Ahh. Thorn gave a suggestion of great pleasure. You have learned much, then.
I am still struggling with the concept Harmodius admitted.
The Wild is far more powerful. Men are doomed. They have no role to play in the future. Too fragmented. Too weak.
That’s not how I see it Harmodius shot back. From where I sit, it is the Wild who is losing.
You delude yourself.
Not as effectively as you deluded me.
Let me make it up to you with knowledge. Look. This is how you can possess anybody you choose. And here – this is how to build your own body. See? I give you this knowledge freely. Come. Be a god. You are worthy. And I’m bored—
Harmodius laughed aloud. Bored of monsters and pining for decent company? You betrayed your king and all of humanity, you piece of shit. As swiftly as he could, with all the borrowed power of the well, he slammed the link closed.
He sat back against the bole of the tree and examined the conversation.
‘I think that went well,’ he said aloud.
But Thorn had planted something in him, a seed in damp soil. It was like finding a beautifully wrapped package on your doorstep.
He put the packages in a room in his memory palace, and he carefully walled that room off from his consciousness. He twinned off a second self to remain in the room.
The second self opened the first package. A third self stood ready with an axe.
The phantasm was heartbreakingly beautiful. Thorn had been a great magus, of course.
Harmodius allowed his second self to subsume himself in the complexities of the working.
He shut down the room, withdrew his second self, and sat in another created room in his memory palace, a comfortable room with a circle of armchairs. His second self sat in another, wrote the phantasms out in longhand, and they discussed them in detail. His third self stood behind the second with an axe.
Suddenly he understood how the cats had been used.
He understood how his former master was using animals to watch the fortress.
He understood how he could possess the body of any creature he wanted, unless they had the power to resist him. How he could subsume their essence – in effect, eat that part of a mortal that Harmodius thought of as the soul.
For power.
And take the mortal body for his own, or make one.
Harmodius let the knowledge roll around inside his head for a little. And found himself watching a mongrel dog – one of the mercenaries had brought the animal into Lissen Carak – rooting in the midden heap that was beginning to fill the courtyard. Eventually, the dog would be eaten, if the siege went on.
I could just try it on the dog.
The dog is going to die, anyway.
The dog turned and looked at Harmodius. She tilted her head to one side, watching to see if the man had anything interesting to offer.
Power poured out around him. No wonder the creatures of the Wild want this place back, Harmodius thought. He reached out to the power, took a taste, and ran it through the phantasm—
And made a motion of negation with his hands, cancelling the working and draining the power into the walls of the fortress.
He got to his feet and grinned at the dog. ‘You’ve got to draw the line somewhere,’ he said aloud.
He did that on purpose, the subtle bastard. He’s inviting me to fall.
Harmodius could smell breakfast, and he decided he needed to be with people.
East of Albinkirk– Ranald
Ranald was tired, and he wept a great deal. He wasted an afternoon trying to catch a horse. At every step, he expected to find the drag, the rear guard, or another survivor. But he saw no one.
He wasted more time at the edge of the battlefield, trying to find his pack.
Eventually he gave up and walked, wet when it rained, scorched when the sun shone. He had nothing to cook with, nothing to eat, and no means of acquiring food
On the evening of the fourth day after the fight, he walked up the lane to the great Inn. Men shouted when they saw him.
Every man and woman in the dale came running, when they knew whom he was. And because he was his cousin’s tanist, they thought, at first, that his appearance must bode well.
But when they came closer, they saw the tracks of his tears, and the sword. And they knew.
By the time he walked the last few paces to the porch of the great Inn, the Keeper alone barred his way, and he was grim-faced. ‘Greetings, Ranald Lachlan,’ he said. ‘Tell me how many were lost?’
Ranald had no trouble meeting the Keeper’s eye. Death made you less careful of such things.
‘They’re all dead,’ he said. ‘Every man of us. I, too, was dead.’
They gasped, the folk of the Dale, and then the tears began, and the wail of loss, the roar of rage.
