The Dread Wyrm

by Miles Cameron

  Deep in his helm, Gabriel laughed. “You made me laugh, Gavin. For that alone, I thank you.”

  “Marshal’s telling us to lace up.”

  “Tell him I’ve been laced up an hour.” Gabriel made his horse rear slightly, and the crowd shouted.

  “Get him,” Gavin said.

  Bad Tom leaned in. “Just fewkin’ kill him,” he said. He smiled. “Be a right bastard and put your fewkin’ iron in any way you can and don’t show off or fewk around or act like yersel.” He grinned.

  Gabriel looked at the marshal. He had his baton over his head, and was looking at the King.

  “The moment I have him,” Gabriel said, “go for the Queen.”

  “Even if he has you, boyo,” Bad Tom said. “I can see Ranald fra’ here.”

  The Green Knight flicked his lance at all of his friends.

  He half reared—exactly as the baton dropped his horse’s front hooves were touching the ground. Ataelus exploded forward.

  Gabriel had the sensation that time, rather than stopping, was sliding. As his adversary accelerated, Gabriel lowered his lance point too far, seated the butt of his lance in his lance rest, and let his point drop below the level of his own waist like an utterly inept jouster.

  Any strike at the opposing horse was a foul.

  Everything was moving so fast, yet in the hoof beats before the crossing of the spears, Gabriel felt the entanglement. The world about him was like a lattice of ice crystals—an infinite connection, man to man, thought to thought, earth to horse to lance to plot to consequence.

  He was in it.

  De Rohan’s lance was firm and solid, the steel tip all but invisible as they closed.

  In practice, Gabriel had made this work once in three tries.

  In the half a heartbeat that the spearheads passed one another, Gabriel used the cut-out corner of his shield as a fulcrum to lever his spear point up. His rising spear shaft crossed the oncoming might of the longer shaft, and struck it—hard.

  His motion had been a trifle late, and the Gallish lance caught the bottom left of his great helm, slamming sideways into his head—he relaxed as much as his inner tension would allow, tried to be the jouster that his dead master-at-arms had wanted and that Ser Henri had derided, flowed with his adversary’s blow and in the second half heartbeat his own point caught his adversary in the shield, just over his bridle hand—

  His solid ash lance exploded in his hand—and he was past, the royal box a blur on his left as Ataelus hurtled down the lists. He was the best fighting horse Gabriel had ever had—he slowed without a touch of the rein.

  There were no barriers down the middle, because this was a war joust.

  And his adversary was already coming at him.

  Of course—his lance had not broken. He was choosing to fight continuously, instead of allowing his opponent to re-arm.

  Gabriel dropped the butt of his lance as Ataelus reared and pivoted on his rear legs, front legs kicking. Ataelus let out an equine battle cry, a great scream that filled the air, and then they were straight to a gallop.

  Gabriel drew his long war-sword across his body. He still had his shield. There was something amiss about his adversary—but the man had his spear in its rest, and the point was coming, held across the charging horse’s crupper in the proper way for fighting in the lists—

  Five strides from contact, Gabriel gave Ataelus the slightest right knee and spur, and the horse turned—more of a gliding sidestep—

  —and then another.

  The lance tip now had to track a crossing target—

  Gabriel caught the oncoming lance—off angle, if only slightly—on the forte of his long sword and flipped it aside with an enormous advantage in leverage and Ataelus took one more stride, just threading diagonally past the onrushing white charger so that the two knights passed, not left to left as de Rohan intended, but right to right.

  De Rohan tried to raise the butt of his lance—

  The Green Knight’s pommel smashed into his visor. It did no damage beyond a spectacular flash of sparks—but the pommel slid to the shield side, crossing de Rohan’s neck even as Ataelus turned on his front feet so that the two knights were crushed together for an instant.

  The Green Knight’s arm locked on de Rohan’s head and he crashed to the dust as the Green Knight’s sword arm swept him from his saddle like the closing of an iron gate, wrenching him over the seat of his high saddle and staggering his horse, too, so that it tottered and fell a few steps on.

