He wondered where she was now, wondered if Averan would fare well tonight.
He found his post on the south wall, and there spotted Baron Poll easily enough. Since Carris sat on a lake, and this particular wall faced the waters, no hoardings had been erected between these towers to protect the castle from bombardment. The fat Baron had climbed atop a merlon and sat with his legs dangling over, looking like some glum gargoyle.
Roland would never have dared hang from the wall like that. His fear of heights was such that it made his heart race just to watch a friend sit in that precarious position.
Wisps of fog reached right up to Baron Poll’s feet.
Everywhere out around him the crows and pigeons were flapping about in the upper fog.
When Roland approached, the Baron glimpsed him from the corner of his eye, and his demeanor brightened. He smiled joyfully. “Ah, Roland, my friend, you made it alive after all! I thought Raj Ahten’s men would be using your skull for a drinking cup by now.”
“Not likely,” Roland said with a grin. “They nearly had me, till they saw that my brain was the size of a hazelnut. I guess they figured my skull couldn’t hold enough to make a decent mug. They ran off and left me alone in the woods while they hunted for you.”
“Then where have you been all day?” the Baron asked in astonishment.
“Wandering down in the fog,” Roland answered.
The Baron glanced down at the mist curling just under his toes. He spat over the castle wall. “Aye, a man can’t find himself to pee in this fog. I made my way to the castle well enough, but it helps that I’d lived here half of my life, and so knew the way.”
Roland stood beside the Baron, looked out at the birds
“So, we’re way up here with the birds. Looks as if they don’t dare find a place to roost.”
“Crows,” Baron Poll said with a wise look. He’d been right. The crows knew where to hunt for food, and they knew that a battle was coming.
Baron Poll glanced over his shoulder, up to a tower in the central keep, higher than any other except the Duke’s Keep—the graak’s tower. Dozens of vultures roosted there.
Roland looked out over the mist, wondering how a fog that was so low to the ground could have been so thick. He set his small shield down on a merlon, as if it were some huge curved platter, then placed his mug and his loaf with meat on it, and began to dine. He felt guilty eating such a fine meal when Averan had complained of hunger this morning. Likely the girl would go hungry again tonight. Roland’s own stomach had been cramping as he walked through the fog, but suddenly he remembered that he’d picked some walnuts for Averan and then forgotten them while evading Raj Ahten’s troops. He reached into his pocket and took those with his meal.
He stared across the darkening landscape. He could still see three bluish clouds out there on the downs, but they had moved closer to Carris, and now were but five and a half miles away.
“What news have we?” Roland asked the Baron.
“Little news, much conjecture,” Baron Poll answered. “The fogs out there have been drifting around all day, never quite stopping. They’re like guards marching atop a wall, except that sometimes they come right up to the edge of our own fog, and then they back away. I think that the troops keep moving just in case Lord Paldane should decide to strike.”
“If they’ve come up close by, isn’t it possible that those mists hide nothing but flameweavers, and all of Raj Ahten’s troops are a hundred yards from the castle?”
“It’s possible,” the Baron answered. “I heard dogs yapping in the mist not an hour ago. I suspect that it’s Raj Ahten’s war dogs down there. If you hear anyone scaling the castle wall—grunting, panting—it would be wise to drop a rock on him. But I’m thinking the walls are so slick, not even Raj Ahten’s Invincibles could chance an escalade.”
Roland grunted and merely ate for a while, tearing off chunks of lamb and gravy from his loaf. He saved his cider for last.
“Is it true about the Blue Tower?” Roland asked.
The Baron nodded darkly. “It’s true. Not one in ten of the knights on these walls is worth a damned now.”
“And you?”
“Me? My Dedicates are safely hidden,” the Baron said. “I can still eat rocks for breakfast and crap sand for a week after.”
That was somewhat reassuring, Roland thought. Though the Baron didn’t have an endowment of metabolism, and thus could not match an Invincible’s speed in battle, he had the brawn and grace of a warrior. It was better to have half a warrior next to him than none at all.
