“When he hears about this, Aldric Talvalin will kill you…!”
*
Killing was very far from Aldric’s mind as he knelt motionless on the balcony outside his room and watched the eroding disc of the moon through half-closed eyes. The notes of a Jouvaine melody drifted through the darkness, played with passable skill on a bowed fola. Music was the last thing he had expected in this grim, ominous fortress, and the sound could have come from another country, or another world. Its shivering, protracted chords helped him think of other things, or even not to think at all.
His battle armour was laid out before him and a thousand tiny moons reflected from the surfaces of helm and war-mask, from mailed and plated sleeves and from the scales of his lamellar cuirass. Except for the Talvalin blue-and-white of silken lacing cords, everything was a hard and brilliant black which gave it a faint air of menace even in repose. With the scabbarded length of Isileth Widowmaker resting on his thighs so did Aldric. He could still hear the demon-queller’s voice echoing in his memory, and it made the sword even more of a reassurance than usual.
*
“Whatever fool performed this summoning is lucky to be alive!” Marek had snarled the words as he pointed to a chalk-drawn circle on the library floor. There were things within its perimeter he didn’t intend to touch, but he approached and knelt and studied them with an air of distrust Aldric could read as clearly as any amount of swearing. There was a broken flint blade, new-made or a survivor from ancient days, there was a blotch of dried brown blood, and there was a book. “If they are alive,” the Cernuan corrected. “This was inadequate, hasty preparation, and then to make a blood-offering in the old way with stone, and,” he glowered at the book, “this foul thing…”
He opened his cymar robe at the neck and pulled out a medallion on a fine chain. It glittered as it spun back and forth level with his heart. Marek gripped the little metal disc between the finger and thumb of his right hand, then swept his left arm down and across between himself and the book.
“I bind you, I secure you, I restrain you,” he recited. “I wrap you close with chains of power, I pen you in with bars of force. Harken and obey.”
“You’re giving orders to a book?” Aldric sounded incredulous, but he was too wise and too experienced for instant disbelief. He stalked towards the kneeling Cernuan, placing his feet with care in the uncertain light of the solitary lamp which was all Marek had risked lighting. The demon-queller glanced up at him.
“Your foster-father would do as I have done,” he said, reaching out to lift the heavy volume. “The stories claim this grimoire can choose what’s conjured through it. And I’m inclined to believe anything I read about Enciervanul Doamnisoar. Until I learn otherwise, belief and the caution it creates is safer.”
“Avert!” Aldric said and matched gesture to word. He knew the book’s name, as Marek obviously suspected, and had heard it spoken in another time, in another place, by another voice. Gemmel-altrou Errekren had mentioned this vile text just once, and had blessed himself as ordinary men did when he pronounced its title. On the Summoning of Demons was evil held captive, malice netted by written words and a wrapper of human leather.
“No man in his right mind would use this foulness simply to commit a murder, and not even a madman would overlook Dismissal. But the man who made this pattern has done both. He knew what it was he did, but not whose will he did.” Marek stood up and looked around in case he had missed any vital detail. “Issaqua’s influence pervades this fortress: cruelty, hatred, fear and madness. Even you drew a blade on me. It’s the Bale Flower’s work: to make a time that profits wolves and ravens, when friend turns on friend and the father hates his son.”
A time for wolves…? Did Evthan kill his wife and daughter after all? Aldric’s mind flinched from the thought. And when King Rynert sent me into this potential slaughterhouse to do more killing, how much did he know?
“This place is the focus of the conjuration.” Marek took in the chalked, bloodied floor with a single weary sweep of his arm. “It drew down the Warden of Gateways and permitted It to enter. And without Dismissal, the Warden was free to call upon its own Master, Issaqua. What began here could fill the world with Darkness. And only we can stop it.”
It was what Aldric had been expecting, with a kind of horrid, inevitable anticipation. He didn’t protest, or make excuses about his other duties. All that was past.
“The Warden of Gateways?” he wondered aloud in a voice which to his own surprise was free of tremor.
