by David Guymer
“Can you?” Fredric said again.
Something in his desperation softened her heart and she nodded. “I will look.”
Fredric rose from his stool, making room, scattering the flock of physics as Andira approached the bedside. She ducked under the lace curtains and sat in the baron’s vacated seat. There, she leant over the bed and touched her rune-hand to Litiana’s brow. It was cool, not feverish, the rune’s faint glow bathing her in a shimmering radiance.
“I can heal her,” she said. Fredric let out a sob, but quickly smothered it, making a fist of his hand and covering his mouth with it. He closed his eyes and nodded as if to some inner doubt. “I can,” Andira said again, withdrawing her hand. “But I have a favor to ask of you in return.”
Fredric’s expression hardened. “You would bargain with me for my wife’s life?”
“The greater part of the Uthuk Y’llan has ignored Kellar to continue north. You know this, I am sure. It is the only reason we are still alive having this conversation. What have you heard from the south? Has any word at all come to you from those settlements lost to the Uthuk Y’llan?”
Brant shook his head. “We’ve too few riders. Those we have out are all at work recalling the baron’s armies to Kellar, or trying to get word to our neighbors. As you’d imagine, their focus has been on the north.”
“I passed through one settlement on my way here. It was a small fort on the forest’s north-eastern border, a short ride from the western stretch of the Forest Road.”
“It sounds like one of the watch forts,” said Fredric. “What of it?”
“I thought them abandoned,” Brant muttered.
“It had been claimed by a bandit chief named Beltran,” said Andira, “but it does not matter much now. The whole camp was slaughtered and ritually slain. Their pain was captured and bent from there to some greater working.” She paused a moment, eyes fluttering closed as though it only just escaped her sight. “It is so close to us here I can almost feel it, an agony just outside my reach. This is why the Locust Swarm has moved less swiftly than they might have. And why they have chosen not to assault Kellar directly as yet. You assume that if they have a goal then it is our destruction. Our destruction is simply the means by which their true goal will be achieved.”
“Which is what?” said Fredric.
Andira hesitated. “I do not know.”
“Get to the point then and tell me what you want from me.”
“I am going after the Uthuk Y’llan. I will be going alone if I have to, but you have an army and I could use one. There are many reasons a blood witch might seek to weaken the natural barriers between planes. Few of them are good. This is not some petty coven of dabblers at large in your barony. This is a blood sister of Kaylor Morbis in allegiance with a demon king of the Ynfernael realm. Whatever they are seeking to enact it will be of a magnitude as befits his majesty.”
Fredric flung up his hands. “But you don’t know what. Can you at least say where?”
Andira glanced towards the slit window and felt a darkness that was barely perceptible at all pass across her eyes. For the first time that she could remember, Baelziffar was not north of her, but east. The realization was almost giddying. She had him. “According to the Greyfox…” A number of the faces around the chamber, Fredric’s included, darkened at her casual use of the name, “… the only place that lies in that direction is a ruin called Orrush Khatak.”
The mutterings that her naming of the Greyfox had brought fell suddenly quiet.
“The Barrowdales,” Beren murmured. “There is nothing there. Unless you count the road. And it goes nowhere, unless to some prehistoric ruin in the far east.”
“Or its destination was never part of the mortal plane,” said Andira.
Fredric shuddered, his hand questing for his unconscious wife’s and squeezing it. “I have been there.”
Brant looked at him sharply. “You have?”
“I was very young. My father thought it important. His father had done the same, he told me, as I would have taken Grace one day.” The young girl looked up at him. The baron looked for a moment as though he might weep, and he held Litiana’s hand more tightly. “The Gate is too huge a thing to have been made. And yet too perfect to have been entirely natural. The stone is the red of blood, and though it was dry to the touch, as stone should be, you could feel that blood had once been spilled there. It is not thirty miles from this castle. With a fast horse and no baggage you could be there in an hour. But it felt like another world.”
“Or a gateway to it,” said Andira, growing excited. “One, perhaps, that knew better than to open.”
“I believe her,” Brant muttered. “I’ve fought the Uthuk, on our side of the water and on theirs, and the things she says, they…” He frowned after the right words, then gave a frustrated shrug. “I believe her.”
“I believe her too, Father,” said Grace.
Fredric frowned. “Then wake Litiana from her bed. Do this for me and you will have your army.”
Andira returned her hand to Litiana’s forehead and sighed. The yellow light emanating from the rune brightened slightly, but except to those, and Beren Salter by her quiet gasp seemed to be one, who had been schooled in the manipulations of the Verto Magica it was so subtle an effect as to be invisible. If one were paying very close attention then they might have noticed a sparkle that engulfed the princess’ sleeping form and then was gone.
The room was still looking at her expectantly when she pulled her hand back and looked up.
“There,” she said. “It is done.”
Chapter Forty-One
Greyfox
Castle Kellar, North Kell
“So…” The lumpen scar of Kellar granite seated against the wall of the adjoining cell leered through the dividing bars. “So, what did you do?”
