The Plague of Swords

by Miles Cameron

  Gabriel looked significantly at Master Smythe’s right shoulder.

  “I told you that my...hmm. Side? Side...seeks to minimize negative outcomes. That’s because we don’t have resources to spare for internecine war. We must always be waiting for the next invasion.” Smythe’s face was calm now, and expressionless.

  “And Ash has broken the agreement,” Gabriel said.

  “Yes,” Master Smythe said. “But I’d like to know why.” He shook his head. “I want to believe that he is merely greedy and unbalanced. But it is possible that he knows things my mother does not.”

  His strange golden eyes met Gabriel’s, and like a viper biting, he was too fast for Gabriel.

  He saw that Gabriel had caught “my mother.” And that Gabriel knew. Or guessed...That his mother was Tar.

  Gabriel chose to plough on. “So, in brief...the Odine may be waking up. The Necromancer may be one of them. The Odine. Do Odine have individuality? No—don’t tell me. If the Odine are waking up—what does that mean? I’m still missing a piece. Or all the pieces. Damn, it’s like playing cards with half a deck.”

  Master Smythe shook his head. “I agree. I have, no doubt, told you too much.”

  “Cobwebs and mirrors,” Gabriel shot back.

  “Welcome to my world,” Master Smythe said. “Let me ask you some questions.”

  Gabriel bowed. “I doubt you will find me just as evasive and confusing, but I will do my best,” he said.

  Master Smythe shrugged. “It is not my intent to irritate you. Indeed, of all men, I find you easiest to understand, perhaps because...never mind. First, then. If you make the journey to Antica Terra, will you look into some things on my behalf?”

  “Why on earth would I go to Antica Terra?” Gabriel asked. “The seas are swarming with newly woken monsters and there’s still a war here, last I checked.”

  Master Smythe nodded. “Of course. Forget I asked. Only, if you do...will you look into the Necromancer?”

  Gabriel’s eyes narrowed. “Yes,” he said, finally.

  “Good,” Master Smythe said. “If you go, come and see me before you sail. Or fly.”

  Both men nodded.

  “Do you intend to pursue Ash into the west?” Master Smythe asked.

  “That’s an excellent question. I may,” Gabriel answered.

  “Hmm,” Master Smythe said. “I would seek to dissuade you.”

  “I’ll consider being dissuaded,” Gabriel said.

  “He’s wounded. He’s desperate.” Master Smythe looked west.

  “Good,” Gabriel said.

  “Hmm,” Master Smythe said. “Time for tea.”

  Inside, Phillippa coughed.

  * * *

  Farewells said, Gabriel clambered back into his flying saddle.

  Love you, said his mount. Love these people. So kind. Love chicken and sheep, too. Love. Hungry.

  Gabriel thought that in another life, he might fancy being a griffon.

  Taking off from a flat field was very different from taking off from the top of a tower, and although it involved a long and somewhat ungainly run by his beast, the griffon leapt into the air with an elegance belied by his size and then they were winging their way aloft in great, powerful downbeats of the vast wings. Gabriel watched behind as the long, lean lion’s trunk stretched into a flat body, the enormous lion’s paws stretched out behind into a more eagle-like tail, and they tucked in perfectly so as not to interfere with flight. Gabriel’s mind was awhirl with Smythe’s latest revelations, and somewhere in that whirlpool, Gabriel questioned the existence and design of the griffon—so spectacular, so clearly hermetical.

  Ten thousand years.

  How long did they fight? On how many...spheres? Who the hell were they? What did they fight over?

  What dragon named Rhun?

  Then Master Smythe led them through a series of turns and rolls and Gabriel almost lost his tea. And then they rolled in on the end of the great fair in the fields by the council tree and made three passes. A pair of genuine wyverns climbed up to meet them and led them in some wyvern sport, tossing a dead sheep around the sky. Gabriel was only a passenger, and a concerned one at that, but eventually, as the queen’s train rode down from the hills to return to the castle for the night, the two wyverns shrieked something—disdain? approval?—and tore off into the gloom, and Smythe turned for home, swooping low over the mountain track where the queen rode with her ladies. Gabriel attempted to wave to Blanche and failed.