  Ataelus, fully in hand, finished his turn.

  The Green Knight let Ataelus come to a halt. Twenty feet away, de Rohan clawed his jousting helm off his head and drew his sword. It was clear that his left hand was injured, and blood dripped from his gauntlet and arm.

  De Rohan’s sword went back. He spat. “Fuck it, then,” he said.

  Tom Lachlan and Ser Michael and ten other knights began to ride along the north side of the lists. No one was watching them. Only Ser Gavin stayed in his brother’s box. He was watching the Green Knight with the intensity of a cat watching a mousehole.

  “Do it,” he whispered.

  In the royal box, the King got to his feet. He towered over his courtiers, and he put his hands on the rail of the enclosure and leaned forward as if he would jump the rail.

  Gabriel saw his knights move towards the Queen and he made a decision. He backed Ataelus a dozen steps.

  Fifty paces away, Gavin said, “No. No, Gabriel.”

  The Green Knight unbuckled his great helm, pulled the lace under his chin, and dropped it in the sand. And then he dismounted.

  Gavin shouted, “No! Just kill him!”

  The Green Knight—now only in a steel cap over his aventail—walked carefully across the sand towards his opponent, who held his great sword over his head.

  A hundred paces from the King, Wat Tyler drew his great yew bow all the way to his ear. He raised the head of his arrow four fingers’ breadths above the head of his target. A dozen people saw him.

  No one stopped him.

  He loosed.

  The Green Knight moved forward, passing one foot past the other like a dancer, his shoulders level.

  He pressed straight in, not pausing for the usual circling.

  Again, just as he pressed into de Rohan’s measure, he felt the entanglement.

  He almost flinched. As it was, he was a fraction late catching de Rohan’s great blow—instead of rolling harmlessly off his rising finestre like rain off a good barn roof, the two swords crossed at the hilts, and he was weaker at the bind.

  De Rohan pushed.

  The Green Knight slammed his pommel, two-handed—into the exposed chainmail of the back of de Rohan’s neck even as the Gallish knight snapped a rising cut into his torso, cutting his beautiful green silk surcoat and bruising him.

  De Rohan staggered back.

  Tom Lachlan was a horse-length in front. He had his horse well in hand and unlike Gavin, he trusted his captain to kill the Gallish knight and move on with the plan of the day.

  Bad Tom had no need to wait around while the Galles and their rats came to their senses. Nor did he have any hesitation about killing Albans. Hillmen had been killing Albans for fifty generations.

  He put his spurs to his horse when he was almost a lance length from the first episcopal guardsmen. His black beast seemed more to leap than to gallop, and his lance slew one guard, passing through his crushed breastplate and destroying the hip of the man next to him before the horse was in among them, his hooves like four warhammers.

  Had there not been nine more knights behind Tom Lachlan roaring his cry—“Lachlan for Aa!”—it might have been possible for the twenty or so guardsmen to rally and fight back. Or perhaps not.

  Five of them were messily dead before Michael’s mace crushed a helmet.

  He set his horse at the barrier surrounding the Queen and, armoured knight and all, the gallant animal leaped. He landed and his mace licked out to kill the sergeant who, with more loyalt
y than might have been expected, had moved to put a spear in the Queen. Blanche had the other end of his spear. She was spattered with his death.

  Chris Foliak’s horse made the leap, too, and the dapper knight reached down a hand.

  “A rescue, your grace,” Foliak said. He didn’t await her answer, but pulled her over his saddle.

  Ser Alcaeus, a more prosaic man in every way, had lifted the gate to the barrier with his sword.

  “Bring Blanche!” the Queen shouted, but the knights were all turning their horses, and Blanche had already slipped under the barrier—rescuing herself was her specialty, and the gore of a dozen dead guardsmen might haunt her memory later, but for now she was free, and running. She ran for the end of the lists. Something was happening in the middle—she’d lost track of the fight when the rescue started.

