Sauce frowned. “Stay the night and listen for the news.”
Tom shook his head. “I fear the worst. Woods is silent—not an irk, not a boglin. Eh? No Outwallers. Eh? I need to know now. My kin are at the Inn and above it, and I won’t leave ’em. And the cap’n told me to raise the folk—and that the Wyrm might not be able to help.” He turned to Ser John. “Want my advice?”
John looked at the big man. “Yes,” he said, not sure what he wanted.
“Dig in, wait one day, and then get gone. If the Emperor’s coming, he’ll be here tomorrow noon at the latest. If he’s not coming, he’s been eaten. Captain’s sometimes wrong, but he says the fight’s at Albinkirk.”
“You’re going the wrong way, then,” Sauce said.
“Hillmen sail the Wild like Outwallers,” Tom said. “Look for me and my folk at Albinkirk.”
Ser Ricar leaned over. “I’m sorry to hold you, Tom, but… messages said the King is dead? The Queen has borne an heir?” He was very hesitant.
A hush fell. They were all King’s men, except the company people, and before Ser Ricar—the King’s Lieutenant in the North—was done speaking, a crowd was forming.
Lord Wishart brought Tom a big stallion.
Sauce caught his hand. “These men need to know, Tom,” she said.
He nodded and pursed his lips like a girl. He stood, lost in thought a moment.
The sound of axes stopped.
He mounted, a sudden explosion of movement.
“I was there,” he roared, in his “Lachlan for Aye” voice. “I was there when the Queen bore her son. I was there when the King died, killed by an assassin. Both of these things, I saw with my own ee’en. The Queen has appointed ministers. There are writs. The law functions. The Galles are beaten by now—I hope. And the Queen lives and breathes and has the King’s son by her side and at her breast, and any man who doubts, come and sing to my sword.”
Three thousand collective sighs. And then a cheer.
“Three cheers for the Queen!” Ser Ricar roared. “And the new King!”
“I didn’t know you could give a speech,” Sauce said mockingly when the cheers had finished.
Tom flicked her an equally mocking salute. “See you at Albinkirk,” he said.
At his back, Donald Dhu and all his tail roared, swallowed their last wine, and rode away—south. There wasn’t even a trail.
“South?” Ser John asked.
Sauce shrugged. “Let’s dig,” she said.
An hour later, a red-eyed Count Zac came in. At his back were thirty shattered Nordikaan guards on foundering horses.
Harald Derkensun fell to his knees trying to pull the Emperor from his horse, and all the guard were weeping.
Sauce was there in an instant, with Mag right behind her, but they were far, far too late.
The Emperor was dead.
“Our army is destroyed, and the Inn of Dorling lost,” Derkensun said. “All our camp. Our people. Gone.” He made a terrible noise in his throat. “I’d rather be dead.”
The Emperor’s face was as serene in death as it had always been in life.
“How’d—?” Ser Ricar began, but Ser John put a hand on his arm.
He went and held the Nordikaan for a moment. “All safe now,” he said. “We’ll beat them. And have our revenge.”
And the Nordikaans behind Derkensun nodded.
All night long, men came in. Some came in in detachments, like soldiers, riding tired horses but with their heads up—a full troop of city cavalry under a dukas, and twenty Vardariotes under a woman they called Lyka. But most were beaten men without weapons, or hope—men who had, in running, abandoned their wives and children to a horrific fate, and now had to live with their failure. There were men with wounds, and men who had abandoned friends to die. They brought fear and terror and self-loathing.
Ser John was an old, hard soldier, and he had Count Zac separate them from his own people by a wide margin. He sent them food and blankets and hot coals to make fires.
When morning came, he ignored their pleas and made them cut trees, and dig. He pushed his scouts as far north as they dared go, so far that they were in constant contact with the boglins and worse creatures suddenly loose across the hills.
He sent a steady stream of mounted messengers back to Albinkirk.
Morning wore on, and still the Moreans came in—more than two thousand already.
“Time to go,” Sauce said.
