by Glen Cook
He would argue but knew that was a waste of breath.
Grolsachers entering the Rault demesne arrived under sentence of death.
Socia Rault, in ill-fitting boiled leather armor, turned up once it was too late to make a scene about the impropriety. Brother Candle strained to hide his amusement. Brock Rault was too young to have forehead veins stand out like that.
Had he truly expected that confiscating the mail she had worn before would hinder her?
It was chilly for the time of year. Teeth chattered. Mist lay in patchlets in the hollows along the creek in the Sadew Valley. As had been the case three mornings running, a trickle of invaders passed without hindrance. They would be dealt with a few miles farther on. Some would be allowed to go back to report that the folk of the Connec were making no organized effort to defend themselves.
Three days of waiting left Brock's followers impatient. Everyone kept quiet while three men passed, arguing bitterly. Once they were out of earshot, Brock asked, "What language was that, Brother?"
Brother Candle had to admit, "I don't know. That's the second group that talked like that." And that made the incursion more disturbing. Fugitives from the advancing ice would grace the Connec's enemies with more power to destroy.
After quelling a belated response to Socia's arrival, Seuir Brock told his family, "I can't keep these men restrained much longer."
The force numbered thirty-five. Thirty-three armed men, a woman, and one Maysalean Perfect Master. Some were from neighboring holdings and felt little need to defer to Seuir Brock's leadership.
There was an invader camp up the valley, in a marshy meadow. And someone was in control. There were pickets. They were not well posted or alert, but they were there. They made scouting the camp difficult. Scores of women and children were among the several hundred people there.
For differing reasons Seuir Brock and Brother Candle each wanted a closer look at that camp.
Thurm said, "That ground is too boggy for a decent camp. There's springs all over. You can sink in up to your hips some places. There's a million mosquitoes. If they stay there very long they'll all come down with dysentery or malaria or something."
Brock replied, "I only pray there's that much stupid among them."
Brother Candle muttered, "So do I."
"God should take the stain from our souls before we smear it on ourselves?" Brock chuckled. "Yes. I'm starting to see how your mind works."
There was no opportunity to debate the rights and wrongs and costs, of defending today's Connec. How many times round the Wheel of Life would it take to expiate the evil that would happen here?
One of the scouts came scooting down the hillside. The needle-strewn slope was steep. "Seuir, some people showed up at the Grolsacher camp. Better clothes, horses, twenty to twenty-five of them. At least eight are knights. Their pennons weren't recognizable."
"Arnhanders," Thurm said. Socia spat to her left like a man sealing a curse.
Brock said, "I didn't expect them to turn up yet. What was that?"
A roar had come rolling down the valley.
"Just guessing," Brother Candle said. "The raiders have been turned loose."
"All in a mob, you think?"
Socia said, "The healthiest will be the first ones here. And the most dangerous."
Brock was not pleased. "The Arnhanders won't be part of the first rush." Meaning the ambush could not be as successful as he wanted. He made a decision. "Put the barricades up." He had kept his men gathering brush and deadwood to create a barrier across the valley. It would not stop the invaders but would create a chokepoint where archers would be more effective.
The Grolsachers came in a racing flood. There were other foreigners among them. Cruel poverty was the commonality of the horde.
A dozen archers went to work. Ten men with shields and spears protected them. The archers seldom missed.
Those invaders who escaped climbed the steep far slope, then fled downstream. Very few broke through the barrier.
The other Connectens struck farther up the valley, hitting the tail-enders of the mob. They pushed downstream. Brother Candle and Socia Rault were tasked with guarding their backs.
There was but one incident involving the two. Brother Candle avoided getting blood on his hands or soul.
"Booga-booga?" Socia demanded in a mocking tone. "What the hell was that?"
"He ran away, didn't he?"
"Right back to the meadow. Where he'll complain that he ran into a ferocious sorcerer."
"Foo."
"You think he'll admit he ran away from a Maysalean Perfect?"
