“That is your dream, not mine,” Thorn said. “Yours and Ser Kevin’s. I gather he won his spurs today?”
“Most men fight well, when the enemy has broken and shows his back,” Ser Hartmut said.
“You mean he did not fight well?” Thorn asked.
Ser Hartmut shrugged. “He killed men as they ran. He had no opportunity to show his metal.” He leaned back. “I ask again—now what?”
Thorn shook his great horned head. “We smash the Inn of Dorling into the earth as a message,” he said. “And then we turn on Albinkirk.”
“Albinkirk and not the Empire?” Ser Hartmut asked. “Must we? The Empire is ours for the plucking.”
“Do you think your compatriot, de Vrailly, will face us?” Thorn shrugged again. “It matters not. Tomorrow, every beast and creature that hears the call of my power in the Hills—aye, and all the way north to the ice—will come to my bidding. The greatest victory won by the Wild in a century.” Thorn straightened, and his stone fists shot up. “Now we will be masters in our own house.”
As if conjured, Ash came. This time, he came like a tail of black cloud—the ash of his name—and he twined about them for a moment before manifesting. He came as a naked man.
Half of him was jet black, and the other half ivory white.
“Oh, the Wyrm will dance to my tune tonight,” he said. “A mighty victory, as men reckon such things. Utterly unimportant in the great turning of the spheres, but what is? Eh? Is anything worth all this striving and dying?” He laughed. “It’s worth it if you win. Not so worth it if you get digested while you’re even a little alive.” He laughed again. “I have waited in this pivot moment for almost an eternity, and never the Wyrm faces me! Storm the Inn and kill all his people.”
“Then Albinkirk?” Thorn asked, gravely.
“Then Lissen Carak, boy. Then we see some real fun.” Ash cackled. “Then I open the gates and let in my allies, and we feast for eternity!” Then, soberly, “You did very well. I like to win. It is so much nicer than losing. Thank you both.”
He vanished.
Farther to the south and west, night was falling on the rout, and tired men gave way to despair, lagged, and were eaten.
Janos Turkos was not yet one of the victims. His Huran warriors had not fought at all, but simply watched the disaster unfold with wary eyes. When the stradiotes began to mount their horses, Big Pine trotted back to the slight rise where the imperial riding officer sat on his small horse and smoked.
“We go,” he said. “You, too, unless you want to be food.” The Imperial Standard had gone down, and there were boglins above them in the great earthworks.
Turkos sighed, barely resisting tears. He knocked the dottle out of his pipe. He hadn’t even drawn his sword, but he knew his duty—to both his Emperor and to his people.
The Huran psiloi were in among the sheepfolds at the leftmost end of the imperial line. Despite hours of effort by boglins and stone trolls and now by the antlered hasternoch, not one Wild creature had flanked the Emperor’s line to find the ambush he had laid for anyone foolish enough to believe that the flank was open.
Long experience of war in the woods had also caused him to secure his retreat. He raised a hunting horn and blew it once.
Two hundred Huran rose from their places—many had lain without moving all day—and ran. They did it with no fuss and no discussion.
Six miles to the south the Huran rallied. It was the place they had chosen, and they ran to it and lay down behind a long stone wall, flanked on one side by a marsh and on the other by a stand of trees—a reaching tendril of the Wild woods that were just in sight across the last miles of downs and green hills.
They had run the six miles in a little less than two hours, without stopping, and now they lay down, drank water, and ate pemmican.
Turkos climbed a tree. When he came down, Big Tree was waiting with crossed arms.
“Going the wrong way,” Big Tree said.
“We are not done yet,” Turkos said. “There’s another army out there—the army our Lord Emperor was supposed to have waited for.” The light was failing, but there were men coming over the green fields. Men, and other things.
“Why do we wait?” Big Tree asked.
“Now we gather survivors, if we can,” he said.
Big Tree looked into the distance and spat on the ground. “Like a busted ambush?” he asked.
Turkos nodded.
