The Dread Wyrm

by Miles Cameron

It crouched, ready to attack, back bent at an unnatural angle, at least to a man, with back-hinged arms and legs.

  They both emerged from their palaces together to look at what he had wrought.

  “What is that thing?” Ser Gavin asked. “I thought I’d seen—everything.”

  Ser Gabriel shrugged. “I suspect that the Wild is much bigger than our notions of everything,” he said. “What is it? It’s the thing that came for our horses last night. Good shooting, Canny. Next time, kill it.”

  He clapped his hands and the sparkling monster vanished and the arrow fell into his hands. He handed it to Wilful Murder. “Put that head on a shaft,” he said. “And keep it to hand.”

  “An’ I know why,” Wilful said. He was pleased to have been picked—it showed.

  The captain got on his riding horse, the last fires were put out, and the column began to ride. Wilful was one of the last men at the fires, and then he used the goodwife’s breakfast fire to get his resin soft. He didn’t leave the clearing until the sheep herd was moving, and he waved to Tom as he cantered past, leaving a mother and twelve scared-looking children alone with the Wild.

  He handed the completed arrow to the captain, and Ser Gabriel took it, said a few terse words in Archaic, and handed it back to Wilful, who put it head up through his belt.

  Six miles on, where the old West Road—really just a trail, and scarcely that—branched towards the tiny settlement at Wilmurt and the Great Rock Lake before plunging north into the High Adnacrags and eventually reaching Ticondaga, the scouts found a man, or the ruins of one. He’d been skinned and put on the trail, a stake through his rectum and emerging from his mouth. His arms and legs were gone.

  Count Zac frowned. “I’ll have the poor bastard cut down and buried,” he said.

  The captain shook his head. “Not until after the column rides past,” he said. “I want them all to see.”

  Ser Michael caught his eye. “The hunter?” he asked quietly.

  Ser Gabriel sighed. “Hell. I didn’t even think. Oh, the poor woman.”

  Ser Michael nodded.

  “I’ll go,” Father Arnaud said. He snapped his fingers and Lord Wimarc, who had joined them with word of the council at the Inn of Dorling, brought him his great helm.

  The captain thought a moment. “Yes. Take Wilful. Get the body down and decently shrouded. Father, offer to take the family with you. Best take a wagon. Drat. This will cost me the day.”

  “It might save your soul,” Father Arnaud said.

  Their gazes crossed.

  “I have to consider the greater good of the greater number,” the captain said calmly.

  “Really?” asked Father Arnaud. “Am I addressing the Red Knight or the Duke of Thrake?”

  The two men sat on their horses, eyes locked.

  “Michael, can you think of a way I can tell the good father that he’s right and still appear all powerful?” He laughed. “Very well, Father. I am suitably chastened. War horse and helmet. Ser Michael, you have the command. If my memory serves there’s a wagon circle about half a league on, just after crossing good water. Give me one of the empty wagons and I’ll take Zac and half his lads.”

  “And me,” Ser Gavin said.

  The captain smiled impishly. “Knights errant,” he said. “Mercy mild. Father Arnaud, Gavin, our lances, and Zac.” He put a hand up. “No more!”

  Other knights volunteered, and Sauce thought they were a pack of tomfools. So did Bad Tom when he came up.

  The “empty” wagons proved to be full to bursting with the loot of southern Thrake, and some very red-faced archers—and men-at-arms—watched their belongings unloaded onto the wet stone road.

  The captain was scathing. “A fine thing if they were to hit us right now,” he said. “Ripped to pieces because we had too much loot. Get it put away, gentlemen. Or dump it in the ditch.” He saluted Ser Michael.

  Ser Michael did not sound like the nice young man they all knew. He sounded like the son of a great noble.

  “Well, gentlemen?” they heard him say. “Time’s passing. I’ll just say a prayer for the captain’s success. And when I’m done, I’ll ask Mag to set fire to anything left on the road. Understand?”

  Mag smiled.

  Sauce laughed. Ten minutes later, moving again, she looked up at the wise woman. “Would you have burned it?” she asked.

  Mag laughed. “With pleasure,” she said.

