The Kingless Land

by Ed Greenwood

  The armaragor swallowed a curse and chopped at the wolf’s head. Its jaws were caught on Craer’s stranglingwire, which the procurer had hastily stretched from hand to hand to bar the way to his throat. The beast was ignoring the long, jagged wound Hawkril’s blade had opened in its side—a rent out of which much dark liquid was pouring—but it couldn’t ignore the blows that nearly severed its head from its body.

  Craer was making wet choking sounds under all the gore, and Hawkril bent to snatch the wolf off of his …

  The sudden blow to his ribs drove the wind from him and tore both hot and cold; Hawkril cried out despite himself as he went to the ground, sword flailing the air in futility. There was a second wolf.

  Gore burst from the jaws and cloven throat of the wolf atop Craer, half drowning him in a hot, wet, blinding flood; he spat and coughed and tried to keep breathing, smashing at lolling jaws with his elbow in an attempt to get out from under. These must be a pair of the legendary smoke wolves, who always kept silence as they slew … at least, he hoped there were only two.

  Hawkril was gasping in pain, the sound almost drowned out by horrible gnawing noises. Craer struggled desperately to roll away from the wet and dead weight on top of him. He had to get to his friend in time.

  He was free! Rolling to his feet, Craer stumbled and fell onto his knees as the ground shook, and something large and dark blotted out the moonlight. It loomed over the struggling forms of Hawkril and the wolf, now rolling and kicking, and a massive stone sword swung ponderously up—by the Three, a knight of stone!—and then down, ringing sparks from ornamental stones set in a floral planting. Hawkril was a hand’s width away from that descending blade, but the wolf that had savaged him was thrashing and sagging on the ground, cut cleanly in two.

  Craer was sprinting by then, dodging past the rising stone sword to pluck at his groaning friend. “Up! Up and run!” he gasped. “Run, you thick-headed sword swinger!”

  Hawkril swayed to his feet, made a sort of a sob, and stumbled out of the floral bed into a staggering, lumbering run, the procurer at his elbow urging and tugging.

  “Come on, come on, hurry, come on.” Craer glanced back at the approaching stone guardian and saw it striding after them, sword raised, staring stone eyes blank. If he was wrong about the magic that moved it, the lives and careers of Craer Delnbone and Hawkril Anharu bid fair to be soon over. The open moonlight of the gardens was close ahead, now, and he’d find out soon enough.

  Was it ever soon enough to die?

  The ground shook beneath their desperate boots; the stone knight was gaining on them. Just a stride or two more, though, and …

  They were out, gasping, into the moonlight, with the tattered leaves of a last bush whirling around them, and a tranquil fountain ahead. Craer caught at Hawkril’s arm as the armaragor staggered sideways, cursing, and risked a look back—just as the knight took a step out into the open.

  It did not freeze, as he’d hoped it would. Soon they’d be close enough to the palace for even snoring servantmaids to hear its lumbering progress, and then it really wouldn’t matter if that heavy stone sword chopped them down—or if they died by guards’ blades or wizards’ spells.

  Dead was dead.

  “And not a gown to show for it,” he muttered, as the stone knight loomed up over them and swept its blade up, heedless of snapping, dancing branches.

  “Hawkril,” he hissed, “there’s a statue yonder! Get around the other side of it—use it as a shield!”

  The armaragor lifted a face that was tight with pain, and nodded. “And you?”

  “I’ll be busy doing something clever,” Craer told him, and was rewarded with the ghost of a smile. It vanished as the thundering fall of the stone blade turned into a scream of stone clawing stone, and an ornamental paving—it might have been a gravestone—burst up in shards from the ground …

  Stone shards that kissed the heels of the staggering armaragor, goading him into a stumbling run, and almost beheaded a desperately diving procurer. Craer rolled, spitting out dirt and carefully groomed grasses, finding his feet again with the patiently striding stone knight close behind him.

  He did a little dance for it, weaving away from the statue he’d seen—some Lord Silvertree waving his sword at the stars to make the stallion beneath him rear, a pose that by the looks of things vastly impressed all the incontinent birds on the island—to be sure it didn’t follow Hawkril yet. The stone face never looked at him, and the stone eyes stayed blank, but its shoulders turned toward the procurer who hated to be called Longfingers, and its blade rose again to smite.

