by M. C. Planck
“Any excitement while we were gone?” Christopher was feeling guilty for hoping the answer was “Yes,” and thus possibly giving him a reason to put off hunting Cannan, but Gregor ruined it as usual.
“Not a bloody lick. Neither hide nor hair of ulvenman, dinosaur, or anything larger than a blasted mosquito. How about you? Did you go off and have fun without me again?”
“Um . . .” Christopher stalled, unwilling to lie. He knew perfectly well that Gregor would consider the fiery incident at the inn as “fun.” His evasion was wasted. The cavalrymen were grinning from ear to ear. Within hours their sojourn at the College would be all over camp. Gregor probably would have considered that fun, too.
“That’s it,” Gregor swore, looking at the men’s faces. “You are never leaving me behind again.”
“Surely you found other ways to entertain yourself?” Lalania asked, her gay and lilting tone wholly at odds with the meaning of the words.
Gregor blushed, but Disa didn’t flinch. A slip of a girl she might be, with less combat effectiveness than a teenage boy, but she was made of courage.
“Welcome to our camp, troubadour. We have missed your music.”
“It’s minstrel now,” Lalania said, strumming her lyre. “But let us not stand on ceremony, Patera.” Christopher had never actually heard the female version of pater before. Everyone in his camp called the woman “lady.” When there was only one around, there wasn’t any chance of confusion.
“Congratulations.” Disa smiled as if she meant it. “By the way, it’s prelate now, but as you say, ceremony is unnecessary. We are all friends here. Rank will not change that.”
“Prelate?” Lalania turned on Christopher. “You have been generous.”
“More than you know,” Gregor admitted. “He made me a viscount.”
Lalania didn’t miss a beat. “Finally, Christopher, you act sensibly. You need a retinue. Your enemies are no longer confined to an overzealous assassin and Invisible Guild pawns.”
“He’s not my . . . retinue.” Just saying the word made Christopher uncomfortable. “He doesn’t owe me anything. We were under siege, and we needed his strength for the next day. That’s all it was.”
Lalania cocked her blonde head at him. “I don’t see it that way, and neither does he. My job is to protect you. I’m going to do it with whatever tools I can. Ser Gregor, your friend rides tomorrow into darkness and danger. Will you honor us with your company?”
“I just said he wasn’t going to leave me behind again,” Gregor grumbled.
“When do we leave?” Disa said.
“You don’t,” Lalania answered. “You belong to the regiment. Christopher cannot haul you along on his private adventures.”
“The Vicar can do whatever he likes with the regiment,” Torme said. “Outside the realm, his word is law.”
A sticky situation. Christopher didn’t want to cut Lalania off at the knees, but he couldn’t tolerate this squabbling among his staff.
“Karl will decide who goes and who stays. Now I’m going to get out of this saddle.” He directed his mount to the pens, where Gregor’s huge warhorse Balance snorted and flattened his ears at their arrival. Royal, in a surprising fit of noble tolerance, only whinnied softly in reply.
“My father was right,” D’Kan muttered while he dressed down his own horse in the next stall. “Two women in camp is too many.”
It was such an unlikely thing for the young Ranger to say that Christopher burst out laughing.
Dinner was served out of huge kettles by insolent privates, amid the jostling of young toughs who were none too clean, using language that was downright filthy. The contrast to the College was startling for Christopher. He’d almost forgotten what army life was like while floating in that sea of luxury.
Lalania dropped her spoon after the first bite and cursed.
“What?” Christopher said, fearing poison, treachery, or cruel pranks gone wrong.
The bard dipped her spoon into Christopher’s plate and stole a bite. Her face stayed sour.
“I’m afraid it’s always like that,” Disa said, commiserating. Gregor didn’t say anything, which was probably wise, but it left Christopher to defend his men alone.
“It’s not that bad,” he said, and dug in. It required an act of will not to spit it out again. He’d forgotten what army food was like, too.