“Ythek’ter auythyu an-shri,” Marek said. “The Devourer in the Dark.”
*
Ythek Shri…
Five days ago, he would have laughed. The Devourer was a childhood bogy, a harmless horror that lurked in the shadows cast by bedroom furniture or hid behind sleep-heavy eyelids. It was a dream. A nightmare. But too many nightmares had become reality for Aldric Talvalin. He no longer laughed. Perhaps that too was a form of madness: to know that one’s most secret terrors stalked to and fro beyond the light as they waited for nightfall.
The melancholy whining of the fola faded into a patter of applause and then silence. Lights and shadows shifted in the distant room where it had played. And much closer, in his own room, something moved.
Behind him. In the dark…
“Is the demon-queller with you?” asked Crisen Geruath. It was several seconds before Aldric’s heart slid back from his throat and down to his chest where it belonged, and several more before he trusted himself to speak.
“He is not.” Even though his brain was jangling with alarm both from the fright he had received and from an ominous sense of warning, the reply was calm, controlled, as remote as if the mind behind the voice was far away. Only a slight movement of one hand which loosened Widowmaker in her scabbard betrayed awareness of anything at all. Crisen ignored the movement. Instead he sat down on the balcony and tried again.
“Will he come here later?”
“I doubt it.” As he spoke Aldric’s hooded eyes opened, staring at the Overlord’s son. Their pupils had expanded in the dim light of moon and stars until only outlines of greenish iris remained around a dark, infinite depth, and they regarded Crisen with a predatory consideration which would have made anyone nervous, even the innocent. “What do you want?” The Alban’s tone was flat and disinterested, and when no answer was forthcoming, he yawned with the luxurious, studied insolence of a cat. “Then good night, my lord.” His eyelids drooped once more, declaring the brief conversation over. It was not.
“Would you kill a man?” asked Crisen. Aldric’s sword-hand flexed, but he kept his voice controlled.
“Who? And why?”
“A-a man whose death would benefit—”
“I need a name and a reason, my Lord Crisen Geruath Segharlin.” Although Aldric spoke the name and title with deceptive gentleness Crisen had grown sensitive to intonation and caught his breath at what lay beneath like the deadly undertow in a quiet river. He glanced towards the door as if seized by second thoughts, then his own words tumbled over one another in their breathless haste to escape his mouth.
“I want you to kill my father. There’s a name. As for a reason, it’s because he hates me. And I hate him. I want him dead before he does the same to me!”
A time for wolves… said Aldric’s memory. He set Widowmaker aside and got to his feet, walking indoors with no sound but the faint creak of his arming-leathers. “There’s the door, my lord.” The leathers creaked again as he pointed. “Leave.”
“What?”
“Get out. Now.”
“But you’re eijo!” Crisen protested. “I saw the way you looked at him. You want to kill—”
“I don’t. I won’t. I may be eijo, but I’m no murderer.” Aldric hesitated, knowing the irrevocable weight of what he was about to say. “I’m no man’s hired assassin.”
And with those words he knew once and for all that everything had been in vain. All the striving and suffering, the blood and
fire and pain, all the deaths that could be made worthwhile by one more, and this one so well-deserved. All of them wasted. Aldric could see the pulse of life in Crisen’s neck, the fragility of eyes and temples, the rise and fall of an unarmoured chest.
Only reach out, ilauem-arluth Talvalin. Reach out with steel or just your bare hands. Reach out, and snuff out, and you are clan-lord without doubt.
The melodious enticement of the Song of Desolation whispered in his ears, promising, cajoling, reminding him of other times and other sensations. The brief jarring resistance as steel clove flesh. The hard crisp noise as bone parted beneath a perfect stroke. The smell of blood as it spilled from someone else’s veins. Then the moment afterwards with limbs whole and unhurt, and the first breath of renewed life…
Aldric clenched his hands into fists and clenched his jaw until the muscles ached, making the creak and grind of his own teeth drown out the Song for long enough to step back from that brink. The eijo – for he was truly eijo now, landless, lordless, exiled by his own choice – bowed his head, not to Crisen standing by the door but to someone only he could see.