  Sauce swore. “He sounds like the captain,” she said, waving at Ser Michael.

  Mag laughed again. “He went to all the best schools,” she said.

  The captain took his command lances; Atcourt, Foliak, de Beause and Laternum, as well as the new Occitan knights, Danved Lanval and Bertran Stofal. With Father Arnaud’s lance and Ser Gavin’s and his own, he had a powerful force, and the spring sun glittered on their red and gold as they rode back down the road towards the Hole. Count Zac rode ahead, the red foxtail of his personal standard shining in the sun, and half a dozen of his steppe riders spread through the trees on either side.

  The company archers rode on either side of the wagon. They were all veterans, and Cully, the captain’s archer, was the company master archer. He rode a fine steppe horse and his eyes were everywhere. All of the archers had their bows strung and in their hands. Ricard Lantorn, despite being mounted, had an arrow on the string of his war bow.

  The pages brought up the rear. In the captain’s household, even the pages had bows and light armour, and they, too, were strung and ready. The captain’s caution had communicated itself fully.

  The spring day was pleasant. The sun was high, and the world and the woods seemed at peace. Robins sang in the high branches of the beech wood through which the Royal Road ran. A woodpecker began his endless hammering, searching for early bugs on a tall dead tree. A few early insects droned along the column. The weather was cool enough to make an arming coat and a few pounds of mail and plate seem comfortable. At the clearing, they could see the loom of the Adnacrags in the north—low hills, dark with trees, in the foreground, and farther, the sharper shapes of the high peaks—snow capped, streaked in the dark lines of distant streams.

  The captain rode with his senses stretched.

  His brother glanced over at him.

  “Asleep?” he asked with a smile.

  Gabriel shrugged. “Something is troubling me.”

  “Beyond that we are riding into an ambush?” Ser Gavin asked.

  “That thing—whatever the hell it was,” Gabriel said. “I wish I’d had a corpse. But it’s not from here.” He struggled for words. “And when I think about the things Master Smythe said—I wonder what that means.”

  Gavin gave him a look that suggested that his brother thought that watching the woods for ambush might be more productive.

  “I need to—never mind. I’m not going to be very communicative for a few minutes.” Gabriel shrugged his shoulders, moving the weight of his harness off his hips for a moment.

  “Should we change horses?” Gavin asked.

  Gabriel looked around. “Not yet. I want my charger fresh.”

  All around him were excellent knights who had killed very powerful things. He

  turned inside himself and went into his palace. Everything was there, and he bowed to Prudentia, who smiled.

  “Watch for me, Pru,” he said. “I need to go in there.”

  She turned her ivory head and glanced at the door. “On your head be it,” she said. “It should be safe enough.”

  Very cautiously, like a man approaching a sleeping tiger, Gabriel walked over to the red door. With a deep breath that had no real meaning in the aethereal, he put his hand on the knob and pushed it open.

  Instantly he was in Harmodius’s memory palace. But nothing was crisp and clear except the golden door at his back and Harmodius’s mirror, a device he’d used. It was an internal artefact that allowed the user to “see” any potentia —any workings—cast directly on his person. Harmodius had spent too long imprisoned in another’s f
alse reality to allow himself to ever be fooled in such a way again. Gabriel was briefly surprised that the old man hadn’t taken the artefact with him, but he smiled at the thought—of course, it was a memory artefact.

  Harmodius’s abandoned memory palace stretched away from the centre checkerboard and the free standing mirror to a distant and dusty obscurity, like a summer house infrequently used. Gabriel moved cautiously across the parquetry floor and then—very carefully—began to examine some of the old man’s memories.

  It was very dark, and he could only see things dimly. He was rarely frightened in his memory palace; casting in combat would have been too difficult otherwise, and the lack of time inside the palace usually gave a caster time to be calm and thorough, but here, in this unlit shadow realm of another man’s mind, Gabriel was scared almost to panic. He had no idea what rules guided his passage through Harmodius’s mind or memories. He only knew that as the man had occupied his head for almost a year, the red door must lead here. Harmodius had entered his own memory palace often enough, but this was only the third or fourth time that Gabriel had gone the other way, and the first time since it was—unoccupied.

