by Dale Lucas
Rem had to defend himself from a falling bludgeon that looked like a sawed-off broom handle. He traded several blows with the broom handle’s wielder before managing to disarm the man and send him reeling, bent double, into the mud. A few feet away, Torval charged right into the oncoming horde, maul in one hand, lidded tin tankard in the other. To Rem’s great astonishment, Torval was using the tankard as a weapon, blocking blows and swinging its broad side into would-be attackers. Gods, but that dwarf could defend himself with just about anything!
Rem found his own position more precarious. There were too many attackers, and the quarters too close, to truly go to work with his blade. Their enemies seemed to prefer speed and surprise over direct engagement. And so Rem found himself on guard against an onslaught of haphazard swipes and strikes from a dozen adversaries as they rushed by and plunged into the column itself, but no one bothered to stop and enter into a battle to the end with him. Every time he ducked or parried or narrowly avoided one attack, he’d be subject to another.
Hit and run, then, Rem thought amid the chaos, like forest brigands. Not precisely sporting, but effective.
Rem took more blows than a half-drunk boxer, got blood in his eyes from a glancing wound to his brow, then lost his breath to an unexpected gut blow that came in from his undefended right. As he tried to right himself, something hard and heavy slammed into his temple, filling his vision with a roiling darkness awash with exploding stars. As his vision swam and his ears rang, he was violently shoved into the mud, face-first.
Rem thrashed in the mud, eager to get his feet under him and avoid being bludgeoned while still sprawling. Somehow he scurried forward, made the brick wall of a nearby tenement, and turned there to survey the scene. He felt safer with his back to the wall, facing outward, but he desperately needed a moment to prepare himself before entering the fray again.
The whole street was choked with chaos and violence, the skirmish stretching from one end to the other. Despite their ill-fitting homespun tunics or cloaks, their cheap masks, and their battered and improvised weapons, the bandits seemed to be winning the battle, having managed to catch the watchwardens and their charges wholly off guard.
Torval went charging by, shouting something. He was backtracking toward the rear of the line. His maul was his only weapon now.
Aemon’s tears—Tavarix!
Rem launched himself off the wall and went running after his charging partner. Torval was making straight for a knot of masked attackers that had surrounded a band of dwarven masters and apprentices. A stout dwarf maid with a wispy braided beard seemed to be the primary defender of that little group, hammers in both hands, sliding left and right to defend the youngsters anytime those brigands got too close. Some of the apprentices were cowering and crying, others stood their ground, wielding their mason’s tools or any stout piece of wood at hand. Tav was one of the latter.
Torval plunged into the fray, knocking one attacker out cold with a swipe of his maul, then jabbing another in the gut with the maul’s grip end. Four more of the masked villains turned their attention on Torval and swarmed him. Rem saw the dwarf’s maul cast down quickly—knocked from his hand by an unlucky blow—but that didn’t discourage Torval in the least. In the next instant the dwarf’s fists were flying, and his hitherto-eager attackers began to slowly retreat.
Rem charged a pair on the outskirts of the band, attacking with his own maul but finding his first few raging, sloppy blows parried and thrown aside by the men he’d engaged. Just as he fell back to prepare for another attack—this one more sensible, more focused—whistles began to shriek up and down the line.
For a moment Rem thought they were watchwarden whistles—the sort that they all carried to call for aid—but then he realized the pitch was too high, too shrill. As the whistles sounded up and down the street, their attackers disengaged and fled, all leaving one adversary or another flat in the mud or reeling from a last vicious blow before dashing for the safe shadows of the nearest alleyway. Rem’s own adversaries slowly backed off, then ran for a nearby side street. When he turned to see how Torval fared, Rem saw the dwarf’s own opponents all scurrying off as well. Two of them hauled an unconscious third between them.
Torval no longer cared about them, though. His only concern was Tavarix. Rem was warmed to see Torval with his son now, questioning him, searching him for signs of injury. Tavarix, clearly in shock, just kept nodding in answer to all of Torval’s questions, withdrawing a little every time his father stepped closer.
Rem turned from the scene to survey the street. Tav and Torval were safe. No more worries there. Now, as for the rest of them …
Rem tried to catch his breath, to study the scene. All around him the sounds had changed. There were no more war cries or curses or shouts, no more ringing steel or thumping hickory. There was only the sound of wounded watchwardens and dwarves, groaning and bleeding in the street. Someone coughed. Someone else hawked and spat. A voice rose above the groaning and cried for a surgeon—someone was bleeding badly, unable to move.
Queydon’s consciousness suddenly invaded Rem’s fevered brain. Remeck?
Safe, he thought, and she receded, satisfied.
Torval appeared beside him. The dwarf’s chest expanded and contracted like a bellows, gulping air desperately. He was splattered with a great deal of mud, a few stray splatters of blood, and a sheen of fresh sweat. Rem assumed he himself probably looked much the same. For a long time the two partners just stood there, side by side, surveying the damage.
“Who do you think they were?” Rem asked between breaths.
