The Bitterbynde Trilogy

by Cecilia Dart-Thornton

  Thus greeted, they exchanged a few words to keep the vast, echoing voice of night from sending whispers of apprehension down their spines.

  ‘What news, Fordward?’

  ‘All is quiet in Slegorn Sector. And you?’

  ‘The same.’

  They leaned on their lances, the wind plucking at the corners of their chequered tabards. A darker darkness began to overcome the night, but the stars bristled more brightly, like fistfuls of pins; bronze, electrum, copper, silver-gilt.

  ‘The Wild Hunt has been busy scouring the skies this half-month,’ said Fordward.

  ‘Methinks it ever heads northwest in its excursions,’ said his comrade.

  ‘Aye, yet ’tis glad I am of the wizard’s weavings about our borders,’ said Fordward. ‘Feulath, and that new wizard who has arrived to replace the outlawed Sargoth.’

  ‘The newcomer has performed with more gumption than I had hoped, considering he is but a backwoods conjurer from a Stormrider Tower.’

  ‘The young Prince personally chose him, so I heard.’

  ‘Is that so? Edward shows discernment, amongst many good qualities. The men love him well, and are keen to prove their loyalty. Thank the Powers he survived the tragedy of the Royal Isle.’

  ‘Aye, thank the Powers,’ Fordward agreed sombrely, nodding for emphasis.

  A tinkling as of tiny bells lapped at the extreme limits of audibility. Neither man commented on the approach of the unstorm—it was an occurrence too common to be remarkable.

  ‘I would fain see an end to this lull,’ said Fordward softly. ‘The sooner we ride against Namarre, the better.’

  ‘’Twill be soon, they say,’ replied his companion. ‘We are all eager to see action. Waiting overlong drives men to restlessness.’

  They conversed a little more, in the same vein. Rarely was their exchange slanderous or vulgar. All the soldiery held the Dainnan in the greatest esteem and the majority therefore perceived the code of the Brotherhood as the measure of their own conduct. The Dainnan Vow—to right wrong, to punish the guilty, to feed the hungry, help the feeble and obey the King-Emperor’s law—those vows of courage, truth, charity, fidelity and uprightness had made their mark on many of the warriors of Erith, as a shining cup casts reflected light on the beholder.

  Hand-picked, these camp sentries were alert and watchful. Even when they met like this, for but a moment, their tongues might wag and their eyes rove but never did their attention lapse. There was no dozing off at the post, especially during the wighting hours. Unseelie incarnations of untold varieties had been straggling through these wastelands for more than a year, coming from the forests in the south or the peaks in the north, making for the Landbridge. Yet the leaguers were forced to position themselves here, camped in an unbroken semicircle around the old fort by the entrance to the bridge, because strategically, it was the best location from which to defend Eldaraigne from Namarran raids. On the naked plain they had found themselves liable to be assailed from any quarter. Along the western line they fenced themselves in with magicians’ sorceries. To the north and south they had thrown up earthworks and spiked palisades.

  To the eastern front the armies bent their gaze. To the east they soon would be ready to advance, challenging the wights holding the Landbridge in an effort to clear the way and march through into Namarre to put an end to the uprising. Meanwhile, scouts searched for signs of a possible early Namarran attack on the Legions. Due to the inability of Windships and Skyhorses to cross water, little was known of what doings fermented in Namarre. Only sketchy information had been gleaned from spies who had managed to sail around and land on its opposite shores—those few who had returned to tell of it.

  The Wastelands altered illusorily as the unstorm swept down. Emerald faces of thistles bristled with amethyst spines. Ruby-eyed sand-mice with opalescent hides skittered amongst broken jewels pulsing with an ethereal diaphanousness. Numinous forces breathed a mockery of life into tableaux—untaltried men had done battle here long ago. Their graves had grown green these hundred years but still their simulacra fought on, long after their original molds had moldered. A Stormrider in haste crossed the airs of the plain. An aeronaut fell, windmilling, from a flying ship. A company of travellers was pursued by wights and bolted, screaming, their mouths round O’s of silence under the white knobs of their popping eyes.

  ‘Look there!’ A sentry snapped to attention. Auburn light slithered along the murderous spike of the cavalryman’s lance he hefted in his right hand. A distant fire winked out, winked into incandescence again. Further on, another winked off, winked on. Something was passing silently between the watchers and the fires.

  ‘I don’t recall seeing that ’un before.’

  ‘It blocks the light. Therefore ’tis real.’

  Shouldering their weapons they ran forward to investigate.

  The untamed winds of gramarye raked through Tahquil’s hair, sizzling in her blood like red-hot pokers plunged into mulling ale. She couched along the horse’s spine, her brown-dyed locks escaping from her taltry to mingle into his grey. With eldritch life springing vital beneath her thighs and gramarye streaming hectically all around, she no longer knew who she was; whether a mote scudding through a void, a half-spelled urge winging its way to calumny, an illusion, a drollery, a flung burst of dust.

  Like daggers honed on stony resolve, male voices penetrated this detachment.

  ‘Halt. Who goes there?’