Greyfox crossed her arms nonchalantly behind her head and leant against the stone wall. The floor was a filthy mat of straw. A tin pot that was stained yellow and reeking sat in the cell’s furthest corner. Thereupon the catalogue of her worldly possessions came to a crashing end. She’d been in worse though. Back in Nordgard or Gwellan, the county sheriff would have had her fingernails out by now. And she would have been sharing that mat. She sighed, looking up at the ceiling. It was true what people said. Baron Fredric really wasn’t as bad as she had always believed.
Given everything she had done on the basis of that belief, it wasn’t a pleasant realization.
“How long have you got?” she said.
The petty crook bared an unpleasant half-moon of toothy pieces. “Tough girl, eh?”
“I’m not here to make new friends.”
“Why not?”
“My imminent hanging probably has something to do with it.”
The man chuckled.
Greyfox turned away from him as something in the corridor issued a muffled squeak.
“Rats,” said her unwanted companion. “You’ll get used to them.”
Greyfox saw them, sharp elf eyes piercing the desultory flicker of torchlight that masqueraded as gloom. There was a pair of them at the stair up the guardroom, picking at the crumbs where the gaoler, through clumsiness or cruelty, always managed to lose half of their daily bread. Greyfox listened to their chittering for a while, then mimicked it with a click of her own. The larger of the pair drew back onto its hind legs and turned towards her. It twitched its whiskers. A second later, both of them came scampering towards her cell, squeezed under the bars, and ran up to her outstretched hand to sniff at her fingers. She turned her hand over, the rats arching their backs as she stroked them.
“Nordros freeze my bones…” her fellow prisoner murmured.
Startled, the rats turned tail and scurried away.
“You’re one of them spirit-talkers from the north hills, aren’t you? What did they say?”
The elf glare
d at him. “That they pine for something fresher to eat. Preferably human.”
Before the crook could answer, a key rattled in its lock and the jail door swung open on ungreased hinges.
The marshal of the watch descended the stair with the tramp of a disciplined man. His boots were bright. His metal breastplate glossed by torchlight. The marshal, and Greyfox knew the type well, took the same pride in his appearance as he took from his service to the baron. His features were hawkish and sharp, the temperamental zeal of a man who enjoyed his work while also wishing it were something grander. No one rose through the ranks of the watch to become marshal without having once dreamed of glory in the baron’s colors. The day he had assumed custody of the infamous Greyfox had probably been the sweetest of his long career. The Bandit Queen of Kell, he had likely thought, with a shiver of delight, here in my gaol. A pair of watchmen followed him down. They were considerably rougher in appearance. Men who dreamed of being street-level bullies and thugs tended to find their niche and stay there. An old man came after them. There was nothing showy about him, just a large man in a coat, but there was something deliberate about his lack of airs that made Greyfox ignore the more ostentatious watch marshal and pay attention.
The rattle of the marshal’s truncheon along the cell bars roused the sleeping drunks. “It’s your lucky day, you unworthy lot.” He gestured back with a sharp crook of the head towards the shaggy old man stood behind him. “This here is no less a personage than General Urban Brant himself.” Greyfox could almost see the man’s words straightening themselves up and standing to attention. “And he has a baronial pardon for anyone here who’ll avail themself in their baron’s time of need. Frankly, I’m tempted to have these two here arrest me so I can march with him myself. Don’t think too hard though. The baron marches tonight and so his leniency lasts until the moment General Urban walks back out that door. “So…” The marshal looked around. “Who can I interest in a clean slate?”
There was a sudden clamor as three-score rough-voiced crooks and felons waved their hands through the bars and shouted their love for Baron Fredric at once.
Greyfox remained where she was.
She’d rather take her chances with the noose than Andira’s demon king. The old general peered from under his bristly eyebrows.
“Is this her?” he said.
“The Greyfox,” the marshal answered, proudly.
The garrulous crook in the adjoining cell backed slowly away from the bars, suddenly regretting their association. “You’re the Greyfox?”
Brant approached her cell.
“What do you say to the baron’s offer?”
“I’m thinking it over.”
“I’m told you know this country well.”
“Who told you?”
“How well do you know the hill roads to the west?”
“I… Wait, did you say west?”
“I’m told you can ride. None better.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Did Andira put you up to this?”
“Strangely enough the hero hasn’t mentioned you once. Your plight must have somehow slipped her mind.”
Greyfox blew out her cheeks. “Sounds like her.” She looked up. Whatever the general wanted from her, if it meant going west then it was starting to sound a lot better than hanging. “What do you want me to do?”
Chapter Forty-Two
Kurt
Castle Kellar, North Kell
It had taken a while, but at last Kell was moving. Long, weary columns of soldiers and conscripted refugees snaked out along the Forest Road, marching under the banners of the southern counties. When Kurt had first spied them coming on him from the western road he hadn’t believed it. A part of him had refused to accept that another human being could exist in the world. It had taken three of them to subdue him. Kurt barely felt it, armored in his own grief.
They had buried Elben and Hamma by the roadside. As a knight, Hamma had warranted the time and effort of a small headstone, but the two bodies lay close enough together in the ground that Kurt liked to imagine it was Elben’s. He did not think the old knight would mind. He had already given everything away but his title, after all.