“Fools,” Torval answered. “Trying to start a war.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Whistles blew. Runners ran. A nearby barber-surgeon and an innkeeping widow, both claiming experience with combat wounds, arrived on the scene to assist. In short order the critically wounded—those in need of immediate transport to the Houses of Healing—were separated from those in need of less acute care. Soon enough they had a tally of their casualties.
They’d begun the night with twenty watchwardens and sixty-eight dwarves. Four watchwardens and seven dwarves were critically injured, likely to survive, but only if they could be treated at once, possibly even if they were attended by true magic-wielding healers. Four dwarves and two watchwardens were unconscious, still breathing, but unresponsive to all attempts to rouse them. That group—all seventeen of them—were hurriedly gathered on improvised litters and hauled away for treatment by physicians and mages.
Of the seventy-one remaining, most walking wounded or wholly untouched, about half required some sort of stitching, bandaging, or binding. Rem had suffered a nasty blow to the head, but the widow innkeeper checked his eyes and his balance and pronounced him only superficially injured.
“Bell rung,” she said, “but not cracked.” She assured him that he’d likely sport a nasty bruise, maybe even suffer headaches for a day or two, but she thought it unlikely that his skull was fractured or his brain in danger of swelling. Assuming that the woman had, in her time, probably seen enough skull-cracked men and ejected enough of them from her public house to know what a potentially dangerous head wound looked like—and how the victim of one behaved—Rem took her at her word.
Rem found Torval sitting on a stone horse trough in front of a now-crowded tavern just a stone’s throw from where the ambush had unfolded. Gawkers choked the tavern’s doorway, appraising the damage, whispering among themselves. Torval, Rem noted, was doing a fine job of ignoring them. Even after Rem sat down beside him, the dwarf continued to stare into the middle distance, stoic and silent. Now that the mud and blood had been cleaned off him, it was apparent that Torval had numerous scrapes and bruises of his own, though most probably looked worse than they actually were. A short, deep cut along his temple had been stitched, while one elbow and both hands were bandaged entirely. Pink seepage through the bandages round Torval’s hands indicated that his knuckles were bleeding.
Rem sat beside Torval on
the horse trough. Most of the critically wounded had been helped away now. More watchwardens of the Fifth were on the scene, having answered the whistles and the runners sent to fetch help. Ondego picked a meandering path among the stunned and injured in the street, taking stock of how much damage had been done, while many of the lately arrived watchwardens interrogated the ambush victims—including their fellow watchwardens—and several others scoured the surrounding streets and alleyways for physical evidence.
“What do you think?” Rem asked Torval. “Was it them?”
“Them?” Torval asked, raising his head.
“The stonemasons,” Rem said.
Torval grunted and shrugged. “Likely, I suppose.”
Torval raised his eyes. He took in the surrounding rooftops, the myriad dark alleyways radiating from the street they currently lingered in. “That attack was swift and sure. Hardly sophisticated, but that didn’t matter. They hit fast, they hit hard, then they scurried away. I’m ashamed I couldn’t bring one down.”
Rem shook his head. “Don’t beat yourself up, old stump. They knew we’d be a match for them if they really tried to stand and fight. Their only hope was to surprise us, make mince of us while we were still trying to get our heads straight, then flee the minute we did.”
Ondego approached them. Just a moment ago, Rem had seen him having a discussion with two lower-ranking watchwardens, examining something they’d discovered. Now, approaching, Rem saw that the prefect carried something in his right hand. When he was just a stone’s throw from them, he tossed it to Torval. The dwarf caught it.
It was one of the masks. Now that Rem could see one up close, free of the frantic demands of the moment of attack, he was satisfied that his first impression had been more or less complete. The mask was simple, largely smooth, made of boiled leather with inked tracing. It was a three-quarter sort, large enough to cover the forehead, the eyes, and the nose, but would leave the lower jaw exposed. Rem knew he’d seen something similar before, but he couldn’t seem to recall just where.
“Recognize it?” Ondego asked.
“Well enough,” Torval said, “since a whole slew of them just attacked us.”
“I meant the style,” Ondego said. “Do you know what sort of mask that is?”
“It looks familiar,” Rem said. “But I can’t place it …”
“Come now, Bonny Prince,” Ondego chided, “certainly such a handsome historical artifact should jog your memory?”
Rem still winced every time he heard Ondego use that teasing nickname.
“If it were fancier or possessed of more flourish,” Rem said after studying the mask, “I’d say it was from a mummer’s wardrobe. Or maybe the sort of thing made for a rich house’s masquerade ball.”
“Not quite,” Ondego said. “Two thousand years ago, during this land’s darkest age, Lord Marshal Zabayus—”
“The statue on Zabayus’s Square?” Torval interjected.
“The same,” Ondego said, then resumed his tale. “Lord Marshal Zabayus, imperial governor of the province that Yenara stood as the capital city of, found his lands beset by reavers from Kosterland, horsemen from the steppe, orcs from the wilds, belligerent elves from the forests, and dwarves from the mountains—not to mention rival principalities from the four points. Everyone was at war with everyone in those days. The lord marshal’s request for legionary support from the imperial seat was refused—they weren’t having a much better time of it than he was.”