  Thorn stood in the deep woods, a trebuchet’s throw from the walls of Ticondaga, watching the castle and events therein through the lens of the awareness of fifty insects slaved to his will.

  He had moved on from moths. And Ghause was far too busy working to defeat him to watch for his simpler intrusions.

  Yet even as she shored up her castle’s hermetical defences and turned his workings, her attention was elsewhere, and Thorn followed her as avidly as the moths followed a candle, waiting for her to make her great working. He had been ready for days—indeed, Ser Hartmut and Orley importuned him daily about his promises of breaking the castle’s defences. The castle had sent out messengers through hidden passages.

  Thorn cared nothing for any relief force. Ghause, his target, was focused on the Queen in far-off Harndon. He wished he knew why, the more easily to predict her actions. Six months, she had laid a working of such power and complexity that Thorn readily admitted he had underestimated her.

  She was powerful.

  But she had made an error. She had compounded that error. And now, as she watched the Queen’s rescue in her crystal, he watched her.

  Ser Hartmut and Kevin Orley were away to the south of the castle, storming Mount Hope, or so they claimed, intent on taking the one piece of ground that would overlook the castle walls.

  Thorn felt Ash’s imminence before it happened.

  He became as two men—a pair of fools, dressed in faded, tattered motley.

  Both men were juggling arrows.

  And laughing—the sort of horrible, derisive laughter that bullies use to torment victims in the back alleys of the world.

  Tyler’s arrow slammed into the King.

  The King fell.

  Ash began to caper—both of him. “Beat that!” he said. “Do you not think that the silken girdle that binds the robe of Alba is ripped asunder?” His two bodies laughed, and their laughter was a cacophony and a polyphony of laughter. “She thought it was about the woman!” Ash roared in delight, and slapped all his thighs. “I lied to her, and she believed me!”

  Thorn shuddered in distaste, wondering to what he had tied himself. “Tyler is more my creature than yours,” he said.

  Both heads turned. “There are no creatures. The wonder of the thing is that they do it to themselves.” The laughter barked out, mad and high. “Oh, we shall have merry times. Look, Thorn. For all their work, we have just erased Alba as if it had never been—with one arrow.”

  One of him turned a somersault and the other began to juggle swords.

  “But the Queen…” Thorn began—and then he saw it, too.

  “The Queen has only a few hours to live,” the Ashes chortled. “She’ll be killed by her own!”

  De Vrailly could not face humiliation, or people. He walked away—past the royal box, past the horse enclosure at the back, and then west to his own beautiful white pavilion.

  There was no one there to disarm him—no wine, no water.

  He knelt on his prie-dieu.

  He raised his arms, and then, almost without volition, he screamed, “WHY?”

  Amicia rose as she saw de Rohan knocked from his horse. No one would pay her any mind, whether she was be-spelled or not, and she slipped lightly along the bench, cursed by those who needed a better view.

  She was still ten men away when the arrow struck the King. Instantly, she reached out in the aethereal.

  She had healed him before, and had today wiped the drug from his body, so she bounded after him into the dimming darkness of his inner sanctum. He had no talent and so his sanctum had no form—

  The arrow had struck below his heart. Even as she reached for the damage inside him, and tried to slow the tearing of his great heart, he was going.

  Amicia knew what was at stake—the peace of Alba, the lives of innocents. She did what she would not otherwise have, what she had been taught never to do.

  She followed the fleeting shadow that was leaving the sanctum, trying to hold it with one aethereal hand while her other hand bound the damaged vein that gushed blood into the cavity of his body and his lungs.

  For a long breath, all seemed to be in balance. And then she realized that all her balance was a lie, and she was following him down into the darkness.

  She had made a terrible error.

  There was a near-riot around the Queen’s barriers and men were running around the King’s box—it was hard for Gabriel to assess what was happening twenty paces away while keeping his focus on de Rohan.

  “The King is hit!” shouted a man.

  A woman screamed.

  Gabriel felt the ring on his finger burn and a great store of his ops torn away from him.

  Amicia.

