by Kate Elliott
Wichman grinned, although it was more a baring of teeth as he struggled against the lance that had torn through his shoulder. He was pinned tight to that trunk. “That don’t mean much, coming from you, Cousin.”
She snorted. Her gaze skipped over Ivar, but then she halted, looked a second time, and fixed her gaze on him in a way that made him squirm. “Good God above! I thought I recognized you. You were dead, you faithless liar! It’s your fault that I lost my noble prisoners and my pretty cleric. You son of a bitch.”
He had not even a knife to defend himself. She raised the mace, and closed on Ivar.
A wild roar of voices lifted off the battlefield as a storm of rage and fear swept the field. Above all this, riding on the wind, a shrill cry rang down from the heavens. A vast shadow scudded over the valley of Kassel. Men staggered to a stop where it passed. Ivar could not move, although he bent his mind on a helpless struggle to get his legs to move. Even Sabella paused in mid-step, her mace lifted above her shoulder, in the act of commencing the blow that would smash Ivar’s head in.
All became still. Thunder faded. The rattle of drums fell silent. Men simply ceased moving. Even the horses could only roll their eyes in fear. Moans rose from terrified men as from a choir, but these voices were soft, muffled by this heavy weight that drowned all creatures on the field of battle.
Wichman grunted. His hand twitched. His fingers curled around the hilt of his knife, and he eased it free of its leather sheath. Somehow, where all others stood in a stupor, as if turned to stone, he flicked his hand.
The knife flew, winking.
God knew that Wichman had always possessed an unnatural measure of luck, although only God knew why such an unpleasant man should gain what was denied to others.
The blade buried itself in Sabella’s throat.
At first, she hung there as though held up by the same stupifying force that had seized all of them. A single drop of blood pearled from the wound.
That shrill cry raked through the valley a second time. This time Ivar saw the beast fly overhead. Its scaly hide shone with a poisonous glamour that made his eyes ache. Its baleful glare paralyzed all that looked its way, and because it was both beautiful and terrible, all men and women stared to see it fly above them.
“Call me a pig,” muttered Wichman. He slumped. His eyes rolled up in his head.
Sabella dropped, with the mace still gripped in her hand and the knife embedded in her throat.
Ivar could not move and he could not hear, not the wind, not any cries of humankind, not the bells. He thought he had gone deaf until the silence was broken by a mundane sound, heard from this distance only because of the uncanny hush.
It was the cheerful barking of a pair of hounds.
2
EVEN the plans of the canniest leader will sometimes go astray, because no person can anticipate the twists of fate. It is always the unexpected blow that brings you down.
He holds the standard devised by the old priest. Its haft is painted wood, and the cross guard is adorned with feathers and bones, unnameable leathery scraps, the translucent skin of a snake, yellowing teeth strung on a wire, the hair of SwiftDaughters spun into chains of gold and silver and iron and tin, beads of amethyst and crystal dangling by tough red threads, and bone flutes so cunningly drilled and hung that the wind moans through them. The haft hums against his palm as though bees have made their hive inside the wood.
This powerful amulet, woven in and into and of the wood pole with its cross guard, protects from magic all those he holds in his hand and under his protection.
Yet there are creatures in the world that have a power akin to magic, woven into their very bones, but which are not themselves magic wielded by the hand of another.
This truth he has overlooked.
When the bell voices throb in the forest, when the pillars of black smoke glide out of the trees and flense his soldiers, he knows fear for the first time. His Eika are the bravest of all soldiers; they do not fear death because they have already eaten death in order to become men and not remain dogs.
What stalks them now is not death but obliteration, and even so they leap to fight it although they are overwhelmed. What the creatures of darkness eat is the soul.
He is shaken. Standing on the road, surveying what he knew until this instant was to be his greatest victory, he is too stunned to move out of the way as the towers of black smoke cut through his soldiers and loom over him.
Last Son slams into him, and they tumble over the side of the ramped road and roll in a cascade of pebbles and dirt around and around and around. The standard is ripped to pieces, shattering. All its parts and pieces spill and spray in every direction.
Perhaps it was a root that tripped him up, or his own feet, or a hollow in the path they followed. He fell sprawling and smacked into the dirt. The hounds at once swarmed him to lick his face and tug at his clothing. For too long—an instant or an eternity—he lay stunned as a growing wind shook the trees and the guivre chirped restlessly, tail thrashing in the brush.
He was blind to what lay outside him, but in his inner eye a vision of the past bloomed until he could see nothing else.
The Lady of Battles and her white warhorse climbing the Dragonback Ridge.
Brother Gilles stuck through with a spear by a ravening Eika marauder who rips the precious holy book out of the old man’s trembling hands.
Aunt Bel standing in the doorway, staring out into the wet night wondering what has become of her foster nephew.
Sparrows eating crumbs off Lackling’s hands as the halfwit weeps silently with joy.
Stronghand chained and a prisoner, howling to provoke the hounds.
Lavastine sitting at the count’s table, measuring Alain with a keen blue gaze.
Lady Sabella with her hair plaited back and dressed in gold-and-silver ribbons, but left uncovered, like a soldier’s.
