Sword of Hemlock (Lords of Syon Saga Book 1)

by Jordan MacLean

  At the alderwood stump, Valmerous rose suddenly. He flung his hands outward and whirled around, and the air rippled violently around him. As he whirled around, his hood lifted away from his face and fell to his shoulders.

  —and Chul’s blood began to boil. He screeched and ran headlong through the thick mob of bowing warriors, climbing over their backs, shoving his way through them toward the knights, toward the impossibly hideous creature at the altar, the one who must not be allowed to live. The warriors looked up at his cry, and some rose to their feet in their confusion. Somehow, none of them seemed to see what had driven him into such a frenzy.

  The whirl of air that Valmerous raised threw the sheriff backward. He let out a sudden scream of pain and dropped his sword.

  “Lord Daerwin!” cried Barlow, roughly searching the sheriff’s armor for dents or breaches while the rest of the knights closed protectively around him. “How now, are you injured?”

  “Hot. It’s burning hot!” He scrabbled frantically at the buckles that held his right vambrace in place, but he could not seem to get his fingers around them.

  “My lady,” breathed Matow, gesturing toward the warriors who were still watching the two Dhanani at the edge of the glade. As far as he could tell, none of them had noticed Valmerous.

  “Watch them.” Renda dropped at once beside her father, sword still in hand. “Keep them back. Don’t let them near us. Father?”

  “I can’t get it off!”

  Barlow managed to unfasten the topmost buckle, but he was burning his fingers. “It’s getting hotter.”

  “Here, let me—” Matow pushed his way past Barlow and grasped the buckle with his mantle. But the cloth was too thick and clumsy, and it began to smoke where it touched the metal. Barlow tossed it away with a curse and tapped gingerly at the buckle with his bare fingers. “It’s too hot! If I can just—”

  “You…can’t…” the sheriff groaned. “My arm, by the gods, Renda, cut it off, just cut it off!”

  Steam and a sickening sizzling sound rose from between the metal plates that held his forearm.

  “No time. Get back!” Renda kicked his arm clear of his body with her boot and raised her sword. Then she slashed through the smoldering leather straps, ripping through them one by one until at last the glowing metal fell away, taking with it flaming tatters of linen and hunks of cooked flesh.

  Matow stripped off his mantle to bind around the sheriff’s wounds, but he hesitated. The wounds were deep, glistening, raw, and already the charred ends of his undershirt were sticking in them. The heavy cloth of the cloak would surely stick as well.

  But Renda took it from him and bound it around the sheriff’s arm. Hopefully Nara or Arnard would be able to see to a proper healing for him at the castle, but until then, the wounds needed protection. So she wrapped the thick cloth around the arm and put the rest of the cloak over the sheriff’s shoulder to act as a sling.

  Lord Daerwin crumpled forward against her, gritting his teeth in pain.

  Not far from them, Chul broke free of the milling warriors and barreled toward the knights, his blade glinting in the torchlight coming from the altar.

  Barlow caught the snarling boy and carried him to the ground, pinning him beneath the weight of the knight’s body and armor.

  “Let me…!” Chul struggled against him and nearly fought his way free. He’d bitten his tongue and his mouth ran with blood. “It must not be allowed to live!”

  “No,” grunted Barlow, trapping the boy’s knife hand, “no, he must not.” He stripped the knife away from Chul and nodded ahead, toward the altar and the cardinal. “And he will not. But you’ll not stop him by burning alive, lad!”

  The air just a few feet ahead of them shimmered with heat, as it did above the scorching roads during the Feast of Kanet. As that roiling heat took shape and substance, it formed itself into a massive dome surrounding Valmerous at the altar until he was no more than a hazy, wavering shape beyond it.

  “We will stop him,” murmured Barlow with a glance at Renda. She nodded. “Trust to that.”

  Whether because Chul understood what Barlow had said or because he could no longer see the hideous face of the Hadrian, the boy stopped fighting.

  “Chul,” she said, “all is well?”

