by Anthony Ryan
“It does,” Wilhum agreed with a mild shrug. “But then, she expects me to run, does she not?” His gaze settled on my face, still drawn in weary resignation but with a knowing steadiness. “Did she tell you to kill me? Is that what the crossbow’s for? Perhaps we’re both being tested, Master Scribe. Or punished. Me for disloyalty, you for your sacrilegious visit to a practitioner of heathen arts.”
We were halted now, alone in the wilds, well beyond the sight of the port or any other set of human eyes. I was suddenly reminded of the skills I had seen Wilhum display in his attempts to teach me the sword. The gap between us was short, leaving little time for me to reach for, load and loose the crossbow. I could draw my own sword, but I had little doubt as to what would result if I did.
“I need to empty my boots,” I said, climbing down from the saddle. I sat on Karnic’s reins to stop him wandering off and unbuckled each boot in turn, Wilhum sitting in placid observance as I tipped the water out.
“She told me to let you go,” I said finally when his lingering stare became irksome. “My test, I suspect, is to actually return with some useful intelligence. You’re not supposed to return at all.” I glanced up at him with an empty smile. “Looks like it pays to have been raised among nobility. Even one so wedded to her faith as our captain will cast aside her principles to save a childhood friend. Her former betrothed, in fact. Was the engagement broken due to her piety? She preferred the Martyrs to you. That must have been galling.”
“You think you know her,” Wilhum said. “You think she is, what? Both a fanatic and a hypocrite?” He shook his head. “You have no notion of what made her as she is.”
“Visions given unto her by the Seraphile.” I peeled the socks from my feet and wrung them out, flicking the moisture away. “So she claims.”
“Visions, yes. And real or not, they are real to her. I know only this, Master Scribe: she is the best of us. Not just the best of nobles, all of us. You, me, every miserable denizen of our miserable kingdom. She rises above it all, for she is the only true heart I have ever met.”
“What about the Pretender? Was his heart not so true?”
Wilhum’s face darkened, the placidity for once giving way to a flicker of anger. “No king’s heart can ever be completely true,” he said, tugging his reins to resume the eastward trek. “Hurry up or I’ll leave you behind. This is not a place to journey alone.”
Wilhum’s demeanour became more alert when we reached the wooded hills, I suspected due to a warrior’s ingrained instinct for danger rather than sudden observance of duty. My own inherent nose for unseen threats reasserted itself as the forest’s shade enclosed us. The trees were mostly pine interspersed with the occasional beech or ash, tall and close packed. They created a dark, uneven wall rich in shadows, any of which might harbour a rebel with a bow or axe poised for throwing. Wilhum refused to take the easier course offered by the channels between the hills, forcing us to repeatedly dismount and lead the horses up a succession of slopes. It made for tedious progress but I felt no urge to complain; each gully and ravine was a ready-made trap.
We kept on until dusk, making camp atop the rocky crest of the steepest hill we had yet encountered. Tethering the horses at the base, we ascended to find a summit that resembled a miniature natural fortress, the rocks forming the crenellations of a battlement. I divined from the way Wilhum moved about the hilltop that he had been here before, a suspicion confirmed when he crouched to scrape a patch of moss from one of the stones, revealing a crude but readable inscription chiselled into the rock.
“‘Wilhum and Aldric’s Mount’,” I read aloud. “Aldric being…”
He traced his fingers over the letters, voice barely a whisper. “Just a friend of old.” He rose, nodding to the eastern slope. “Any visitors are likely to come from that direction. All the other approaches are barred by the river. We’ll eat, then I’ll take the first watch.”
I sat down to retrieve the salted pork from my saddlebags. I didn’t bother asking about the possibility of lighting a fire since it would betray our presence.
“In my darker and less enlightened days,” I said, “I mean to say, before being called to service as a soldier of the Covenant, our band would always know within the space of an hour when strangers had ventured into our patch. I take it the Fjord Gelders we seek are unlikely to be any less observant.”
“You do have a gift for employing ten words when one will do, Scribe.” Wilhum perched himself on a rock and drew his sword, pulling a whetstone from the pouch on his belt to hone the edge. “If you mean, ‘do they know we’re here?’ The answer is: probably but not definitely. Anticipating your next question: yes, they will certainly attempt to kill us should they find us.”