  A seeking spell, then, and not some wizard awake in a room of the Castle directing it to smite thus and so … thank the Three at least for that!

  Craer caught his breath, watching it loom up over him, and cast another glance at the statue. Yes, ’twas tall enough, and Hawkril was safely in its shadow, gasping loudly enough to be heard from here.

  This would be a slim, deadly chance—but slim, deadly chances were all they had just now … were all they’d had for some time.

  “Come on, then,” he murmured. “Hew down the hero.”

  The stone knight’s blade rose again and fell. It didn’t have to be fast, if a foe couldn’t flee. One strike of that stone sword—as large and as heavy as a horse—would kill even someone as large as Hawkril. It would probably reduce Craer Delnbone to bloody pulp, not even worth the bother of burial.

  Stone whistled down, and Craer leaped for his life.

  The ground trembled dully behind him—very close behind him—and then he was sprinting through the moonlight, racing across the neatly trimmed sward as if there were more wolves plunging after him.

  Perhaps there were, in some distant glade of the garden. A worry for later; he had worries enough to keep him busy now. The procurer swarmed up the stone statue, his wet hands slipping all too often, and thanked the Three for sculptors whose flowing tails and highbacked saddles made easy footholds for desperate climbers. He saw Hawkril peering up at him as he reached the horse’s head, kicked a bird nest from its mouth, and saw the stone knight bearing down on him.

  Its sword was rising, and its head was tilting back as if it could see him. If there wasn’t some way to knock its head off, they were probably doomed—unless Craer could get it to fall over the statue somehow. He stood above it on his sculpted perch, waiting tensely. He’d have only one chance to leap.

  Its sword swept around in a chop that rang off the statue’s sword, turning the knight slightly, and would have missed Craer by inches. He let the stone sword go past, and then leaped almost delicately onto the knight’s shoulder, clawing at its head.

  No, there was no seam here, and no wobbling weakness. It might have been a living man, it felt so alive. Alive, and as solid as stone, and he was going to die, here and now, as the stone sword swept back again to shear him off the knight’s head.

  At the last instant Craer swung himself around the far side of the head and dropped, clinging by his fingertips. The knight smote itself hard on the head, and Craer’s world rocked.

  Brief lightnings crackled through his fingertips, raging over the curved stone, and the procurer fell away, pain stabbing through him in a rush that left him unable to even cry out. He bounced on the damp grass, and far above him, the dark bulk of the knight swayed, blotting out the moon, and then started to fall, in a dark and looming rush he knew he could not escape.…

  A strong arm snatched him by one elbow and threw him into a flowerbed.

  “Can’t you keep out of tr—,” Hawkril snarled, before the deep, ground-shaking crashes began, drowning out whatever else the swordmaster was trying to say. The knight’s fall threw Hawkril helplessly up into the air, and in the moonlight Craer saw his tumbling friend arch in silent agony before a different part of the flowerbed swallowed him.

  And silence, after ponderous pieces of stone stopped rolling, finally fell.

  Craer rose into a low, tense crouch, keeping his eyes on the shattered k
night, but its parts did not move again, and he let out his breath in silent thanks as he peered all around, seeking running wolves or armored figures or other guardians and finding blessed nothing.

  “Hawk,” the procurer hissed, “it’s down. How badly?”

  “Do I look like a master healer to you? How the horns should I know?” the armaragor snarled, from not far away. “My ribs … gone. Everything … wet and open …”

  Craer scrambled through floral displays to pluck Hawkril’s arm away from his side and look at the wounds, but the armaragor shook him away, wincing and gasping, and staggered to his feet, stumping off across the grass toward the fountain.

  The procurer frowned at the wounded warrior’s back for a moment, and then slowly sat down on the smooth turf and took off his left boot. It held about as much water as Hawkril’s had—but it also held something else: a flat glass vial that Craer unstrapped, held in his hand for a moment as if reluctant to let it go, and then sprang up, bootless, to offer to the swordmaster.