  He blinked up at Renda in bafflement. “Yes, I think so. I don’t remember…”

  When Barlow felt Chul relax, he helped the boy to his feet and returned his knife without comment. But Matow patted the bewildered boy’s shoulder and nodded toward the injured sheriff. “It’s a good thing Barlow stopped you. Lord Daerwin all but lost his arm when it rose.” He picked up a long tree branch and threw it as hard as he could through the shimmering wall of heat, but it caught fire as it left his hand, and the instant it touched the wall, the thick wood vaporized. “Hate to think what would have happened if you’d tried to run through.”

  Renda frowned through the wall. Valmerous could have raised it as soon as he and his priests arrived in this glade and locked the knights completely out with it. But he had waited to raise it until now. Clearly, he had been waiting for something, and that something had come to pass, but what it was, she could not guess.

  “Lady Renda,” Chul began, “Gikka sent me to warn you about the priests.”

  Matow snorted.

  “Sent you?” Renda looked back through the trees. “Where is she? Is she here?”

  The boy shook his head. “She went back to Graymonde. I was to meet her there. This was not…” He looked around at the horror of the glade. “I was supposed to warn you.”

  Renda breathed deeply to hide her disappointment. She had ordered Gikka to stay away. Once, just this once, she wished Gikka had ignored her orders. She rose to her feet with a brave smile and gestured toward her father. “Chul,” she said, “I need you to help Lord Daerwin back to the horses and stay there with him. I may need you to see him back to Brannagh if we cannot.”

  Chul frowned at her and opened his mouth to protest.

  But with amazing strength of will, Lord Daerwin raised himself to one knee, then to his feet. “I can go on,” he growled. “I’ll not be sent back to the horses while B’radik and all Syon are in danger.” He reached down with his good hand and picked up the sword he had dropped. Then he nodded toward the dome. “The battle is joined. We cannot stop now.”

  She looked at him worriedly. His face was waxy and pale, and his lips looked almost blue to her, so intense was his pain. During the war, she would never have let him—or the boy, all the nonsense about Dhanani boy-warriors aside—stay to fight, not like this. But then, during the war, she’d have had an army of knights and soldiers to take their places.

  She blew out a hard breath. “Quickly, then. Matow and Chul.” She lowered her voice to a whisper, watching the warriors, who were still distracted for the most part by the two Dhanani at the glade’s edge. “Gather wood, leaves, rocks, damp moss, anything we can use to try to weaken this wall.”

  Sir Matow and the boy nodded and moved away along the edge of the trees. Chul slipped easily between the trees while Matow, in full armor, fought for every inch.

  “Tedriadre.” A new voice chuckled bitterly, the same chilling, sinuous voice Renda had heard in Cilder’s chambers, and the knights shuddered. “Tedriadre arada veo!” Thunder shook the ground, and a vicious wave of power rippled outward from the dome, directed, like His sneering words, not toward the knights who seemed beneath His notice for now, but toward the other two Dhanani at the edge of the glade.

  Still, they were in its path.

  “Down!” Renda threw herself to the ground to cover her father with her own body while the wave broke over them. The concussion was overwhelming, and her armor seemed to compress around her, trying to squash itself flat under the force. She could not breathe, could not move, and the flow of power held her pinned to the ground.

  The wave stretched outward instantly, blasting through the dead warriors who had no time to escape it, straight toward Chul. Too dumbfounded
to throw himself down or try to run, he could only watch the blaze of power hurtling toward him. But it drew up short and splashed sullenly to the ground at his feet. Chul backed up clumsily, unsure what he had just seen, and fell through the trees.

  Untouched by the ferocious attack Themselves, the two Dhanani at either side of him had held Their hands outstretched toward Chul, and crashing against Their combined strength, the great wave had bled to death at the boy’s feet. Now They turned and raised Their hands against Valmerous, and Their powerful attacks sliced toward the priest, the combined powers of Mercy and Death.

  “Barlow!” Renda called when she’d regained her breath. The wave had passed at last, and she could move again. She lifted her head above the settling dust and squinted through foul, greasy smoke, looking for the two knights. “Matow! Chul!”

