The Dread Wyrm

by Miles Cameron

  Mag looked ahead at the line of trees. “Never is a long time,” she said slowly. “And power is even thicker than blood. Ser Gavin is in contact with Gabriel’s mother. I know.” She smiled fastidiously. “Gabriel’s mother is the most powerful of her kind I’ve ever encountered.” She frowned. “Except the former Richard Plangere. As great as Harmodius, but all green.”

  Sauce frowned. “You mean all this—riding on errantry and rescuing princesses and getting contracts—it’s all just another play at power?” She spat. “Fuck. I don’t believe it.”

  Mag laughed. “For the life you’ve led, child, you can be naive. What else is it all for, to the likes of them?”

  “He’s not one of them!” Sauce said.

  Mag sighed. “I suspect I like him as much as you do, sweet,” she said, as she might to a child who’d just had her first courses. “But this is what they do. They are not like you and me. They’re like animals in the Wild. They play for power.”

  Towards evening, the pace picked up, and they moved quickly. Sauce knew from her outriders that they were passing through the battlefield where the drove had been massacred by Outwallers last year, and that no one wanted to camp among the bones and the ghosts. The column began to string out, and a mist rose out of the deep valley of the stream.

  Sauce left the column to check her outriders. Many of her Moreans had never seen woods like this—great beeches and oaks seventy feet high, with a few birches interspersed, the boles so big that two men couldn’t pass their hands around them and the undergrowth almost non-existent, especially under the oaks, although there could be tangles of blown-down limbs or even whole trees uprooted. Maple trees like green cathedrals rose above the beeches. It was beautiful, if you let yourself look.

  Besides the woods, she was still grimly pleased with what she found. The Morean stradiotes knew their business, and their pages were mostly tenants and what an Alban would have called sergeants and what they lacked in experience they made up for in caution. Sauce moved along their line, pleased that each man—no women—kept his partners in sight. Evening made the woods noisy, and there were enough large animals moving to keep the vedettes awake.

  Sauce wished for Gelfred, but the green-clad huntsmen were away. On another mission. Not to be discussed.

  He was playing for power. She saw it now, and it pissed her off. He was doing something he knew the rest of them wouldn’t approve of—which was why he’d split the company. She knew that Ranald and Gelfred and the loathsome Kronmir had all gone somewhere. She had her suspicions that they’d gone south to Harndon.

  These were surface thoughts, because the caution her outriders were showing was infectious, and because she had enough experience of the Wild to know that something was wrong.

  She cantered up behind a pair of her men, Spiro and Stavros, both watching the woods across a glade to the south. Both had their bows in their hands.

  Sauce reined in. “Stavros, back to the wagons, tell Mag we have something—not an alarm, but time to be careful. Then up the column, find the captain and get his arse out here. With my compliments.”

  The man snapped a crisp salute, turned his horse on its hindquarters and raced away.

  Spiro frowned. “Could be a deer,” he admitted.

  Sauce nodded. She was still on her riding horse and sorry for it. “No self-respecting deer would be this close to a moving column,” she said.

  She felt foolish, having ridden out of the column without a heavy lance or her fighting helmet. She loosened her sword in its sheath.

  Something moved across the clearing.

  And the mist was rising. The sun was just on the point of going down to the west—they were late on the road.

  About another hour of light.

  “We’re too exposed here,” she said calmly. “Back away.”

  Spiro was delighted to concur, and they backed their horses among the trees—from copse to copse, one turning and then the other, covering each other.

  Her opinion of Spiro went up and up. She’d barely met him, but he was solid and dependable and his head was everywhere. He was clearly shit-scared, and equally clearly good at dealing with it.

  She saw movement to the west, and then a flash of reassuring scarlet. At the same time she saw her next pair of outriders waving, and she and Spiro bore west and north through a tangled thicket and emerged into another glade. Count Zac was there with four of his men.

  She was so glad to see him that she felt a moment’s disorientation, and then she realized how much terror she’d felt—

  “Ware!” she shouted. Its approach had been gradual, but now she knew the feeling. She’d felt it at Lissen Carak. Some of the creatures of the Wild exuded terror.

