“Lo ’n behold, th’ gallant nob’ty deigns take int’rest in th’ ’fairs o’ th’ comm’n folk.” The words came as little more than a guttural snarl from a bearded, bearlike peasant bearing a battered buckler and a bent sword in his huge, ham-like hands. “Where were ya’ lot when our homes were burnin’ ’n our fam’lies bein’ run threw! All high ’n lordy, gettin’ fat off n our sweat! But when we needs ya, where’s our mighty nob’ty then!”
“Have a care, ’bert,” one of the other peasants warned. “Mind y’r place ’r they’ll string y’r neck!”
One of the bowmen sneered at the frightened speech. “I don’t see no rope. All I see is two nob pigeons waitin’ to be plucked.” He drew back on the arrow nocked to his bow. “A groat says I put this one right in the old one’s eye!”
“And a groat will get you very far, Pierre, when you’re hiding in the woods with all the other animals.” The admonition came from an older peasant, his lean face still bearing dark soot-stains. By the quality of his clothes, he was probably a village hetman, burned out of his farm by the marauding undead.
“Stay out of this, Otker!” the bowman snarled.
Vigor straightened up as best he could and glared down at the murderous Pierre. “Sure, don’t listen to the one fellow talking sense!” He snorted derisively. “You won’t have to wait for the vampire to kill you. Murder these nobs and they’ll send a hundred knights looking for you. Believe me they will. The nobs have a way of finding out about things and they avenge their own.” He stared pointedly at Sir Leuthere, then shifted his gaze to Count Ergon. “They go crazy when they have kinfolk to avenge and even common sense won’t get in their way. Loose that arrow and you better hightail it for the Forest of Châlons. You might be able to hide out there for a year or so as an outlaw.” Vigor shrugged, a gesture made somehow unsettling because of his deformity. “That is, if you don’t starve first or get eaten by beastmen.”
Fear crawled into Pierre’s eyes. Slowly the man lowered his bow, his shoulders slumping in defeat. Leuthere saw the doubt on the faces of the other peasants. These men weren’t really murderers, they were just angry and frightened, looking for someone to blame their misfortune on. Someone to lash out at.
“I sympathize with your plight,” the knight addressed the mob. “But trying to kill us isn’t going to bring back your dead or rebuild your farms. It most certainly won’t stop the Red Duke.”
Leuthere watched the reaction as he invoked the fearsome name of the legendary fiend. Gasps rose from the peasants, several men dropping to their knees and making the sign of Shallya, calling on the goddess of mercy for protection against this nightmarish monster.
“The Red Duke,” Otker repeated with a shudder, leaning heavily on the scythe he carried. “It was the Red Duke who destroyed our homes, killed our folk?” He shook his head and grimaced. “After all these years, the Red Duke has returned.”
“His stay will be a short one,” Count Ergon vowed, his voice a venomous growl.
The bear-like Robert scoffed at the nobleman’s boast. “It’d take ’n army to reach th’ monster, ’n th’ Green Knight hi’self to lay him ’n his grave! What’re two lone knights suppos’d to do agin’st such a fiend!” An angry murmur swept among the peasants as Robert voiced his scornful doubt.
Leuthere raised his hand, motioning the mob to silence. Long years of deference and servitude made the peasants respond almost instinctively. “You are right to be doubtful, but if there is a way to stop this monster before he can hurt anyone else, then it is our obligation to try.”
“They’re mad,” Pierre exclaimed. “The both of ’em! No need to stick ’em with arrows, they’re gonna do the job for themselves!”
“Damn your churlishness!” Count Ergon growled. “The vampire killed my son, my wife and my servants! Anything worth calling himself a man would hunt down this scum if he were the Blood God himself!”
“We intend to seek guidance from the prophetess,” Leuthere said. “Perhaps her magic can show us a way to destroy the Red Duke.”
An uneasy silence fell upon the peasants. They glanced anxiously at one another, each hoping for one of his fellows to speak first. It was Otker the hetman who finally broke the silence.