Ranald Lachlan told his story quickly, and without embellishment. And then he turned to the weeping woman who stood by her father. ‘Here’s his sword,’ Ranald said. ‘If you bear him a son, he says the boy is to avenge him.’
‘That’s a heavy load to lay on an unborn bairn’s shoulders,’ the Keeper said.
Ranald shrugged. ‘It’s not my choice,’ he said wearily.
Later, he sat in the Keeper’s own rooms, and told the story of the last fight. Hector’s wife listened through her tears. And when he was done, she looked at him long, and mean.
‘Why’d they send you back, then?’ she spat. ‘When they might have sent my love?’
Ranald shrugged.
The Keeper shook his head. ‘Too many men lost, along with the whole herd.’ He put his chin in his hand. ‘I’ll be hard pressed if they turn on the Dale.’
Ranald didn’t even pretend to be interested. And the Keeper let him go.
He was not interested when the men in the Inn offered him ale.
He wasn’t interested when the woman of the Inn offered themselves, nor when a travelling player offered to make a song of the battle.
He slept, and the next day he was just as numb as he had been the day before, and the day before that. But he went down from his room to the common room at dawn, and there he faced the Keeper and asked for a horse and gear.
‘You can’t mean to go fight the Outwallers all by yourself,’ the Keeper said, gruffly.
‘No,’ Ranald said.
‘You mean to just ride home?’ the Keeper asked, incredulous.
‘I’m a drover,’ Ranald said. ‘I have no home.’
The Keeper drank some small beer and wiped his moustache. ‘Where, then?’ he asked.
Ranald sat back. ‘I’m going to find the Wyrm of Erch,’ he said. ‘I mean to ask why he allowed us to be attacked by the Wild.’ The drover shrugged. ‘We pay a tithe to the Wyrm in exchange for protection from the Wild. It’s the Law of Erch. Eh? Ancient as the oaks and all.’
The Keeper put his beer down slowly. ‘You mean to speak to the Wyrm?’
‘Someone has to,’ Ranald said. ‘I might as well; I’m already dead.’
The Keeper shook his head. ‘I have just a dozen horses left. Your cousin took my herd.’
Ranald nodded. ‘I mean to remedy that first, before I go to the Wyrm. Give me twenty men and I’ll bring in the herd. There’s a lot of it left. A thousand head at least.’
‘You are like your cousin,’ the Keeper said. ‘Always a sting in the tail.’
Ranald shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t bother, but Sarah’s boy will need those beasts, if he means to be a drover.’ He didn’t say the other thing that was on his mind. That he was a King’s Man, and he owed the king a warning of the Wild.
That afternoon, with twenty wary men, he rode south.
They rode quickly, spread in pairs over a mile of ground, scouting every hummock and every stand of trees.
They made a cold camp and Ranald ate the oatcakes that Sarah had given him, and when the sun was a red disc on the edge of the world they rode on.
By noon they found the first beasts. The Dalemen were spooked,
terrified of the Sossag, and afraid, too, to find corpses grinning at death in the woods, but they were still, by Ranald’s reckoning, miles north of the battleground. The herd had turned and headed home, as animals will do.
Ranald swept south along the road, and before darkness he found the boy that Hector had sent back as a messenger. He was dead, and he’d either been lost or he’d ridden a long way west to get around something. He lay on his face, a cloud of flies around his bloated corpse, and his horse was still standing nearby. The boy had four arrows in him, and it was clear he’d died trying to fulfil his mission. The Dalemen buried him with love and honour and his cousins, two tall, grey-eyed boys, wept for him.
But the next day held the greatest shock.
They were well west of the fight, collecting animals hard against the great Swamp, and Ranald scented a fire and went to scout it himself. It was a foolish risk to take, but he couldn’t bear to be the cause of any more Dalemen’s deaths.
What he found was the drag – twenty of Hector’s men, alive, with a third of the herd. Donald Redmane had led them west, and they had fought three times against scattered Outwaller bands, but they had lived and kept a great deal of the herd together.
Ranald had to tell the story all over again, and Donald Redmane wept. But the rest of the men in the drag swore a great oath to avenge Hector Lachlan.
