by T. O. Munro
“That elf was my grandmother.” There was an edge showing through Quintala’s usual mocking tone.
“Kaylan meant no offence I am sure, Seneschal.” Niarmit did not take her eyes from the thief as she spoke. “Besides myself and Quintala only Giseanne and Rugan knew that Kychelle and I had come to an understanding. We had meant to share the news at council this morning. What of it?”
Kaylan shrugged. “I’m not sure my Lady, but I find it curious the Lady Kychelle died at the point when the other delegates would have thought her an obstacle to our plans and an enemy of yours.”
“Are you saying one of them killed her?”
“Well somebody did,” Quintala exclaimed. “And if it wasn’t one of us, it must have been one of them.”
The bald observation precipitated a silence in which there was a soft knock at the door. “Enter,” Niarmit said.
A silver liveried flunkey came in and bowed low. “Deaconess Rhodra’s compliments my Lady and she would speak now with the Lady Hepdida, if she is ready.”
Niarmit looked across at the Princess and raised an eyebrow in enquiry. Hepdida, gulped and smoothed her dress before standing up. “I’m ready,” she lied.
***
“I haven’t brought it,” the squat army chaplain muttered. “I have my staff though.”
“I should knock you on the head with it,” Abroath stormed. “What kind of priest are you to leave the symbol of your faith behind?”
“I… er.. that is…” the man stammered inadequately.
“Sergeant!” Ambrose commanded and a warrant officer came running. “Take this foolish chaplain and find whichever card sharp won his crescent symbol from him in a wager last night. Then re-unite the prelate and his possession.”
“Thank you, oh thank you, Sir Ambrose,” the chaplain gushed.
“Don’t thank me,” the knight growled. “You’ll be paying the debt out of your wages for years to come. You should never bet what you can’t afford to lose. Now hurry, these creatures are nearly within range of the Prior’s prayers.”
Abroath stared at the gambling chaplain’s retreating back. The Sergeant was alternately urging him on and glancing over his shoulder at the closing battle lines, his face a picture of frustration as he hurried away from the battle.
“My apologies, Prior, the men of cloth who would serve in the army are often prone to other vices,” Sir Ambrose bent from his saddle to offer Abroath his excuses.
“That is what worries me,” Abroath said softly.
“Must we stand infront of the line, Prior?” another of the knight’s less holy clerics asked.
“There can be no obstacles to bar the power of the Goddess’s grace,” Abroath told him.
With a silent prayer, the Prior led his little troop through a gap in the shield wall which closed behind them. They spread out finding some comfort from the spearmen at their back even as the zombie ranks accelerated towards them. Whether it was the scent of fresh flesh, the remorseless driving will of the necromancers or the slight levelling of the slope as the crest approached, Abroath could not tell, but the creatures were certainly gathering pace and there was not much time for the clerical vanguard to make their preparations.
He knelt and held his symbol high as he uttered the familiar simple blessing directing his prayers at the massed centre of the zombie line, which was even now losing cohesion as the creatures broke into a limping lope to close the narrow gap and feed. Again, the power of the Goddess coursed through him and the first two zombies crumbled to dust filled empty armour, raising a ragged cheer from the spearmen at his back. However, the creatures behind his first dissipated targets just bent their backs and leaned into the blast of divine displeasure. The ash of destruction streamed from the joints in their rusted armour but still they came on. Abroath strained with effort, sweat bursting from his skin despite the cold winter air. He felt the necromancer’s mind urging the dead things forward, nourishing them against the flaying blast of the blessing of the Goddess. “You shall not win,” Abroath declared before shouting a second benediction drawing on all the strength of his faith, all the blessings of the way of the Goddess, in sharp and blinding contrast to the failed promises and deceit of unlife.
This time the path he cleared ran like a giant’s sword stroke through the ranks of the zombie hoard, cutting a swathe yards wide and deep which all but bisected the undead division. And, he felt the cry of alarm, the injury he had done to the shepherding necromancer on whom the pain of his creature’s final blessed release had fallen.