“And will you fight them if they do?”
He didn’t look up from his task, the stone drawing a long hiss from the blade as he worked it all the way to the point. “I’m keeping my steel sharp, aren’t I?” he asked, a ghost of his old winning smile on his lips.
He shook me awake a few hours past midnight, not that I required much rousing. My sleep had been shallow, but sadly, not so as to forbid dreams. The Traitors’ Field had been a regular night-time visitor since my equally troubled slumber aboard the Gracious Maid. The dream was typically an unnerving melange of frenzied violence and discordant screams, but now and then the face of the first man I had killed that day would loom out of the chaos in garish splendour. Sometimes he would just stare in vacant regard, features slack and grey save for the blood that ran in thick rivulets from the billhook embedded in his forehead. Other times he was more vocal, his lips squirming like worms as they sang songs, recited scripture or, most aggravating of all, asked questions in a convivial tone of light curiosity.
“Don’t you ever wonder,” he enquired shortly before Wilhum shook me awake for my turn on watch, “why your whore mother didn’t strangle you at birth? Or leave you out for the foxes or wolves? What possessed her to preserve one such as you?”
Consequently, I spent the hours before sunrise untroubled by the lure of sleep, for I had no desire to face more of the corpse’s questions. I kept Swain’s crossbow close at hand. The longsword I left sheathed so its steel wouldn’t catch a betraying gleam, but I drew my knife, concealing the blade beneath my cloak. Fortunately, no rebels came to trouble us that night, but the experience left me with the nagging sense of lingering peril when we broke camp and moved on at first light. It wasn’t quite the itch that told of being observed by unseen eyes, more the prickle to the skin that warned I was now traversing dangerous ground. When we set off, I kept the crossbow tied to the pommel of my saddle, a bolt tucked into each boot.
It was close to noon when the smell reached me, mostly composed of woodsmoke but laced with the sharper sting of shit. Wilhum sensed it too and immediately drew his sword, pressing his thumb to the blade as it slid free of the scabbard to muffle the betraying scrape of metal. I moved with similar caution to prime the crossbow and we turned our horses into the wind, keeping to a slow walk.
When we caught sight of some wispy smoke rising through the trees, Wilhum halted his mount and raised his arm. We dismounted, tethering the horses to branches and moving forward in a crouch. My ears strained for the sound of voices, hearing only the creak of trees and the occasional flutter of birds on the wing. I stopped when I saw the man and touched a hand to Wilhum’s arm in warning. The stranger stood part wreathed in smoke from a dwindled fire. His posture was odd, standing with both arms outstretched and head slumped forward. As we crept closer, I realised that his arms had been fixed by ropes to two saplings. Also, he was very dead.
“Well, that’s a new one,” I observed softly.
The body was stood in the centre of a small clearing. He had been stripped naked and propped amid the remains of a well-rummaged camp. The man’s back had been opened with two deep vertical cuts, the ribs, obscenely clean and white among the gore, broken and spread open. Flies buzzed around the reddish-black organs that had been drawn out a
nd laid over his shoulders. I was grateful now for the chilly climate as warmer weather would have attracted a great deal more bugs.
“The Crimson Hawk,” Wilhum said, features drawn in grim recognition. He gestured at the offal resting on the man’s shoulders. “The lungs are supposed to resemble wings, you see.”
I shifted my gaze from the gruesome sight to inspect what was left of the camp. “Pleasant customs these Fjord Gelders have.”
“This isn’t the work of the Geld folk. It’s an Ascarlian blood rite, only ever performed by a Tielwald of high rank.”
“Tielwald?”
“A mix of warrior and priest. Besides the Sister Queens, they’re the closest thing the Ascarlians have to nobility.” Wilhum’s gaze grew wary as he scanned the surrounding forest. “And they don’t travel alone. This poor fellow was caught by a warband.”
“Cart tracks here,” I said, kicking churned mud at the edge of two narrow furrows in the ground. They led off to the east, disappearing into the woods after a dozen paces. “He must’ve been a wool merchant on his way to Olversahl. Desperate too if he was willing to risk travelling unprotected in times like these.”