“You intend to go to the tower?” he asked.
“That is our plan,” Count Ergon said, irritation in his tone. The nobleman was growing irritated at wasting time with these men.
Otker nodded. “Then you’d better leave your horses here,” he said. He smiled as he saw the suspicion that flashed across the faces of the two knights. “We’ll take care of them for you,” he promised. “Every man here knows the only thing more stupid than killing a knight is stealing his horse.”
Slowly, with some reluctance, Leuthere and Count Ergon dismounted.
“What about the girl, my lord?” Vigor asked. Aimee continued to cling to the man’s waist, making the prospect of dismounting even more awkward for the crippled peasant.
“Is there someone who could look after the girl?” Leuthere asked Otker. “She doesn’t have any kinfolk, her village was wiped out by the Red Duke.”
“I’ll see she gets the best of care,” Otker promised. One of the bowmen slung his weapon over his shoulder and lifted the little girl from the pony’s back. The child resisted, trying to maintain her grip on Vigor’s back. Gently, Vigor worked her hands loose and the bowman took her away.
“A word of warning, my lords,” Otker told the knights. “We’ll have to be careful where we’re going. If you want to get close enough to see the tower, then stay quiet and keep your head down.”
Otker and two of the bowmen led Sir Leuthere, Count Ergon and Vigor into a dense stand of trees several fields from where the peasant mob had ambushed them. The trees ran along one side of the bocage country, eventually connecting with a forest. The going was rough, the ground uneven and overgrown with brambles. It was a strange sort of journey, for the woods were entirely silent, devoid of the rustling and scurrying of small animals, absent of the whistles and chirps of birds. Even the flies, a persistent nuisance in Aquitaine this time of year, were gone. It was as though every living thing in the forest had fled or was in hiding.
Darkness found the men several hours into their woodland hike. Several times Count Ergon complained about leaving the horses behind. It would have been quicker to skirt the edge of the forest and dismount closer to where they were going. After a time, even Leuthere began to echo the nobleman’s sentiment. Otker, however, insisted that the woods offered the only cover from spying eyes. If the knights wanted to see the tower, then their only hope was to remain unseen.
When the sounds of axes chopping wood reached their ears, it seemed like the roar of thunder after the silence they had become accustomed to. Otker raised a warning finger to his lips, motioning for the knights to stay close behind him. The bowmen nocked arrows to their strings and spread out, warily watching the shadows.
Count Ergon did not need to be told when they drew near the enemy. He was the first to recognize the rancid stink in the air, the sickly scent of decaying flesh and dark magic. At once, the old knight grew tense, his right arm reflexively moving towards his sword until a spasm of pain stopped the motion. He scowled at his injured arm and used his left hand to draw his blade.
“Woodcutters,” Otker whispered. He pointed three fingers to their left. Dimly, through the darkness, the men could see a trio of grisly creatures awkwardly felling timber, their fleshless bones almost seeming to glow in the moonlight. “The woods are full of them.”
“Soon there will be a few less,” Count Ergon promised. He started towards the walking skeletons. Otker dashed after the knight, gripping him by the arm.
“They’re only after timber,” Otker said. “They won’t even look our way if we don’t bother them.”
Count Ergon ripped his arm free from the peasant. “Coward,” he cursed the man.
“We’re not here to destroy the vampire’s slaves,” Leuthere reminded the noblema
n. “It’s the Red Duke we’re after, and our best chance to get him is to speak with Iselda.”
Reluctantly, Count Ergon nodded his head and turned back.
“Perhaps once you’ve seen the tower you will change your mind, my lord,” Otker said.
Another hour found the men at the northernmost edge of the woods. They had been forced to follow a circuitous route through the forest to avoid the undead woodcutters, which seemed to increase in number the farther they went. Several times, loping ghouls had come scuttling through the trees, but the loathsome scavengers had passed the lurking men by without noticing them.