"The thing is done. Don't!"
Too late. Socia had stabbed the moaning, wounded old woman. The lives of these desperate intruders meant no more to her than did those of roaches or rats.
"What?"
"Never mind."
"We need to get back to Caron ande Lette. Fast." Only women, children, and a few old men were there to defend the fortress.
Brock Rault had a different idea.
The butchery was over. The Sadew Valley was now a vale of the dead. Brother Candle knew the mind exaggerated horrors but still thought there were at least a hundred dead. Moans and whimpers came from hiding places in the undergrowth. Brock ignored them. After excusing six men who had been injured, he murmured, "I'm going after the men behind this."
"Oh. No," Brother Candle muttered. "That'll only make it worse."
"Brother, nothing will make it worse. They mean to kill us, take everything we own, and make the Connec part of Arnhand. With no leftover heretics. Self-defense is not a sin. Your own Synod of St. Jeules so ruled."
The Perfect bowed his head. That was true.
And he no longer deserved the title Perfect. His thinking had become dominated by emotion.
Rault continued. "We aren't asking you to cut throats. Just get out of the way." Irked.
"That I can do." But he did not stay behind when the healthy and willing headed for the meadow camp.
The camp was a sprawl of pathetic shelters built of deadwood, brush, reeds, and ragged blankets. A nest for misery unimaginable.
The new arrivals were not alone. Scores of sick, elderly, women, children, and even healthy men had not joined the rush down the Sadew Valley. The camp was in an uproar.
Socia glared at Brother Candle. "Booga booga."
"What?" Brock asked.
"Private joke."
Brock looked at her askance but addressed Thurm. "You know this ground. Can mounted, armored men operate on it?"
"Not most places. Not well."
After consultation, Brock chose a direction from which to attack the camp. He approached boldly. His archers launched fire arrows, starting several blazes. Some Grolsachers came out, angry. They accomplished nothing. Several got killed for their trouble.
Brock let fly a few more fire arrows, then began a slow withdrawal.
"Ah. Here they come."
A parade of horsemen left the camp, spread out abreast. Knights, squires, and mounted sergeants, they numbered eighteen. Thurm said, "They don't look much more prosperous than the Grolsachers."
"Paid fighters," Brock said.
"Most likely." Meaning they would be clever and cruel.
Changes were going on in Arnhand and the Empire. Younger brothers with nothing to inherit traditionally went to the Holy Lands or joined the Grail Knights in their wars to convert the pagans of the east. But those journeys into a brief, brutal, lethal exile had lost their emotional appeal. Still, one had to make a living. Having been raised up to follow only one trade.
Thurm said, "They plan to carve out chunks of the Connec for themselves."
"Let's see if we can't disappoint them."
The Connectens kept backing away. The day was near its end. The sun's lower limb settled into the pines behind them.
Brock had his archers launch a flight at the Arnhanders. Most of the shafts fell short. The few that did not miss or, in one instance, strike a shield, shi
fted to intercept it.
Socia complained, "These damned mosquitoes are driving me crazy!"
Swallows ripped the air overhead. Soon bats would come, to the feast. But not ravens, Brother Candle hoped. Ravens lived on both sides of the boundary with the Night. Human faith had endowed the birds with vast symbolic and oracular power.
The horsemen began their advance. In no hurry. Measured. Which was not what Brock wanted. "Loose another flight, then run for the trees. But watch where you put your feet down."
The horsemen were closer. Most of the arrows reached. Only one found a living target, however, and that a horse when a shaft ricocheted off a shield.
Several Arnhanders spurred their mounts, knowing the odds were too dense for a successful pursuit there.
Others followed.
Within a minute two-thirds of the animals had bogged down in the narrow, sluggish streams meandering under masking surface vegetation.
Those hazards were obvious enough in a good light, when one was unhurried and watching.
Brock ordered, "Archers, turn and loose. Concentrate on the horses."