“If the fishing’s bad the crofters go hungry. Wool is all they have to trade.” Wilhum drew his dagger and moved to take hold of the dead man’s wrist, setting the blade to the rope that bound it. “A good man will risk all to feed his children.”
“Be better if you left him as he is,” I warned. “Cut him down and they’ll know others have passed this way.”
“I intend for them to know me full well before long.” He flicked his dagger, severing the bond before moving to the other.
“We don’t have the time to bury him,” I said, watching Wilhum set the corpse down.
“Fjord Gelder’s don’t bury their dead. They say their prayers and leave them to feed the creatures of the wild and succour the earth with the marrow of their bones. So in death we give life.” He knelt and closed his eyes, murmuring an unfamiliar cant in archaic dialect. I recognised it as aligning with the Covenant in its mention of the Martyrs and the Seraphile, but much of it was meaningless to my ear.
When done, he got to his feet, moving towards his horse with a purposeful stride.
“You know what this means,” I said, hastening to catch up. “An Ascarlian warband within the borders of the realm is no small thing. The captain should know of this.”
“Then go and tell her.” He climbed into the saddle and aligned his mount with the cart tracks. “Though I don’t think it wise for you to return without an accurate count of their number.”
He kicked his horse into a trot before I could voice another protest. I stood watching him fade into the forest’s shadow, seized by indecision. Just tell her he died, my weary inner critic drawled. The Ascarlian savages killed him and you barely got away. As for the warband, fifty sounds about right. Sixty if you want to appear brave.
“She’ll know,” I grated, hurrying to mount Karnic and setting off in pursuit. “She always knows.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Wilhum, being a considerably better horseman, soon drew so far ahead I had no hope of catching him before he found his quarry. Still I kept on, drawn by the sound of pounding hooves as he spurred to a canter whenever the trees thinned. I found it best to give Karnic his head, his hunter’s instincts finding the most efficient course through the trees as he sought out his stablemate. I knew this was folly, an unwise surrender to urges I would once have ignored. If he runs, let him go. Here he was, running, albeit set on a punitive excursion that would most likely see us both dead before long. If I were to ride off in the opposite direction, would I not be simply following orders?
I have often pondered my failure to succumb to common sense at this juncture. Typically, I ascribe it to the odd, near-inexplicable web of familiarity, habit and mutual reliance that binds one soldier to another. Or, it may have just been due to the fact that, for all his noble pretensions and enviable charm, I liked Wilhum Dornmahl and would rather he didn’t die. Sentiment is always the deadliest toxin.
Still, as one mile of pursuit became two, then three, the nagging sense of peril that had bedevilled me since entering this forest grew into a bone-deep certainty of imminent doom. Why should I not trust it? Had it not been fear that had kept me alive for so long?
Finally, as terror-born nausea summoned a lurch to my gut and a near retch to my throat, I hauled on Karnic’s reins and brought him to a halt. He huffed and stamped in protest, still intent on finding his friend, but I was having none of it.
“Shut up, you!” I snapped, provoking a loud snort as I turned his head west. Seventy, I decided. There were at least seventy, Captain. Huge, blond-haired savages, they were. Each with a freshly severed head impaled on their swords…
Luck, however, decided to take flight at that very moment, for, echoing through the trees, came the loud scream of a horse suffering great injury. It was enough for Karnic to forget all bonds of obedience and whirl about, spurring unbidden into a gallop. I could only gasp out a few profane curses and hang on as he sped onwards. I ducked some branches and suffered scratches to my crown from others, coming close to tipping from the saddle several times when Karnic rounded the more substantial trees, barely slowing in the process. The ride was so alarming I began to entertain the notion of drawing my dagger and sinking it into the beast’s neck if he didn’t consent to halt soon.
We burst free of the trees in a cloud of displaced pine needles and leaves to be instantly blinded by a pall of thick black smoke. I coughed, blinking stinging eyes as Karnic bore me through it until a shift in the wind brought a sudden glare of sunlight. Smoke-born tears cleared from my eyes to afford only a brief glance of the scene ahead. The pall came from a tall stack of blazing wood, the column of dark fog it birthed rising high into the air. It was positioned where a stretch of rocky ground met the edge of a steep cliff, beyond which lay a broad stretch of blue sea.
