by Dave Duncan
She pulled a face and drank wine as if rinsing away a bad taste. She had been upset enough by Azuolas’s death, and the Long Valley blast must have killed thousands. If she was not aware of that, why did she seem so distressed now?
Snow had stopped falling at Castle Gallant. Anton and Otto were on the roof of the north barbican, inspecting a completed trebuchet. Anton was even congratulating the workers, a courtesy that Otto undoubtedly must have suggested to him, for he would never have thought of it by himself.
Vlad was on foot—which seemed very odd and dangerous—working his way through a litter of broken pine branches that had almost buried the road. He must be in the gorge, where there was no snow falling and not very much light, either. He had a dozen or so men with him, and they were all fighting for every step. What was the big lunk up to? Where were the Wends?
“I agree. Tell me about Elysium.” He waited to see if Justina would answer.
She took a sip of wine. “It’s wherever Lady Umbral happens to be.”
“And Lady Umbral rules the Saints?”
“That brat jabbers far too much. Lady Umbral is our prelate. The pope rules the Church; the voivode rules the Agioi; and Umbral the Saints. People come and go, the names remain.”
“The Saints are a guild of free Speakers, like free masons, bound to no lord?” And the Agioi must be the Greek Orthodox equivalent.
“More or less. The Church captures most Speakers as adolescents; rulers also collect them when they can find them. We survive because we do not raid or proselytize to others. We obey the commandments, and the Church lets us be.”
“But you do favors for rulers, like helping Zdenek out with Castle Gallant.”
“Sometimes,” she admitted.
He suspected that answer fell considerably short of the truth. Helping out kings in trouble would be a highly profitable business.
“So am I to be allowed to join the Saints?”
Justina sighed and refilled her own glass. “No. Your execution of Father Vilhelmas was rank murder. The death of Father Azuolas was another. I have spoken twice with Lady Umbral, and she insists that we cannot shelter a murderer.”
“I see.” Wulf contemplated his future and saw only darkness. No life with Madlenka; no life without her either. How did a man hide from pursuers who could come to him at any time, no matter where he was?
Anton and Otto were still on the roof of the north barbican, staring up the deserted road, waiting for Vlad’s return. The entire sortie party had disappeared into the gorge.
Vlad.… Vlad had stopped trying to force his way through the nightmare of deadfall, and was watching a peculiar struggle going on just ahead of him. It looked as if the sortie had finally made contact with one of the Pomeranians, who had tried to run from them. Three of the Cardicians had gone in pursuit over the obstacle course.
Justina said, “I wish I’d gotten to you before you started killing people.”
“My bite has always been faster than my bark,” Wulf said. “But I’m not making excuses. I am sprung of a warrior line. Magnuses kill men and brag about it over dinner. I saw Marek in danger, so I pulled the trigger. I would do it again. If I must pay the price, I won’t whine about it.”
Justina shook her head, staring at him, but with more pity than disapproval. “You had reasons for both killings. You did not start the aggression. A completely impartial court might levy a lesser penalty than death on you.” She was repeating arguments that Lady Umbral must have already rejected. “The Church is not impartial. You killed two priests. We cannot help you escape from that.”
“Would Zdenek get me a royal pardon, if I saved his castle?”
“He might save you from being hanged, if you’d rather be burned. Royal pardons don’t help if the Church convicts you of heresy or witchcraft. And Zdenek will certainly not admit to employing witchcraft. You’re nothing to do with him, my boy. As of today, he’d never even heard of you.”
Which was exactly what Wulf himself had told Anton.
Stars were wakening in an indigo east. Wulf rose, stretched. He was weary, aching through to the marrow. “Excuse me. I think the war’s over for today.”
She nodded. “I wish I could give you better news, squire.”
“="-">“Not your fault, mine. Is this goodbye?”
“I’m afraid it must be.”
He walked around the table and stooped to kiss her cheek.
“What’s that for?”
“It’s faint, but there’s still a trace of Dobkov in your voice. Thanks for doing what you did, Auntie. I know you’d have helped more if you had been allowed to.”