  Hawkril sank down on the stone lip of the fountain and swallowed the healing draught without query or hesitation. Craer held him firmly by one arm as the usual brief, teeth-chattering seizure wracked the armaragor.

  When it was done, Hawkril looked up, the creases of pain gone from his face, and said softly, “Have my thanks. That’s a very large thing I owe you, Craer.”

  “We’ll be wed come morning,” the procurer joked, stepping into the fountain. The waters were cold and the stone beneath his boots slimy with greencreep, but he had to get rid of the wolf blood, or there wouldn’t be a blind hound in all the Vale that wouldn’t be able to follow him.

  As Craer crouched down and watched dark threads of blood drift away from him across the water, Hawkril followed him in. He growled, deep in his throat, at the water’s chill, and then sank down as the procurer had done, wincing as the slimy wet touched his ravaged side. He touched himself there rather gingerly, then looked up and asked, “Well, shall we press on? By now she’s either up and waiting for us, or she’s deaf.”

  Craer lifted his lip in a mirthless grin and led the way through a still and coldly beautiful succession of paths, lawns, bowers, and little arched bridges over ponds. It was a surprisingly long way; if the Lady of Jewels had only her ears to rouse her, and not the promptings of magic, Hawkril might be wrong … and they just might live to see another morning. Beyond that, the procurer wasn’t willing to entertain any bets.

  The westernmost outcropping of the castle stretched away along the wall out of sight, in a series of towers and buttresses and balconies that looked for all the world like some great and many-legged stone beast sprawling asleep along the ground. In front of them, though, its grim gray stone launched out into space in a trio of slender hanging bridges, covered and windowed walkways that led to the Lady Turret, built of ivory stone to house the many wives of a long-dead Lord Silvertree … and now the home, it was said, of the Lady of Jewels. The balconies and arched windows they’d seen from afar were, of course, larger than they’d thought, but the two intruders reached their shadows at last and held still for a long time, looking and listening for any sign of sentries or something stirring. Only in bards’ tales had wizards so much magic to waste that they cast field upon field of nightly watchings and wardings—but, as the old saying went, it took only one.

  Craer threw back his head and drew in a deep, soundless breath, shaking his shoulders and fingers to relax. Then he plunged his hands to his belt, drew his sodden tunic up to his armpits, and began to unwind what looked like ridged armor from around his midriff. It was a long, dark waxed cord, and it piled up in a coil by his feet with only the faintest of wet slitherings. As Hawkril watched, the procurer adjusted his wet gloves and went up the wall with the slow, deliberate ease of a master climber. He’d chosen a fluted column that ascended beside three tiers of balconies, and he moved up it like a slow shadow, as silent as Hawkril’s held breath—past one balcony, then the second, onto the third. After a moment or two came the ripple along the cord that told the armaragor to start climbing.

  Hawkril set booted feet against fluted stone, gathered a winding of rope around his arm, and grimly hauled himself toward the stars.

  It was a long way in the bright moonlight to that third balcony, and Hawkril was breathing heavily when he crouched down beside Craer and made the double finger-tap that told his brother-in-arms that he was ready to proceed. The procurer put his mouth to Hawkril’s ear and breathed, “I mislike the look of all these doors. A simple cord-and-bells would serve as a night alarm, with never a spell needed.”

  Hawkril looked at the row of balcony doors. They were little more than ornate metal frames set with glass, with closed draperies behind them forming an endless dark wall veiling all view of any treasures—or guards—within. He shrugged and muttered, “You’re the procurer. Whither on, then?”

  Craer pointed at a small, shuttered window along the wall, a good way out above a sheer drop. Hawkril rolled his eyes and then smiled, shrugged, and made a be-my-guest gesture. The thief surged along the balcony like a shadow in a hurry, bent double to keep below the height of its parapet, and without hesitation swarmed along the wall, finding holds with uncanny ease and in eerie silence.

  Clinging to the wall with his fingertips, Craer reached the shutters and pulled ever so gently, first on one and then the other, only to find them both fastened firm. He glanced down for the first time, checking on what lay below, and then reached for the top of the shutters, clung, and slowly shifted his weight onto them.