“Where does the mask come in, then?” Torval asked impatiently.
“I’m getting to that,” Ondego snapped. “Shut your sauce box. So … Zabayus realized that he was on his own, and that if he was going to mount a concerted defense against both human and inhuman enemies, he’d have to better organize his forces. He formed a militia, impressing every man between sixteen and sixty in the city and from the countryside surrounding, and he drilled them hard, day and night, until he could sift the martial chaff from the wheat.
“The story goes that the merely competent formed the core of the first homegrown Yenaran legion—a new beast, unaffiliated with the Horunic empire—while the best of the best, his strongest, smartest, fiercest warriors, were organized into an elite unit known as the Sons of Edath.”
“Edath?” Rem asked. “The first man, from the Scrolls of Derivation?”
Ondego wobbled his head and offered mock applause. “At last the Bonny Prince recalls his ecclesiastical instruction! Took you bloody long enough, you plank.”
“I don’t get it,” Torval said. “What has the first man from a bloody holy book got to do with Lord Marshal Zabayus or his elite soldiers, or that mask, even?”
“Visit the library,” Ondego said, holding up the mask now. “Ask to see some of the old scrolls and their attendant illustrations. In every image of Zabayus and his elite troops, you’ll see those soldiers wearing these masks, or something like them. Membership in that coterie and the sign of the mask bears such pride among old Yenaran families that most of them have these cheap replicas made for every newborn male in the family, if there’s any reasonable way they can claim descent from one of those troopers.”
“People and their bloody traditions,” Torval muttered. “As if it matters twopence who your bloody grandmother or grandfather was …”
Rem broke in, finally dredging up a great block of text from the Scrolls. “‘Then did the Maker traverse the garden of His Making,’” he recited. “‘Thereupon he saw every beast and bird, every mite and every serpent of the sea.’”
“What a lovely singing voice he must have,” Ondego quipped.
“Wait,” Rem said. “I’m getting to the important bit. ‘The dragons were wanton and cruel, the elves indolent and decadent. The dwarves grew trifling, consumed by greed, while the orcs were as shallow as ponds, yet turbulent as seas. “Shall I rid the earth of these, and let the beasts inherit all that I intended for my awakened kith … or is there, I wonder, some way yet to humble these knaves and arrest their excesses?”’”
“Get to the bloody point,” Torval said.
Rem looked to Ondego, as if for approval to continue.
Ondego nodded. “Carry on. You’re almost there.”
“‘And in that moment,’” Rem continued, “‘the Maker conceived of humankind: as wise and wondering as elves, as tough and industrious as dwarves, and strong, courageous rovers like the orcs. Though their bodies were slight and trim, the Maker ignited in their breasts the fire of dragons, and with it, mastery over the world.
“‘And the Maker said to the man and woman as he awakened them, “Though I made this world for those that came before, now I say to you, this is your inheritance, your kingdom, your domain.”’” Rem paused so that those words could sink in. Torval’s grim stare indicated that at last, he understood. Rem carried on, slowly now to emphasize what followed for all of them. “‘“Where they bow to you, make friends of them; where they ask of you, ‘Whence came you?’ point to my throne and urge their swift return; but where they challenge you, my children, my beloved, humble them with fire and sword.”
“‘And the man He named Edath, and the woman was Yfrain.’”
“Wonderful,” Ondego said drolly. “I’ve got chills.”
“But I’m right, aren’t I?” Rem asked. “These masks—they’re the mark of elite soldiers whose whole calling was to protect mankind from all that was not mankind.”
“Exactly right,” Ondego said, nodding.
“‘Where they challenge you,’” Torval quoted softly, “‘humble them with fire and sword.’ And the pillars shook …”
“Now do you see what we’re dealing with?” Ondego asked.
“Dwarf killers,” Torval said.
“Worse,” Rem added. “Zealots.”
Ondego stared at the mask in his hands. After a moment’s contemplation he drew a deep breath and turned to leave them. “Watch your backs, boys …”
He left them in silence. Neither had words of comfort for the other.
Never mind that it came from spilt blood and broken bones. Valaric didn’t honestly think they’d killed anyone tonight—he’d certainly given orders to avoid any such blows, reminding the men, constantly, that their aim was simply to frighten the dwarves and humble them, not to murder them outright. That was why all of their weapons had been the blunt sorts: bludgeons, mauls, maces, many wrapped in straw and burlap to soften their blows. All that their foray that evening needed to impart to their enemies was this: they were being watched, they were never safe, and if the fury of the men of Yenara was roused, they would be punished.
Valaric, having spent long enough watching the celebrations from a far corner of the room, finally decided to move among the men. He tapped the nearest keg and refilled his mug, then meandered off to hear their tales, to see the wonder and energy on their faces up close.
“Did you see that gaping little knuckle dragger I downed?” Keelix, one of the younger masons, said to a coterie of companions, all eager to hear the tale. “He came right at me—howling, like a goddamned ape!”