Ordination

by Daniel Ford

  “I’m not sayin’ I agree with Idgen Marte here, or quite buy all this Mother business the pair of you are selling, but didn’t you, just the other day, speak eloquently to me of the difference between the law and justice? Seems to me that tossing the man to a mob, no matter how good it may have felt, would’ve been neither.” The dwarf rested his rein-wrapped hands on his knees as he spoke, eyes moving speculatively from the woman, to the man, and back.

  “Eloquently?” Idgen Marte practically chortled the word, her mount tossing its head as if echoing her laughter. “Him?”

  “Well,” Torvul, said, shrugging his shoulders expansively, “maybe the compliment will inspire him to aim higher in future.”

  “I am right here,” Allystaire replied, his lips curling in anger around his teeth. “I am not an animal to be spoken of as though I cannot comprehend.”

  “Then stop sulking like a kicked dog,” Idgen Marte said sharply. “The matter is done with. When Rede finds a bed this night, like as not his sleep will be tortured with memories of his sightlessness. It has been so for better than a week now. That the people of Grenthorpe did not flock to the Mother is not to be fixed by killing him.”

  Allystaire sighed and balled his fist again, raising it as if to pound it into his thigh, then dropping it, flattened, to his side. “He poisoned the well before we ever got there,” he admitted.

  “We did the good that we could. That’s all we can do.”

  “It was not enough.”

  “Speaking of beds,” Torvul said, raising his voice pointedly above the brewing argument, “we ought to be after finding ours, eh? Not so very many turns of daylight left. There’s a decent village with a perfectly agreeable inn but a couple of turns ride ahead. Called Hillendale, or something. Such imaginations you people have. Still, their inn has the only tolerable beer in this barony outside of Londray.”

  “I could do with a night in bed,” Idgen Marte nearly sighed. “Allystaire?”

  “I never sleep in a bed anyway,” he said laconically.

  Idgen Marte rolled her eyes and tugged the head of her horse, turning it away and back up the road, throwing back over her shoulder, “Then sit on the floor and stiffen your back, you bloody martyr.” She was quickly out of sight around a bend, the hoofs of her courser pounding into the dirt.

  “Just because you’re a masochist fool doesn’t mean the rest of us are,” Torvul chided. “Besides…I think maybe the lass might not, ah…” The dwarf cleared his throat delicately.

  “Spit it out, dwarf.”

  “I think perhaps she’s tired of having the bed to herself, as it were.”

  “She is free to fill it however she pleases,” Allystaire said, his voice skin-chillingly cold.

  “Are you daft? A eunuch?” Torvul shook his head, spat to the dirt, and tched-tched his team into motion with a light click of his tongue accompanied by a lighter flick of his wrist. “Never mind. I already know you’re the first and if you’re the second it’s too pitiful to know. I hope you’re just a prude.”

  “I am neither a eunuch nor a prude.”

  “Least you’re not arguing on daft,” Torvul said. “Maybe you can learn.”

  “Why are you still here, dwarf? Why do you still follow me, if you find me so contemptible?” Allystaire nudged Ardent with a heel and thundered off, his countenance as dark as it had been before.

  The dwarf chewed hard on the inside of his cheek for a moment, and when the paladin was out of earshot, murmured, “Haven’t got anywhere else to be.”

  * * *

  The village was precisely where Torvul remembered it to be, and the three travelers rode into its outskirts as the last bit of sunlight was sinking below the nestling hills. When a single finger of vanishing light danced across his face, Allystaire paused and took a deep breath and closed his eyes, gathering himself.

  He slid off his horse and remained that way, eyes closed, breathing softly but deeply, unspeaking and unmoving. He did not hear the Mother’s voice, as some part of him hoped, but did, perhaps, feel the ringing chime of one single note of the music that seemed to fill his mind in Her presence, however distant. I am sorry, Mother, he thought. I should not question Your justice. The apology, however, rang a bit hollow; with a grimace he added, Yet I am as I was made and as You found me. It is hard to see one who has wronged Your people in Your own name go free.