Ahead, through the trees, the knights could see the Tower of Wizardry, the walls of the fortress standing stark in the moonlight. They could also see the fields around the tower, fields that now swarmed with activity. Pale, fleshless shapes were at work in the fields, not to till crops but to shape the timber that gangs of zombies and skeletons dragged from the forest. Hundreds of the undead were at work with saw and hammer, taking the logs and rendering them down into flattened planks and beams. Other skeletons worked to assemble the planks and beams into more complex constructions.
Before the knights’ eyes, the first siege tower rose above the field. The reason for the Red Duke’s journey north was now explained.
The vampire was besieging the Tower of Wizardry!
CHAPTER XIII
“I will not ask you to stay. I know your pride and your honour are too great for that. I know there is nothing that would make you forsake your duty to the king, nothing that would keep you from giving your sword to a just and righteous cause.” Duchess Martinga closed her arms around her husband, pressing her soft lips against his neck. “Only promise me, promise me you will come back to me.”
“The Lady herself could not keep me from your side,” the duke said, hugging Martinga close to him. “We shall rout this villain Jaffar and drive his thieving corsairs out of Estalia and back into their deserts. I’ll be back before the harvest.”
The duchess pulled away from him. She lifted her face and smiled at his optimistic assurances, but the smile did not reach her eyes.
The duke noted Martinga’s unease. He bent his knee, kneeling before his wife. He took her little hand in his own, turning it over so that he could kiss the palm. “The king needs me. I am the best swordsman in Aquitaine, and that means in all of Bretonnia. He will need good fighting men if we are to free Estalia from the heathen.”
“I know,” Martinga assured him, but there was still a note of fear in her voice.
The duke rose to his feet, laughing at his wife’s anxiety, making a great display of nonchalant bravado. “Why carry on so?” he asked. “I’ve been away before on far more perilous quests. Remember last summer when I helped Duke Chararic campaign against the orcs raiding his lands along the Upper Grismerie? Or when I joined Duke Arnulf to hunt down the dragon Gundovald? Or when I spent a month at the court of Duke Ballomer and had to endure the raw seafood diet of Lyonesse?” He tried to tickle his wife’s throat as he made the last jest. Defiantly, she drew back.
“Be serious,” she said, trying to suppress a shudder. “I know you have done many bold and reckless things…”
“Some would call them heroic,” the duke quipped. “Most certainly anyone who has stared at a Lyonesse lobster lying sprawled in its enormity across his plate.” He saw that his levity had not lightened Martinga’s mood. Contritely, he clapped a hand over his mouth and waved his hand in apology.
Martinga began to pace across the lush carpets of her sitting room, collecting her thoughts, trying to put into words the nameless dread that clutched her heart. Her steps carried her to the narrow window that allowed light and air into the chamber. She stared out the opening, watching the guards patrolling the castle walls, seeing the craftsmen and merchants navigating the narrow streets of the town beyond the castle as they brought their wares to market. Everything seemed so peaceful, so normal, that she could not help but think her fears to be childish and unfounded. But however she tried to rationalize them away, she could not rid herself of them.
“There’s something… some dark force I don’t understand,” she told the duke. “Every night I wake up and I can see it, a black shape looming over you. Reaching down to take you from me!”
“You sound like the Prophetess Isabeau,” the duke told her. “The next time you think you see this phantom, wake me so that I can see it too.”
Martinga’s face went pale. She rushed to her husband, taking his hands in hers. “I don’t ever want you to see it,” she gasped. “It’s an omen, a warning! Something evil is waiting for you if you ride with the king!”
“I can no more abandon the king than he would abandon me,” the duke told her, his voice carrying a painful note, knowing his words would cause his wife hurt. “I have to join his crusade against the sultan.”
Martinga turned away. “I know you do,” she said. “But be careful. Remember a foolish woman’s nightmares. “Don’t let the darkness take you from me.”
The Red Duke watched as his engineers began to assemble the first of the trebuchets that would batter the Tower of Wizardry into rubble. When he was finished here, he would leave no trace that a fortress had ever stood here. He would cast the ruins of the tower into Lake Tranquil stone by stone. He would raze the very foundations, undermine the crypts and cellars from below and send them crashing down into the very pits of hell. A hundred years and no man would be able to say where the tower had stood or dare to speak the name of the treacherous witch who was its mistress.