Brother Agius hand in hand with Biscop Constance as they whisper late in the night, captive both in body to their enemy and in heart to each other—a marriage long ago forbidden and impossible. Beyond them, Biscop Antonia’s eyes are open, and she watches as they comfort each other. She is a huge yawning maw sucking in life and air, a gate through which the most unnatural forces can cross. Envy is the shadow of the guivre, the wings of death.
She has called the galla from a far place that is no part of this world, or of the aether that circulates through all things, through the cosmos itself.
“Go,” he whispered into the dirt. He shoved himself up. He faced the guivre and caught it with his stare. “Go! As I command you, who spared you once, this favor I am owed in recompense. Go to the field of battle. Fly there until I say otherwise.”
On the ground it was an ungainly thing, but when it leaped and caught the high wind, it flew with a grace that makes a man smile with joy to see God’s hand in the heavens working such beauty. It cried out once, and then he lost sight of it as it winged away over the trees. He brushed off his forearms and his legs, and pulled a twig out of his hair. Sorrow and Rage sat watching, panting although the wind was brusque enough to make eyes sting when you faced into it. The sky overhead was as dark as pitch, but it was not raining, although it ought to have been. The Lady had called this storm, and it followed no natural course.
“Come.” He broke into a steady run. The hounds loped with him, one before and one behind. Yet it was too late. Too late. The battle had already started; he had not prevented it after all.
Except that it is never too late. The world continues on its path despite the accidents and tragedies and joys that unfold in the life of any given individual. You must press forward so long as you have breath. Toil in those fields that God cherish most. You have done as well as any man.
So Lavastine had said. But Alain had lost Tallia, and he had lost Lavastine as well. He had watched the count turn to stone, his own effigy.
Memories chased him as he ran, images rising and falling away in time to the beat of his footsteps pounding on
earth.
A dawn battle against the Eika when the Lady of Battles rode at his side.
Henri accusing him of lying in order to gain a count’s favor.
Liath weeping by the hearth fire.
The battle at Gent, and the ragged, half-wild prince stumbling away from the victory feast, retching because he was unable to tolerate food after starving for so long.
Tallia on their wedding night. Always there would be a measure of pain, remembering this. Remembering the nail she had used to scar her own hands.
I have been tricked.
He had lost the county of Lavas in the end and marched east as a Lion, where he had killed a man to show mercy and had been himself killed.
Death had taken him to Adica, and death had taken Adica from him—although surely Adica had never belonged to him or he to her in those ancient days, forgotten now by humankind. Only the burial mounds remain, which is memory of a kind, a thing tangible but mute.
He had found peace at Hersford Monastery for a short time, yet peace had a fragile heart and this was soon broken. Falling into the hands of bandits, he had killed the man once known as Brother Willibrod, a creature without a soul who had sucked the life out of others to maintain his rotting shell.
After that, memory scattered. He lost his anchors—Rage and Sorrow—and it seemed to him that his memories of that time toiled around and around in an endless circle until a sharp blow sent him plummeting into the pit. He wandered for a time in darkness and after this in light, and for a time he was caged and after this the tempest rose and the sea swamped him and the dragon broke free of the earth that had imprisoned it for a time beyond memory. Beyond any memory but his own, who because of the intervention of sorcery had witnessed the ancient spell which had set all this in motion.
Who else recalled it?
One: the centaur shaman. But when he sought the breath of her soul in the living world, he could not find it.
Two: the WiseMothers, who were born out of that ancient conflagration and who had spread the nests of their children across the northern lands. But when he sought the spirit of their slow minds in the aether, he could not find them.
It falls to me to do what is right. That is reward enough in the eyes of God.
When he came to the forest’s edge high above the fields, the lines of battle had already been drawn and overrun, but soldiers on all sides stood in an uncanny stillness, frozen by the guivre’s stare. He stood on the edge of a steep hillside torn by an avalanche. It was loose with debris, too dangerous to cross or descend.
He called. The guivre swept a wide circle and came back to him. He grabbed the hounds by their collars and led them along a tree trunk that had fallen out into the open space to make a precarious ledge. The log slipped sideways under their weight. The hounds yelped in panic. The guivre swooped low as the log gave way and rolled out from under Alain’s feet. Its claws fastened on his shoulders, and the startled hounds were silenced as they, too, were yanked upward with the collars biting into their vulnerable throats. Their weight seemed likely to pop his shoulders out of joint, but the guivre plunged with dizzying speed down along the barren slope and over its desolation of splintered and jumbled trunks, snapped and shredded branches, and scraps of vegetation marked by clusters of blooming cowslip and vine-pinks that had taken root since last autumn’s tempest.
The lay of the ground—the steep slope dropping precipitously into a hollow backed up into a trio of low hills—had protected the walls of Kassel from destruction. Here the mass of debris had piled up into a fresh berm. The guivre skimmed low along the north and east flanks of the town. Soldiers were fixed at attention along the walls. No one pointed, and if any screamed, all Alain heard was the whistling of wind and a distant mutter as of humankind trying to find a voice.
Made mute and frozen by the guivre’s roving gaze, every creature there stood helpless.