I glimpsed Wilhum on the far side of the fire, whirling his longsword with furious energy in the midst of what appeared to be no fewer than six armed assailants. They were all uniformly bulky in appearance, clad in a mix of furs, leather and armour. A couple wore helms of iron but the others were bareheaded, their braids whipping about as they fought.
Wilhum’s hunter was down, the stallion’s legs flailing as crimson foam frothed from its mouth and blood streamed from the large wound in his flank. I also saw two fur-clad bodies on the ground, indicating Wilhum had at least managed to claim some recompense for the unfortunate wool merchant before ensuring his own imminent demise.
More concerning, however, was the realisation that Karnic was galloping towards the clifftop without any indication of stopping. As we neared the edge, another figure sprang up from the rocks to our front, drawn bow in hand. He had been aiming at Wilhum but, hearing the thunder of Karnic’s hooves, instantly turned his arrow upon us. For all his swiftness, he wasn’t quite quick enough, Karnic riding him down without pause, the bow sending the arrow wide and its owner’s cries choking off into a short-lived scream accompanied by a welter of cracking bones.
At last recognising the danger, Karnic began to rear, skidding over the earth and colliding with a large boulder with sufficient force to dislodge me from the saddle. I landed on my side, fortunately on a patch of soft earth rather than rock. I also had no weapon to hand beyond the knife at my belt and the crossbow bolts tucked into each boot. It was not the best state with which to land in the midst of a furious skirmish. Hearing a shout close by, I resisted the impulse to scramble upright, lying still and letting out a pained groan. I continued to feign injury until my half-closed eyes glimpsed a pair of boots, then snatched the knife from my belt.
I was lucky that the fellow’s boots were fashioned from soft leather, the blade cutting through both just above the ankle with relative ease. Their owner let out a yell that was a combination of both scream and roar as I rolled clear, his sword slicing into the earth rather than my neck. My next action w
as the result of long-ingrained skill and outlaw’s intuition. Wilhum was a master of the longsword but I had been killing people with knives since childhood.
Shifting my legs under me I launched myself at the swordsman, wrapping one arm around his neck and twisting us both into a ragged pirouette. I feinted a jab at his eyes, causing him to raise his elbow, then drove the blade deep under his arm, finding a gap between his furs and leathers. I bore him down as the blade bit home, feeling the hot rush of blood on my knife hand. A hardy fellow, he continued to roar and struggle despite what was surely a mortal wound, attempting to shift his sword to his other arm. I raised myself up and brought my forehead snapping down into his nose. It stunned him for only a brief second, but it was enough for me to pull the knife free and stab him in the throat.
I reached across his twitching form for the sword he still clutched in his part-slackened hand, but quickly abandoned the attempt at the sound of more feet to my rear. Another swordsman had forsaken the fight with Wilhum for easier meat, this one with a stout iron helm on his head and bearing an oaken shield. Beyond him, Wilhum still battled his attackers, now reduced to three in number meaning another life claimed to balance the wool merchant’s murder. However, I could tell he was tiring.
A shout from the shield-bearing swordsman snapped my gaze back to more immediate concerns. His face was set in a mask of furious challenge and, before I turned and ran in the opposite direction, I made out the angular web of blue ink tattooed into the flesh beneath his beard. It is my honest duty, dear reader, to inform you that, if Karnic had not blundered into my path at that moment, I would most likely have fled into the woods. But blunder he did, and in doing so swung Sergeant Swain’s crossbow, still tied to the pommel of his saddle, comfortably within reach of my arm.
I tore it free and ducked, rolling under Karnic and sprinting forwards, hearing the mingled shouts of horse and shield-bearer to my rear as the fellow attempted to clear the horse’s path. I ran for the tallest boulder I could see, leaping atop it and jamming my foot into the crossbow’s stirrup. I forced myself not to look up as I drew the cord back into the lock, snatched a bolt from my boot, laid it into the groove along the stock, raised and loosed it without pause.