“See how the Prior does it, you fools,” Ambrose was shouting at his chaplains. “And you do likewise!”
Abroath, panting heavily looked left and right. The army priests were enjoying less success. A few had destroyed some undead, most had only stalled the zombies’ advance. One nearest him was scrabbling to climb over the shields as the undead sped towards him. “Let me through,” the man was whimpering. “I have sinned, the Goddess will not spare me a blessing. The pleasures of the flesh have destroyed me.”
Abroath swung his symbol high and delivered a blessing which swept away a fine mist of the chaplain’s attackers. Then he grabbed him by the arm. “Have faith,” he commanded. “It is not our sins which condemn us, but our faith which saves us. Have faith and be the vessel of the Goddess to bring these creatures some rest.”
“Have faith! Have faith!” the refrain was taken up by the spearmen in a rousing chorus and, glancing to the side, Abroath saw the strengthening resolve and attendant success of his little force of clerics.
“Fine work, Prior,” Tordil called. “You destroy the undead, leave the orcs to us.”
***
She was a pleasant woman, round faced and red cheeked with a warm smile you instinctively wanted to trust. She was the enemy. Hepdida sat, unnaturally stiff, before the Deaconess trying desperately to work out how she would have behaved if she had had nothing to hide. She would have smiled of course she would. Her lips half twisted upwards before she thought, no, two people had been murdered, who would smile at that, save only a guilty person. She twitched away the half made gesture, turning a smile into a smirk. Her hands fidgeted in her lap, writhing with guilt. Her mother had always said ‘I watch your hands, Hepdida, you can lie with your face but not your hands.’ At the recollection, the Princess hurriedly clasped her hands behind her back, which meant behind the back of the ornate chair on which she was sitting, creating the impression she’d been tied to the seat for an interrogation.
‘Oh crap,’ she thought as the Deaconess’s smile broke into a frown of puzzlement at her behaviour.
“Are you quite well my dear?” Rhodra asked. “Would you like a drink, some water perhaps? You look flushed!”
Hepdida felt the intensity of her blush deepen and she swept aside a strand of hair that wasn’t in her eye and pulled the shawl closer about her shoulders. “No, thank you ma’am. It’s just… er… that is…”
“This must be difficult for you,” Rhodra said. “I heard something of what you had been through from the Lady Giseanne. You have had many awful experiences this last month and a half.”
“What, oh, yes, ma’am yes awful.” Hepdida ventured a slight swoon, raising a hand to her head as she swayed in the chair. “Yes, these dreadful murders, they bring it all back. Awful, just awful.” She licked her lips, trying to glean how far the inscrutable deaconess was moved by her charade. “Awful,” she repeated softly, her imagination a desert of inspiration.
“Quite so, dear child,” Rhodra soothed. “I have been lucky enough in my long years to have seen nothing more alarming than childbirth. Though, I tell you, that can be pretty alarming on occasion. I just wish girls your age would think of that more often whenever a handsome boy catches their eye and bids them walk a while in the woods. There’s many a girl found their virtue forced from them by some swain who became a monster when the Sun set.”
The Princess met the Deaconess’s eyes with a puzzled curiosity and Rhodra flung a hand
to her mouth to stop the words she had already said. She looked away a brighter pink spotting on her cheeks. “Forgive me, my Lady. That was insensitive of me. I didn’t mean to revive the distress of your imprisonment.”
Hepdida nodded slowly, seeing that the Deaconess was as discomforted by the interview as she herself was. She stretched out a hand of reassurance to her interrogator. The Deaconess clasped it two-handed, eyes bright with relief. “The orc,” she said. “Did he.. did he take…”
“Everything.” Hepdida answered.
The Deaconess nodded. “Yes, quite so, vicious creatures. Still I should not leap so foolishly from one unpleasant business to another. To the matter in question then.” She patted Hepdida’s hand and the Princess felt a tingle of some enchantment scamper across her skin.
She tried to pull her hand away, but Rhodra held it with a firm grip and beam of reassurance. “Fear not my child, it is just a gift of the Goddess will help me see you speak true.”
