Here the road was a steep street lined with magnificent white-walled houses, each as tall and turreted as small castles. They were adorned in gilt and black iron with red or blue doors, tile or copper roofs, marble statuary painted and unpainted, and windows, clear or stained, high or wide. Each house was a palace and had its own character.
I used to dine here. And here. How long have I been under?
The pressure in his chest eased as Harmodius rode down the hill, looking at the palaces of courtiers and great knights and wondering how it was that he had never visited any of them.
He rode through the Inner Gate without glancing at the guards. It was chilly in the wind, and he struggled with his cloak as he rode through Middle Town, and peered out into the High Cheaping, the city’s principal market. The Cheaping was a market square two or three times the size of the courtyard of the castle, and packed with stalls and the bustle of commerce. He watched it as he passed, and then he was into the lower town, the Cheaping in local dialect, crossing Flood Street at the Bridge Gate, and his heart began to beat faster. He saw no threat – but he expected one.
The men at the Bridge Gate had all of their attention on a magnificent retinue of knights and armoured men-at-arms entering the city. Harmodius looked at it from under his hood, trying to make out the blazon and guess whom the lord might be – not anyone he had ever seen at court. A tall man, heavy with muscle.
The guards clearly wanted no part of making the decision to let the giant and his men into the town. Nor did they have any attention to spare for solitary old men riding out.
The knight commanding the retinue did, though, and turned to watch him as he rode by. His glance sharpened – and then the Lieutenant of the Lower Gate appeared, armoured head to toe and holding not a wax tablet and stylus but a pole-axe, with four more knights at his back. The foreigner stiffened, and Harmodius rode past him while he was distracted.
Through the gate, down the slope past the lesser merchants who were only allowed to display their wares outside the walls – in the Ditch, as men liked to call it. He rode past the mountebanks, the players, and the workmen building bleachers and barriers for the Whitsunday Play.
He pursed his lips and touched his heels to the horse’s flanks, and the mare, delighted to be out in the spring and bored by the pace, sprang forward.
Harmodius cantered along beside the market and continued past the outer ring of homes, the poorest still associated with the city, and past the first fields, each surrounded by a ring of rocks and old, painstakingly cleared tree stumps. The soil here was not the best. He cantered along the road for a further half a mile, pleased with his horse but still in the grip of fear, and came to the bridge.
Still no one challenged him.
He crossed the first great span, stopped, spat into the river, and worked two powerful spells while he was safe in the bright sunshine at the centre of the bridge. Hermeticism functioned best in sunlight; while most workings of the Wild couldn’t cross running water without enormous effort or the water’s Hermetic permission. There was no power on earth that could take him in bright sunlight, in the middle span of flowing fresh water.
And if there was such a power, he had no chance against it anyway.
Then he went the rest of the way across and took the road north.
The Behnburg Road, East of Albinkirk – Robert Guissarme
Robert Guissarme was tall and cadaverously thin despite his intake of mutton and ale. Men said that his appetite for food was only exceeded by his appetite for gold. He called his company of men a Company of Adventure, like the best Eastern mercenaries, and he dressed well in leather and good wool, or in bright armour made by the best Eastern smiths.
No one knew much of his birth. He claimed to be the bastard son of a great nobleman, whom he was careful never to name – but he was known from time to time to lay a finger to his nose when a great man passed him on the road.
His sergeants feared him. He was quick to anger, quick to punish, and as he was the best man-at-arms of his company none of them wanted to cross him. Especially not right now; he was sitting fully armed on his charger, in deep fog, looking at a pair of peddlers who had passed them the night before, and who now stood in the middle of the road. They had been carefully butchered, flayed, and then set on posts in the road so that their heads seemed locked in endless screams of abject agony.
