Days of Blood and Fire

by Katharine Kerr

  “Ah.” Jill let out her breath in a burst. “Did you now? And what did you do with the thing?”

  “I did give it to Tek-tek for her hoard. She be one of our ferrets, you see, and they do love to magpie away shiny bits and other such that catch their fancy. She took it thong and all into her treasure ball among the straw, though truly, Ambo, our big hob I mean, it may be that Ambo did steal it from her later.”

  “But it’s among the weasels still?”

  “It be so, for truly, I see no reason why Mam or Da would have taken it. It be a fair bit mucky by now, I wager.”

  Jill laughed, a quick peal quickly over.

  “Well and good, lad, well and good. Then I doubt me if our enemies will go a-hunting for it, and if we ever get you home again, there it’ll be, waiting for us to have a look at it.”

  During those long days passing in the world of men, for Dallandra, Time’s wheel had turned little more than an afternoon’s hour. She’d occupied herself in alternately fuming at her captor and laying plans. If only she could get out of her prison and reach the page before he or his men could, grab him somehow and put him behind her, then they could both take their chances together in a fight. The question was how. Often in Evandar’s country things that seemed solid were nothing but illusion, and in the spirit of experiment she focused her mind on one of the cage bars nearby. If it didn’t exist, her mere skeptical attempt to put her hand through that bar would dissolve it, but when she tried, she got a solid bump for her trouble. It had proved hard-woven astral substance, perhaps even of Evandar’s making, if he’d created the trees her captors had destroyed to imprison her.

  Although any piece of physical matter, if it had been possible to transport such to this plane of existence, would have gone right through the cage, her own illusion of a body was woven of the same stuff. Thus it behaved in relation to the “things” of Evandar’s country the same way as real flesh would behave in the physical world. Her body was also real enough to ache or, rather, to register the sense impressions of her etheric double as pain, modeling that feeling, most likely, on her memories of actual physical pain. From her rough capture she still hurt, a constant, distracting gnaw. She found herself rubbing the amethyst figurine round her neck to ease her bruises, just as she might rub a sore shoulder back on the physical plane.

  She lay down on her stomach on the cage floor and pretended to sleep, but she was actually studying the layout of the camp. The herald had wandered off into the forest, perhaps to nurse his sense of dishonor at his lord’s conduct. The ursine fellows had fallen asleep and snoring from their lord’s—Dalla had taken to calling him Lord Vulpine for want of a better name—from Lord Vulpine’s magically created mead, but the wolf warrior, the other foxlike creature, the distorted human, and the lord himself all sat alert and chatting by their fire.

  If only she could get out of the cage, she could use that fire against them, make it flare and explode with salamanders, tossing flames all over the clearing. Nothing would truly burn, but she doubted if they’d realize that in time, and their astral bodies would register the raw energies of elemental fire as pain. In the panic she perhaps could get the boy out of his prison. Making a great show of yawning, she rolled over on her back and flung one arm over her face, peering out from under it to study the lashed branches. If it were dark, she could probably unpick knots, but when or even if night would fall in this magical country was problematic. She rolled over again, carefully and slowly, so as not to attract their attention, and considered what weapons might lay to hand if she could gain the ground.

  All of a sudden, from the forest edge, the herald shrieked and howled. Dallandra sat bolt upright as down below the bear warriors woke with a grunt, and Lord Vulpine and his other men sprang to their feet. Waving his staff and moaning the herald waddled out of the forest with a black-mailed warrior striding behind. Like his lord he was mostly human, with only his red roach of hair and clawed hands to betray him.

  “Our borders!” the herald called out. “A breach, a breach.”

  Dallandra nearly laughed aloud, thinking they meant Evandar. In his cage on the ground the pageboy leapt up, too, and leaned against the bars to listen. While the herald moaned and dithered, the armored fox warrior knelt at Lord Vulpine’s feet.

  “My lord! The rebels have marched across our land, hundreds and hundreds of them, and they had an army with them, strange horrible beasts with horses and manes like horses on their own heads.”