  Then they winged away south over the Albin River and then south again over the Brogat. Gabriel noted that there was almost no traffic on the river or the roads, and no one was tilling the fields, which seemed odd, but high summer is the time that farmers take a rest. But it was eerie, and he began to watch the ground despite the ongoing terror of rapid turns and even flying upside down.

  But none of the maneuvers practiced over the fields of the northern Brogat and the woods of the foothills of the Adnacrags terrified him as much as the landing.

  They approached the citadel of Albinkirk from the north. Gabriel was able to pick out his tower against the sky from a great distance, and he settled himself in his heavy leather saddle, relaxing his muscles for the approach.

  But nothing in his life had prepared him for the last ten heartbeats of the landing. Perhaps a hundred paces out from the tower, flying at a speed that left the rooftops below a blur of tiles and slates, Gabriel was sure they would slam into the tower, but then Ariosto pivoted on a wingtip, so that Gabriel’s legs screamed at the effort of holding on to the barrel-shaped back and the restraining belt across the high back of the saddle cut deep into his gut.

  They were fifty feet below the perch and still moving at an insane pace.

  The great wings shot out, and up they went, a rising swoop, exactly like the rearing of a trained warhorse, except that it was a hundred-foot fall to a messy death below if Gabriel went over the back of the saddle. He was staring straight up into the sky one moment, and then the great wings on either side beat once and seemed to cup the air—their lightninglike progress was suddenly stilled, the rushing air in Gabriel’s ears fell away to nothing, and they settled onto the perch. The griffon missed his grasp with one foot and they swayed a moment, and Gabriel’s life passed slowly before his eyes...he thought of Blanche, and Amicia, and Gavin, and then Ariosto’s head was turned, the great right eye was on him, and the griffon’s thoughts beamed their affection and demanded praise.

  It occurred to Gabriel that Ariosto had become his mother’s enduring monument and her revenge.

  Love you! Ariosto beamed. Let’s eat!

  Gabriel managed to hug his war beast before facing the horror of the dismount and the long, precarious shuffle along the perch, a hundred feet above the tiltyard.

  Master Smythe watched him without doing anything helpful, head cocked slightly to one side like a large hawk.

  “Problem?” he asked.

  “I’m scared of heights,” Gabriel commented as he took another shuffling step and the breeze nuzzled him.

  “Ah,” Master Smythe said. “Well, use makes master, or so they say. Come on, Ser Knight!” He laughed. “I have a gift for you, but not if you take all night.”

  “You could give me a hand,” Gabriel allowed through gritted teeth.

  “Oh, does that help?” Master Smythe asked. He held out his left hand, and Gabriel caught it and managed the last long step from perch to solid stonework. “Thank you.”

  “Think nothing of it,” said Master Smythe. “Come.”

  They went down past the main hall and the kitchens, and out into the yard, and along the stables to the tiltyard. Gabriel looked up just as Ariosto looked down, and he was loved from a hundred feet above. It was curious that from the perch, the tiltyard looked miles away, but from the tiltyard, the griffon seemed quite close.

  There was the sound of planishing coming from the armourer’s shop, a permanent shop manned by whatever itinerant armourer could be persuaded to work on the cast
le’s mountain of old and damaged harness.

  Gabriel liked armourers. He liked them all, the old, bent ones and the young, intense ones. They were all mad, but all equally driven and passionate.

  But the tall figure working carefully on polished metal was no man. He was obviously an irk. He had the high forehead and almost-pointed ears of his people, and far too many teeth, but the focused intensity of his stare at his piece of metal defined his breed more than his ears.

  “Ah, my lord dragon,” sang the irk. His voice had none of the sibilance of the Faery Knight. The armourer sounded more like a chorus of coyotes or wild wolves, his voice split into a strange polyphony. “And the famous Ser Gabriel. It is good to see you in person and not mere measurements.”

  Master Smythe nodded. “Gabriel, this is Cull Pett, the master artist of armour among all the people that you men call irks. He is just finishing my gift.”

  “You will have to finish it, lord dragon,” Cull Pett said. “I do not play games with reality like some I could mention.”