Ser John shook his head. His mind was made up, now. He knew what he was about. “Not as long as we can cover these poor bastards, Sauce. Two days or three, and we’ll have saved enough to make an army.” He pointed at a file of Morean women who’d stolen horses in the rout and ridden for two days. “That woman says they were saved by what they called ‘the rearguard.’ So out there somewhere is a formed body, still fighting.”
“An army of wretched men who ran away?” she asked with contempt. “And a handful dying…”
“Sooner or later, everyone runs, even you.” Ser John made a face. “They lost everything. That makes them very dangerous. And every day that the sorcerer doesn’t come down this road is a day we get more of them. And then…” He paused. “There’s your Ser Milus. Where is he?”
Sauce chewed on the end of her hair. “That’s a very good question,” she said. “Two hundred lances, and they wasn’t in the rout. Where are they?”
The second full day at the Hole, and the insects were the worst they’d ever been—clouds of mosquitoes and some black flies rising like an evil miasma off the swamp water. From the north, no news. More refugees, and a steady trickle of desperate routiers, looking for salvation beyond hope and finding it in Sauce’s hard-eyed pickets.
At noon, a single rider came in from the west, moving at a dead gallop with three riderless horses behind him.
“Galahad D’Acon, as I live and breathe,” Ser John said, offering the boy a glass of the diminishing store of red wine.
The young man took the wine, drank it straight off, and sat rather suddenly. “The Queen is one day short of Albinkirk. She’ll reach it tonight,” he said. “She’s raised the Royal Standard at Sixth Bridge, and the Red Knight’s got five hundred lances. He says, he asks all your intelligence and all your guidance.”
Sauce leaned in. “He didn’t say, get your arse back to Albinkirk?”
Galahad managed not to smile. “He said that as a veteran captain, Ser John doubtless had his reasons, and would he be so kind as to communicate them. The Queen adds she has made you Count John of Albinkirk.” D’Acon reached into his belt pouch and took forth a chain, which he deftly put over the older man’s head.
Ser John was struck dumb. A life of the comparative indifference of princes had not prepared him for any kind of promotion.
“Go to bed, son,” Ser Ricar said to the young man, “and we’ll send a rider—”
“Saving your pardon, my lord, but I’m magicked, or hermeticized, with some working that makes me—unseelie the enemy. And I’m under orders to take your best reports and return.” D’Acon shrugged. “Certes I was little troubled on my way here.”
Ser John snapped his fingers. “If there’s an army behind us,” he said.
Even Sauce looked different. She grinned. “Now we’ve got something.”
Strong in the knowledge that the company was behind him, Count John of Albinkirk threw his best knights forward in the early afternoon, and by the fortune of war they rescued the imperial rearguard—two hundred Hurans under a war chief and an imperial officer, and another hundred mixed imperial cavalrymen. It was a small victory, but they stung the pursuers, charging into an open rabble of boglins and enemy Outwallers on both sides of the road and sending them, in turn, running. But the woods behind them were alive with monsters, and Count John had no reserves to spare.
Fifteen minutes’ fighting sufficed to break the rearguard, exhausted but suddenly full of the energy of hope, free from the enemy. It also sufficed to teach Count John that he lacked the power to fight in the
woods without either a mage or a lot of archery.
He had his knights and squires each take up one of the imperial Hurans on his saddle, and they trotted back to safety.
“Anyone behind you?” Count John asked Ser Giorgos.
“Not still alive,” the imperial officer said.
The Outwallers were useless for building anything. They expressed disinterest and wandered away. None of them—except Orley’s warband—could be made to build ladders except by force, and even then, the ladders they built were useless.
“Animals,” Ser Hartmut spat.
But the sailors had a more proper view of work, and they produced a dozen heavy siege ladders in short order—wood being in abundant supply. The wreck of the Morean camp was stripped for lumber, and trees were felled—not without some anger on the part of the creatures of the Wild. It was a long day, and an exhausting one.
The men on the walls of the Inn mocked them. They were loud and Ser Hartmut was curiously tender to it.