CHAPTER 18
Wulf went back to the Blue Room. It was cold and almost dark, because it was on an outside wall lit by only a narrow, unglazed loophole. Many hours had passed since he ate Justina’s strange fish soup, but he was too weary to go in search of food.
Anton and Otto still lingered on the barbican roof. They must be really worried about Vlad’s sortie, wondering what was keeping it. Vlad himself.… His men had caught their fleeing Wend and were bringing him in, not gently. There was a lot of guttural shouting in several languages.
Curiosity jabbed Wulf and told him he couldn’t possibly go to bed before he discovered what was going on up there in the gorge. Conscience retorted that to materialize in the middle of a group of workaday men-at-arms would violate the first commandment. But wait … when Wulf himself had returned from Long Valley a few hours ago, he and Copper had not emerged exactly where he had aimed, but nearby. Somehow his Voices protected him from accidentally exposing his powers.
He opened a peephole through limbo some distance away from Vlad and his men, back along the track they had cleared. They all seemed to be engrossed in the prisoner; the light was bad, and the piles of tumbled deadfall were almost head high. Confident that his arrival would be unseen, Wulf enlarged the gap, stepped through, and began picking his way between the heaps of wreckage to join the conference. Soon he was noticed, but attracted no special interest. If the count had sent his squire to check up on them, that was not their concern.
The prisoner, who was being addressed as Lech, was a grubby, heavyset bear of a man. He looked unprepossessing and none too smart. He was far from happy, but everyone else was grinning and chuckling, so the news must be good. Vlad was firing questions, one of the men-at-arms was translating them, and the prisoner’s answers were making the same laborious journey back. By the time Wulf was close enough to make out what was being said, Lech’s presence there was being explained. He was a carter, and he had been at the mouth of the gorge when “the wind came.”
“Says he was sent back to get the oxen, sir. He’s to unyoke them and try to drive them back to the bivouac.”
“He’ll never get them through this muck,” Vlad growled. “Who owns them?”
The question was translated and answered, the answer translated: “He thinks Duke Wartislaw does, sir. He says they’re not his.”
“He’s even more of a fool than he looks. If he’d said they were his I might have let him keep them. Tell him we’re taking him and all that steak back to Gallant.” Vlad glanced around. “We can’t do more here than get ourselves killed. Let’s—” He jumped, rattling his armor, as he discovered Wulf at his elbow. “Where in flames did you come from?”
“Came to see what was keeping you,” Wulf said cheerily. “What’s up?”
“Much what we thought. Back home, everyone. No fight tonight. Go and make your wives happy. And tell Sir Teodor to turn his troop around.” He waved for his men to leave without him. “Come and look at this.” He led Wulf in the opposite direction. “See the trees?”
“Er … no.” Against the last traces of daylight in the western sky, there were no trees. The steep hillsides had been stripped bare. The trees were down here, in the gorge. In pieces. Wulf had only a rough grasp of the lay of the land, but he was sure the wagon he had fired had been at the far end of the gorge, two or three miles from here. The blast couldn�
�t have stripped hills that far away, surely?
But he couldn’t ask Vlad, because the big man was plowing through the branches and debris, evidently returning to some particular place. He was big and clad in steel, heaving debris out of his way like some great impatient bear. Even following in his tracks, Wulf could not go as fast. When Vlad stopped, he had to wait for him to catch up. “Can you hear the waterfall?”
Wulf listened. He heard a million syncopated dripping noises, nothing more.… Possibly voices a long way off. “No.”
“Thunder Falls. Should be right here, Jachym says, and the others agree. The river’s not running.”
“That’s ridiculous! What can stop a river running?”
“You can. Look down here.” What he had brought Wulf to see was under deadfall, almost invisible in the gloom.
Wulf squatted down, then stood up hastily. “Bodies!”
“About three of them, we thought. That’s if you put them back together, they’d make three or a bit more. A horse and a half on top of them, roughly, and then trees on top of that.”