  The glade was all but empty. Most of the dead warriors were gone, and the other two knights and Chul were nowhere to be seen. They’d vanished. She found no bodies, no weapons, no armor. No trace of them. Apart from her father and herself, she could make out only a last scattered handful of the risen warriors and the other two Dhanani through the smoke.

  “Here!” Chul scrambled toward her through the smoking brush.

  Then the two Dhanani lifted Their hands.

  She ducked and threw her arms across her father again. Great icy blades sheared by just a hand’s breadth above her head, blades that ripped open clefts in the nearly opaque wall. Through those clefts, she could clearly see Valmerous shaking out his blue mantle and setting it over the altar as calmly as Greta might set a tablecloth. Somehow, he was completely unmoved by the attack. Unaware of it, if that were possible.

  Her father was barely conscious. She could not leave him here; he would never survive another attack alone. Whatever else she might do, she had to see to him first. “Come, come,” she whispered to him, heaving him up to lean on her shoulder and half carrying, half dragging him back to the safety of the trees. “We’re caught between. We can’t stay here.”

  “No,” groaned the sheriff, “Valmerous must not win…”

  “You can’t come on, and I’ll not leave you here,” she grunted under his armored weight, “Valmerous be damned.”

  “Damerien….”

  “Damned, I say.” A flicker of movement drew her eye, and she paused to look. Nothing overt, nothing clear, but it was inside the dome with Valmerous, and in the moment it took her to turn her gaze to that spot, it was gone.

  Her mind raced. One form attended the altar. Valmerous. The other seemed to be near the other side. It was small, whatever it was, and fast. At least it seemed so. What she had seen had been no more than a shimmer, a bare shuffle of movement that might only have been the last leaves of the trees falling to the ground. But there it was again. No, she was certain now. Someone was inside with Valmerous.

  She chewed her lip and considered her position. Barlow and Matow were gone, likely dead, and her father was badly injured. She was the last of the Knights of Brannagh, alone against Valmerous and his god, the last defender of B’radik. Her only ally was a young Dhanani. The hopelessness of her situation was almost laughable.

  She turned her eyes toward the two Dhanani shamans or sorcerers, whoever they might be. They were fantastically powerful, and they seemed most committed against this cardinal, which made them her allies, at least temporarily. Her brow flickered upward. Perhaps all was not lost after all.

  “I have him.” Chul slipped his arm under the sheriff’s other shoulder and, between them, they moved him a few feet deeper into the shelter of the woods, where they settled him against a stout tree trunk.

  “There, there.” Renda took off her father’s helmet and lay her thick cloak over him to keep him warm.

  Renda watched Chul lay the back of his hand against Lord Daerwin’s forehead, watched the calm reassurance that seemed to pour from his hand, and she could not help but see the shadow of Aidan’s gentleness and caring in him.

  He carefully unwrapped the sheriff’s arm and frowned, looking over the burned flesh. After he wiped his knife clean on his leathers, he pulled down the sheriff’s sleeve as far as he could under the armor and cut off great hunks of it. Then he fished two of Aidan’s salve-filled leaves from his leathers, untied them and sniffed at them.

  “This is the same balm Aidan used on me when…” He glanced down at his own arms where the scars had gone light with time. “It keeps out infection and speeds the healing,” he said to the sheriff as he gently pressed the ointment into the burns, “but it does nothing for the pain. I’m sorry. If Aidan were here…”

  The sheriff nodded groggily and fell back against the tree, weak, exhausted by this new assault on his burns.

  “Chul.” Renda’s gaze touched on the other two Dhanani, who had momentarily stopped their barrage of attacks on the dome. “Who are they?”

  “They,” he said without looking up, “are gods.”

  He might have been talking about the price of goats at Marketday, his tone was so calm, and it took Renda a moment to be sure she understood what he’d said. Her breath caught in her throat. “Gods.” She stopped and stared at him. “What do you mean, gods?”

  “Anado and Nekraba, gods of the Dhanani.” He rubbed more of the gooey salve into the burns, then wrapped the linen strips around them. “They came to fight the cardinal.”