  Lord Vulpine swore and raised his hand. A silver sword manifested within his grasp.

  “That bitch Alshandra!” the kneeling warrior said. “She was at their head in the form of a huge raven. They traveled into Evandar’s country, where we dared not follow, so I know not where they went.”

  Dalla clutched the bars of her cage so hard the structure swayed on its ropes. She could guess the ultimate destination of that army. They were marching on Jill, Cengarn, and the child and her mother. Images of slaughter and terror flashed into her mind beyond her power to stop them.

  “Where were our guards?” Lord Vulpine snapped.

  “Overrun. These creatures—they carried iron.”

  His lord threw back his head and howled, a long wail of rage and frustration. All at once Dallandra realized that he could be a weapon in her hand, if she could seize it without cutting herself.

  “Oho!” she called out. “You! Dog Nose! Some fine lord you are.”

  He spun round, peering up, flicking the sword point in her direction.

  “Hold your tongue, elven bitch, or I’ll cut it out.”

  “Huh, no doubt you would. That’s an easy thing, torturing a helpless woman and a child.” She gestured at the page. “A good way to forget your defeat, I suppose.”

  “Hold your tongue!”

  Behind his lord’s back the herald lifted wrung hands, as if imploring her to stop. She ignored him.

  “You forgot one thing, didn’t you now? That raven your man saw, that can’t be Alshandra, not so close to all that iron. How could she travel with that army?”

  He opened his mouth, then hesitated, thinking.

  “Well, that’s true,” he said at last. “So?”

  “Then where is she? She’s lurking round the Lands still, no doubt on your side of the border, because she’s terrified of Evandar, as well she might be.”

  He snarled, then kicked the warrior kneeling at his feet. The man whined but stayed where he was.

  “You can’t keep Alshandra out of your territory, can you?” Dallandra pitched her voice to an insolent lilt. “Oh, a fine border you keep! Even Evandar’s cast-off woman can go strolling past your guards anytime she has the fancy to.”

  Lord Vulpine growled, clutching the sword in a hand suddenly become furred. She could see fangs, too, biting into his lower lip, as if he would transform into an animal in front of her.

  “My lord!” the herald shrieked.

  With a toss of his head the lord collected himself and became, again, mostly elven.

  “You forget, slut,” he snarled, “that her warriors carried iron.”

  “They did, certainly, but how could she do the same?”

  He hesitated, caught. She laughed.

  “You, herald!” she called out. “How does it feel to serve a coward, one who can threaten a caged woman but not guard his own borders?”

  The herald gaped his long slit of a toad’s mouth and made a gurgling noise in his throat, as if he were swallowing prayers. With paws cocked to noses the bear warriors looked back and forth between their lord and the others. Lord Vulpine swung backhanded and smacked the herald so hard he fell.

  “Summon my men!” he snarled. “We ride for the borders!”

  His band cheered him.

  “You!” Lord Vulpine spun round, pointing at each warrior in turn. “Guard them well, the lad and the elven shrew. Once the army’s on the way, the herald here will be keeping an eye on you. There will be no parley, old man, so I don’t need you. You stay here, and if I ret
urn to find these prisoners gone, I’ll slice those folds of flesh away from your neck while you beg me to let you die.”

  The herald squawked wordlessly. Lord Vulpine grabbed his arm and hauled him up.

  “Summon my men, I said.”

  He dragged the herald off into the forest while the warriors argued and swore, bewailing their guard duty and a lost chance to ride with the army. So far so good, Dallandra thought. She reminded herself that even if night lay close at hand for her, weeks might pass in the lands of men before the sky above her turned dark. She was going to have to scheme out some fast escape.

  • • •

  On the third day of the siege of Cengarn, Jill rose at dawn and climbed to the top of the main tower to renew the astral seals. After she finished her working, she stood for a moment looking out over the enemy army, ensconced now some hundred yards back, well out of a bow’s range, from the city walls. Beyond this neutral ground rode a few guards, ambling on their enormous horses in a lazy circle. Beyond them lay ground kept clear for possible fighting, and farther still the tents. As the sun brightened, it glittered on armor and weapons as the soldiers strolled through the camp, getting their rations, probably, since just past the tents stood the wagons, extra horses, and supplies.

