Priest (Ratcatchers Book 1)

by Matthew Colville

  “Oh,” Heden said, deflating a little.

  “Ah-hah,” Renaldo said. “You know something of their conspicuous absence.”

  “Not yet,” Heden said. “But I think I will soon. It’s why I’m here.”

  “I think I understand. Well good luck finding them, my friend,” Renaldo played a little tune.

  “Why?” Heden asked, frowning.

  “Because the forest will not permit it.”

  Renaldo played softly, looking down at his instrument. Heden didn’t say anything for a few moments, he just stared at a point on the wall a few feet behind Renaldo.

  “Wonderful,” Heden said.

  Renaldo stopped playing and laughed. “You have a unique sense of humor brother Heden.”

  “A thousand people waiting to be crushed by an army of urmen’s not my idea of funny.”

  “Ah well,” Renaldo said, “as to that. These people have been saved by the order before. That they cannot contact these knights is strange, but it does not worry them overmuch.”

  “What did you mean by ‘the forest will not permit it?’” Heden asked. Knowing the wode, he anticipated a gruesome answer.

  “The baron sends men into the forest to find the order’s priory. Their gathering place.”

  “I know what a priory is.”

  “Of course you do. My pardon. They return unscathed but unfulfilled.”

  “Well,” Heden said and reached out to take a swallow from Renaldo’s wine, “could be worse.” The wine was fantastic, better than anything he had at the Hammer. He looked at the bottle and noted it bore a faded Riojan label. He decided not to ask how this man traveled thousands of miles with his own bottle of wine.

  “How long until the urmen?”

  Renaldo shrugged. “How to tell? Days it seems.”

  “Days,” Heden said.

  “A few days.”

  “You’re not worried about a thousand urq days away from crushing this place?”

  Renaldo’s head lifted from concentrating on the strings of his lute, and he looked off into the distance as he considered Heden’s question. He pursed his lips.

  “No,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “Oh,” Renaldo said, “because I will run away.”

  Heden nodded as if confirming a suspicion. “Smart,” he said, looking at the townsfolk.

  Then he looked out the corner of his eye, suspicious of the minstrel’s motivations.

  “So why not run now?” Heden asked, and turned back to confront the minstrel.

  Renaldo appeared to be ignoring him.

  “How much money are you going to make in the next few days?” Heden asked. “And do you need it? Why are you still here, Renaldo de Merisi?”

  Renaldo sighed and lay his lute in his lap, cocking his head as he looked back at Heden.

  “Very well, you have me. I hope to convince these people to flee.”

  Heden sat back, smiling smugly.

  “Seems somewhat out of character, don’t you think?”

  Renaldo frowned. “I enjoy casting against type,” he said. “Like you, I fear the knights will not come, in which case the only hope these poor idiots have is flight. I sing them songs to highlight the wisdom of saving one’s own skin. They, of course, do not realize my intent, or my meaning. I find being direct so artless.” He smiled widely bearing perfect white teeth. “They know only that the songs are brilliant.”

  Heden nodded, humoring him. “Brilliant,” he said.

  Renaldo looked at him, studied his face.

  “You will head into the forest looking for this Order Green,” Renaldo predicted, his brow furrowed as he played out the events of the next few days. “Tell me, my friend. Do you think it likely your immediate future holds tales of adventure, heroism, and miraculous deeds?”

  Heden stared at the Riojan.

  “I don’t know,” he said, looking at the bar. He turned back to Renaldo and looked at him with misery. “Probably.”

  Renaldo smiled slowly until his grin turned into a hungry, feral thing.

  “Then I must attend you. Your death will, I surmise, fuel an excellent tale.”

  “My death,” Heden said.

  “I am an optimist,” Renaldo said, shrugging. “Heroic tragedies are very popular in my homeland right now.”

  He adjusted his instrument and began to play. “Please come find me once the baron is done with you!”

  “What?” Heden asked. Renaldo looked meaningfully behind Heden.

  There were two guards behind him, one at each elbow.

  “Hallo sunshine,” one of the guards said with a mean smile. “Now why don’t you stop bothering our little sparrow here and come with us?”

  Heden turned slowly and looked at the two men, each taller than Heden. One round and old, the other whip-thin and young. He pointed at the fat one.

  “I know you,” Heden said. “You were at the town gate.”

  “That’s right. And I don’t know you. The baron likes to meet new people,” the thick man said, smiling.

  “Oh. Good.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  The baron was a baroness. Heden wondered why no one seemed to use the gendered term.

  She and two advisors stood behind a large oak desk at which sat a bald, elderly monk who scratched ink onto vellum. It was likely, Heden thought, that the baron could not read. Literacy had never caught on here at the fringes of civilization. The writings would be posted, but first a crier would read them to a gathered throng. There was a time when this would have seemed hopelessly backward to Heden. Now he experienced a mixture of nostalgia and respect. Things here hadn’t changed in a long time, because they didn’t need to.

  He waited, eyes cast down, listening to the baron’s voice as she took advice from her privy council. One old man with white hair and a long robe, and a man Heden’s age who wore a breastplate and a mace at his side. A talisman around his neck. A wizard and a priest. Heden frowned, wondering what Renaldo would think.