  De Rohan read his body language aright, and attacked, a flurry of mighty two-handed strokes. That Gabriel guessed they were fuelled by desperation took nothing from their intensity.

  De Rohan cut from his shoulder—right, left, right, like a strong boy practising at a pell. But de Rohan was the match for any knight. His blows were too hard to ignore, and fast—as fast as Mag’s stitches in fine linen.

  Gabriel gave a step. Then another—his second cover.

  The third fast blow came with a deception, a reversal.

  Part of it hit his skull cap, and he was stunned. But he’d trained to fight when stunned, and his body continued—his left hand grabbed the blade of his sword and he raised it, making any further smashing blows difficult to throw and pointless.

  And now it was Gabriel who was desperate.

  He could feel Amicia—slipping. Somewhere…

  He lost de Rohan’s sword and thrust desperately with his own, and hit something even as he took another blow in the side—this one under his arm. It drew blood, de Rohan’s point pricking through his chain mail.

  With terrifying clarity, he realized that whatever was happening to Amicia was severing her link to him. And his invulnerability.

  De Rohan cut—a flashy lateral cut from the hip that snapped up to be almost vertical. Gabriel counter-cut.

  He and de Rohan came together crossed at the hilts, and de Rohan tried to control his sword at the bind, pushing hard. He had an instant of initiative and he let his sword roll as he stepped, and he slammed his free left hand into de Rohan’s face.

  Blood flowed—

  De Rohan’s blade licked out—creased his cap and cut into his forehead—again. The flow of blood almost blinded him.

  But his experience of near death at the hands of an assassin in Morea steadied him. The wounds to his forehead were not killing blows. His vision functioned.

  De Rohan was very strong, even with his hand wounded. And he threw strong blows.

  “I’ve given him too much time,” Gabriel said in the calm of his palace. He took an instant—no time at all, in the real of the fight—to push all the ops he could easily find—straight down his link to Amicia.

  Then he lowered his sword—all the way to Coda Longa.

  Amicia was on her bridge and yet she was drowning, and there was neither calm nor focus, and her world was utterly black. She had let go of the King—he was gone into the grasp of death, and in her fear and anguish Amicia feared that she, t
oo, was already dead and her disembodied soul was struggling futilely, as she could no longer make any contact with the real.

  But something was keeping her anchored on her bridge. She could feel its aethereal planks under her feet.

  It was utterly black around her, but as she struggled against the dark she saw a flash of pale light—the light of the sun, from the ring on her finger.

  She found the strength to pray.

  The bridge under her feet began to give way.

  She was in the midst of death. She had gone too far—too far, too far.

  For some reason she looked up.

  Above her, in the contradictory way of the aethereal, there was light that never entered the depths where she was. Above her was God’s light, and she was deep into death’s darkness. The darkness seemed heavy and potent, and she imagined that she was past the point from which she could return to air and light, except—except—

  Gabriel’s sword snapped up, low to high, a rising head cut that turned slightly in its last hand’s breadth.

  De Rohan snapped a strong cover, throwing a hard blow at the flat of Gabriel’s sword.

  The Green Knight’s sword snapped aside—driven hard to the outside.

  Gabriel turned it, as he had always intended, the pommel rotating under his hand as the blade rotated on top of it, the point transcribing the base of a cone and the cross guard turning in place until the Green Knight’s sword had changed sides of his adversary’s blade in the beat of a faery’s wing.

  Gabriel reached in with his left hand, caught his own sword point and the middle of his opponent’s blade in the same grip. Ruthlessly, he used his own left hand as a guide, his sharp blade cutting his glove and his hand as his point—neatly guided—slid through de Rohan’s left eye and into his brain.

  De Rohan was dead long before his knees hit the ground.

  Before his head followed his knees, Gabriel was in his own palace and his hands formed a pillar of fire—

  Amicia reached up towards heaven and grasped the rope of green fire that rolled down and took it. Only as her hands closed on it did she know what she had grasped—her working for Gabriel’s invulnerability, which she held in her guard. She was voiding it.