  Spiro looked over his shoulder—raised his bow—

  Sauce dragged her sword clear and cut—

  The thing leapt. Sauce smelled the burned soap smell and saw the bright red crest. Her blow was parried with the bronze haft of a heavy stone axe—a magnificent weapon of polished lapis that came back at her like a nightmare.

  The daemon sprouted a feathered shaft. She got her sword on the haft and let the weight of the blow slide off her like water off a roof as her riding horse panicked between her legs—and bolted.

  The daemon—twelve feet of muscled armour and blood-red webbed crest and gills—slammed his lapis axe into Spiro, killing him instantly, crushing his ribs into his heart. Then it rotated its hips, pointed the elegant bronze staff of his axe and a beam of coherent light blew Count Zac out of his saddle. The little man landed like a sack of wheat.

  Sauce was wrestling with her reins. When her palfrey stopped and reared, Sauce rolled over the horse’s rump—in armour—and landed on her feet. She turned.

  The adversarius was forty feet away, twice her height, and glowed with arcane power.

  Sauce had a fortune in wards on her harness—one from Mag and one from the Red Knight himself.

  His blue-white fire struck her in the chest.

  And dispersed.

  “Fuck me,” Sauce said, and charged.

  The daemon shaman hesitated, obviously disconcerted by her attack and the failure of his sorcery. It gathered power—Sauce saw that much.

  A gob of white fire travelled across the shaded glade like a ball thrown by a grown man. It struck the daemon low, on the hip, and the daemon’s belt of what appeared to be emeralds burst into fire.

  The thing stumbled, looked wildly around, and another ball of white fire struck it in the torso just as Sauce’s sword cut at the thing’s outthrust, scaled leg. Blood and fire sprayed in every direction, the axe flashed at Sauce and she slipped her lead foot and made a two-handed cover. The axe slammed into her blade and snapped it, and the point of her own sword cut into her left hand right through a heavy gauntlet.

  But she was otherwise uninjured, and when a third gout of fire struck the daemon, it shuddered and said one word, and was—

  —gone.

  Count Zac was not badly hurt. Spiro, on the other hand, was messily dead. The captain’s post-mortem that night was highly complimentary to Sauce. He ended by saying, “Let’s try not to lose any more.” He shook his head and looked at Mag.

  “I hit the damned thing three times,” Mag said. “It had a layered protection and some serious skills.”

  The captain had a cup of watered wine in his fist and he was sitting in a camp chair with most of his officers. Zac was still in Father Arnaud’s hands.

  “What was it doing out there, alone?” the captain asked. He looked around. “We’re still in the circle.”

  Tom, who was grumpy because he’d missed a fight and grumpier because everyone was praising Sauce, spat. “Wild’s got to have young fools as much as folk,” he said.

  “You’d know,” Sauce said.

  The captain laughed. “I thought you two were sick, or something. I suspect that we are watched. My sense of the arcane in the air is that our daemon came the way he went. That’s why it was so clever of Sauce to understand.”
He looked at Mag.

  Mag nodded. “That’s consistent with what I felt—pulses of potentia. If it was powerful enough, it came—and then went.”

  “The outriders surprised it,” Sauce said. “It didn’t expect resistance so far out from the column.”

  Ser George rolled his eyes. “Once again, the omnipotent captain reads the enemy perfectly.”

  Ser Danved laughed and pounded his saddle. “He does posture on and on…” He looked around.

  Ser Francis Atcourt slapped him on the back. “Don’t worry, he loves being told when he’s posturing,” he said.

  Instead of rising to the quip, Ser Gabriel smiled. “In fact, Master Smythe warned me pretty carefully. I cannot claim this one, and thus I’ll try not to be insufferably glad that a powerful mage-warrior couldn’t even get a view of our column.” He was silent a moment. “We’ll bury Spiro in the morning, and then, I’m afraid, we’ll march the whole company over his grave.”