There was grumbling. The animals were more valuable than the men riding them. But there would be no prizes taken here.
Rault's order was sound tactically but difficult practically. The archers had scarcely a dozen arrows left amongst them.
Brock swore. "Damn! I was hoping more would go down. And that some would drown. That we could finish them off while they were tangled in their harness, in the peat and the mud."
The Arnhanders did not let that happen.
One man and four horses did suffer. Those Arnhanders who remained mounted declined further pursuit.
"At least their damned camp will burn down," Socia grumbled.
Brock Rault insisted on traveling through the night. Progress was slow and exhausting. And often painful. In the wee hours Brother Candle told Seuir Brock, "Leave me. I can't keep up. I'll be all right. They won't harm a holy man."
"You're whistling in the night, old man. You're exactly what they're hunting. The only way you'd survive is if they sent you to Salpeno for a show trial."
Rault ordered an hour's rest. While he and Thurm scouted ahead.
The break gave Brother Candle a chance to become so stiff he could hardly move. Nor did he have the energy to swat mosquitoes. "They're going to suck me dry," he muttered to no one in particular.
Despair threatened him. He thought about Margete, began suffering worldly regrets about the choices they had made. Margete was now Sister Probity in the Maysalean convent at Fleaumont. He had not seen her for years. Had she seen any of the children lately? He had not. One of his sons, the wholly materialistic Aimechiel, refused to acknowledge him because he had given his wealth to support the Seekers.
He was ashamed. He no longer knew where to find any of his children.
The Perfect jerked out of his reverie, smitten by sudden fear. There was a huge absence in the night. The mosquitoes were gone.
The Sadew Valley lay in the embrace of a silence as absolute as that of a crypt. As the darkness grew deeper.
No insects buzzed. No owls gossiped about where to find the fattest mice. Nothing scurried through the leaves and needles, trying to find a meal without becoming a meal. And the darkness deepened.
Leaves crunched, then, as Brock and Thurm returned. Brock whispered, "We're two hundred yards from the edge of the woods. We'll be home before dawn, easy. Even if we have to carry our chaplain. What?"
Brock froze, finally sensing the horror. The deep horror. Which came without accompanying menace.
It did not come near enough to be seen. It wore darkness like a disguise. But darkness did not mask its smell, nor the soft sounds it brought along when it came close.
The stink was that of summertime death a week old. The sound was the hum of ten thousand flies.
Brother Candle shook his head violently, as though to fling the stench out of his nostrils while rejecting the power of ancient Night. Those old gods were gone! Rook had been disarmed, dismembered, constrained, in the very earliest days of the Old Empire. Not even another god could shatter the mystic shackles holding defeated Instrumentalities.
Those harsh old gods had been conquered by men. Only human instruments could loose them again.
The stench drifted onward, following the trail of corpses down into the Connec. The darkness faded back to normal. Sound returned.
The Connectens resumed travel. Not one of them believed the real Rook had passed by, dripping maggots on the forest floor. They would rather believe their priests than their senses. To them that Instrumentality was too awful to bear thought. Someday they could garner the notice of the Lord of Flies. Unless they prayed very hard to their own greater god.
The Arnhanders did not believe, either, though something so terrified their horses that most fled despite the darkness. The surviving camp folk, now without shelter, had less trouble believing. Quietly, beneath Grolsach's placid Chaldarean surface, some recollection of the old gods soldiered on. In circumstances as woefully reduced as those of the Grolsachers themselves.
The mosquitoes returned. As they did, Brock Rault insisted, "Get up, Master. We don't have far to go. And the worst is behind us. You'll be asleep in a feather bed before the sun comes up."
Brother Candle clambered to the parapet overlooking Caron ande Lette's gateway. The sun was going down. He had slept eleven hours. Every joint still ached. As did every muscle. He was too old for adventures.
Before coming topside he had eaten till he was ready to burst. Now, content despite his discomfort, he stood in twilight considering the besieging mass pathetic despite its numbers.