Ahead lay the scene of the worst slaughter: a line of siege works overtaken by a charge, men fallen every which way and horses broken down with wounds and shattered limbs. Cavalry had fixed in their tracks along the road—from the height he discerned the paving slabs and graded foundation of the old roadbed, strung so straight and turning at such precise angles that it could easily be seen to be the work of the old Dariyan Empire.
A ramp bridged the bluff that separated the valley from the higher forest to the east. Many soldiers stood paralyzed on the road and within the trees. Along the hills, Eika corpses lay strewn in horrifying numbers, and among them gleamed white bone remains of human soldiers, their bodies consumed by the passing galla.
A score of galla poured down along the ramp. The timbre of their bell voices rang both despair and pain.
He kicked as the guivre dropped low over the high end of the ramp. He and the hounds tumbled to earth, and because he released their collars they bounded away, barking as they found themselves free.
At the base of the ramp lay a wrecked wagon fallen on its side. The bodies of the two horses and the driver were wrapped in the tangle of harness. The cart held a tiny house built over its bed, which remained mostly intact, but the axles had splintered and the wheels shattered into a dozen spars and slivers. A single body sprawled in the middle of the road.
Not one soul moved except the galla. They had crossed into this world through a rent in the fabric of the universe; the guivre’s stare could not hold them. They flooded down the ramp and churned in a whirlpool about the wagon and that one isolated figure.
He heard them call: Sanglant.
But they could not find Sanglant—they could not find his essence, the substance that caused him to be alive.
Alain approached along the road while, in a mirror of his own movement, a single mounted soldier drew close to face him from the other side of the picket of circling galla. The iron heat that roiled from them forced him to stop well back. That taste of the forge burned his skin and coated his tongue with a sour flavor. But the black pillars—each a void—eddied around the body fallen in the road. They did not approach or retreat; they seemed caught between purpose and confusion.
“He served me well for many long years, dealing death but never suffering death,” said the Lady of Battles. “I wondered if any hand could stop him while his mother’s curse protected him, but I think that now he is truly gone.”
Sanglant had gone under the wheels and been besides pierced through his abdomen by a jagged spoke flung hard away in the wagon’s crash. His mangled body was slack. The strap on his dragon’s helm had been severed and the fanciful helmet itself had tumbled an arm’s length from the man. A single griffin’s feather had come to rest across his body, and possibly it was this guardian that held off the galla.
Possibly Sanglant was still alive.
The cold smile worn by the Lady of Battles goaded him forward. The hounds began to follow him, although they were terrified, so he commanded them to stay well back from the whirlpool of darkness.
He walked, and where he walked the galla swung wide around, avoiding him. His skin prickled where the tide of their passing brushed against him, but their touch did not devour him. As he walked through their ranks, he listened.
They had voices but not precisely words; they spoke, but not with a verbal language in the manner of humankind and her cousins. It sounded at first like the hissing of snakes, but even the hissing of snakes carries meaning. Deep within the tolling he heard what they were trying to communicate.
Pain. Pain. Pain. The breath of this world scalds us. We suffer. Let us go home. This soul called Sanglant is the gateway through which we can cross. Where has it gone?
He knelt beside Sanglant and pressed a hand to the side of that dark neck, but found no pulse. Around him, the galla loomed, more deadly than storm clouds and as black as the Pit. He could see nothing beyond them, only this patch of road and the body of the prince. It was as if the world had vanished, or never existed. Only the Lady of Battles gleamed, a presence without physical substance that yet permeated the world.
<
br /> In the beginning existed the four pure elements: light, wind, fire, and water. Above these dwelled the Chamber of Light, and below them, in the depths, the Enemy, which is darkness. By chance, as the elements moved and mingled, they transgressed the limits set them, and the darkness took advantage of the momentary chaos to rise out of the pit and corrupt them.
“You will ever be with us,” he said to her, “but even so, I will never cease in the struggle against you.”
“Stay beside me.” Her smile was that of an irresistible temptress or a generous mother. It would be easy to believe that smile a worthy gift, and a worthier reward, but he knew better.
“So I will. You will not escape me.”
He picked up the griffin feather. Rising, he stepped in among the galla.
“Go back,” he said to them, extending his arm. They swayed into him, crowding as he cut through the black substance of the closest galla. With a snap, and a hiss, and a whiff of the forge, it vanished. The others followed, one by one, until the last agonized voice was drained from the world.
When he turned, hoping he had banished her, the Lady of Battles waited. The griffin feather held no power over her. He placed it on the body.
“The guivre holds these combatants in its thrall,” she said, watching him. “It cannot do so forever. Then they will fight. There is nothing you can do to stop it. You have admitted as much yourself. This is the way of the world.”
“You are mistaken.”
She laughed, turned her horse and, between one breath and the next, vanished into a shower of mist. Rain swept the field and passed swiftly into the west. Thunder boomed. The guivre shrieked, awaiting his command as it circled on an updraft.
He whistled. The hounds loped up to him, butting him with their great heads. He scratched the base of their ears and touched a palm to their cold moist noses. They turned from him and approached the body of the prince with more caution, ears down and tails stiff. Sorrow growled, and Rage nudged the body with her muzzle.