Donald took Ranald aside. ‘You fought in the south,’ he said. ‘You think Tom is still alive?’
‘Hector’s brother Tom?’ Ranald said. ‘Aye. Unless the red hand of war has taken him, he’ll be alive. On the Continent or in the East, I reckon. Why?’
Donald Redmane’s eyes were red. ‘Because he’s the Drover, now,’ the older man said.
‘He won’t want it,’ Ranald said.
‘He will if it means he can make war,’ Donald pointed out.
The next morning, scouts killed a strange creature – shaped like a man, short like a tall child, with heavily muscled arms and legs like thick ropes and a misshapen head like a man’s but heavier. Ranald had to assume the beast was an irk, a creature somewhere between myth and reality to the men of the hills. Legend said irks, like boglins, came from the deep woods far to the west.
Ranald made camp with the whole band – forty-four men. They had more than twelve hundred head of cattle, and all of the goats. Seventy-five head of horses. Sarah Lachlan would not be a pauper, and the clan was not dead.
Hector Lachlan was gone.
But Lachlan was for Aa.
The Albin River, South of Albinkirk – The Queen
The Queen watched the banks go by and she smiled at a young guildsman with a crossbow who crouched behind the boat’s high sides, watching the banks. In truth, he wasn’t really watching them. He was of an age where he was conscious of nothing but Desiderata a few feet away. His eyes flicked to her over and over.
She watched the banks and smiled inwardly. The rowers chanted, on and on, and the mosquitoes descended on them in swarms unless a breeze rose upriver.
Lady Almspend lay next to her in the bow, a wax tablet open across her lap and a stylus ready to hand. ‘Another letter?’ she asked somewhat languorously.
The Queen shook her head. ‘It’s too hot.’
‘Pity the poor rowers,’ Lady Almspend answered. She turned her head. Most of them rowed naked to the waist – a few more naked even then that. Their work left them, to a man, with magnificent physiques, and Lady Almspend considered them carefully. ‘They are like the Archaics,’ she said. ‘I withdraw my former statement. I don’t think they are to be pitied, but rather admired.’ She smiled at one in particular, and he smiled back even as he brought his sixteen-foot oar through the end of its sweep and brought it back to the top of its arc.
The Queen smiled. ‘Do have a care, my dear,’ she said.
‘I will only admire from afar,’ Lady Almspend said. ‘Do you think the sentries really saw a boglin in the night?’
The Queen nodded. ‘Indeed, I’m quite sure of it.’ She was not going to enlighten her secretary any further, but the banks were already dangerous, and the boats were now using islands in the river for camps.
‘Could we not arm the rowers?’ Lady Almspend asked.
‘They have weapons; javelins and swords,’ the Queen answered. ‘But against a sudden onslaught in the dark, we’re safest behind a wall of water.’
Lady Almspend shook her head. ‘I cannot imagine what has happened, for the North to be so utterly over run. The king must have his work cut out for him. When will we be at Albinkirk?’
‘Tomorrow mid-day, at this pace,’ said Almspend. ‘If the Queen could wear even less, the rowers might row even harder.’
Desiderata grinned at her friend. ‘I aim to row through the night,’ she said. ‘The river remains broad, and we are late.’
Lady Mary looked at her oddly. ‘Have you had a message?’ she asked.
The Queen shook her head. ‘I have a feeling,’ she admitted,’ nothing more. If the king has made any pace at all, he’ll already be gone west, towards Lissen Carak.’ The Queen lay back, feeling the summer sun on her shoulders. The bugs never troubled her. ‘Send a message to the king, Becca. Tell him how close we are,’ She batted her eyelashes at the rowers closest to her. ‘Tell him we can be with him in three days.’
Royer Le Hardi volunteered, and they put him ashore with his horse and a spare. He received a kiss from the Queen, and he was still red as a beet when he rode west.
Albinkirk – Gaston
Gaston watched the Royal Army break camp and turn west with something very like trepidation. None of the military orders knights had returned, despite Lissen Carak being only two days’ march west of Albinkirk. Each night, light rippled in the western sky.