“No!” Wulf said, appalled. “The explosion couldn’t have done this! The powder wagons were miles away.” This was destruction on a scale he could barely imagine. Men torn to pieces?
“The explosion rattled Castle Gallant!” Vlad said with a chuckle. c0em201C;But you’re right. The gunpowder went up very close to their camp, the man says. Lech is his name, Polish. The blast did terrible slaughter, he thinks, but all he truly knows is what happened here. One or two men have gotten across, but there’s still about a thousand men bivouacking on this side tonight, so let’s you and me just creep quietly away and not provoke any nasty reprisals.”
He started to move. Wulf grabbed his steel-plated arm. “This side of what?”
Vlad chuckled. “Of the avalanche. The blast you set off shook the mountains and started an avalanche. The valley’s totally blocked with snow above the falls. A couple of hundred feet high, Lech said, but we caught a glimpse of it and I think he may be short a bit. Who knows? Avalanches start terrible winds, laddie, and this one came crashing down into the gorge. Its wind smashed everything on this side and probably on the other side, too. The debris has dammed the Ruzena.”
It had surely damned Wulfgang Magnus. “Then the lake will rise? And…”
“Not much, we decided. It’s a big lake, the men tell me. But the low point is where the river drains out, so the area just beyond the snow pile is going to fill up. The gorge will become a smaller lake, until the snow melts next summer. If the Dragon isn’t under the snow, or gone over the cliff, it’s going to be underwater, and when the dam breaks it may even get swept away. Don’t make no difference now.”
“We won?” Wulf said, unable to comprehend the scale of this disaster.
Vlad gave him a buffet on the shoulder that almost knocked him over. Luckily the giant was wearing leather gloves, not gauntlets.
“It was you who won, sonny! Duke Wartislaw is either dead or beaten. Wulfgang Magnus, you are the greatest of us all. I couldn’t believe you were going to do what you said you would do with that bed warmer. You’ve got more stomach than a herd of cows. Maybe you were just ignorant and lucky, but that’s true of lots of heroes. You single-handedly stopped thirty thousand men and lifted the siege of Castle Gallant. I’m so proud of you I want to scream your fame to the skies, and I know I mustn’t do that. I tell you, Father would have wept with pride.”
Just a few days ago, Wulf would have burst his heart to earn such words from Vlad. Now they made him feel ill. He was doing the devil’s work.
CHAPTER 19
How many Speakers eavesdropped on that exchange could never be known. As Justina had said, Speakers could not spend all day and night Looking, no matter how interesting the subject, and they were limited to exploiting the points of view of people they knew. Very few had ever met Wulfgang, and although Vlad’s reputation as a warrior had spread all over Christendom, Speakers had little interest in soldiers. Duke Wartislaw undoubtedly had some Speakers with his army, and one or more might have survived the disaster. Cardinal Zdenek’s hirelings were certdom, ainly watching events, and the Church’s huge workforce of Speakers would be keeping watch on Wulf, amassing evidence of his Satanism for future action. Justina was well known among the Saints, and news that the old bird had taken on another hire would have aroused their curiosity. However the news got out, it spread across the continent faster than fire in a powder wagon.
Justina herself was drunk, drunker than she had been in thirty years, still slumped on the bench outside her cottage, trying to get up enough energy to put herself to bed. What a disaster! Those astonishing Magnus brothers, her great-nephews. Ottokar and Anton were still shivering on the roof of the north barbican. Vladislav was apparently interrogating a prisoner in a collapsed forest … and Wulfgang was there with him! Twenty minutes ago the kid had been chalky white and ready to fall over, but he must have found some more energy from somewhere. Ah, youth!
But then her curiosity was aroused by the devastation. In a life of nigh on a hundred years, she had never seen anything quite like that. She watched as the two brothers went off to inspect something. In a few moments she sobered herself with a flash of talent and sat up straight. She heard every word of Vlad’s lecture.
God be praised!