Since yesterday, he had pushed his convoy north-west along the bad road that connected Albinkirk to the east – to the Hills, and then over the mountains to Morea, and the land of the Emperor. He’d started his convoy in Theva, the city of slavers, and had pushed his men so hard that their horses began to fail. As for the long chain of slaves that was their principal cargo – he no longer cared much whether they lived or died. They had been entrusted to him in Theva; a long line of broken men and women – some pretty, some ugly, and all with the blank despair of the utterly beaten human being. He’d been told that they were a valuable consignment, being skilled slaves – cooks, menservants, housemaids, nurses, and whores.
His company had treated them well enough on the long trip west. Well enough, despite the frowns of the Emperor’s Knight – a pompous bastard too proud to share his meals with a mere mercenary. After Albinkirk the man would no longer be his problem.
But when they passed Behnburg, the last town before Albinkirk, and found the town’s garrison and population huddled within their walls in fear of un-named terrors, he’d started to hurry west, leaving the rest of the spring flood of merchants to hurry along in his wake. A dozen with wagons and good horses had paid him in gold to stay with his convoy.
He’d only taken the job transporting slaves to pay his passage – rumour had it that the fortress convent at Lissen Carak was offering payment in gold for monster-hunting work, and Guissarme needed the work. Or his company did.
Or perhaps they could manage a little longer. He sat his charger, at eye level with the corpses who had been killed, he now saw, by the act of their impaling.
He’d heard of impalement. Never seen it before. He couldn’t tear his eyes away.
He was still gazing at them, rapt, when the arrows began to fall.
The first hit his horse. The second struck his breastplate with enough force to unseat him and sprang away and then he was falling. Men were screaming around him, and he could hear his corporals shouting for order. Something struck him in the groin and he felt a hot, rapidly spreading damp. Heard the sound of hooves – heavy horses moving fast, although with an odd rhythm. He couldn’t see well.
He tried to raise his head, and something crouched over him, coming for his face—
The Behnburg Road, East of Albinkirk – Peter
Peter watched the arrows fly from the woods that lined the road with a sort of hopeless, helpless anger.
It was so obvious an ambush. He couldn’t believe anyone had walked into it.
Chained by the yoke around his neck to the women front and back, he couldn’t run.
He didn’t have the words, but he tried all the same.
‘Fall down!’ he shouted. ‘Down!’
But the panic was already coming. The terror – he’d never felt such terror. It came directly behind the arrows, and washed over him like dirty water leaving fear behind. The two women to whom he was bound ran in different directions, stumbled, and fell together, taking him to the ground with them.
The arrows continued to fall on the soldiers, who mostly died. Only a small knot of them were still fighting.
Something – he couldn’t see very well in the late morning ground fog – something came out of the fog moving as fast as a knight on a horse and slammed into the column. Men and horses screamed anew, and the terror increased to the point where his two companions simply curled into balls.
Peter lay still and tried to make his head work. Watched the creatures coming at the column. They were daemons. He had heard of them in his home, and here they were, and they were feeding on the corpses. Or perhaps the living.
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A wyvern fell from the sky on the blonde woman ahead of him, its beaked head ripping at her guts. The woman behind him shrieked and got to her knees, arms extended, and a gout of pure green passed inches over Peter’s head and slammed into the thing, which gave off an overpowering smell of burning soap.
It pivoted on its hips like a dancer, the action ripping the screaming woman under its forefoot in two and snapping the chain that connected the slaves. The end of the chain whipped around the creature’s leg.
The wyvern unwound the chain fastidiously, using a talon, and the woman at Peter’s back cast again, two handfuls of raw spirit shot out with an hysterical scream. The wyvern screamed back as it was hit, hundreds of times as loud, snapped its wings open and flung itself on the woman.
Peter rolled beneath it, the newly snapped end of the chain running through his yoke, which caught on a tree root and wrenched his neck. Free, he was on his feet and running into the fog.
A flash, and he was thrown flat. Silence – he got to his feet and ran on, and only after a hundred panicked steps did he realise he was deaf and the shirt on his back was charred.
He ran on.