  And of course, with the guiding light of the other essence gone, it was dark.

  “Summoning,” Gabriel said aloud.

  It grew lighter. And he watched a memory flit across the floor in wisps, like a marred projection or a magic lantern slide with honey on it. It was an interesting memory; Harmodius was sitting with Queen Desiderata in a room and casting. She provided the ops.

  Gabriel watched the summoning. Because it had involved the casting of a form, the memory was very clear, and he could follow the shadows of its casting around the chamber of Harmodius’s mind.

  But the experience began to leach at him somehow. He couldn’t put a finger on the experience to name it, but he felt as if—as if he was Harmodius—so he was not Gabriel. And it was almost physically painful, almost like dreams of leprosy or watching another man get kicked hard in the groin.

  There was more light.

  He stepped towards the golden door, which seemed farther away.

  The lights grew brighter.

  Gabriel moved—decisively. He ran across the tiles, past the mirror and, to his immense relief, the door did not flee before him and he grasped the golden handle. He pulled the door open and found Prudentia standing at the other side with an arm outstretched to him and he stumbled through.

  He stood in his own palace and breathed deep. The sun fell like golden fire from the dome overhead and outside his green door, great gouts of green potentia rolled and seethed like the sea in a storm.

  “Something is coming,” Prudentia said.

  Gabriel patted her ivory hand.

  “Was it bad?” she asked.

  “Whatever that was, it misses its master,” Gabriel said. “I don’t think I could face it again.”

  He surfaced into the real and looked around. It was still a brilliant spring day. Squirrels were running along branches that overhung the road.

  “Stay sharp,” the captain yelled.

  After the captain’s shout, every man looked around carefully, and for fifty jingling strides, the only sounds were those of horse hooves on stone, the woodpecker in the distance and the rattle of armour and horse harness.

  The captain pushed his aethereal sense out as far as he could. He was surprised how far that was. He was not broadcasting—to do so would be to announce his presence as far away as the villages of the Huran. Instead, he listened passively. He was able to detect a strong presence well to the east; another enormous presence the same distance and more to the north that almost had to be his mother.

  The Wyrm was a dull warmth from over the aethereal horizon—a line that had almost nothing to do with the actual horizon. It had never occurred to the captain before that moment to ask why distances and horizons were different in the aethereal, but in that moment, he thought of how he might hide—if he could map the gradients of power.

  Distraction is one of the most dangerous failings in a hermeticist. He was building a mapping process in his memory palace when he realized that his horse had stopped moving.

  Ser Gavin gave him a look left over from childhood. “Fat lot of good you are, my overmighty brother,” he said. “Asleep?”

  Gabriel looked round, disconcerted. The wagon was rolling to a stop in front of the goodwife’s house. The older girl had just run inside, calling for her mother, and the archers were leering. The girl had been on the porch, spinning, wearing only a shift.

  Francis Atcourt was leering, too. Gabriel raised an eyebrow and the dapper knight raised his and grinned.

  “Not something I expect to see in the woods every day—a girl that pretty,” he said.

  Chris Foliak, Atcourt’s usual partner in crime, grunted. “And she’s coming with us,” he said.

  “And we’re protecting her from the monsters,” Ser Gabriel said slowly. “Not, gentlemen, being the monsters ourselves.”

  “I won’t hurt her at all!” Foliak said, grinning. But when he met the captain’s eye, his smile vanished. “Only having a joke, my lord.”

  Gabriel reached out again. There was something—

  Father Arnaud emerged with the goodwife.

  “How can you be sure it was my man?” she asked on the porch.

  “We can’t. But having seen the signs, the captain feels you’re better in the walls of Albinkirk.” Father Arnaud glanced at Ser Gabriel.

  “Shall I describe him for you? The old da, he was not a tall man—”

  Father Arnaud shook his head.

  “But what if there’s some mistake, and I pack and leave?” she asked. “And he comes back looking for his bairns and a spot o’ supper?”