“Forgive me, father,” he said. “Once again I break my Word. But I can’t do this.”
Crisen made no excuses, nor attempted any of the suicidal things which might have tried to cover his indiscretion. Though the Alban’s longsword lay out on the balcony, there was still the ever-present dirk pushed through his belt. But with one hand already on the latch, he looked back in desperation with fear scored into his face.
“Please… Please don’t tell my father—”
The door opened.
“Don’t tell me what?” asked Lord Geruath. Aldric stared at him for a second then glanced at Crisen.
“Ask your son,” he said. “You should find the answer interesting.” Geruath waved away the guards who would have followed him into the room, then shut and locked the door. He kept the key in his left hand.
“Well, Crisen? Interest me.” His son wiped dry lips with the back of one hand and retreated two steps, curd-pale with terror.
“It isn’t important. Father, I promise…”
“I will judge its importance. I always do. So tell me. Tell me at once!”
Such contempt had been honed to a fine edge over many years. Geruath clearly despised his son because of what he had become, but more probably because he had never measured up to some unattainable ideal. There might have been beatings, for small offences or no reason at all, but most of the punishments would have been less painful yet more protracted. Welts on flesh were easier to salve and quicker to heal than those laid on the spirit. Despite himself Aldric felt a small touch of pity, for Crisen would have spent his childhood and youth in a constant miasma of fear, waiting for the next time he did something wrong and never knowing what it was. And now he was that frantic child again.
“I asked. I wanted. He was to. To do a task. For me. Nothing more. Nothing. I swear it!”
“What task?” Geruath moved forward, hunch-shouldered, violence brooding in him like the threat of thunder in still air. “What task, my son? Answer me. Or must I—”
“No! I-I mean I can’t. Please…”
“Tell me, Crisen. What have you done this time?”
Aldric could barely catch Lord Geruath’s words through the eerie moaning of the Song, and a heavy scent of roses swamped his senses with a reeling perfume richer than the fumes of wine, sweet and sickly as no natural flower should be. Dear Light of Heaven, can they not hear, can they not smell? His gaze flicked from son to father and back to son, knowing something frightful was about to happen. He backed away—
And that slight movement registered on Crisen’s bulging, panic-stricken eyes. He turned, arms flung wide as if in supplication, and one hand touched the tsepan-hilt at Aldric’s waist. The dirk fitted snugly in its sheath and always, always needed a slight twist to free it. Except for this time of all times as Crisen’s fingers closed around its grip and the blade came out smooth and swift…
Lord Geruath’s expression changed from rage to outrage the instant steel gleamed in his son’s hand. He spoke, but the words were lost in a choked gargling as the dirk jabbed underneath his chin to open veins and windpipe. It wrenched free, and a long spurt of vivid crimson followed in its wake.
Geruath’s head lolled forward, his mouth opened and a wide ribbon of blood flowed over its lower lip like a bright red beard. He might have meant to ask a question, but it turned into a surprised cough that misted the air with a fine spray of scarlet and freckled Aldric’s face with minute warm droplets.
Then Crisen stabbed him again. In the belly, under the ribs. Stabbed him a dozen times in half as many seconds. And ripped the blade out sideways after every one.
There was no smell of roses now.
The Overlord staggered, then collapsed, and Aldric felt the dead-weight’s sodden heat as his arms supported it a moment before it slithered to the floor in a tangle of slack limbs and open torso. The fingers of one hand clawed at the floor, nails scratching louder than anyone could have believed possible, then trembled once and didn’t move again. Aldric knew there was blood all over him: on his hands, on his face, smeared across the black of his leathers. And Crisen was watching intently with eyes that were far too bright.
Horror froze him to the spot for a second too long. Not horror at the violence, for he had seen and done much worse, but because a father had been butchered by the hand of his own son. That crime above all others was anathema to Albans. It was unthinkable, and beyond belief that he had witnessed it yet done nothing. Crisen saw the expressions chase each other across a face too stunned to hide them, and drew a long breath.