Whatever they were fighting was utterly alien. The boglins had startled him at Albinkirk – even a few of them, they were so ugly and so very wrong. He wanted to call them unnatural, except that they were spawned by the Wild.
His cousin was ecstatic – the flashes of light in the west guaranteed that the castle there still held, and that meant that battle was at last imminent. For Jean de Vrailly, that battle had become the guiding force – the lodestone on which his life turned.
Gaston inspected his company and reminded them, for the tenth day in a row, of the lessons they’d learned from the Count of the Borders. To always have scouts – front, flanks, and rear. To ride with the knights inside a strong box of spearmen and bowmen, so that, in case of an ambush, the knights could react instantly, from safety. To put the wagons at the very centre of that box.
All good sense. But it required a reliance on the low-born men by the knights.
His scouts rode off into the pre-dawn and he mounted his charger. His squire handed him his weapons and then he sat quietly watching the column form, and waiting for the sound – the shouts, the trumpets – that would signal a fight.
Once again, he felt homesick. He wanted no part of this strange warfare against fabulous beasts and monsters. At home, he fought men. He understood men.
When his company was formed with his cousin’s he rode west along the column to the king, who sat mounted amidst a circle of his lords. He had a scroll in his hand, as he did most mornings – the Kings of Alba had a fine express service, and its riders continued to reach him despite the increasingly dangerous roads.
‘She’s ignored me,’ The king said happily. He looked up, and greeted the captal with a nod. ‘My wife has ignored my advice and is on her way here,’ he said.
The captal, as usual, mistook his meaning. ‘Then I suppose your Majesty must punish her,’ he said.
The king chose not to take exception, and instead, smiled. ‘I think we would be most ungrateful,’ he said, ‘to be rude to a lady who brings us a great supply of food.’
The Count of the Borders smiled. ‘When do you expect her?’
The king looked out over the woods that stretched like a sea of green to the west. ‘She’s three days’ march to the south of Albinkirk,’ h
e said. He shrugged. ‘But she’s commandeered a flotilla of boats – she’s moving much faster than we are.’
‘But she has to follow the snake of the river,’ said the Count of the Borders.
Sir Ricar Fitzroy fingered his beard. ‘You Grace, she’s got a head on her shoulders. She’ll still be faster, and she’ll carry a great deal more food and fodder than a wagon convoy.’
The constable sat back on his charger and put a fist in the small of his back. ‘Am I the only man who thinks he’s too old for all this?’ he said. ‘Your Grace, I propose that we fall back along the line of the river until we link with the Queen. We only have five days’ rations – we’re short on meat already, and the woods are scoured of animals. The Royal Huntsmen – begging your Grace’s pardon – aren’t bringing in enough game to feed the Royal Household.’
The Count of the Borders agreed. ‘No need to rush to a fight,’ he said. ‘Not with the Wild.’
The Earl of Towbray shook his head. ‘The fortress could fall,’ he said.
‘Lissen Carak will stand or fall,’ the constable said. He looked around, and lowered his voice. ‘My lords, we carry the weight of the kingdom on our shoulders. If we lose this army there is no new army to replace it.’
‘Albinkirk is all but in cinders,’ the king answered. ‘I will not lose the Fortress of the North, as well.’
‘We need food,’ the constable argued. ‘We planned to resupply from the magazine at Albinkirk. Or to find the drove coming south from the Hills and buy their beef.’
‘Can we last five days?’ the king said. ‘And how long can the fortress last?’
Jean de Vrailly rose in his stirrups. ‘Bah,’ he said. ‘The men can last without food. Let us find the enemy,’ he said.
The Albins looked at him wearily.
‘Let us finally face these creatures!’ the captal insisted.
The Lord of Bain didn’t comment. He merely raised an eyebrow.
The king’s friend, Ser Driant, scowled. ‘I’m not the hardiest warrior, and I’m well known to these gentlemen as a lover of my dram.’ He leaned forward towards the captal. ‘But we are not going to risk the king’s host on a battle where we have unfed horses.’
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