  “Mama,” the older girl said carefully. She had a low voice and she was still wearing only a shift. “Mama, these gentlemen think there’s somewhat unnatural, right here. They want to go. They ain’t stayin’. If’n we want to be with them, we need to go.”

  The goodwife looked around. “It’s me home,” she said quietly.

  “And I hope that in a month you can return to it,” Gabriel said. “But for the moment, ma’am, I’d request you and your oldsters get everything you can into that wagon.”

  The goodwife wrung her hands for as long as a child might take to count ten.

  “Yes,” she said. “But what if it were’n my old man?”

  “We’ll leave a note,” Ser Gabriel said.

  “Ee can’t read,” the goodwife answered. “You take the kiddies and I’ll stay.”

  “I’d rather you came, ma’am,” Ser Gabriel said.

  She went in, and her two eldest, a boy and a girl, went to help. When the girl emerged with the first armload, she was fully dressed in a kirtle and a gown of good wool, which showed that she had some sense, or quick ears.

  The boys began to move wooden crates and trunks into the wagon, and before the sun had sunk a finger’s width, the children—all twelve of them—were up on top of the load.

  “By Saint Eustachios,” the woman said. “It’s lucky we’d scarce unpacked. I hate to leave my good spinning wheel. There it is. And my baskets. Good boy.”

  “You’re coming, then?” asked the captain.

  She looked down. “Children need me,” she said. “The priest says… he says—” She put her head down.

  Father Arnaud looked hurt.

  “War horses,” the captain called. “Three leagues to go and three hours of good light. Let’s move.”

  Cully shook his head. He took a heavy horse-dropper out of his quiver and tucked it through his belt. He exchanged a long look with flap-eared Cuddy, his best mate.

  “Fuck me,” Cuddy said.

  The captain rode with his head down, concentrating. He was nearly sure he’d caught something, or someone, breaking cover—a hermetical power trying to conceal itself.

  Count Zac’s horsemen moved back and forth at the forest edge, winnowing the ground like a team of hayers with scythes. The
y now rode with arrows on their bows, and once, when a deer broke cover, they all shot before they fully identified the threat, or lack thereof. The deer was butchered on the spot—intestines removed, and the rest hung between two of the spare horses.

  “That will attract anything we haven’t already attracted,” Gavin muttered. He scratched his shoulder. Then he reached back under his harness to scratch.

  The captain looked up into the branches and saw the edge of a wing—a flash of a talon.

  “Wyvern!” he called.

  In an instant, every weapon was drawn. Eyes strained towards the sky.

  The Red Knight backed his horse a few steps. “I think it wanted to be seen. And we’re still in the Wyrm’s circle. Someone’s either cocky or insane.”

  Gavin frowned. “Or trying to make our friend show his hand.” His voice was muffled by the pig snout on his bascinet.

  “Move!” called the captain. “Eyes on the woods. Only men on the road watch the sky. Keep moving. Let’s not be out here after dark, eh?”

  “Didn’t Alcaeus get ambushed right here?” Gavin asked.

  “Further east—four hours’ ride from Albinkirk,” Ser Gabriel said. “Drat.”

  “Drat?”

  “I have a flickering contact. There’s something out there, trying not to be seen, but using power. Only a little. It has some sort of ward.” He frowned.

  Ser Gavin rose in his stirrups and looked around.

  Ser Gabriel’s horse plunged forward. “Faster,” he said.

  The wagon team began to canter, and the wagon jolted along the ancient stone road. The horses began to go faster.

  “No bird song,” Ser Gabriel shouted. “Ware!”

  Off to their right, one of Count Zac’s men drew to his cheek, his body arched in his light saddle, and loosed as he rose in his stirrups. He loosed down as if shooting at the ground, and his horse sprang away.

  Something as fast as a rabbit and ten times as large appeared and struck the archer’s horse.

  He loosed his second arrow, point blank, into the thing’s back from above.

  His mare stumbled, and four more of the things hit her, tearing chunks off her haunches. She screamed but lacked the muscles to kick or even stand, and she slumped, and her rider somersaulted clear, drew his sabre and died valiantly, ripped to pieces by a wave of the things—ten or more, as fast as greyhounds but ten times as ferocious.