The first men to reach them were cavalrymen. Most were survivors of the Scholae. There was a full troop in good order on exhausted horses.
Turkos met them in the field and their officer all but fell from his horse in surprise. “Christ is Risen!” he called. Closer to, Turkos could see the man was a rich aristocrat in a superb scale corselet and filthy silk breeches. The front of his horse was crusty with black blood.
“Dismount!” the man croaked, and his troopers—more than twenty of them—slipped from their saddles. Some slumped to the ground and sat until veterans pushed them and their tired mounts towards the stream.
“Ser Giorgos Comnenos,” the man said. “Thank Christ you are here. I don’t think we could have lasted another hour.” The man was all but crying.
Turkos put his arms around the man, although a stranger. “And the Emperor?” he asked.
Comnenos shrugged. “I have no idea,” he said. “We charged three times. Then the monsters came. I confess—we ran.” He looked off across the hills. “We were lucky—we were in the second line, resting, when the centre broke.”
Comnenos nodded politely to the painted warrior who appeared at his side and offered him a flask of very strong liquor. “You must be Turkos,” he said.
The riding officer bowed. “My apologies—I am Janos Turkos, and I thought we might make a stand here, and see what we could collect.”
Even as he spoke, a Huran gave a long call like a heron, and all the warriors took cover but, again, the men who appeared out of the hillside were imperials—first, some stradiotes from a city regiment, and then some of the moutaineers.
They were hollow-eyed men, who had seen the loss of the centre.
One man begged them to let him go back. “My wife is in the camp!” he cried.
Another, an older mountaineer, insisted that the Emperor was dead.
Big Tree shook his head. “These men are broken,” he said. “We should run.”
Eventually, morning came. Ser Hartmut had slept ill, and he armed in a sullen silence that his squire dared not disturb, mounted his spare horse and rode through the fortified camp his men had constructed, aware of how many men were missing.
He found them at the top of the hill, as he expected—in the wreck of the captured imperial camp. There, thousands of victorious Outwallers and their allies paraded their captives or abused them—three thousand new slaves who had, the day before, been wives or husbands or children and were now mere objects for lust or drudgery.
He watched with disgust as two of his brigans drew their hooked swords and cut at each other over a woman already so abject and destroyed that he wondered she could be the cause of even a moment’s erotic urge, much less a murderous rage.
He reached down and, with a flick of his arming sword, killed her.
She sank forward over her knees, and her head rolled a foot or two before coming to rest, still jetting blood.
Slowly, her body relaxed into the earth in the final embrace of the dead, where every muscle surrenders to gravity.
The two soldiers paused, swords drawn, and looked at him.
“I’ve saved both your lives, you fools,” he said. “Get back to camp.”
An hour later, with a hundred lances at his back and all of Orley’s men, he began to clear the enemy camp. He and his knights systematically killed the enemy’s camp followers and terrified their own allies into quitting the ground. At some point, the routiers and the sailors joined the massacre. It didn’t take as long as he’d expected.
He ordered the whole camp burned, and tu
rned his back on it.
Still there were new faces in his camp—haunted women, mostly young, and a dozen boys. And hundreds—even thousands—of their north Huran allies took their booty, which was by Outwaller standards immense, and their slaves—the cannier warriors had saved them—loaded their horses or their travois, or even their new captives, and abandoned the army, going north.
He went to Thorn.
“You must stop this, or we will have no Outwallers at all,” he said.
Thorn stood on the hillside, looking down at the column of Hurans and other northerners quitting the army. “You know that most of the captives they take will be adopted, and become Huran?” he said. “Unlike your people, who rape their captives to death.”
Ser Hartmut shrugged. “Sure, war has little beauty to it. I believe the poet said it was only sweet to those who’d never had a taste. I propose we attack the head of the column at last light and kill enough of them that the rest get the message.”
Thorn turned his great stony head to look at the Black Knight. “You would massacre our allies to force them back to their allegiance?” he asked. “Are you a complete fool?”
“It would work, given time and a firm hand,” Ser Hartmut insisted.