“So, what are we protecting?” Roland looked down at the mist. He couldn’t imagine why he’d need to sit atop this wall. No man could have climbed up its plaster surface. Tree frogs might do it, but not men.
“Nothing much,” the Baron said. “The boat docks are on the other side of the castle, up north, and Raj Ahten’s men could try to break in that way. But there’s nothing for us here.”
Roland sat beside the Baron for a long time, neither of them speaking. A chill wind had begun to blow from the east. As it did, the magical fog around the castle blew with it, attenuating to the west, so that it stretched along the folds of lowlands like fingers searching for something in the fields.
The same wind began to blow the blue fog away from the armies of the Invincibles, and some men along the walls chattered excitedly as they saw the first signs of Raj Ahten’s troops.
A pair of frowth giants, each twenty feet tall at the shoulder, paced along the front of the mist. They bore huge brass shields.
At a distance of miles, Roland could not see them well, of course. Even a giant at that distance seemed only a stick figure, and while others shouted that they could see war dogs and Invincibles against a line of trees, Roland could not see anything smaller than the giants.
They looked nothing like a man, any more than a cat or a cow could be compared to a man. Their fur was a tawny gold, shaggy along the arms. Their enormous muzzles were longer than a horse’s, with sharp teeth in long rows, while their small round ears lay flat against their heads. Dark ring mail hid their stubby tails, while they wore shields in rows along their belts. Each giant carried a huge iron-bound stave as a weapon.
To Roland, they looked like some sort of giant rat or ferrin, armed and armored.
In the last light of day, the giants turned their muzzles and stared toward Castle Carris longingly. The mouth of one of them gaped open. A bit later, Roland heard the roar carry across the distance. Roland imagined that the giants were hungry, longing for human flesh.
He finished eating, then strapped his shield over his back, letting it protect him from the bite of the chill wind. Within an hour, he felt miserably cold.
As darkness fell, he suddenly saw lights begin to glow redly through the patch of fog directly to the west. A fire burned there, a big fire.
“That’s the village of Gower’s Ambush, or maybe Settekim,” the Baron said uneasily. Roland wondered why Raj Ahten’s troops had set the village afire, but the answer seemed obvious to everyone else. The flameweavers sacrificed it to the Power that they served. Roland did not much care. He only wished that he could be a little closer to the flames, so that they might warm his hands.
As the darkness deepened, villages off to the north and south also began to go up in flames, and off to the west dry fields burned bright.
It looked as if the flameweavers would raze the whole valley.
A blue spy balloon, shaped like a giant graak, lifted into the air on the eastern shore of Lake Donnestgree at about ten at night. It came hovering over the castle, its shape dark against the stars. The far-seers in the balloon rode the skies at least a thousand yards above the castle, so that no man could shoot them down, no matter how powerful his bow. The wind pushed them along quickly, so that the balloon landed far to the west.
Up and down the ranks, worried men kept saying, “They’re planning something big. Keep your eyes open!”
Word had it from the nor
th that Raj Ahten had let his flameweavers destroy the whole of Castle Longmot. They’d summoned fell creatures that sent a wave of flame washing over the castle, slaying thousands of men.
Such a plan wouldn’t work at Carris, others ventured. Carris was protected by water, while Longmot had only had earth runes carved into it.
Still, the knowledge settled uneasily into Roland’s stomach, along with the lamb and loaf.
Who knew what the flameweavers might do? Perhaps they were burning the countryside in an effort to build up some spell powerful enough so that no water wizard’s ward could repel it.
Yet for hours he kept watch in the bitter cold, and nothing more happened. The fires burned across the fields and hills outside of Carris. The spy balloon flew over twice more during the night.
On the castle walls, men sat above the fog and told tall tales or sang, so that in some ways the long night’s watch took on an almost festive atmosphere.
By the third time the balloon hovered over, at three in the morning, Roland was hunched down behind Baron Poll, shivering violently, wishing for a blanket because with flameweavers about, the Duke had forbidden any fires on the wall, lest the sorcerers turn the fire against its makers.