As the light began to dim and it became clear that early morning would mark the first assault, he went to find the sorcerer.
“We could save a good deal of time if you’d drop a rock on the castle,” he said.
Thorn stirred his great limbs. “It would,” he admitted. “But it is protected beyond my ability to affect it. It would take less time to send for your siege train from Ticondaga.”
Ser Hartmut’s temper exploded.
“That will take weeks,” he said. “Weeks we do not have.”
“We have won a great victory,” Thorn intoned.
“Most great victories aren’t worth the sweat of a single dead man,” Ser Hartmut said, “and this is like to be one of them. Do you mean that all your vaunted sorcery is useless against a stone-built inn?”
“You have no idea what you are talking about,” Thorn said. “Beware. When you speak of making war, I have learned that your wisdom is deeper and better than mine. Accept my word on this. I have no sorcery that will breach the Inn.”
“Summon your master,” Ser Hartmut spat. “If the student cannot pass the test, let’s have the master.”
“Beware what you wish for,” Thorn said. “My master is in the west. And all is not well. Storm the Inn with ladders—surely you care nothing for the losses.”
Ser Hartmut growled in his throat. “You confuse the killing of useless mouths who lower the condition of my men with the waste of precious soldiers, without whom there is no victory,” he said coldly.
Thorn nodded. “I suppose I do. They all look the same to me.” In the dirt, he scrawled, As we all appear the same to my master.
At first light the assault went over the ridge. The assault was entirely conducted by men—none of the monsters could be made to carry ladders or even understand them, except the stone trolls, and no ladder would hold one of them. Given time, Ser Hartmut imagined he might use slaves to build a ramp of earth…
Then he was pounding forward, his sabatons ringing on the hard ground of the old road and the Inn’s outer yard.
For this kind of thing, you had to lead from the front.
The brigans had been storming towns all their bloody-handed professional lives, and they were quick and efficient. The great ladders—six of them—went up almost silently in the first light of day, and not a single arrow came down to kill a man.
The garrison was asleep. Ser Hartmut had hoped for some such sorcery from his allies, and he led the way up the first ladder against the lowest wall, the gate wall at the front of the great Inn. Neither oil nor red-hot sand greeted him, and he ran up the ladder in his full harness, and his sword flamed in his hand.
At the top—the first man on the wall—he let loose his mighty roar of battle, a wordless cry, and the brigans and sailors and knights at his back echoed it with a cry so savage that the boglins in the valley below shuddered, and the irks looked away from the savagery of man.
But the defenders didn’t answer his war cry. They didn’t face him on the empty walls, and they were not huddled in the courtyard, and they were not waiting at the Inn’s great doors or in the common room or upstairs, or down.
The Inn was empty. There were no people, and no animals—no cups, no plates, no glass in the cupboards. The whole of the great stone complex was so empty that it was as if it had been stripped by robbers, or emptied by a rapacious seller looking to cheat the buyers of his goods. It was uncanny, curiously malevolent, and it cheated two thousand men of their sack, their rape and their looting.
At the base of the hill, Thorn watched and, as he watched, Ash manifested—more swiftly than usual, and more fully, being almost solid to the touch.
“He’s clever, my kin,” Ash said, and spat. His saliva burned the grass. “As usual, he avoids conflict with his cunning and cheats me of a simple contest. He has taken his people elsewhere. The coward.”
“Where?” Thorn asked.
“How would I know?” Ash shrieked.
Thorn tried not to show his unease. “There is a rumour in camp that…” Thorn hesitated.
“That those fools, Treskaine and Loloth, were defeated? They were. Massacred.” Ash’s round, black eyes were themselves uncanny, and they rested on Thorn. “And their Outwallers betrayed them, for which they will pay. But you know who defeated them? My old friend Tapio.” Ash nodded, solemnly.
“I should have killed him,” Thorn said.
“You should have, but you lacked the ability, then.” Ash nodded again. “Not now.”
Thorn considered what the Faery Knight’s position implied. “He is on our flank.”