  At the outermost ring, the enemy had begun to dig trenches behind them and pile up earthworks to defend themselves from an army riding to relieve the town. Thanks to Cengarn’s position, straddling hills on the edge of more hills, the Horsekin had a difficult emplacement to defend, broken in places by rising land, in others by valleys. It would take them a good long while to dig themselves in properly, Jill supposed, or so she could hope. Whether or not they had magical defenses was the question that was truly vexing her. From her position in the dun, she could spot nothing but clouds of faint purplish glow, here and there, that indicated personal talismans of one sort or another—Horsekin magic, such as Meer and now Carra wore round their necks.

  Even though the dun stood on the highest inner hill, thanks to the broken landscape not all of the enemy camp stood visible. Since Meer had told her that the Horsekin not only carried hunting bows but prided themselves on their skill, she had no desire to go flying over the camp in falcon form to scout. Later that morning, in the company of Lord Gavry, she went down to the town walls, which of course lay farther out than those of the dun. With a yeoman captain, Mallo, to guide them, they climbed a ladder up to the wood catwalks. Although Mallo wore a stout iron pot helm, the rest of his accoutrements were made of boiled leather, studded here and there with brass. Jill could guess that most of the town defenders had no better.

  As they walked their slow circuit of the walls, stopping now and then to peer out between the merlons, Jill let the two men fall a little ways behind. She opened up her etheric sight, turning the stone walls round her so black and dead that she felt as if they’d crawled into a cavern, and began a careful study of the enemy camp. Round the western side, right under the dun itself, she of course saw nothing new, and nor did she find any traces of magic up to the north, where the town looked out into the rising hills about a half mile beyond the enemy camp.

  The eastern quarter brought her better hunting. Here the northern hills circled round, coming closer to the town in a couple of low fingers of land, and here stood the east gate, where Carra had tried to slip inside unobserved after her brief jaunt some weeks earlier. Out on one of those fingers of land, about some five hundred yards from the town, Jill saw a bubble of pale gold light, dotted at the cardinal points with glowing specks that, at some closer distance, would probably prove themselves magical seals. She refocused her sight to the physical and saw white shapes much like distant tents, and the occasional flutter of a red banner.

  “There we are!” she called out, pointing. “Some rather eminent persons are camped in those tents, I’ll wager. Their cadvridoc, perhaps, and their mazrak.”

  Gavry and Mallo hurried to a space between merlons and peered out, shading their eyes.

  “Lord Gavry, when we get back, you’d best report this to his grace,” Jill went on. “Mallo, how well defended is this gate?”

  “’Tisn’t a gate no longer, good sorcerer. We’ve sealed her up and good. This was always the weak point of the whole town, and some of the dwarven gentlemen, what are sieged here with us, I mean, they supplied these sacks of grayish stuff. Magic, I suppose it be, but when you mix it with water to a porridge, like, and ladle it round your gates, then it dries as hard as stone. We did seal the gates, and pile up loose gravel and bits of rock behind it, and slop a fair bit of that magic stone round and over the pile, and I doubt me if a god could break his way through the east gate now.”

  “Splendid!” Jill said. “Now that’s the kind of magic we could use more of.”

  The men laughed, but uneasily. Jill refocused her sight to the etheric and walked on, pausing every few steps to peer out at the enemy camp. In the quadrant that ran from the domed and sealed tents down to the south gate, she found more and more magical traces, glimmers of purplish light, streaks of pale red from some different sort of talisman. They were nearly to the south gate when Jill saw what seemed to be three shafts or slender towers of black light, unimaginable as that sounds, huge beams of light turned to perceptible darkness, glittering like obsidian from the fire mountains of the north and rising some thirty feet into the air. Down her back ran the ice touch of dweomer warning.

  “I don’t like this,” she burst out. “Mallo, are the men on alert?”