Thorn’s voice held an unaccustomed bitterness. “It wouldn’t work on the dead ones. I think you still underestimate the stubbornness of the Outwallers. But the thing that surprises me most is that men think I’m evil. That the Wild is the enemy.” His eyes bored into Ser Hartmut’s. “You have just massacred three thousand innocents to make sure your schedule is kept.”
“It is not my schedule, but yours,” Hartmut snapped. “And I merely do the hard things that need doing. I do not enjoy killing children. But sometimes such things must be done. If you are finished with your lilly-white moralizing, perhaps we can get the army into motion—the army that took more losses from defection than from battle.”
“We will gain that many again in new adherents,” Thorn said wearily, as if the process bored him. “They are already coming in.”
“We need to march, nonetheless.” Ser Hartmut was adamant.
Thorn waved a hand. “Let us wait a day. The northern wardens are close—let us at least bring them in.” He paused. “And my master will want to take the Inn.”
Indeed, the Inn still stood, its out-walls untouched, and was still heavily garrisoned. It had taken in many fleeing Morean soldiers and their women.
“An inn? I’ll have it in an hour. Not a full day,” Hartmut spat. “There are other armies in the field. So you have said.”
Thorn stirred. “My master says little.”
Ser Hartmut struggled with his temper and instead said, “Perhaps it is time to collect information ourselves?”
Thorn looked at him a long time. A man screamed—two Galles held him while a dozen boglins began to eat him. Men began to wager.
People laughed.
“This is who people really are, you know,” Hartmut said quietly.
Thorn grunted. “So my master says. The two of you must get along well.” He watched the atrocity and tried to remember who he had once been. He sighed. “I will try and get the wyverns to fly. Their losses have been terrible. All our flying creatures have been decimated.” Thorn shook his head. “I love the wyverns.”
Hartmut spat. “This is not a time for petty likes or dislikes. I’ll speak plainly, Lord Sorcerer. Your master is either mad, or has a plan that does not—mesh—with the plans my own royal master has made—or worse. I suspect betrayal. I wonder at his disinterest in our battle, our victory, the Emperor—I’m not a fool, Lord Sorcerer. He has a different objective than mere military victory.”
Thorn regarded him again for a long time. One of his great arms moved, and his spear-staff traced lines in the leaf mould.
“Beware of voicing such things,” Thorn said. “For myself, I have no doubts.” He looked around. “Put your energies into taking the Inn.”
Thorn turned on his heel and walked away, leaving the Black Knight standing in the leaf mould. He turned to walk away, and a thought struck him, and he paused, looking back.
I am never alone.
There it was, scratched in the dirt.
Hartmut ran two fingers through his black beard.
“By Satan’s crotch,” he whispered. And then, smiled.
Gilson’s Hole—Ser John Crayford
Two days’ march south of the ruin of the imperial camp, Ser John Crayford was sitting, utterly indecisive, in the clearing that had once been the village of Gilson’s Hole.
No one lived there. It was just three good cabins and the ruins of six others, and a common that had once been grass and was now mud and raspberries.
Ser Ricar and Ser Alison—Sauce—reined in by him.
“I mislike it,” he said. He was tired and saddle sore. They’d had two fights in the woods and he’d had to come back to the road—the rain had turned the southern Adnacrags into the Adnabogs, as his archers were saying to each other at every step.
Sauce flipped her great helm back on her shoulders to hang from its strap. “Sun’s a nice change,” she said. “Where the fuck’s the Emperor?”
Ser Ricar shook his head. “What do you intend, John?”
John Crayford shook his head. He unbuckled his chin strap and pulled his light bascinet over his head and gave it to his squire. His face was writ large with his indecision. He leaned forward in his heavy saddle as if he could see through twenty miles of heavy forest and discern what was ahead of him.
“I intend—” he began. He scratched his beard.