There were hundreds of Grolsachers out there. More were off foraging, finding neither food nor plunder. Those on hand were not in a bellicose mood. They were the tailenders. Yesterday's survivors. There were not a lot of healthy adult males among them.
Wailing broke out whenever a corpse was found and identified. Though how they recognized their dead after Rook's passage was beyond Brother Candle.
He had not seen a corpse touched by the Instrumentality. He had heard a description. While eating. The Great Demon left only a dried husk so desiccated that it could be hoisted with one hand.
Brock Rault was on post. As always. The Perfect asked, "You've decided to live up here, now?"
"I can see from here, Master. Not a lot, but enough to follow what's happening right around here."
"Which would appear to be not much."
"Correct. Pretending, but nothing of substance. We broke their spirit."
Thurm and Socia arrived, Thurm teasing crumbs out of the red brush at the corners of his mouth.
"And the Arnhanders?" Brother Candle acknowledged Socia with a nod.
"Trying to forage. Having no luck. If they work in small parties they get attacked. If they go in number they only find people too stupid or stubborn to go hide in the woods."
"So someone deluded the Grolsachers into thinking they'd just stroll into milk and honey. And the Arnhanders into believing that there would be no resistance."
"That isn't wrong. We can't do much but sit here." Brother Candle did not believe him. Sitting was not in keeping with the Rault character.
Socia said, "You've got plenty of initiative left, big brother." She gestured. Barely discernible in the failing light were' earthworks the invaders had begun that day, without enthusiasm or urgency. Only a fraction of the foreigners had pitched in. The more hale had gone looking for food and plunder. Many foragers failed to return to their loved ones. "Yes?" Brock asked.
"If the Arnhanders go foraging, sortie. Destroy their camp. Steal or kill their extra horses. And their grooms and servants."
Thurm grunted. "Only, why take risks? If we just wait… How long before Count Raymone rescues his precious Socia?"
Socia punched him. An argument ensued. Socia was full of bloodlust. Ready to fling one-woman sallies at the Grolsachers. 'To keep the weeds down. So they don't get too n
umerous to handle."
Brother Candle feared the truth of her central argument. What they saw was the first lapping wave of a flood. The Sadew Valley could become a river of desperate humanity that would come till they overwhelmed the Connec.
Providence knew, the province could not mount an organized effort to defend itself. The central authority remained confused and irresolute, if not moribund. Foiling the poison plot had not paid off in a ducal resurrection. Many lesser lights remained interested only in making their neighbors miserable. Those who did retain a sense of responsibility mostly were content to wait for trouble to come to them. Only Count Raymone Garete, because of past successes, could rally many followers. But he had no legal power to raise levees or give orders outside his own county.
Count Raymone was the most dangerous man in the Connec, from the viewpoint of the Brothen Church. Which explained why Antieux attracted so much attention from the Society.
Campfires appeared as darkness deepened, all round Caron ande Lette. They were too few to establish a blockade.
That could change.
Brock had no intention of letting an investiture develop. He collected a volunteer force of five. He and they went down ropes on the south side of the fortress, where the wall was shortest. Rault explained, "They should be watching for a sally from the gate."
Brother Candle spent hours, waiting, listening, watching. There was nothing to hear. And only lightning bugs to see. Brock was working with admirable stealth.
The old man wore out before midnight. His body still had a thousand repairs to make.
The Perfect wakened once, round what was called the witching hour. He had felt something terrible in the night. But it was gone before he wakened fully. He drained his bladder, returned to bed. He shivered like it was the heart of a cold, damp winter till sleep returned.
Brother Candle rose with the sun. Despite all the sleep, he was weak and groggy and inclined to lie down again.
Thurm and Socia joined him for breakfast. That included fresh bread, preserves, and bacon in quantity. Brother Candle felt compassion for the Grolsacher families outside.
Thurm said, "That thing was out there again last night."
"Thing?"
"From before. Up the valley. The Lord of Maggots."