“It seems,” he said, with only the faintest quiver in his voice, “that the task I required of you is done.” The tsepan touched his left palm and sliced across it in a dramatically bloody superficial cut, then he clutched its blade in sticky fingers for all the world as if he had just snatched it away at great risk to himself. Realisation flared within Aldric’s shocked and sickened eyes. “So I no longer need you.” Crisen laughed softly, then screamed “Guards!” until the door burst in.
The soldiers outside had been expecting trouble since Lord Geruath first summoned them, and acted on what they saw without demanding explanations or excuses. The haft of a gisarm slammed into Aldric’s stomach, punching the air from his lungs and folding him over the impact. Another swept his legs from under him so he fell with a wet slap into the glistening, warm morass which had once been Geruath the Overlord.
Despite everything he didn’t resist. It would only compound his apparent guilt. Seghar’s magistrate would surely know an eijo would need only that single mortal thrust to the throat, and anyone could tell him that no Alban with a shred of decency would use his tsepan as a murder weapon. Aldric coughed, wincing at the pain it drove through his bruised stomach muscles, and raised a head spattered with blood and the foul residue of opened guts. Then a new, cold fear churned inside him as he saw the soldiers salute and bow. They were giving respect to their new Overlord.
Who was also the magistrate…
Crisen Geruath, Overlord of Seghar, Executor of High and Common Justice, reached out his injured hand with a lordly air while a retainer bandaged it. Over the servant’s shoulder he smiled down at where Aldric crouched in the mire of a dead man’s bowels. All who saw that smile would think it a display of courage in the face of pain and grief.
All but Aldric, and who would listen to anything he said?
As they marched him out, arms wrenched high between his shoulder-blades by makeshift bonds, Crisen stopped the escort and waved them to one side. Aldric stared dispassionately, guessing that this new lord shared the old one’s penchant for a parting shot. He was right. Although Crisen spoke too softly for anyone else to overhear, he leaned so intimately close that Aldric swayed back in disgust.
“When I see an opportunity,” the Jouvaine murmured, with self-satisfaction lacing every word, “I take it. With both hands.”
CHAPTER TEN
“I know the man, and what you tell me is hard to believe.”
Marek’s opinion was a dangerous one, but it needed said, aloud and before witnesses, even such unlikely ones as the armoured retainers standing to either side of the Overlord’s great carved chair. Marek noted the metal being worn where crested coats had been enough before tonight, and wondered if the men had been ordered to wear it or decided by themselves.
Crisen Geruath gazed at the demon-queller and cleared his throat, serene and confident in his own power.
“I have a title now, hlensyarl,” he said.
“My Lord,” Marek responded, after a pause long enough to make his disapproval plain.
“Hard to believe or not, Marek Endain,” Crisen continued in the same placid voice, “it’s true. Your Alban friend slew my poor father with that black knife of his.”
If the new Overlord had been more observant, he would have seen real suspicion appear on Marek’s bearded features. There had been uncomfortable close encounters with blades the eijo carried, but never that one. As the demon-queller said, he knew Aldric well enough, and though Cernuans had no love for the Horse Lords, a man so scrupulous about honour wouldn’t dishonour his tsepan. There was only one proper use for the black dirk: killing its owner either to end the agony of a mortal wound or in tsepanak’ulleth, the ritual of formal suicide. It was never, ever used for simple murder. Marek knew for certain what he had only suspected before: Crisen Geruath was lying.
“My lord,” he asked, respectfully for once, “may I see Kourgath? Before this murder he was my friend…”
Crisen nodded and waved dismissal both to Marek and two more soldiers standing with ostentatious nonchalance beside the door. The demon-queller glanced at them and kept a frown from his face with difficulty, for he would have much preferred to forego the ‘courtesy’ of an escort. It was becoming clear that in Seghar a guard could also be an executioner. As he left the audience chamber with the soldiers falling into step behind him, he heard the Overlord’s voice and wondered why it seemed so irritable.
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