  The baron looked ten years older than Heden and, while all the noblemen he’d ever met wore plated armor over chain and leather, she was sporting scale armor, which Heden had only ever seen in paintings and tapestries. The scales were white and Heden wondered what they were made of. They fit her well, which Heden wondered at because he suspected the armor was very old. She seemed fit and capable. Her straight hair was cut just below her ears in the classical Golish style. She had that bronze-skinned, black-haired look of the ancient Gol that bred true every few generations. Heden thought she was probably proud of her heritage.

  She was talking about drunkenness and curfew during the siege. There was a stack of already finished proclamations and Heden recognized she was anticipating the next week or two’s events and preparing documents now while she could.

  The two guards stood behind Heden in the large stone room, the ceiling an impressive thirty feet high. Shafts of pale light stabbing through tall, narrow windows onto a once ornate faded rug.

  He listened to several proclamations, all very pragmatic, and then she finished. She looked at the guards. They shoved Heden forward.

  Heden remembered his etiquette, bowed, and said “Thank you for receiving me, milady.”

  The baron tilted her head to one side and examined Heden for a few moments, then looked at one of the guards.

  “He was talking to that little birdie they’ve got down at the Turnip.”

  The baron turned to the old man.

  “The Riojan, milady. Renaldo,” the wizard-looking fellow said.

  The baron nodded. She walked around the front of the large oak table the scribe sat scribbling at, and leaned back against its edge, bracing herself with her hands, legs crossed at the ankles. In spite of her Golish heritage, her ancient armor, and her even more ancient castle, she had to Heden’s eye a very modern attitude.

  “Are you a friend of the minstrel’s?” she asked.

  “No milady,” Heden responded.

  “Just…plying h
im for information?”

  Heden shrugged.

  The baron shot a look at the head guard, who lunged forward and bashed the back of Heden’s neck with his mailed elbow, causing Heden to stumble forward.

  “When the baron asks you a question, you better come up with a fucking answer,” the guard said, his voice thick and meaty.

  The baron frowned at him, and he stepped back a pace.

  Heden, hand to his neck, slowly straightened up and turned to stare at the guard.

  The guard tried to stare back, but after a moment seemed to doubt himself and looked at the baron for help.

  Heden turned back to the baron.

  “Your people are under a lot of stress,” Heden said, looking at the light coming in the window. “There’s a siege coming, everyone’s talking about it. People may die.” He looked at the baron. “But you tell your warthog there that if he touches me again he won’t have to worry about the siege because I will put him on his ass and he will not get up.”

  The guard stepped forward ready for violence but the baron made a gesture and cut him off.

  The almost-certainly priest walked to the side of the table and looked at Heden with scorn.

  “Someone called you a priest,” the man said with disdain in what seemed to Heden an affected noble accent.

  Heden gave the man a pained look. He didn’t say anything.

  “Well man, speak up. You have no chasuble, no raiment. What manner of priest did you claim to be?”

  “I was made a Prelate five years ago,” Heden said. True.

  The baroness looked at him with something approaching hunger. The man with the mace stepped back a pace unconsciously.

  “My advisor,” the baron said, appearing to take a little pleasure from the confrontation. “Deacon Owlsley.” With her northern accent, it sounded to Heden like ‘woolsley.’

  “A Prelate five years ago,” she repeated. “And now?”

  “I’m seconded to Bishop Conmonoc, Hierarch of the Church of Cavall the Righteous.” Also true.

  She looked at her Deacon for confirmation. Owlsey’s mouth was open; he seemed to be having trouble breathing. He saw his baron’s expression and closed his mouth. Composed himself. He concentrated.

  Heden could tell Owlsley believed him even before he prayed. When you sense truth for a living, you developed a quick instinct for it. A whispered prayer and the Deacon nodded to the baron.

  The baron was impressed and looked at Heden as though he was a statue made of gold and she planned on melting him down and spending him.

  “What saint do you follow?” she asked.

  Heden took a weary breath. “Saint Lynwen.”

  The baron shook her head and looked at her priest. He shook his head once.

  “She’s obscure,” Heden explained. True. He omitted the fact that he was her only follower.

  “What is your name?”

  He told her.

  “Heden, you come to us in a time of dire need.”

  I bet, Heden thought.

  “Everyone believes there’s an army of urmen on their way here,” Heden said.

  The baron nodded.

  “Have you seen them?”

  “My scouts have. My wizard has scryed them,” she said, indicating the older man behind her.

  “How many do you estimate?” Heden asked, expecting the answer to be in the hundreds. The number he heard outside the gate, a thousand, was an exaggeration.

  “Five thousand.”

  Heden didn’t say anything. His expression didn’t change. But his sense of ease and his relaxed attitude faded. Only someone who knew him would notice it.

  He frowned, remembering something.

  “You normally rely on the Green Order to defend you.”

  The baron nodded.

  “But there are only nine of them.”

  “They are the greatest knights on life,” she said simply. “A single member of the order could hold off hundreds of lesser beings.”

  Lesser beings.