“They won’t let me cook,” Disa explained. “And they won’t learn anything from me. Karl only assigns cooking duty as punishment, so they refuse to even try.”
“No doubt you won’t let me set a separate table for you, Christopher.” Lalania eyed him hopefully.
“No,” Karl said, emptying his bowl with grim efficiency.
“Very well. But can I have permission to at least endeavor to make a skill of it?”
Christopher choked down his second bite. “Yes . . . Karl, see if you can find some other unpopular duty for discipline. Anything at all.”
Karl was implacable. “Cooking is women’s work. There is nothing lower in the camp to do. Even shoveling manure is a man’s job, in peasant eyes.”
“Then tell them they can’t get off kitchen duty until they do a proper job of it,” Lalania suggested.
They sat in silence for a moment, watching D’Kan at the end of the table struggling manfully with his bowl.
“Fair enough,” Karl agreed.
In that moment they were a family again, all divisions forgotten. They left the mess tent with jokes and laughter.
But when Christopher went for his final walk along the wall, greeting his sentries and looking out over the dark marsh, he found Lalania sitting alone in a crenellation, pretending to tune her lyre.
In turn, he pretended not to notice the streaks that ran down her face, glistening in the flickering illumination of light-stones. There was nothing to say, so he just stood there, sharing the silence with her.
“Good night, Christopher,” she said after a while.
“Good night, Lala.” He finished his patrol, and went to bed. Alone, as always, while he tried to forget the feeling of her back pressed against his, when they had slept together under the stars.
4
HUNTING BARBS
Lalania got her way. Christopher didn’t want to know if it was because she was right, or because she’d bamboozled Karl somehow. It didn’t really matter. He wouldn’t have allowed Disa to go under any circumstance.
The men that rode out with him were all his, not the draft’s, a half dozen of the cavalrymen Karl had recruited from the gutters of Kingsrock. Gregor and Lalania too, just like old times, if you ignored Disa’s fervent embrace, and the gentleness with which Gregor peeled her hands away. The knight’s relationship with Lalania had been bright and hard, like a shiny coin. With Disa, he was like a man tending a flower garden.
D’Kan rode in front, scouting, as he called it, but Christopher felt he needed the space to hide his face and his feelings. Going to confront the man he once had thought of calling brother-in-law, and now must call kin-slayer, stretched the young Ranger as taut as a funeral drum.
Torme’s face was as inscrutable as it always was. Watching him leap expertly into the saddle, Christopher was reminded of how little he knew the man. And yet they were tied together by their service to Marcius, the only priests of the Marshall of Heaven in the entire realm. Torme was no fool. Surely he must guess that Marcius’s reemergence was significant. A herald of change, an omen of troubles to come. Torme had heard that trumpet call and responded, while others were still wondering at a faint and distant sound.
Not all others. Karl rode out with him, too, bound as tightly to his cause by his innate character as Torme was by his oath to the god. Christopher was surprised to see him leaving the army behind. He had come to think of Karl as not just part of the regiment, but as the embodiment of it. He had come to think of Karl as his inevitable replacement.
Listening to the young man issue orders to the mercenary cavalry, watching them obey without hesitat
ion, Christopher realized why Karl had to come. This was all too traditional. Christopher had a retinue, whether he wanted to admit it or not. He was surrounded by elites, by people with ranks and powers. All of them had gotten a rank from his hand, and could therefore reasonably expect another.
Karl would not. Karl would ride into this haunted swamp, face terrors that had no name, and come back again, just plain Karl. Goodman Karl, never Ser. The ordinary men who rode with him would know that they were coming back the same. For all the tael Christopher had given out, to everyone from craftsmen to wandering minstrels, he had never made a knight out of a common man. He had essentially promised Karl that he never would.
Christopher didn’t know if Karl was there to hold him to his promise, or to make it easier to keep. As long as Karl was not knighted, no one else could expect to be. Karl was going to eliminate the aristocracy through sheer example.