  Ser Bescanon had fought the Wild most of his youth, but he was shocked. “That’s desecration!” he said.

  The captain shrugged. “Less a desecration than having something dig his corpse up and eat it,” he said. “We’re in the Wild. Let’s keep that in mind.”

  “I miss Morea already,” Ser Michael said. “Everyone remember how we said fighting in Morea was dull? We were fools.”

  The next morning arrived earlier than anyone wanted. And Sauce began to see that Ser Bescanon might have talents in Bad Tom’s direction after all. He had the entire quarter guard out and moving through camp, waking everyone. The captain’s trumpeter sounded the call every minute for ten minutes, and the woods rang with his trumpet. It was freezing cold; wooden buckets had a rime of frost, and the horse lines were horse-huddles.

  It was not their first day on the road, but it was the earliest start with all the new recruits. Tents were slow coming down. Ser Gavin, temporarily in charge of his brother’s household, had trouble finding enough spare bodies to get his brother’s great pavilion packed, and Mag had to shriek like a hen wife to get her wagons packed. The sun climbed in the sky, and Count Zac emerged from Father Arnaud’s tent pale and shaken.

  Sauce threw her arms around him. “I thought you were fucking dead,” she said.

  “Me, too,” Zac admitted. “I owe Kostas the shaman. Big time.”

  Father Arnaud smiled at them both. And then they sensed his attention leaving them, and they both turned.

  A flight of faeries emerged out of the morning mist. They flitted about the clearing, moving rapidly from point to point like cats sniffing out a new house.

  Eventually they gathered into a cloud of colours, a ball of darting and moving shapes. The ball moved cohesively across the clearing.

  No one moved.

  Bad Tom was standing while his squire—Danald Beartooth—laced his byrnie.

  The faerie swarm floated to a stop in front of Bad Tom.

  “We were Hector,” they said. “We remember. We do not forget.”

  Tom flinched. “Hector?” he asked.

  Just for a moment, the swarm took the shape of the dead Drover, Hector Lachlan. “We remember,” they said.

  Bad Tom watched them. “I remember, too,” he said.

  “We wait for you,” they said. “We remember. You are the sword.”

  Tom drew the great sword by his side with a ferocious fluidity, but as quick as he was, the whole cloud of faerie folk was faster.

  His sword glowed in red and green and blue like the shimmer of a peacock. “I’ll be right here waiting for you,” he said. “Come and try me.”

  The faeries seemed to sigh. “The day cometh, man. You are the sword. We remember.”

  And then they flitted away, each one going in a different direction, exploding outwards into the new day.

  One faery, bolder than the others, circled close. But, alone, its voice was so quiet that only Tom could hear it.

  “We will be there for you,” he said, and flitted away.

  Mag looked at Sauce. “I used to love them, as a child. I cried when I realized what they are.”

  Sauce was still locked in an embrace with her lover. “What, then?” she asked.

  “The soul vultures,” Mag said grimly.

  The captain had to ride out and direct the turn-over of the camp-guards to the outriders himself—too many new officers and too many new people. He, too, missed Gelfred.

  A league farther on the road, they passed Gilson’s Hole, a break in the road. The road here had once crossed the wetlands of a large marsh on a causeway, with the upper waters of the Albin to the east, out of sight and farther down. Years and years ago, something had blown a forty-foot hole in the fabric of the road, and a combination of ill luck and botched maintenance attempts had created a hole that filled with water and wouldn’t drain, surrounded by forty bad paths around it through what was increasingly a rank and fetid swamp, not a freshwater marsh—and a settlement had grown on the high ground just to the west and south, where a low ridge offered good air and good grazing, and a higher ridge offered safety. The settlers had specialized in getting cargoes across the hole. There’d been talk of building a bridge. They’d built a small fort on the higher ridge.