  Training to be a knight took years, it included at least a year questing as a Knight errant. The same urman that threatened a famer’s life, his family, was a nuisance to a well-trained knight. But nine against five thousand? He conceded it was possible. The Mirror Circle could do it. The White Hart certainly. But they were the king’s personal guard. How could an order out here in the middle of nowhere…? Something didn’t fit.

  “Where are they now?”

  “There has been a death,” the baron said. “And since then, nothing.”

  She knows about the death, Heden thought, and remembered the one milky white holly berry.

  “The minstrel said you haven’t been able to contact them. Said something about the forest not permitting it.”

  The baron ignored the question. She sighed and turned to the scrolls she’d been dictating and, almost absently, asked; “how much do you know about the urmen?”

  Heden looked around for a place to sit, and noted the guard scowling behind him.

  “I know they were created by the dragons in mockery of men,” he said. Everyone in the room looked at him, surprised.

  “Is that true?” the baron asked her advisors. They indicated this was the first they’d heard of it.

  “Possibly an ancient legend, milady,” the wizard said.

  “They live short lives,” Heden continued, ignoring the wizard who, at least, was not affecting an accent above his station. “Thirty years. And they war constantly. Your son or daughter might take a year to learn to walk. An urq can walk and talk a week after they’re born. The only thing they understand is strength. The strong lead, the weak are killed. They’re smart. You can treat with them but it’s rare. They hate humans and don’t really…they’ve never understood what makes humans strong. Or believe humans can be strong. And they don’t live long enough to learn. They take what they want, or die trying.”

  The baron was obviously impressed. She looked at her wizard disparagingly.

  “You speak of negotiation,” the wizard intoned, trying to control the conversation and make up what he had lost in his master’s eye. “What, in your expert opinion, would they want in return for sparing us?”

  The baron turned back to Heden hoping for an answer. A solution.

  Heden shrugged. “The dragons created them to hate humans. It’s in their blood. An individual might decide different but as a race…” Heden pursed his lips and shook his head dismissively. “They’re driven to attack whatever humans hold. And,” he added casually, “it gives them something to do.”

  “Like building castles,” the baron said, wryly.

  “Better to be fighting you than each other. Every few years a strong leader comes around, unites the tribes….” Heden stopped, the conclusion was obvious. “I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often up here.”

  “The order,” the baron said. Heden was still skeptical. Something was missing from the equation. Nine men and woman holding back everything that called the Forest home?

  “Could you stop them?” she asked.

  Heden stared at her.

  “Could I stop five thousand urmen?”

  “Yes.”

  Heden’s eyes darted around the room, looking for any sign of sanity. Everyone was looking at him expectantly. “No.”

  “He could do it,” the deacon snapped. He seemed to Heden afraid.

  “You’re mad,” Heden said, as though identifying the man’s country of origin.

  “A Prelate of Cavall could summon a Dominion. A whole army of Dominions. He could…” the deacon stopped talking to the room and spoke directly to Heden. Any fear of Heden, any embarrassment at being made to look the fool was gone. This was a man begging for his life. “Listen man, you could take our men and pray and bless them until each was worth ten urmen.”

  Heden stared at him as though he’d gone insane.

  “It doesn’t work that way,” Heden said. “You should…” he looked at the baron. “He should know better. Is this w
hat you’ve got?”

  She ignored him.

  “You would have the use of my men,” she said.

  “Your men?” Heden asked, skeptical.

  “Yes.”

  “How many men do you have?” Heden asked, keen to hear the answer, showing a little anger at the irresponsibility in evidence.

  “Two hundred regulars and maybe four hundred peasant levies.”

  “You’d need at least a thousand,” Heden said. “Ten units of trained and experienced solders, forget farmers with pitchforks. Inside a Gol keep, with foreknowledge of the army, a thousand soldiers could defend five thousand urmen. Until you ran out of food, but the urq don’t like long sieges.”

  “I have six hundred.”

  “Then you need to get your people out of here.”

  “That’s been suggested.”

  “Good.”

  “It’s too late,” the baron concluded. “We couldn’t move fast enough.”

  “Why did you wait?” Heden demanded. “You’ve sentenced these people to death, what did you think was going to happen!?”

  “One does not address the baron in that manner!” The wizard said. Heden ignored him and locked eyes with the baron.

  She just looked at him, her jaw set, her mouth a thin pursed line, but her eyes pleading.

  “The Green Order,” Heden said for her. She didn’t object. She at least had the decency to appear regretful. Shamed. Heden thought for a moment.

  “Alright, here’s what you do. You tell your people to scatter. Run like mad for any town in any direction. Don’t let them group up. Send your men in squads with them, give them orders so they make sure the people don’t end up running to the same place. Confuse the enemy. Make them split their forces. The urmen won’t know what to do when they leave the forest, they don’t like plains. They’ll probably still take the keep even if it’s empty. They’re stupid that way.”

  The wizard and the deacon both looked expectantly at the baron. They were hoping she’d take the advice.

  The baron ignored them and held Heden’s gaze. “We’re going to wait here.”

  “What?”

  “The Green is out there, they have to come. It’s their oath.”

  “Their oath?” Heden repeated.