  If Hawkril hadn’t been straining to hear the faint groan of protest from wood and hinges, he wouldn’t have heard it. The procurer hung there like a patient spider for a moment, drawing a knife from a sheath along his forearm. Hawkril watched him run it up the crack where the shutters met with slow care—and then, as it lifted an unseen hook fastening within, saw the shutter Craer was still holding onto swing open under his weight, heading for a crash against the wall.

  The procurer shifted during that brief journey so that his shoulders took the impact with waiting stones. Shutter and procurer shuddered together—the silence was uncanny—and Hawkril saw Craer grimace in pain before the procurer heaved, swung his legs up, and vanished into the tower.

  In a torn and ravaged flowerbed that lay in full, bright and cold moonlight, a stone larger than a man shuddered—and then slowly rolled over.

  There was no one there to push it, no monster thrusting up from beneath it to break the earth and send the stone rolling, but it was rolling, now, slowly and in eerie silence.

  Rolling out of the flowerbed, to clack against another stone it had been attached to, not so long ago. A stone shaped like a giant human hand.

  A stone that rose on its fingertips like a dark, dogsized spider to creep tentatively through shadows to touch a shattered row of stones that had been its arm. Stones that shuddered and drew together, clacking like stones bowled by gamblers that strike each other in a long, rippling line.

  A line that rippled, surged, and suddenly rose into the air, the hand atop the line questing into the moonlit sky like the head of an ungainly snake. The arm swayed upright atop a strange cairn of unbalanced stones and then swooped like a striking hawk to pounce on the stone that had first rolled out of the flowerbed. A brief fire of darting sparks laced from one stone to another, and suddenly stones everywhere in the moonlight and the shadows were shifting and stirring, rolling together with sepulchral gratings. A toppled head settled onto shoulders, a fallen sword rose, and a stone knight raised its head and stood up in the moonlight once more. Like a beast sniffling for scent it stood turning its head slightly this way and that. It was seeking something. Something it had failed to slay.

  * * *

  No lamps were lit, but the procurer could see enough to tell there was a table in front of him, in a long and narrow chamber whose walls all held curtained archways. Spindles of thread stood on shelves to his left; shears hung on a wallboard to his right. This must
be a sewing and fitting room—and that shape across the room was no guard, but a dressmaker’s wooden lady.

  Well and good. A gentle, spicy aroma of mingled scents was already telling Craer he’d entered the chambers of a lady of high station. He perched on the sill, listening and looking and deducing, until he’d decided where best to proceed. First, secure and quiet footing—so—and then to draw the shutters closed behind him.

  Craer crouched in the shadows beside the table for another silent eternity, listening, and then crept catlike toward one of the archways. Parting the curtain with his knife, he peered. Ah, he’d guessed right: beyond lay a robing room. And what a robing room!

  Fanlights above the draperies allowed faint moonlight into the chamber he was looking into, and by its blue-white glow he could see a low, ornate wardrobe whose glossy top displayed a row of wooden heads—all of them sporting sparkling tiaras, dangling clusters of gleaming earrings, or finely graven metal masks. Hooks on the walls and harnesses hanging on chains from the ceiling all held gowns. Scores—nay, hundreds—of vivid and stylish garments, all of them glistening with the cold fire of gems!

  Cascades of gems, clusters and swashes and swirls, thumb-size here and larger there, never lone stones or paltry trios … zelosters and blackamarls and even a starburst brooch as big as his hand, adorned with the rarest gems of all: the rainbow-hued, glistening teardrops known as scarmareenes. By the Lady’s Horns, what riches! More than he’d ever dreamed Aglirta or even all Asmarand held! Why—but no, tarry gawking no longer. Take and flee, before any doom could awaken.…

  Craer took a handful of gowns, wrapped them around his arm, and turned with infinite care, careful not to make a sound that might bring—

  Blue fire snapped out of the darkness without warning, the fire of a spell that smashed into him, searing and piercing, and drove him reeling across the room in a numbed, gasping dance of agony.

  Wreathed in lightnings, the procurer staggered through a row of gowns and another curtained archway beyond, into a chamber Hawkril must be crouching outside. With his last sobbing strength Craer ran into the curtains and tore at them, bringing them down.