  Allystaire was jolted out of his reverie by Idgen Marte’s hand upon his shoulder. “We can’t kill everyone who wrongs our people, Ally,” she murmured—too softly, he hoped, for Torvul’s ear—“any more than we can save everyone who needs us. Don’t let it consume you. We have too much work to do.”

  “Because of him, Grenthorpe will not know the Mother,” Allystaire replied, though his voice was calm and his jaw had finally unclenched.

  “They don’t have to worship Her to be Her people,” Idgen Marte chided him. “Nor to be ours.”

  He nodded, finally, with another deep exhalation, letting out the tension and the anger he had been carrying all the day. “True. Thank you for reminding me.”

  “My job,” she smiled, letting go his shoulder with a pat and picking up the reins of her horse.

  Something jolted him suddenly, and Allystaire fixed her with a questioning look. “Ally?”

  She grinned lopsidedly at him, stretching the taut, whitened skin of the scar descending from a corner of her mouth. “It’s what Garth called you, aye? Thought mayhap it’s what friends…” She shrugged and turned away, still grinning.

  Allystaire went and picked up his own reins as Torvul’s wagon rattled past him, the dwarf clucking at his team, and then at him. “Daft.”

  The wagon rolled along into the village square with Allystaire and Idgen Marte walking to either side of it, and Torvul holding forth. “Folks here probably haven’t seen a dwarfish wagon in some time. Like to be a mob scene all demanding pots mended and tools fixed. Wanting emetics and potions to stir the ol’ kindly feeling, poison for the rats and something to clear the dog’s eyes—”

  “And all you’ve got that ain’t poison is those dwarfish spirits, which might as well be, so what are you going to sell ‘em?” Idgen Marte looked up at him, grinning a bit wickedly.

  The dwarf’s expression darkened, and he rolled off a string of grim noises that sounded like stones being cracked apart by fast-freezing ice.

  “If you are going to curse, do it in a language we can understand.” For the first time in many turns, Allystaire’s voice carried a hint of laughter in the feigned reproach.

  The dwarf spat to the side of his wagon and said, “There’s no proper curses in your northern human tongues, anyway.”

  “Eh?” Idgen Marte and Allystaire chimed in unison as they turned to face Torvul.

  “There’s no word in your tongues for, ah…” The dwarf paused, wrinkling his heavy brows. “A vein of ore that can’t be extracted without crashing the tunnel. Well there is, I just said it, but it’s a bit unwieldy. Lacks impact and verve. And I have to add another word to say whether it’s silver or tin or…” He shuddered and hoarsely whispered, “gold.” Then he shook his head as if to clear it of a horrid vision, and both humans laughed, though Torvul looked on their mirth with dismay.

  By now they had reached the outside of the largest building in the square; it boasted three stories, dozens of rooms, thick glass windows along the front, and a cluster of outbuildings spreading behind. The scents of woodsmoke, horse, wet hay, and cookery on a large scale seemed melded together in an inescapable scent that all three recognized simply as inn.

  As they pulled up short of it, Torvul said, “Odd that no one’s spotted us yet. Not exactly dark. And you can joke as you like, but usually the moment I roll into a village this far out in the hinterlands I’m mobbed. By the children, at least.”

  The lights of fires, lamps, and candles shone through windows in the buildings that sur
rounded the green on three sides, and in some of the closer outlying houses, but although the trio hadn’t been quiet in their approach, no faces had peeked out through curtains or lifted the flaps of hide or oilskin to look at the new arrivals.

  “Probably all after their dinners. Time we were after ours,” Allystaire said. He started to walk closer to the inn’s door, lightly tugging on the reins he clutched in one hand. The huge grey destrier refused to move. He tugged again and the horse gave a slight negative whicker, stamped a hoof, and tried to tug out of his grip. “Ardent,” Allystaire admonished gently. “Nothing to fear here. Calm.”