His mouth was so dry he could not swallow, and his thighs and calves burned as if they, too, had been burnt. But he ran until he crossed a deep stream, and there he drank his fill and lay gasping until he passed out.
Albinkirk – Ser Alcaeus
Ser Alcaeus rode up to Albinkirk on a blown horse, with his destrier trotting along behind him. He’d lost his squire and his page in the fighting but his valet, a boy too young to swing a sword to any effect, had somehow survived with the pack horse.
Alcaeus pounded on the town’s west gate with his sword hilt. A pair of scared looking guards opened the main gate the width of one horse to let him in.
‘There is an army of the Wild out there,’ Alcaeus gasped. ‘Take me to your captain.’
The captain of the town was an old man – at least as fighters went – grey bearded and tending to fat. But he was booted and spurred, wearing a hauberk of good iron rings and a belt that showed his paunch to unfortunate effect.
‘Ser John Crayford,’ he said, holding out a hand.
Ser Alcaeus thought it unlikely that the man had ever been knighted. And he wondered how such an ill-favoured lout had come to command such an important post.
‘I was with a convoy of fifty wagons on the Behnburg Road,’ Alcaeus said. He sat suddenly. He hadn’t intended to sit, but his legs went out from under him.
‘The Wild,’ he said. He tried to sound sane and rational and like a man whose word could be trusted. ‘Daemons attacked us. With irks. A hundred, at least.’ He found that he was having trouble breathing.
It was difficult even telling it.
‘Oh, my God,’ he said.
Ser John put a hand on his shoulder. The man seemed bigger somehow. ‘How far, messire?’ he said.
‘Five leagues.’ Alcaeus took a deep breath. ‘Maybe less. East of here.’
‘By the Virgin!’ the Captain of Albinkirk swore. ‘East, you say?’
‘You believe me?’ Alcaeus said.
‘Oh, yes,’ said the captain. ‘But east? They went around the town?’ He shook his head.
Alcaeus heard boots on the steps outside. He raised his head and saw the same man who’d let him into the city, with a pair of lower-class men.
‘They say there’s boglins in the fields, Ser John.’ The sergeant shrugged. ‘That’s what they say.’
‘My daughter!’ the younger man shouted. It was more like a shriek than a shout. ‘You have to save her.’
Ser John shook his head. ‘I’m not taking a man out that gate. Steady, man.’ He poured the man a cup of wine.
‘My daughter!’ the man said in anguish.
Ser John shook his head. ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ he said, not unkindly. He turned to the sergeants. ‘Sound the alarm. Bar the gates. And get me the mayor and tell him I’m imposing martial law. No one is to leave this town.’
East of Albinkirk – Peter
Peter woke at a jerk of his heavy yoke. It was a hand-carved wooden collar with a pair of chains that ran down to his hands, allowing some movement, and a heavy staple for attaching him to other slaves, and he’d slept in it.
Two Moreans, easterners with scrips and heavy backpacks, wearing hoods and the air of men recently released from fear, stood over him.
‘One survived then,’ the taller one said, and spat.
The shorter one shook his head. ‘Hardly a fair return on the loss of our cart,’ he said. ‘But a slave’s a slave. Get up, boy.’
Peter lay in abject misery for a moment. So, naturally, they kicked him.
Then they made him carry their packs, and the three of them started west along a trail through the woods.
His despair didn’t lasted long. He had been unlucky – or perhaps he had been lucky. They fed him; he cooked their meagre food and they let him have some bread and a little of the pea soup he’d made them. Neither of them were big men, or strong, and he thought he could probably kill them both, if only the yoke came off his shoulders.
But he couldn’t get it off. It had been his constant companion for a month of walking over snow and ice, sleeping with the cold and hellish thing while the soldiers raped the women to either side of him and waiting to see if they would take a turn on him.
He bruised his wrists again and again trying get free of the thing. He daydreamed of using it as a weapon to crush these puny men.