“It tickles,” Hepdida said wriggling in her seat.
“We can be brief, my lady. Now tell me true, did you have any hand in the murder of these two innocents last night?”
“No,” Hepdida said, grateful to be able to answer with a forceful honesty that made the Deaconess jump.
“Do you know who did?”
A trickier question. She swallowed hard and prayed that Kaylan’s forest root would guide her through the trap. “No,” she answered again, without knowing whether or not she spoke true.
There was a long silence and then the Deaconess released her hand. “There my dear, that was not so bad was it. All done now.”
Hepdida scratched idly at her itching hand. “I can go then?”
“Of course. And if you would send your Lady’s companion, the man named Kaylar?”
“Kaylan?”
“Yes, I would speak with him next.”
***
Abroath’s throat was as dry as the dust he had turned the undead into and his fatigue was so great he could barely have sat upright but for the support of Elyas at his side.
“You did well, Prior,” the elf said, offering him a gourd to drink from. “You all did.”
Abroath glanced around at the army clerics sitting where they had fallen, as though at the completion of an epic race of many leagues. Archers had flung cloaks around their shoulders to offer the exhausted priests some comfort before they followed the advancing spearman down the valley.
Before them, in the shadowy twilight, the Eastway and its muddy environs were littered with the empty armour of dispelled undead and the hacked remnants of those few who had required a more physical disposal on the end of the polearms of the soldiers of Medyrsalve.
“Drink this, Prior.”
Abroath spluttered as the fiery liquid scorched a pathway to his stomach. “What is this Elyas, do you mean to poison me?” he coughed.
“It will refresh you Prior, lift the weariness so that you can witness our victory at the mouth of the pass,” the elf lieutenant assured. “Come, drink deep, I would join the battle myself before all is done.”
Abroath took another draft of the burning fluid and found, as Elyas had promised, that the heaviness left his limbs and he could stand without aid. At a click of the elf’s fingers a hobiler approached with Elyas’s horse and a pony for the Prior. “Quickly, Prior, they are half a mile down the pass already.”
With returning vigour Abroath followed the elf in a jolting ride down the Eastway, the only ground on which their steeds could be sure of their footing. The elf trotted a length or two ahead, glancing back at the Prior with every stride as though his impatience might drive Abroath to greater speed.
“Go on,” Abroath said. “Do not wait for me.”
“The Captain said I must, you are precious to him.”
“I knew not that Tordil liked me so.”
“He likes your skills master Prior, the ones that took us through the undead into the soft belly of their orcish scum.”
“I didn’t think orcs had soft bellies. I didn’t think they had anything soft,” Abroath called back as his pony gathered pace at some whispered command of Elyas’s.
The frontline had moved further than Elyas had reported, nearly a mile West and several hundred feet lower than the battle’s opening encounter. Torches lit the darkening night as the troops of Medyrsalve and Oostsalve pursued the retreating orcs down the widening gap of Tandar. The increasing breadth of the pass was allowing more troops to deploy in a line that stretched and thinned as the torches of silver and gold steadily followed the loping orcs in their downhill retreat.
“This is not right,” Abroath muttered hauling his pony up short.
“It is entirely right, Prior. The orcs flee and we pursue. They may run faster than men, but they cannot run for ever.”
“Elyas, we were defending a bottle neck at the top of the pass, now we have an extended line halfway down from the peak. In a mile or two more we will be out on the open plain, right where the snake lady has always wanted us. Can Ambrose and Tordil not see that?”
Elyas looked at him oddly, as though belief had not yet caught up with comprehension.
“Elyas, the buggers may run faster downhill. I bet they’ll run faster uphill as well. I’d rather not be retreating uphill through the mud with orcs at our heels as we try to regain the security of the positions we have been lured from.”
“Tordil means to win the war tonight, Prior,” Elyas said.
“Tordil cannot win this war in a single night, Elyas,” Abroath shouted. “But he could lose it.”