  “They are, my lady.” He patted a silver horn hanging at his belt. “All I have to do is signal, like.”

  Jill walked on, a little faster. The dweomer traces out in the massed enemy camp grew brighter, more clustered. At the towers over the main gates, the southern pair, she found four of the gwerbret’s men, mailed and armed with hunting bows, leaning over the merlons and arguing among themselves about something they saw outside. Jill brought her sight down and stared with them. In the Horsekin camp some sort of activity was stirring up dust.

  “Mallo!” Jill yelled. “Sound the alarum!”

  Like birds the silver notes swooped over Cengarn. Down in the streets men shouted, town guards came rushing to scale ladders, women shrieked and ran, grabbing children and dragging them back from the walls into the relative safety of the center of town. Up in the dun another horn called in answer. As soon as they could grab weapons, the gwerbret’s men would be reinforcing the guard on the outer walls.

  “Gavry, get down!” Jill shouted. “You’ll only be in the way.”

  The elderly lord was more than glad to follow her order, scrabbling down a ladder to hurry back to the dun. Jill found a spot where she could wedge herself next to a tower and out of everyone’s way, then brought her sight back to the etheric. The pillars of black light were moving closer.

  “Siege towers,” she yelled. “Hidden by dweomer, but they have them.”

  She heard Mallo yelling orders about fire, and in a few moments she could smell wood smoke and the sickening odor of melting pitch. For a moment she debated trying a banishing against those towers of blackness, but if she could simply guide the archers? Better yet! Let their enemies wonder how their dweomer defense had been pierced! She switched her sight down and noted the lay of the land, then returned it up to mark the towers of black light. From auras and the traces of talismatic magic she could easily keep track of the various squads of men.

  “Directly behind the five mounted lords,” she called out. “Sight over those ranked foot soldiers in front, sight some five feet behind the horses, now lift your aim to about ten feet above the ground.”

  With a whoosh and a stink of smoke the first course of flaming arrows flew. Jill could hear the Horsekin screaming in rage, but she kept her sight focused on the etheric plane—the higher ground in this peculiar battle.

  “Just a little to the left!” she screamed.

  The second flight whistled out. One of the black shafts of light exploded and vanished in a rush of pure elemental
energy, the red and gold of natural fire. As the rest of the arrows fell into the army, shrieks of pain howled up with the battle cries. Taken off-guard the enemy squads were milling round, trying to form into some kind of order for a charge.

  “A strike! A strike!” the guards cried.

  “There’s two more,” Jill called. “Swing to your right. Over the men holding that—ye gods, they’ve got a ram! Behind the ram, then, and just five feet behind and the same height as your last volley.”

  This time the first flight struck home, and another black shaft vanished into fire. Down below the enemy charged; from the walls a single flurry of stones greeted them. This early in the siege the defenders would have to trust in their walls and gates rather than depleting their supply of weapons. Jill sighted on the third siege tower, called down the flaming arrows again, and again, they struck home, setting the engine alight. Cengarn’s walls rang with jeers and catcalls as the soldiers carrying the ram tried one feeble bounce, then retreated fast under a covering fire of arrows that stilled the defenders’ laughter. Jill dropped below a merlon just in time, and a curse next to her told her that one of the guards had lingered too long.

  She brought her physical sight back fast, and kneeling, she crawled over to him, but he was already dead, pierced through the neck by sheer luck and little else. All Jill could do for him was close his eyes. Mallo came crawling to join her and swore when he saw the corpse.

  “We’ve driven the bastards off,” he said to the dead man. “You didn’t die in vain, lad.” He glanced at Jill. “He’s our first, is he? I’m not fool enough to think hell be our last.”

  Nodding agreement Jill rose, risking a look through two merlons. The enemy had withdrawn, leaving their siege towers burning like huge torches in the neutral ground while they dragged their dead and wounded away. Black smoke rose to defile the sky.

  “Well and good,” Jill said. “We got a claw into them, did we? And now they’ll have to think for a while before they risk feeling the whole paw.”