  Gods, appearing to fight a mortal man. “I think not,” murmured Renda with a glance toward the altar. “They came to fight Xorden.” She rose to her feet, not letting herself wonder why the gods of the Dhanani had come to fight while the rest of Syon’s gods kept silent. “Which leaves the cardinal to us, I’m afraid. Chul, stay here with Lord Daerwin. I must find a way into that dome.”

  In his mind, Chul saw villages, towns and cities full of Dhanani like those he had seen in the glade, dressed in sheer linen and smooth silk in the midsummer heat. The sun shone brightly over the water to the east, and voices called out through the streets in the Old Voice, hawking food, silks, trinkets from across the sea. It was a sort of Marketday, but filling the whole city from end to end. It was unlike anything he had ever seen.

  Servants richly dressed in robes of crimson and honey carried palanquins draped with elaborate embroideries through the streets, stopping here and there to accept a gift offered by this merchant or that. As they passed, the crowds of people would smile and sweep into low bows before going on about their own business in the marketplace.

  Katsa.

  The word came unbidden, a word in the Old Voice that he had never heard before, a strange word that had about it the flavor of both chief and shaman, and for some reason, he had trouble keeping the word in his mind. It was as if it would hide in the deepest part of his memory or disappear entirely if he did not repeat it over and over to himself.

  The ones inside the palanquins were…katsa. Rulers of the city. And the god they served was Xorden.

  “Tedriadre, Xorden!” Chul distantly heard Anado shout as if He were far away. “Leave the boy’s mind alone!”

  “Have You something to fear, Anado, Quiixia, He-Who-Would-Take-No-Side?” The disembodied voice seemed almost to laugh in its mocking tone. “He is Dhanani! Let him see what his people had, what they were before the Invaders came. What they lost. Let him imagine what they might have become if We had won instead of the harridan goddess and Her pet, Damerien. Then let him carry what he’s seen back to his people.”

  “Impossible!” Anado shook his head angrily. “B’radik’s word is clear—”

  “B’radik is bound!” Xorden crowed, “I say let the boy see and judge for himself!”

  “If You insist,” Nekraba snarled and raised her fists, “but if he must see, he will see the truth!”

  Chul was at the edge of the glade again. But Lord Daerwin was not with him, nor was Lady Renda, and the sky above the clearing was as dark as midnight. A ring of torches burned around the alderwood stump—eleven of them, he noted stupidly—and between those torches stood ten men in crisp, ide
ntical robes of crimson and honey. Young men and boys, Chul saw, not all of an age. At the altar itself stood the eleventh man, older and clearly in charge of the proceedings.

  Ten young men and boys, these wearing ceremonial knotted silks in the colors of their clans, entered the circle of torches and knelt, each one at the feet of one of the men standing. Then they all stood and embraced the men before them.

  Outside the brightest part of the light stood their families, proud families who were deeply honored to have had their firstborn sons chosen to become katsa.

  No, that was not quite right. Their sons would indeed be katsa, but something else was happening here, something that eluded him, a slippery underbelly to this rite that was at the same time its real purpose. If he could just wrap his understanding around it...

  “Ha!” the disembodied voice laughed. “So You begin to see the unfairness of B’radik’s decree against Us. For the boy to see Your truth and keep it, You must break Her law and give him back what She took from them when She banished them to the Kharkara Plains. You must give him the language, the words, the concepts and names of the lost doctrines. Noti’s, Mine, Kadeta’s, Pildaro’s—”

  “And bring all Your poison back to them?” Nekraba screamed. “I will not!”

  “Oh, but You will. Because without them, I’m afraid he’ll never understand just what a monster I am.” The disembodied voice seemed to smile and settle back against the cushions of oblivion around him. “Not to mention these glimpses he’s already had. What if he were to misunderstand and judge all the gods harshly?”

  Nekraba snorted. “The judgment of a boy—”

  “The judgment of Your people, Goddess!” He laughed again, but this time his voice was much darker. “Without them, You are less than nothing.” He paused, only a breath, to let Her consider. Then he smiled, his voice soft again. “Besides. What does it serve, to show him, if he cannot understand what he sees?”