The Baron just stared up at the damned balloon. “Pshaw,” he said to Roland. “You might as well get some sleep. I’ll wake you if anything happens.”
Trembling from cold, Roland lay with his back to the stone and closed his eyes. It was cold, terribly cold, and he would have slept soundly except for the cold.
He managed to doze in brief snatches, sometimes disturbed by nothing more than the wind or someone bumping against him as they stumbled past in the dark. Once, he woke to hear some nearby fellow with a lute plucking an endless bawdy ballad such as a jester might fancy.
He listened to it only distantly, half-asleep. The song spoke of a running feud between two men in the King’s Guard, and the various embarrassing and dangerous tricks they played on one another.
Roland was not really listening as the tune spoke of a young squire who made a tryst to meet a girl at a pond after dark, only to have his nemesis manage to get the young squire assigned to other duties. Afterward, the nemesis went to the pond himself, under cover of darkness. Roland came fully awake when he recognized a name….
“Then comes the squire, to catch Sir Poll:
and it ain’t a bass he’s kissin’ in the fishin’ hole.
For Poll’s got the squire’s lass,
and he’s making quite a splash,
with his naked little ass—Uh-oh!
Diddly-oh!
Ain’t it funny how the story grows?”
Though Roland came fully awake, he suddenly realized that he’d missed most of the song, for in the next verse, Squire Borenson leapt into the pond and chased Sir Poll “Without any luck, whilst quacking like an angry duck.”
The good squire cornered and stabbed the “foul” Sir Poll, “And his fondest wish was to gut him like a fish.”
But the trollop in the pond managed to “nurse Sir Poll back to life, and become his nagging wife.” Each stanza of the ballad ended with the chorus, “Uh-oh! Diddly-oh! Ain’t it funny how the story grows?”
Roland glanced up to see Baron Poll’s reaction. The old fellow took it stoically. There was nothing he could do, after all. Bards were historians, and songs about living lords could only be sung openly by the King’s consent. Thus, both Roland’s son and Baron Poll had displeased their King enough so that as part of their punishment, their deeds were left open to the “scorn of bards.”
Roland silently wished he’d been awake during the whole song. When Baron Poll had said that Roland would likely hear his story at the mouths of minstrels, Roland hadn’t taken him seriously. Normally, only the most craven enemies of the King were so ridiculed.
But then another thought struck Roland. “Ain’t it funny how the story grows….” Now Roland had come into the story, and maybe someday the bards might sing a verse about him.
Roland finally felt so cold that he made his way back to the baker’s tower, where the heat of the ovens and the smell of baking bread tantalizingly wafted up from below. But far too many men lay there for him to comfortably squeeze in.
He returned to Baron Poll, who said, “Can’t find a warm place to sleep?”
Roland shook his head, too weary to answer.
“Here’s how you do it,” the Baron said. He escorted Roland back to the baker’s tower, and Baron Poll growled, “Up, you slackers! Back to your posts, you lazy dogs, or to a man I’ll throw you from the tower into the drink!”
He aimed a few timid kicks, and in no time at all, dozens of men were scurrying from the warm tower. Baron Poll then bowed to Roland and gestured in a servile manner, like some chamberlain eager to ingratiate a visiting lord. “Your bed, sirrah.”
Roland grinned. Baron Poll was a trickster.
Roland lay down next to the warmth of a chimney, his teeth still chattering, and found it almost too hot. Baron Poll went back to his post. Soon, men began sneaking back to sleep next to Roland.
He lay hoping that sometime before dawn he’d get warm enough to sleep.
But half an hour later, men began to shout when a city to the south was put to the torch. Roland looked up, saw the Baron and other warriors gazing off, the firelight reflecting from their eyes. But he was too tired to watch the flameweaver’s show, and he reasoned that if a huge wave of fire did come sweeping toward the castle, the safest place he could be was down there, hidden behind the stone.