  His words, or at least his tone of voice, had some mitigating effect on the animal’s mood and, though still shying, the horse followed his master’s steps. Allystaire grounded the reins and stepped lightly on them, then approached the door, knocked politely but loudly, and stepped back.

  The door opened slowly, and the man standing on the threshold was unmistakably the innkeep: portly, balding, red-cheeked, and apron-clad. He simply stood, however, staring at them. There was light at his back and darkness fast approaching out of doors, so Allystaire couldn’t make out his features entirely, but the stiffness with which the man held himself appeared odd.

  “Evening, goodman,” Allystaire said warily, standing up a little straighter, his scalp tingling slightly. “Have you rooms and space for our animals? Three travelers and five animals all told.”

  “Three…three?” The innkeep dragged out his second iteration of the querying word, and his voice was rather hoarse. “Three travelers? Is one of you a dwarf?”

  “Aye, goodman, a dwarf indeed and to your luck an alchemist, a handy fellow with every tool known to man and several dozen yet unknown in this benighted but charming country…” The dwarf trailed off as the innkeep’s head turned sharply toward him, and a flash of pale, sickly yellow, so brief it seemed a trick of the light, blazed in his eyes.

  The innkeep’s mouth opened wide, stretching so far that they heard the bones of his jaw creak in protest, and an unearthly wail, an ear-splitting sound, emanated from his mouth. Their animals screamed in a unified protest, and the paladin himself quailed and stepped back away from the door, clutching at his ears.

  “What in the Cold…” As Allystaire turned toward Torvul, who’d been stunned into silence, he heard Idgen Marte’s long and very slightly curved sword whisk against its sheath as it was drawn free. The innkeep, his eyes now pulsing with the sickly yellow light, was drawing a deep breath, his jaw still nearly obscenely open, preparing to unleash another wail. Bugger that, said a dry, practical voice in Allystaire’s thoughts, and he stepped up and drove a fist hard into the man’s stomach, stepping forward and turning his body into the blow by pivoting on one foot. The intended wail became a choking gasp, the punch sending the aproned man stumbling backwards.

  When Allystaire turned back toward Idgen Marte and Torvul, he saw every door and every window on the square open, each one framing the same pulsing flashes of yellow—dozens of them, always in pairs, at heights ranging from his waist to his head.

  Torvul cursed again in dwarfish, and the words required no translation. Then, his voice thick, he cried out, “Sorcery!”

  CHAPTER 33

  Something of Ambushes

  In contrast to the brightly lit houses of the village square, the more outlying houses were completely dark, save for one. A thick, sickly yellow glow—just like the pairs of eyes that were even now advancing on Allystaire, Idgen Marte, and Torvul—filled the interior of the house and spilled through its oilskin windows. It was not the glow of lamp, hearth, candle, or rushlight.

  Instead, the glow emanated from a single figure that hunched over a large family dining table, the surface of which was slick beneath his hands. Thick, dark liquid pooled in dents and marks on the table’s surface. The glow rose from beneath his fingernails, from his eyes, and faintly from behind his clenched lips.

  The simple farmhouse was a scene of unimaginable gore. Several bodies lay motionless—a few large, some much smaller, none with all their limbs intact.

  The robed and hooded man who stood amidst this nightmare was wet to the elbows from the blood that he swirled and pushed upon the table with his glowing yellow fingertips. His eyes were narrowed in concentration and his thin lips moved in a constant, incantatory susurration.

  * * *

  “Sorcery and no freezing mistake about it,” Torvul yelled. “And powerful stuff.”

  The innkeep Allystaire had punched had recovered his footing, and now he lurched forward clumsily, almost drunkenly, reaching for the much larger man. His strong hands found no purchase on the scored and pitted metal of the paladin’s armor. By the time his fingers, groping almost blindly, started to find a grip near the underarms, Allystaire had picked him up by his collar and belt, lifted him a foot off the ground, and flung him, as carefully as he could manage in such a moment, back into the inn, from which were emerging more ensorcelled townfolk. Women, children, men young and old began closing in with the same half-drunken walk as the innkeep.