‘You’re a good cook, boy,’ the taller man said, wiping his mouth.
The thin man frowned. ‘I want to know what happened back there,’ he said, after drinking watered wine from his canteen.
The thicker man shrugged. ‘Bandits? Cruel bastards, no doubt. I never saw a thing – I just heard the fighting and – well, you ran, too.’
The thinner man shook his head. ‘The screams,’ he said, and his voice shook.
They sat and glowered at each other, and Peter looked at them and wondered how they managed to survive at all.
‘We should go back for our cart,’ said the thinner man.
‘You must’ve had a bump on the head,’ the fatter one said. ‘Want to be a slave? Like him?’ he gestured at Peter.
Peter hunched by the fire and wondered if lighting it had been a good idea, and wondered how these two could be so foolish. At home, they had had daemons. These idiots must know of them too.
But the night passed – a night in which he never slept, and the two fools slumbered after tying his yoke to a tree. They snored, and Peter lay awake, waiting for a hideous death that never came.
In the morning, the easterners rose, pissed, drank the tea he’d made, ate his bannock and started west.
‘Where’d you learn to cook, boy?’ the thicker man asked him.
He shrugged.
‘Now that’s a saleable skill,’ the man said.
The Toll Gate – Hector Lachlan
Drovers hated tolls. There was no way to love them. When you have to drive a huge herd of beasts – mostly cattle, but small farmers put in parcels of sheep, and even goats as well – representing other men’s fortunes, across mountain, fen, fell, swamp and plain, through war and pestilence, tolls are the very incarnation of evil.
Hector Lachlan had a simple rule.
He didn’t pay tolls.
His herd numbered in the hundreds, and he had as many men as a southern lord had in an army; men who wore burnies of shining rings and carried heavy swords and great axes slung from their shoulders. They looked more like the cream of a mercenary army than what they were. Drovers.
‘I didn’t mean to cross you, Lachlan!’ the local lordling pleaded. He had that tone, the one Hector hated the most – wheedling bluster, he called it, when a man who had pretended he was cock of the north started begging for his life.
Hector hadn’t even drawn the great sword that sat across his hip and rump. He merely leaned his forearm on the hilt. He stroked his moustache
idly and ran a hand through his hair, looked back down the long, muddy train of cattle and sheep that extended behind him, as far as the eye might see on the mountain track.
‘Just pay me the toll. I’ll – see to it you ha’ the coins back soon enough.’ The other man was tall, well-built, and wearing a chain hauberk worth a fortune, every link riveted closed, strong as stone.
He was afraid of Hector Lachlan.
But not afraid enough to let the long convoy of beasts past. He had to be seen to try and collect the toll. It was the way, in the hills, and his own fear would make him angry.
Sure enough, even as Hector had the thought, he saw the man’s face change.
‘Be damned to you, then. Pay the damned toll or—’
Hector drew his sword. He wasn’t hurried by his adversary’s anger, fear, or the fifty armed men at his back. He drew the long sword at his own pace, and allowed the heavy pommel to rotate the sword in his hand, so that the point aimed unwaveringly at the other man’s face.
And punched the needle sharp point through the other man’s forehead with all the effort of a shoemaker punching a hole in leather. The armoured man crumpled, his eyes rolling up. Already dead.
Hector sighed.
The dead man’s retinue stood rooted to the ground in shock – a shock that would last a few more heartbeats.
‘Stop!’ Hector said. It was a delicate art – to command without threatening them and provoking the very reaction he sought to avoid.
The body crashed to the ground, the dead man’s heels thrashing momentarily.
‘None of ye need to die,’ he said. There was a thread of the dead man’s blood on the tip of his sword. ‘He was a fool to demand a toll of me, and every man here knows it. Let his tanist take command, and let us hear no more about it.’ Lachlan got the words out, and for a moment the men he was facing teetered on the knife-edge of doubt and greed and fear and loyalty – not to the dead man but to the code that required them to avenge him.
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