***
Niarmit had been watching her for some moments while Hepdida tried to concentrate on the dark bound psalter which Giseanne had loaned her. As a servant’s daughter in Sturmcairn, her letters had always been less important than her looks. Her mother had often said if she concentrated on landing a good husband she would have no need of books. For a Princess it was apparently a different matter. So now Hepdida struggled slowly to make sense of all the swirling decorative words, helped by the fact that the prayers on the pages were ones she had chanted by rote many times in church.
At last she could bear her cousin’s scrutiny no more. “What is it? Why do you stare at me so?”
“You’ve been on that same page for five minutes now.”
“Is it any wonder, with you glaring at me all the time?”
Niarmit frowned, “put the prayer book aside, Hepdida I need to talk to you. There are questions I must ask.”
With cross gratitude Hepdida dropped the book on the seat beside her. Niarmit came and knelt on the rug before her. “What do you want to ask?” the Princess said with a haughtiness she hoped would discourage the enquiry.
“Has Kaylan spoken to you?”
“He speaks to me a lot,” she shrugged.
“I need to know,” Niarmit said. “I need to know what he has said, I need to know what he has….” She stopped her eye catching on something. “What is that mark on your dress?”
“Where?”
“There.” Her cousin pointed out a spot just below her shoulder where the shawl had shifted with her shrug. Hepdida’s eyes widened at the spot of purple on the white silk of the borrowed gown. “What is that?” Niarmit demanded.
“I don’t know.” Hepdida swallowed hard.
“Hepdida,” Niarmit asked heavily. “Has Kaylan given you anything to chew, a white vegetable maybe that he is fond of?”
Hepdida blinked rapidly. “Why would he?” she flung back a question not daring to lie outright to her cousin.
“Why would he indeed?” Niarmit mused aloud as she stood up.
“Was that the question you wanted to ask?” Hepdida said, not liking the frown that darkened her cousin’s face.
“Get back to your psalter Hepdida, a book of prayers might serve us well today.”
***
They stood in a line on their respective steeds. The sequence of the knight’s huge destrier, the elf’s elegant courser and the Prior’s ti
ny pony made for a contrast of scale that would have been comic but for the dire circumstance they faced.
Abroath looked along the line of stationary torches that denoted the waiting lines of human troops. Beyond them the orcs jeered and called from the darkness beyond accurate bowshot. In many ways it was a reprise of the battle’s opening, only without the interposed zombies and this time the human line was longer, thinner and lower and the night was darker.
Tordil scowled. “What now?”
“We wait or we retreat,” Abroath said.
“Incredible,” Sir Ambrose exclaimed on the elf’s other side. “Who would have thought that orcs could retreat with such discipline to draw us from the hills?”
“Anyone who watched the Redfangs at the battle by the Saeth,” Abroath growled, irritated by the incaution of the professional soldiers.
Ambrose gave him a sharp look, “the power of your prayers is great, Prior Abroath, but you should not presume on that basis to lecture us on military matters.”
“Oh but he should, Sir Ambrose,” Tordil said with bitter self-reproach. “The man of cloth speaks wisdom to the men of mail. We have been duped.”
“We cannot retreat,” Ambrose declared. “Not, uphill in the dark and mud. Our lines would splinter and break before we’d gone a hundred yards and the orcs would be in amongst us in an instant.”
“Nor can we advance,” Tordil replied. “Already the pass is broad enough that our men can stand but five ranks deep. Any further and our line will be too thin to hold when they strike back.”
“Then we must stand,” Abroath concluded. “We hold the line in this position, unfavourable as it maybe, and hope to make our withdrawal when daylight comes.”
“It is going to be a long night, Sir Ambrose,” Tordil said.
“Aye, especially when yon green skinned scum realise they have tempted us as far as we will go, and decide this is now their best opportunity to attack.”
***
Once again the delegates and their entourages sat on the fashionable chairs in Rugan’s council chamber. Only this time they shared the space with Rugan’s personal guard. A dozen men in gleaming plate stood by the double doors ready to arrest whichever culprit the Goddess had helped Rhodra to identify.