  Last year, the Sossag had come and burned the settlement and killed most of the folk. The fort had held through the troubles and some families had survived, but only one family had returned. The goodwife came out of her little stockade to watch the first outriders negotiate the paths around the hole, and she’d sent her eldest boy to guide them. The captain spoke to the boy and gave him six golden ducats to guide the whole column, and it still took them almost the rest of the day to get all the wagons and the drove around it.

  They camped in the clearing, and because they’d had a short day, the captain ordered Oak Pew to gather a work party and clear the burned steads. A hundred men and women made short work of it, stacking the un-ruined boards and heavy house timbers and building bonfires of the rest.

  The goodwife curtsied her thanks. “It’s hard to look at,” she said. “We got away, but others didn’t. And with the—wreck—gone, mayhap other folk’ll settle back.”

  “Do you have a man, Goodwife Gilson?” the captain asked. He was sitting on her firewood porch, drinking his own wine. He’d brought her some. She had twelve children, the oldest daughter old enough and more to be wed, and the youngest son barely out of diapers.

  “He’s hunting,” she said. Only her eyes betrayed her worry. “He’ll be back. Winter was hard.” She eyed the six gold ducats—two years’ income. “I reckon you saved us.”

  The captain waved off her thanks, and after hearing everything she knew about traffic on the road and creatures in the woods, he went back to his own pavilion. The quarter guard was forming, and there were six great bonfires burning, fed from the remnants of twenty houses and twenty firewood piles.

  His brother was sharing his pavilion, and he was standing in front of it in conversation with Ser Danved, who was in full harness, leading the night watch. The captain came up and nodded, intent on his bed.

  Gavin pointed out over the swamp. “This position is nigh impregnable from the north and east,” he said. Out in the swamp, faeries flitted and smaller night insects pulsed with colour. The swamp spread almost a mile north and south, which was why no one had driven a new road around it.

  The sky in the west was still coloured rose, and silhouetted the stockade of the small fort behind them—currently sheltering the baggage and part of the quarter guard, on alert.

  Gabriel looked around in the dusk light, as if seeing it for the first time.

  Ser Danved, who always had a comment for every situation, laughed. “It’s fine if you don’t mind having both of your flanks in the air,” he said. Indeed, at their feet, a small stream—the captain had stepped over it on his way to his tent—ran down from the higher ridge into the swamp, and provided the only cover for the ridge’s northward face on its burbling way to the Albin, miles to the east. “Jesus saviour, this mu
st be the only place in the world with a swamp halfway up a mountain.”

  Bored and tired, the captain shrugged. “If I ever have to fight Morea, I’ll keep it in mind,” he said. He passed into his tent, and caught Danved and Gavin exchanging a look of amusement.

  He ignored them, intent on bed.

  They had two alarms in the night. Both found the captain fully armoured and ready, but there were no attacks and no engagements.

  In the morning, the captain found a splay-footed track just south of the horse lines, and a heavy war arrow. He brought it to Cully, who eyed it and nodded.

  “Canny said he hit something. Even a broken clock is right twice a day, it seems.” Canny was a barracks lawyer and a liar and scarcely the best archer, but the bloody fletches told their own story.

  The captain tossed the arrow in the air and snapped his fingers. The arrow paused—and hung there. The captain passed his hand over the length of the broken arrow and the head flared green.

  Slowly, as if a vat filling with water, something began to form in glittering green and gold, starting from the ground. Soldiers began to gather in the dawn, and there was muttering. The captain seldom used his hermetics in public.

  Mag came and watched him work.

  He was in deep concentration, so she

  found him in his palace. As they had once been bonded—however briefly—she could enter his palace at will. He smiled to see her.

  “A pretty working,” Mag said.

  “Gelfred’s,” he said. “A sort of forensic spell. All the huntsmen have variants of it.”

  She watched him as he manipulated his ops in four dimensions and cast, his use of power sparing and efficient.

  The thing continued to fill with light.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “I have no idea,” he said.

  It had an elongated head and far too many teeth. The head seemed to speak more of fish than of animal—streamlined and armoured. The neck was draconian—long and flexible. The body seemed armoured in heavy shell, at odds with the elegant neck.