And then they had marched. And Kurt, for no better reason than momentum, had marched with them.
On the fourth day Kellar rose in the east.
Its town was sticks and mud. It looked like a campfire that had been kicked over and stamped out. Perhaps by one of the giants that were supposed to live in the hills above it. A number of soldiers cried out as the dusty castle came in sight of the road. They obviously cared more for it than Kurt did. It was just another place. One more faraway place. The man marching on his right, a youngster from one of the southern border villages, a place called Trenton if he remembered, pointed up at the castle’s promontory and said something.
Kurt grunted, didn’t listen.
He wasn’t interested.
The man gave up.
“You’re as cold as Nordros’ stare, Kurt Stavener.”
Sabe Constan, lord of Downs County and captain of the south, rode up alongside. His exhausted mount settled gratefully into a walking gait. The captain looked to be about half Kurt’s age, late twenties to middle thirties, but his face told a shorter and happier story. Wind and sun hadn’t turned his skin to wood. Pain and loss hadn’t dulled his eyes, nor pinched his smile. His armor was mud splattered, but lordly, painted in the baronial purple and edged with silver and gold. The heraldic owl stared wide-eyed from the pectoral, the rondel discs, the caparison of his horse, and from the tricolor banneret that snapped from the neck of his upraised lance. If his beard had been permitted to grow overlong, then this too was all a part of his extended adventure into the north.
“You were a real soldier, weren’t you?” he said. “Before all this.” He gestured vaguely as though all this were something too ephemeral to be put into words or for proper soldiers like them to talk over.
Kurt nodded. He hadn’t spoken much since his last words over Elben’s grave. There wasn’t a lot left for a father and widower to need saying.
“I can see it in your face. In the way you walk. I’ve been thinking about giving you a unit to command when we continue on.”
Message riders had been galloping back and forth from Kellar, or what there still was of it, since the early morning. By now, even the dimmest of the horses had to know there was going to be no respite for them before they were marched back into battle. If they were lucky they might have the opportunity to find a latrine and change their socks before new orders and new officers came in.
“Stavener?”
Constan was still there, still waiting on his answer.
Kurt thought it was a terrible idea. He wouldn’t want to be in a unit commanded by him. He shrugged.
He didn’t even care enough to tell the man “no.”
The captain smiled, seeming relieved. “I like you, Stavener. The troops like you. They look at you, cool as Forthyn in winter, and think that maybe the thing they feared isn’t so terrifying.”
“I’m not scared of the Uthuk,” Kurt muttered. “They’ve already done their worst.”
For the first time in his life, he was getting exactly what he wanted. How ironic that it should be a battle. But then what else was there? Elben was in the dirt. Sibhard too. Hamma’s last words had brought home the madness of following in the footsteps of heroes. All he wanted now was to punish the invaders that had brought him this pain. Vengeance. It was dirty money, but it was a bill he meant to see the Darklanders pay.
The Shield of Daqan was coming together, and it was turning east.
Even through the cold sheath of mail he wore over his heart, there was some small pride that he felt in that.
Constan threw him a salute. “I’ll see if I can’t rustle you a set of corporal’s epaulettes before we leave Kellar.”
He spurred his horse and trotted on ahead.
Kurt shrugged.
He doubted there’d be time to sew them on.
Chapter Forty-Three
Andira Runehand
Barrowdales, North Kell
Andira had quested over half of Terrinoth, from the disputed county of Roth’s Vale, wedged between Carthridge and Rynn and the haunted mistlands of the Thirteenth Barony, to the far south and beyond humanity’s borders into the ancient woodland of the Aymhelin. In all those years of travel she had never crossed a land so bleak, so ill-disposed to life in all its forms. The hills were naked and ashamed, brooding in their cold stone. No crofts stood amongst them, no bits of wall, no grazing livestock. There was not even a bird. The only feature that the eons had changed was the sky. It was a bowl, vast and variable in its gray shades, ringing to the hoofbeats of two thousand mounted men-at-arms bearing east along a metaled roadway that had no right to exist at all except by Ynfernael decree.
Each senior knight, and there were hundreds, commanded their own lance of a dozen or so lower ranking knights, squires and armed retainers. The thundering mass of the heavy cavalry shook out a dark haze from the old road, obscuring the proud heraldries and banners of the martial orders and turning the evening prematurely to dusk. Horn blasts sounded out like wolf cries from the hills as the lances signaled their movements to one another. Fredric’s own lance company, in which Andira rode along with Kellar’s noblest sword captains and heroes, was particularly well provisioned with bards and heralds, and the clamor of trumpets and clarions was all the more cacophonous for it.
It was a certainly a mighty showing. Andira doubted it was all strictly necessary, but if it bolstered one warrior’s courage for the battle ahead then the din would have been worth it.
Fredric himself was clad in plainer armor, the baronial harness ruined beyond all hope of recognition, if not eventual repair. He was properly helmeted so as to obscure the burns to his face while the visor was down and a long comb of purple and gold feathers traied it. Andira wondered if he realized that it was Starchaser he rode, or who it was that had ridden the proud gray before him.