They hugged the marsh for a few miles before it ran out into trackless bush. Then they plunged into the swamp, D’Kan now only a few paces ahead. Christopher struggled to keep Royal from taking the lead. Somehow Gregor had convinced Balance to take the rear of the column, a position soon lost to the close-hanging vines. The scrubby trees looked like they were weeping, bound to the earth in chains of green. Christopher slapped a mosquito and blinked, startled, at the sound of ringing metal. He had forgotten he was wearing his plate mail.
D’Kan glanced over his shoulder, frowning. Christopher frowned back. The sweltering, deadening armor was not his idea. Only when Gregor had donned his own had Christopher given up the argument and accepted his imprisonment. If they were attacked, the armored men would naturally be the first targets. It was simple fairness, since they were the most likely to survive, having several ordinary lives bound into their tael.
The tactical notion of hiding their principles no longer applied. They were revealed as players of significance by their mere presence in this untamed swamp.
They camped on ground that could only be called dry by virtue of not being underwater. D’Kan made them set a watch, two men at a time. Only the soldiers surrendered their sleep for this duty. The ranked were treated like prized boxers, coddled until it was time to step into the ring. Christopher would have found this disturbing, except in this particular case the coddling meant an extra hour lying on soggy, saw-toothed grass that managed to be slimy and sharp at the same time, and using all of his powers of concentration to ignore the insect zoo that crawled, slithered, hopped, and flew around them, seeking an exposed patch of flesh to feed on.
D’Kan steered them expertly. They only had to backtrack around a pool, quicksand, or impassable thorny hedge a dozen times. Once, they came across a float of crocodiles in a shallow pond. One of the beasts began drifting purposefully toward the horses; D’Kan shot it in the nose with a blunted arrow. It thrashed its tail in annoyance, but kept its distance. The men lowered their rifles while D’Kan rolled his eyes. A single gunshot would have revealed their presence for miles.
The days began to blur together, in one hot, miserable streak, but on the fourth day D’Kan came to an abrupt halt, and Christopher automatically drew his sword.
“What is it?” he whispered.
“Nothing,” D’Kan answered. “That is the problem.”
Christopher was covered in a sheen of sweat and raw skin from wearing the unaccustomed armor. Worse, he couldn’t scratch half the places he itched because they were protected by steel plates. He was in no mood for riddles.
“Fine, then. What isn’t it?”
“What it is, my lord, is the absence of ordinary fauna. We are in the Moaning Lands.”
Instinctively he looked behind to see where the border was, but all he could see was swamp.
“Damn it.” Another broken promise he might have to pay for.
Lalania had ridden up to see what the delay was.
“Relax, Christopher, no one is in danger yet. One fact we do know of the Moaning Lands is that it is haunted only by night.”
She hadn’t known that a week ago. Christopher was guessing the Skald could talk through the scrying ball as well as listen. Lalania’s stray bits of useful information seemed a lot less serendipitous now.
D’Kan’s horse started to move forward again.
“Whoa,” Christopher said. “You’re not going any farther. You have to get out of here before nightfall.”
“The murderer could be in the next grove.” D’Kan stopped to argue. “We might seize him and return before dark.”
“Or . . . not.” Christopher jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Head on back. Take some of the riflemen, set up a camp, and wait for us.” He put on his best minatory glare. This time, damn it, people were going to do what he told them to.
D’Kan sulked, but only briefly.
“Very well, my lord. But I’ll be far safer alone than with your blundering smoke-and-thunder men. I can hide from much more than they could kill.”
Christopher eyed him speculatively. Was the Ranger telling the truth, or was he trying to weasel out from under Christopher’s watchful eye?
Lalania’s latest lesson had application here. Splitting his forces was unwise. If the Ranger was false, assigning common men to guard him would only cost them their lives; if he was true, Christopher would want the men with him to hunt the murderer.
“Can you find us again, when we come out? We’ll need you to get us back to the fort.” Glancing around at the trackless swamp, it occurred to him they might have trouble even getting back to this place.