He thought of Martinga’s warning, that last day before he set out for Carcassonne and the Estalian frontier. She had spoken of a dark phantom, a black shadow reaching down to take him from her. He had always thought of the duchess as a calm, practical and iron-nerved woman. He had loved her because of her strong personality, the dignified courage only a member of the fair sex could ever lay claim to. She was not someone given to premonitions and nightmares. Perhaps that is why he hadn’t listened to her warning, had allowed himself to be unmoved by her dread.
But she had been right. Something evil had been waiting for him, to inflict upon him a fate worse than dragon’s breath and troll’s belly. A fate that had taken him from her, taken him away for all eternity. He would never enter the Gates of Morr, never see the peaceful gardens where his wife’s spirit had gone.
He was now the Red Duke, now and forever.
How was it that his wife, a woman without the arcane powers of a prophetess, had foreseen the horrible doom waiting for him at the end of his crusade? How was it that Isabeau, with all the magic and mystery of the grail damsels behind her, with the divine grace of the Lady flowing through her, how was it that she had failed to sense the Red Duke’s damnation?
There was only one answer: she had. Perhaps it was she who had turned the ear of King Louis. Perhaps it was Isabeau who had plotted the whole sordid plan to wrest the dukedom from its rightful lord and pass it to a usurping king.
The Red Duke glared up at the tower, watching as the prophetess walked about the balcony. She had changed her appearance, looking more youthful and dark than when she had cast him out from the tower. Her dress was of a sheer, body-hugging cut that he had never seen before, her long conical hat draped with ribbons of silk and feathered tassels. The vampire did not know what Isabeau was playing at, but if she thought a change of clothes and a bit of magic to alter her face would hide her from him, then she was sorely mistaken.
The Red Duke laughed grimly as he watched gangs of skeletons dragging long slender poles out into the field below the balcony. He knew how to break the woman’s spirit. Like all women, she would have little stomach for violence and barbarity. The vampire had learned much of both when he made war against the Arabyans. For now, the sharpened stakes lay upon the ground, but soon they would rise high over the fields, burdened with the screaming bodies of villagers and farmers. He would break the witch’s defiance.
The vampire growled irritably, snapp
ing an order for Baron de Gavaudan to attend him. He was annoyed at the lack of progress being shown by his army. They should have captured hundreds of peasants by now. His skeleton warriors should already be well into planting a forest of the impaled before the tower walls. Instead they stood idle beside their piles of stakes, drawing the fire of the few bowmen hidden inside the fortress.
“Where is de Gavaudan!” the Red Duke roared, kicking at the zombie polishing his boots. The creature toppled back, its jaw broken by the vampire. Mindlessly, the rotting corpse crawled back to its seated master and resumed its duties, oblivious to the shattered bone piercing its cheek.
“Where is that slinking cur!” the vampire snarled again.
Renar, like the others of the Red Duke’s inner circle, stood in attendance upon the vampire within his shadowy pavilion. The necromancer groaned. It was almost on his tongue to tell his master that he had left Baron de Gavaudan locked inside the chapel at Mercal, but he knew no good would come of bringing that up. Instead he nudged the dark knight standing beside him, the thrall the Red Duke had created to replace de Gavaudan. “I think you’d better be the baron,” Renar told the dark knight.
Confused, the dark knight approached the seated Red Duke, bowing low before his master.
“Where have you been, de Gavaudan? Out filling your belly with the blood of peasant girls?” The Red Duke glared at his thrall. “I am displeased with the progress my troops are making. I dispatched my knights to burn all the villages and bring back every prisoner they could catch.” He gestured angrily at the empty fields. “That was yesterday and they still have not returned! I want my prisoners, baron! If those louts can’t find a rabble of illiterate peasants, I’ll have their spurs! I’ll lay each of them across an open fire and cook them in their own armour!”
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