzir continued to mutter aloud. The boy caught something about an “ancient enemy”—then the sorcerer was laughing.

  “As if any enemies are left to frighten the Knowing.”

  The sorcerer poked and prodded a few moments more. “Still. It deserves attention. I must speak with Gethmasanar. The idiot knight’s tendencies can be exploited, surely. And of course he must be taken and studied.”

  “Of course, master,” the lad echoed, even as he stared at the woman’s slack eyes and still features.

  CHAPTER 32

  Daft

  The three of them made a small and dismal column—the two humans mounted and the dwarf on his wagon. They followed a thin and none-too-well maintained dirt track that was threatening to become mud as a warm rain fell around them.

  “Never get used to the way summer fights its ending up here,” Idgen Marte grumbled, riding alongside Allystaire on her courser. She had pulled a light, hooded cloak from her saddlebags and worked at arranging its peak above her head with one hand.

  “What do you mean?” Allystaire looked at the smattering of first fallen leaves on the dirt track they followed, frowning. He fiercely ignored the rain, letting it pelt off his face and shoulders.

  “It’s autumn. Even the trees know it. And yet still the heat would like us to braise in our saddles.”

  Allystaire turned toward her. “Surely a southerner is not telling me it is too hot for her.”

  Idgen Marte sniffed. “In my part of the world, the seasons go gracefully.” Then she added, “And spring lasts longer than the two bloody weeks between the snowmelt and the pounding summer sun.”

  “Seasons at all are an abomination, you ask me,” Torvul called out from behind them. The dwarf had reins gathered in one hand. He guided his harnessed team with practiced ease and a light hand. The whip sat almost unused on the bench next to him, along with his cudgel and an earthenware jug. He paid as much attention to the rain as did a rock. “Weather should be hot and dank and dark at all times.”

  Idgen Marte laughed at the dwarf’s jibe, but Allystaire’s face was dour, grim beneath his broken nose and angry blue eyes, his jaw taut with tension. He suddenly pounded a balled up fist into his thigh and muttered, “I never should have let him go. He should have been brought back to Grenthorpe to face those people.”

  Idg
en Marte reined in, and the dwarf tugged his team to a stop. Sensing his rider’s anger, Ardent stamped at the ground.

  “We agreed, Allystaire. If he’d been meant to die, the Mother would have told me. He was judged, and he was punished.”

  “Might’ve wanted to make sure of that one,” the dwarf offered, his tone reasonable, mild, the companionable suggestion of the man who is rather certain he is the smartest one in the room and sees no need to point it out. “Not good policy to leave enemies behind you.”

  “He should have answered to the folk he wronged.” Allystaire was insistent, and rather than meet the gaze of the woman or answer the dwarf, he stared off into the trees flanking them.

  “He answered to the Mother, and he will not find Her justice pleasant.”