Ash laughed. “In the Wild, there is only here and now. Flank is a human concept, and thus, worthless.”
Thorn grunted. “Humans excel at war.”
Ash shook his black mane of hair. “No. That is a lie. As well say beavers build great cities.”
Thorn took a great breath, and let it out slowly. “What do you wish of us?”
Ash nodded, pleased. “Take this rabble and go to Albinkirk.”
Twenty Miles East of Dorling—Morgon Mortirmir
The moonlight made it possible to move, and Ser Milus had made it clear that the white banda would not halt until they reached Albinkirk, five days away. At least.
They’d left the road the first day, and tried to pass south and west, skirting the enemy. Instead, they were almost lost in the endless long green hills and valleys, all identical, all laid out in every direction so that no valley ran in the direction you expected, and scouts would climb to the top of one hill to find that they were merely at the base of another.
Most of the men-at-arms were stripped to mail shirts and breastplates, helmets and gauntlets. The rest were with the baggage, or simply left—a fortune in leg armour and war saddles abandoned on the high moors of the eastern Green Hills, for nesting mice and snakes.
“Just the parts of your harness you want most, if you face a couple of dozen boglins on a dark night,” muttered Ser George Brewes. His curses were reflected a hundred times—almost all the rouncys were gone and almost all the war horses, so that the archers and the men-at-arms alike were walking. Every surviving horse, including a dozen magnificent chargers, were harnessed to the baggage wagons without which they could not move at all.
Morgon Mortirmir walked on, working carefully on a couple of different invocations simultaneously. He knew that something had gone awry from the soul-screams of his fellow practitioners a day back. That haunted him. He knew those aethereal voices, and they were gone.
He thanked God, guiltily, that none of them were Tancreda Comnena, whose family would never have allowed their daughter out of the confines of the city. A wise choice.
In the security of his palace, he could see Thorn as a nimbus of green power almost due west. He could feel the comings and goings of other powers, and he was aware that in the last hours there had been some mighty shift in the currents and breezes of Power—something had been done, some great invocation cast, some massive working engendered.
&n
bsp; As he walked in the real, he was building traps and fall-backs in the aethereal, for whatever had killed his peers.
The hilltops that flanked the road held life, but no thaumaturgy that he could detect—merely wandering flocks of sheep and goats, and some herdsmen who were chary of the armoured men in the defile.
When all the herdsmen vanished, Morgon sought Ser Milus.
“My lord, the herds are gone. They were there—above us, towards Mons Draconis, and now they are gone.”
Ser Milus was one of the few men besides wagoners and scouts still mounted. He put a fist in the middle of his back to ease the pain. “Son of a bitch,” he muttered. “What the hell?”
Mortirmir shook his head in the darkness. “I have no idea, my lord, but I think there are men moving on the ridges—perhaps worse than men. But my notion is that there are horsemen.”
Milus was grey in the moonlight, but eventually he summoned a few of his scouts—his own archer, Smoke, and Tippit and No Head.
“I’ll put it to you straight, boys,” he said. “I need you to ride up slope and see what the hell is happening.”
“Ambush?” No Head asked. He sounded interested.
Mortirmir shrugged, a useless motion in the darkness. “Men on horses, I believe.”
“You coming, smart boy?” Tippit asked.
Mortirmir stiffened his spine. “I’d be delighted,” he said.
Tippit spat. “Let’s get it done.”
The four men rode up the slope slowly, without speaking, fifteen paces between horses. They were hard to see even in the moonlight, and Mortirmir kept drifting, but always managed to find his way back into the line.
The slope was deceptive, both steeper and longer than it had seemed from the base.
The burst of a partridge from cover shattered the night.
A dog barked. Shapes moved suddenly at the crest of the stony ridge, which rose steeply above them—still higher than Morgon had imagined.
“Freeze!” hissed No Head.
A voice shouted far away, and a horn sounded.
Sheep gave voice at the sound of the horn.
“I know that voice,” No Head said.
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