  With the first man tossed away from him, Allystaire’s hand curled under the heavy head of the maul he wore on his belt, pulling it free and slapping the metal-banded, polished wood of the haft across both of his hands. “These folk—are they dead, or do they live?”

  Torvul stood and braced one foot on the front of his wagon. He’d wrapped the reins around one fist, while the other grasped his bronze-capped headknocker. “They live, but their minds aren’t their own. Cuttin’ a way out would be easiest for such as the pair o’ya.”

  “Idgen Marte,” Allystaire called out, seeing, in his peripheral vision, the swordswoman brandishing her sword. “We are leaving. Now. We are not cutting anyone down.”

  “I was afraid ya’d say that,” Torvul said, limbering up his arm with a few tentative swings of his cudgel.

  “Alchemist, can you do anything for them?”

  “Even if I were in good form these days, no. Sorcery needs be met with sorcery, leastways it does now. Or you kill the sorcerer, I s’pose.”

  “Then we will find him. Ardent,” Allystaire bellowed at his mount, which had flattened its ears and was stamping at the ground and whinnying nervously. “To me.” The horse dutifully trotted over and Allystaire swiftly hauled himself into the saddle, switching the hammer into his right hand. He saw Idgen Marte slide into her own saddle. “How easily can you turn that wagon, dwarf?”

  “Quicker’n you’d imagine,” Torvul answered. He sat back and flicked the reins, setting his ponies into motion.

  The villagers were closing in from all sides; forms had squeezed out through the windows of the inn.

  Allystaire’s mule stepped away nervously and finally bolted. Idgen Marte cursed and kicked her heels into her courser’s flank, starting off after it. The smaller, heavily laden animal had set a course straight into a knot of village folk, and though Idgen Marte caught up to it quickly and seized its dangling lead, by the time she had started to turn both horses, the glowing-yellow-eyed mob was upon them.

  “Dwarf, your cudgel!” Allystaire slid his hammer back into the ring on his belt and extended his hand.

  Torvul’s throw was true—the stout length of wood thunked into Allystaire’s hand even as his eyes turned to look for it. He spurred Ardent, and the huge destrier gathered itself in a great muscled leap, then charged, neck extended. Allystaire leaned low in the saddle, shifting his weight to the right, cudgel held at head-height of a man.

  Idgen Marte was trying to bring the flat of her sword into play, but the thin curved blade didn’t have enough surface area to work well as a bludgeon, and while he could see her blows stinging, and in one case opening a thin line of blood across an outstretched arm, the pain didn’t seem to frighten the villagers away.

  He had one moment of brief thought. Please, Ardent, do not crush any of them, before man and horse crashed into the crowd.


  Perhaps the horse heard his thoughts, guessed his intent, or felt some subtle shift of weight or mood. Regardless, the horse did not simply crash straight through the crowd. At the last moment it turned sharply and smacked its flank and hindquarter into the mass of bodies. Allystaire swept the cudgel out in a wide blow—forceful, but not enough to crack heads or spines. These are innocent people, he reminded himself. These are my people.

  The combined weight of horse and man, and Allystaire’s work with the cudgel, sent many of the stumbling crowd flying and others tripping over them. Idgen Marte wasn’t yet free, though, as two of them had hands on her legs and were trying to drag her from the saddle. Fortunately they were to either side and so pulled against each other. Her sword raised, she had just turned her wrist to slash down at one of their hands, leading with the edge, when Allystaire cracked the villager on the back of the head with his borrowed club.

  The yellow points of light in his eyes winked out, and the man sank to the earth like a stone. Two other villagers tripped over him reaching for Idgen Marte, who kicked her way free of the villager on the other side and smacked her horse’s flank with her other heel. The knight and the warrior, their mounts and packhorse, pulled away from the crowd, but better than three dozen folk still barred their way. Torvul had not been idle, though. Driving his wagon straight onto the green, he’d given himself space to move and forced the mobs to shift course. He was rummaging in his many pouches and tossing tiny, easily broken vials at the crowds that were converging.