  He took the plate he had been working when they came in, a small, roughly square plate with a decidedly curved surface and some form of articulation—something very fine. Gabriel thought that it might be part of a gauntlet.

  He was pleased to find he was correct. A single left gauntlet lay on an old sack. Cull Pett took the gauntlet and snapped something, turned a threaded screw, and put the articulated plate across the back of the hand. He flexed it a few times.

  Gabriel noted that the irk had done no measuring that he had seen. All by eye.

  “Try it on,” the armourer said. “I haven’t had you to work with because my patron wanted not just the object but some form of surprise.”

  Gabriel realized it was not a gauntlet. It was a hand.

  Even as he understood and reached for the thing, the armourer said, “It is foolishness, keeping the model from the artist. I should have had access to you and your stump a day ago at least. The vanity of the dragon is, of course, proverbial. Ah, there, it fits, but ’tis only luck. I should have made it better if I’d had you here. Perhaps it is too small...”

  It was just like having a silver hand. It didn’t work, of course. It was inert. But it was magnificent, and the size was perfect. It was as if he had a lifeless silver hand.

  “Well?” said the armourer, somewhat pettishly, to the dragon. “You have to try it, Master. I can’t close it up unless we both know it works.”

  Master Smythe created a working. It sometimes troubled Gabriel that the dragon didn’t seem to have a memory palace or a working system. He did not hum, he did not sign, he did not manipulate beads. He merely cast. It was not a human thing, and to Gabriel it represented the single major difference between their kinds. Somehow, the dragons manipulated ops without ever converting it to potentia or working it.

  The working crept across the worktable and then entered into the inert hand, which lay, attached to Gabriel’s stump, in his lap. Tendrils of green-and-gold fire licked at the tips of the fingers.

  Instantly, the tips of Gabriel’s fingers prickled. Without a conscious thought, his fingers twitched...his silver fingers twitched.

  “Oh my God,” Gabriel breathed.

  “Satisfactory?” the armourer asked.

  Master Smythe beamed.

  “Right, take it off,” the armourer said.

  Gabriel knew a prick of fear. He was trying to make the fingers close on one of the hammers left on the workbench. He was close.

  Cull Pett came up close to him and lifted the hand. He stared at it a bit, moving the wrist articulation back and forth.

  “I will do better if I am allowed to open your body and recut the wound,” he said. “There will have to be wires...the cuff...you see? A small cutting.” He pointed at the cuff, held on to another part by tiny screws. “This is only temporary.”

  Gabriel sighed as the hand was taken from him. “When will you finish it?” he asked.

  “Oh, as to that, tonight under moonlight will be best,” the armourer said. “And tonight, if you will bear it, I will attach the socket. It will hurt as much as any surgeon’s work.” He shrugged, as if Gabriel’s pain were of no moment to him, which was probably the case.

  “You are superb,” Master Smythe said.

  “It would have been better if I’d been allowed access to him earlier,” the armourer said again. “Still, I suppose we were lucky.”

  They walked back across the tiltyard. Master Smythe paused, looking up at the perch. “I probably shouldn’t tell you this,” he said. “But before I even knew who you would be...when I first sensed you in the possible, before I became entangled in these threads...I saw this hand. I have no idea why. Actually, this is untrue, sloppy human emotional speech. I have a thousand ideas why. But I have made of that hand as potent an artifact as I know how to create. Before we part, I will teach you what it does. But the most important is, it will serve as a ready focus for power, the way Harmodius uses his staff. His new staff.” Master Smythe smiled. “His old staff, you should know, is the stave of your weapon.”

  “I thought that was your notion of a wicked jest,” Gabriel said.

  “Hmm,” Master Smythe said.

  * * *

  Full night. Gabriel ate with the queen, and there was formality, but not too much, and he sat with her ladies while they played with the king. Just as the sky passed from the last of twilight to full darkness, an imperial messenger came to the stables and a page brought him the messages, both from Gavin.

  Gabriel read them through, first one and then the other. Then he read the first again.

  “Madame, I need to speak to Master Smythe immediately, and then I fear I will have to advise you. You may wish to have all your council about you,” he said.