“I could find you with a bucket on my head. But if for some reason I fail you, simply head north. Eventually you will bump up against some part of the Kingdom. For now, travel due east until you find the Avenue of Fear. The murderer will be drawn to the center of the taint. So will you, for that matter.”
D’Kan pulled his horse aside and watched them pass. Christopher let two cavalrymen take the lead, trying not to wince at hiding behind their mundane flesh. The memory of Lalania’s lecture when they had ridden through Dark counties burned his ears. Here he was, clad in plate and tael, hiding behind men who had only one life bound to their bodies. But there was no help for it. If the men stumbled into some horrible trap, they could be revived. Though Christopher could be revived too, death would reduce him by a rank; at his current status, replacing a single rank would cost more than reviving half the regiment. Perversely, he was less prepared to survive death now than he had been when he’d first arrived.
They rode for hours while the sun crawled across the sky. Despite the light the marsh was cloaked in muggy gloom. The insects here seemed even larger and more aggressive. Huge blowflies, black and glittering, assaulted their faces so relentlessly that soon they had their heads wrapped in scarves despite the heat. Clouds of gnats blinded him every dozen steps, and the horseflies were so vicious that Royal began snapping at them when they flew by. It was a futile war. The flies could trade bite for bite for a thousand years and still win.
As twilight crept up on them, the insect swarm began to thin. Christopher breathed a sigh of relief, until Torme spoke up.
“The flies abate. The taint must be stronger here. Perhaps you should try your detection spell.”
This was their grand plan. Christopher’s latest rank gave him access to a spell that would guide him unerringly to an object, if it were within several hundred yards. He wasn’t sure why the ability to find lost car keys was on the same level as curing cancer—but in this particular case he was glad to have it. They knew Cannan still had the magic ring wrested from Black Bart; it was far too valuable to part with, and in any case the druids had apparently observed its effects in action while spying on him. Christopher fixed his mind on an image of the ring, bright gold and black onyx, and said words in Celestial, the language of his god.
Somewhat to his relief, nothing happened. But the respite was only temporary. With a sigh he untangled his feet from the stirrups and his hands from the reins, preparing to launch into flight. He could cover a
n astonishing amount of ground that way, flying just above the treetops so that Cannan couldn’t see him coming while his magic radar swept the ground for the ring.
“Not tonight,” Gregor said. “Wait for the light.”
“I concur,” Karl agreed. “We should look for a place to sleep.”
Christopher looked ahead and behind, and made a startling realization. They had been traveling in a straight line for the last several minutes. Around him he could see the others reaching the same conclusion.
“Welcome to the Avenue of Fear,” Lalania said, her voice uncharacteristically hushed and heavy.
It was drier and clearer than the rest of the swamp. With a shrug, Karl dismounted and began pitching camp.
Someone shook his shoulder. Gently at first, but when he tried to ignore it, the touch hardened.
“What?” he said, opening his eyes. For a moment he wasn’t sure where he was. The sky glittered above him, with its impossible profundity of stars.
“Something comes. Get up.” Karl’s voice was flatter than usual. Christopher sat upright, and Karl pulled him to his feet.
“What?” he asked, less querulously this time.
Karl shrugged. In the dim light, his rifle barrel was a black void.
“Colonel,” said a voice from the edge of their camp. One of the cavalrymen. Christopher had thought they were hard as iron, but this man sounded frightened. He went over to reassure him.
When he got there, he could hear what spooked the soldier. A distant mumbling, low and sad. The horses heard it too, and whinnied in complaint.
“Shh,” Christopher tried to tell the horses. They ignored him. The moaning grew louder, and Christopher knew it was coming toward them.
“Stand your ground. If rifles can’t kill it, Gregor and Karl can.” The two men were bearing magic swords. Lalania had sworn the enchanted blades could slay incorporeal beings, even ghosts. Christopher didn’t understand how, but then, he didn’t understand how a being could be incorporeal in the first place. Gregor was also in full armor, having volunteered to sit watch for the entire night. Ghosts were not the only thing they feared here.