She hurried indoors and changed into a finer cloak and bonnet. She opened a gate through limbo, emerging on a small balcony that seemed to be suspended directly below the stars. Blind until her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she fumbled her way to the solitary high-backed oak chair. She stretched out a hand to find the bell rope and tug it to announce her arrival.
Despite what she had told Wulfgang, Elysium was a real place, the former monastery of St. Pantaleimon, at Meteora, in Thessaly. Although this was not generally known, the original monks had been wiped out by pestilence more than a hundred years earlier, and the Saints had moved in. Like many other religious houses in the area, St. Pantaleimon’s was perched on a sheer rock pillar hundreds of feet high, completely inaccessible to workadays. Food and other supplies had to be hauled up on ropes. Speakers, of course, could enter and leave by way of limbo, bringing most of their food with them.
Vlad was still making his way back to the castle. Wulf was already on the barbican tower with Otto and Anton, reporting what he had seen.
Justina leaned back in the chair, keeping her eyes closed. Darkness or closed eyes made it much harder, although not totally impossible, for would-be eavesdroppers to locate her. Besides, there was nothing out there to see except sky. By daylight, this balcony looked out on the great Thessaly Plain, and some rooms had views of other monasteries on other pillars, but no nosy neighbors were close enough to realize that any dark-clad figure glimpsed at a window or on a terrace might be a woman.
The little hatch behind her slid open. Someone coughed.
“Kristina,” she said. “Greenwood. Nor angels nor principalities.” Her original name, the code word assigned by Cardinal Zdenek, and a Saints password that would fetch Lady Umbral instantly,ralod. N even if she were dancing with her current beau, King Edward of England.
The hatch closed.
Justina made her old bones as comfortable as possible against the oaken back and contemplated her astonishing day. She could not recall one like it in the eighty years since she was jessed.
Now she had a chance to analyze what she had just heard from Vladislav. Perhaps young Wulfgang had worked his miracle with the help of a lot of luck, but the Saints appreciated luck. Some people knew how to use luck and some did not. Luck rubbed off. He had completely changed the game.
Eventually she began to worry. She had used the “angels and principalities” code only twice before in her long service to the Saints, and Lady Umbral had always responded much faster than this. Was Justina being put in her place as a stupid, dithering, sentimental old woman? Worse, was that what she had become? Today was the first time she had ever returned to the prelate to ask for a deci
sion to be reversed, and here she was back yet again. Voices had been raised at their meeting earlier. Had she slid into senility without realizing?
Then she was addressed from the small grille in the wall to her left. “I hope you realize,” said the familiar, faintly mocking voice, “that I was on my way to sup with the pope?”
“I hope I won’t spoil your appetite, my lady. The situation has changed.”
“I made my views quite clear, I think.”
“You did, but I do think you will change them now.”
“I doubt that,” Lady Umbral said impatiently.
Justina wished she could watch the lady’s expression, but a drape hung over the grille on the far side, and Lady Umbral would be sitting in darkness. Elysium had been made as snoop-proof as possible.
“Wulfgang has done what was needed. He went into the Wends’ camp and blew up their powder wagons with hot coals from a bed warmer. We don’t know yet what damage that did directly, but it brought down an avalanche that plugged the pass. He’s dammed the Ruzena River and closed the Silver Road for months or years. The Pomeranian invasion is over.”
“Mother of God!”
In the reigns of three prelates, Justina had never before heard an Umbral blaspheme.
“Wartislaw is totally defeated and may be dead. He must have lost thousands of men, plus his camp and complete artillery train. It’s a rout.”
Umbral laughed. “I grovel! I abase myself! I genuflect to your paramount wisdom. Enlist him! Grab that Magnus boy before Zdenek hears of this. Or the Church.”
The game had changed. The fact was that too many Speakers were half mad, like Leonas, or twisters like Vilhelmas. Honest, effective Speakers were rare and very precious. Justina had been one in her day, and Wulfgang was clearly another. Even the Church might prefer to turn him than burn him now. Negotiation might be possible.