  “My lord, you scare me,” she said.

  “I scare myself. Ash has designed another plague. This one kills people. It is loose in the army, and the hospital, and I fear it is already loose in the northern Brogat.” He thought of the empty roads and fields. He thought of Master Smythe, and Ash.

  * * *

  It was late when Gabriel made it to his apartments. He now had the whole of the turret top, with Ariosto in one open-roofed chamber, and he had the foyer as a receiving room and both bedrooms for his armoury and his newly appointed secretary. Master Julius was still writing—orders, the result of the meeting of the queen’s inner council. Toby was directing a pair of maids and a new page, Anne Woodstock, in laying out clothes for morning. A pair of pourpointers, a furrier, and a leather worker were in the outer office, despite the hour, sewing a quilted leather flying doublet lined in fur.

  It was the first night they had all been back in Albinkirk. Gabriel had only just been released from the sister’s open-air hospital. The queen had stayed nearby, with the garrison at Gilson’s Hole, for just as long, planning her summer progress and sparing Albinkirk. Money was short, and camping was cheap, even for monarchs.

  Toby looked up, caught his chief’s eye, and looked away. “Bad as that, sir?” he asked.

  “Mortirmir has it under control for the moment but it is not beaten, and there’s already people dead in camp and at the hospital. It may already be loose south of here, Toby, and even here in Albinkirk and there’s a report from Harndon too. So have a care. If you start coughing...anyway, we’ll be trying to get word out to people as soon as it is light. The church will play the lead.” Gabriel put his hand in front of his eyes and yawned. “Damn it!” he said. “I can’t be this tired.”

  Woodstock helped him with his boots. She didn’t know him yet and he didn’t know her, so she said nothing. He stretched his legs a little. “Thanks, Nell,” he said.

  Anne Woodstock glanced at Toby, who made a motion with his head.

  Toby stepped forward. “Have you seen your leather pourpoint?” he asked. “Everyone will want a griffon, my lord.”

  Gabriel sat back and took the cup of wine that Toby pressed into his hand. “Everyone should want a griffon, Toby. He’s qu
ite wonderful, if just a trifle...overbearing.” He rubbed his temples. “Where is Blanche?”

  Toby smiled a slight smile. “Probably waiting on the stairs to be asked for, my lord.” Toby’s flat, matter-of-fact “squire’s voice” expressed a great many opinions all at once...that this treatment was unfair to Blanche, and that Blanche deserved better.

  Gabriel shot to his feet. “Damn it,” he said. “Why didn’t you just move her things here?”

  He looked at Toby. Toby’s closed face once again was its own signal.

  “Aha. Right. Apologies, Toby. Would you be so kind as to fetch her?”

  “Might I be bold enough to suggest you might want to get her yourself, my lord?” Toby was laying out clothes for the next day. Light clothes. He had heard that the armourer was going to cut into his captain, and if he felt any apprehension, he hid it well.

  “You are a very fountain of wisdom tonight,” Gabriel said. He finished his wine. “Best pour me more. Stairwell?” he asked.

  “Unless she’s gone to bed in the queen’s chamber, my lord.” Toby hid his disapproval. His captain was tired, and when tired, the captain took people for granted. Squires, pages...lovers.

  * * *

  Gabriel ran down the first set of stairs to the floor below, where Galahad D’Acon and three other royal messengers shared one room, Harmodius and Payam shared a second, and the queen’s ladies shared a third. He could hear voices—and laughter.

  Pavalo Payam was as black as the irk armourer, but any resemblance ended there. Payam was tall but heavily built; his face was narrow and his limbs were long and graceful. He was dressed in court clothes, a pair of fine hose and a velvet doublet that some tailor had run up in a hurry, and he looked more elegant than Gabriel could have imagined. Lady Natalia and Lady Briar were sitting under a mage light working embroidery, while Lady Heloise wove a silken lace. Galahad D’Acon was providing the frame with his strong fingers, and Payam was playing an instrument that looked like a mandolin but had more strings and a complex, bent neck. The music he was playing sounded like nothing Gabriel had heard before.