Moments later, he heard a deep rumbling sound that filled the whole sky for sixty seconds. The walls of Carris trembled beneath him, and he could feel the tower sway. People screamed in terror, for Raj Ahten had destroyed Longmot, Tal Rimmon, and other castles by the power of his Voice, and everyone imagined that it was happening to Carris now.
Yet as the rumbling subsided and Carris still held, Roland felt intense relief that lasted for only a few seconds. For immediately the rumbling was followed by the shouts of men on the nearby walls: “Trevorsworthy Castle is down!” “Raj Ahten has come!”
Roland climbed up, and gazed to the south where everyone pointed. There a city burned, flames leaping high into the sky.
Trevorsworthy Castle, four miles to the south, was not nearly as large as Carris, was not even manned, yet Roland had not been able to miss seeing it earlier in the day. It stood on a hill and had risen like a beacon from the fog. Now the hillside roared in an inferno, great clouds of smoke roiling up into the night, while flames licked at them.
In that light, Roland could see what remained of the castle: a heap of stone and a couple of jagged towers and sections of wall. Dust rose from the castle, and even as he watched, a tower leaned over like a drunkard and crumbled in ruin.
Carris had not been the focus of the attack. Trevorsworthy had. Roland ran back to his post.
“Well,” grumbled Baron Poll, “at least he’s given us fair warning.”
“What do you mean?” Roland asked.
“I mean that Raj Ahten’s men have been forced to race at least eighteen hundred miles in the past two weeks, and he knows he can’t run them any farther.” Baron Poll spat over the castle wall. “So he wants a nice cozy place to lay up for a few months, and Carris is the best that Mystarria has to offer.”
“So he wants to take the castle?” Roland asked.
“Of course! If he wanted these castle walls down, they’d be down. Mark my words, he’ll be offering us terms of surrender within the hour.”
“Will Paldane accept?” Roland asked. “He said we’d be down to knife-work by dawn.”
“If he doesn’t surrender,” Baron Poll said, “then just listen for that sound Raj Ahten makes. When you hear it, take a running leap and throw yourself off the castle walls, as far into the water as you’re able. If the fall doesn’t kill you, and a rock doesn’t land on you, and if you don’t drown, you just might make it.”
Roland was stunned.
He w
aited for a long hour, until the sky in the east began to lighten in the cold of dawn.
Roland never saw Raj Ahten draw near the castle, though he saw the work of his flameweavers.
A brilliant glow arose beneath the fog, as if a great fire raged on the ground, but that glow moved forward steadily from the south at the pace of a walking man. Accompanying that glow, Roland could hear the creaking of harnesses, the occasional slap of a shield against a breastplate, a man’s cough or the yap of a dog.
Raj Ahten’s army moved toward Carris almost sullenly, and the troops at Carris accepted them with similar reserve. Duke Paldane and his counselors labored up the stairs above the castle gate, a ragtag band. As they reached the top of the gate, so that Paldane himself could see out over the fog, he shouted, “Archers, make ready! Artillery, take aim!”
Yet Raj Ahten’s progress was undeterred. When the great light reached the causeway west of Carris and suddenly stopped, Roland waited expectantly for Paldane’s artillerymen to open fire, or for Paldane to shout some command.
Instead, the glow beneath the fog intensified, as if the sun itself blazed there for several long moments, until at last pure rays of light began to pierce the opal mists. Roland lifted his arm to shield his eyes. The light burned the magical fog back for a hundred yards in every direction.
There at the end of the causeway sat Raj Ahten on a gray Imperial charger, while two flameweavers blazed beside him, pillars of living fire, naked but for the flames that wreathed them.
Raj Ahten wore a simple footman’s helm and a shirt of black scale mail under a golden silk surcoat. He looked tired, grim.
Roland found that his heart was racing, and his breath came fast. Raj Ahten was the most handsome man he’d ever seen, more glorious than any he’d ever imagined, and completely unanticipated. Roland had expected a man who would be monstrous in form, cruel and deadly.
Yet Raj Ahten seemed to embody everything that Roland had ever hoped for in a lord. He appeared bold and imperious, powerful yet capable of great kindness.
Brotherhood of the Wolf Page 39