“Look,” he said—mostly to Sauce, whose endless and accurate criticisms were a source of real pain. “If the Emperor fights and loses, we could run into the sorcerer—”
“Any fucking time now,” Sauce spat. “I’ve been saying that for two days, and we’re still strung out on a forest road with no front and no cover.”
Passing archers looked away.
Ser John reined in his temper. “But if he’s holding, he’ll need us.”
“Captain said Albinkirk. This ain’t Albinkirk.” Sauce didn’t moderate her tone. “This is a fucking noose, my lord, and you have put our heads all the fucking way in.”
Ser Ricar sighed. “Sauce,” he said quietly.
Sauce took off a gauntlet. She’d hurt her thumb cutting wood—they’d all cut wood in the rain—and it had swelled. “Sorry, John. But what the fuck? I know it’s on you—I know it ain’t my command. But—no offence—fuck the Emperor, one way or t’other. He’s got a third of the company and that’s my business, but the captain said Albinkirk, and here we are, almost to the Inn. Captain’s trying to get the armies to combine.”
There were hoof beats—definite and audible and coming fast, from behind. Count Zac had both ends of the column covered with his superb men and women—Ser John never considered attack.
But he stiffened.
“Twenty men,” he said. “All right, Sauce. We camp. And dig in.”
“Not what I want!” Sauce all but shouted.
“It’s the compromise you get from me. Let Zac make contact with the Emperor. Maybe one of those precious black and white birds will show up with all the answers—but for now, we’ll dig in here with a big marsh covering our front and this nice fort already built and this village for pre-cut logs.”
He turned to Wilful Murder.
“Strip the village. I want redoubts either side of the road on the lower ridge and a palisade.” He waved to the men behind Wilful Murder. “Get all the women and all the wagoners. Cut every tree out to a long bowshot and clear them. Close in, weave me an abattis. Find every thorn-apple you can. Mag—can you get a lot of poison ivy?”
“By our lady, Ser John, you’re a cruel bastard.”
“Aye, madame. We’ll see.” He didn’t grin. “Sauce, I mean to hold here until I know something.”
Sauce saluted crisply. “I’ll shut up and soldier,” she said, but muttered, “Captain said Albinkirk.”
As if she’d said a charm, the riders burst from the far tree line into the remains of the little village. She knew Bad Tom instantly, and so did Ser John.
Tom Lachlan rode into the command group on a horse so tired that it had foam flecks at the corners of its mouth. He dismounted as soon as he rode in among them.
“Sauce, you’re a sight for sore eyes.” He grinned, and she leaned down and kissed him.
He turned. “What news? Oh, aye, and the cap’n was rather expecting you to be closer to Albinkirk, like.”
“So I’m told,” Ser John said.
“Well, this is better for me,” Tom said. “I’ve orders to go save the Emperor from his own wee daft heid, so to speak. And raise the Hills.” He looked around.
“The Emperor made it to the Inn of Dorling. That’s our last word,” Ser John said. “He was supposed to march for Albinkirk.”
Tom grinned. “Aye, well, that could be said o’ others, too, eh, Ser John?”
Ser Ricar made a visible effort to stifle a laugh.
Tom took in the work around the clearing—the thud of axes, and the six men with chalk lines at work on the areas either side of the road on the low ridge that dominated the Hole.
“Digging in?” he asked.
Ser John nodded.
Tom looked at the sky. “When did you hear the Emperor was at Dorling?”
“Two days ago,” Ser John said. “No imperial messengers since then.”
Tom shrugged. “I know another way to Dorling,” he said. “The high drove road—the way Hector took. Gi’ my lads a change o’ horseflesh and we’re away.”
Ser Ricar frowned. “Christ’s wounds, Ser Thomas! We could use a sword as strong as yours.”
Bad Tom laughed. “If you’re lucky, you won’t need me at all—but I’ll need you. Where’s Zac?” he asked Sauce.
“Out ahead—on the road to Dorling,” she said.
Bad Tom made a grunting noise. “Aweel, aweel, my lads and lasses. I’ll away then. I was going to ask for the loan of him, but I can’t wait.”
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