  She was unable to identify them through the mirages shifting in the unstorm, nor had she the power to reply in any case; her tongue mimicked wood. For their part, in the fickle illuminations of the shang, the men-at-arms could not clearly make out the intruder.

  ‘A horse—but ruled by a rider?’ muttered Fordward.

  ‘In the name of the King-Emperor, halt or be run through!’ shouted his companion.

  A spear-cast away, the horse propped, skittishly kicking up its fetlocks.

  ‘No rider,’ uncertainly said one man.

  ‘It has broken loose from the pickets and strayed.’

  ‘Or else ’tis some unlorraly killing-thing, bound for Namarre.’

  ‘Nay—see? ’Tis only a pony—not a war-horse at all, and too small to be an aughiskie.’

  ‘Unless it is glamoured.’

  ‘I carry a strong charm against glamour and I see a pony.’

  The object of their attention abruptly galloped away. In a flash it was beyond the range of their lances and had disappeared into the confusing backdrop of shanged fires and stars and plush velvet shadows.

  ‘Raise the alarm?’

  ‘Naw. ’Twas only a harmless nygel for sure, and riderless.’

  They jogged back to their stations to resume their patrols.

  Coated with the thickly fragrant juices of vine-flowers and plastered like a four-limbed starfish to the nygel’s side, Tahquil was carried through the unstorm and the encampments of the Royal Legions. The lightness of the nygel’s hooves, the swiftness of his passing and the bewildering nature of the Wastelands under shang combined to conceal their passage from all but the keenest eyes—which, by the time they blinked, had lost their evidence.

  The girl’s cheek was fastened to the living hide. Unable to lift her head, she missed seeing the tall pennons and banners snapping in the breeze. Unnoticed, the King’s Standard and the Royal Banner, the personal flags of the Royal Family, flew from the largest of the pavilions—that which bravely displayed a canopy of purple and the Royal Crest emblazoned in gold on every silken wall.

  The shang wind released its hold on the memories of the elements and fled over the shores, out across the sea. The nygel passed beyond the last watchfires of the front line and thence into the ruthless darkness of no-man’s land, where two days since, a skirmish had been fought. He darted past two sprawling, silent shapes with mortified claws where hands once had been, jumped over another that moaned softly, and eluded a strange hulk looming against the sky. He ran past the ruined fort standing deserted on the
doorstep of the Landbridge. Foliots had found and claimed it, as they claimed most abandoned halls of men. The empty windows flared with their sudden lights and eclipses.

  And then the nygel with its lopsided burden cantered onto the Nenian Landbridge.

  In the wake of the unstorm, thick clouds had begun massing up from the southern horizon, until they blanketed half the dome of the sky. Out of the gloaming, eldritch faces leered, wightish forelimbs snatched, eyes darted like spiders on fire, voices sniggered, sobbed and gibbered.

  The nygel did not stop. He did not turn his head to inquire after his passenger’s comfort—such an idea never broke into the weird forests of his mind. He cantered on, joyously—for the smell of the sea came from all sides now, telling of swells like black glass mountains, and the heaving muscle of tidal forces, telling of whipped-cream wind-tickled wave crests, of spray and spume smashed against the sky, and cruel currents that mocked humanity, flowing as cold and sensuous as eldritch desire. Like all of their kindred, nygels loved best the sea, that mother of all waters.

  Officially, the border between Eldaraigne and Namarre divided the Landbridge exactly in half. Tahquil, semi-insensate, and her steed had almost reached this midpoint when the twilight gave out an unpleasant surprise. Chrysanthemums of fire came blazing at them—brands brandished in the meaty fists of a band of Namarran warriors headed by one of their wizards. With yells of triumph they whirled lassoes above their heads in practised fashion. One man cast his rope. It struck the nygel’s neck and fell short. At the touch of the hated halter, the wight uttered a scream of fear. Feinting and dodging so rapidly that few mortal riders would have remained mounted without the aid of supernatural adhesion, he eluded them, only to run into a second band, the ambushing compatriots of the first. Now desperate, the waterhorse flared his waterlily nostrils and caught the scent of his ultimate resource, that which was his native shelter, his natural—if such a term can be employed for the supernatural—element.

  The two bands of wight-tamers converged, rushing together like breakers in a choppy soup. In a burst of desperate speed their quarry slipped out from between them and dived into a pool of water.

  A brackish pool it was, lying so close to the sea: a damson-coloured bowl of rock and sedge and salty mosses and secrets. A drowning pool.

  Deep under the water sank the nygel. All care for his burden had been chased from the kelp forests of his animus by the urge to escape, the instinct for water, the imperative to elude the rope. Silently he sank and perforce silently Tahquil, attached to his flank, sank with him. A few bubbles rose up like hollow planets, sat like silver thimbles on the surface, and then popped.

  The Namarrans, cheated, raged at the brink, cursing and flinging stones. A moment only remained they thus. One, more nervous than the rest and sharper-eyed, called out.

  ‘Blood’s death! A scavenger! A scavenger moves this way!’

  A flurried chaos at the poolside, a clattering of stones, a swishing of bushes and the Namarrans were absent. Only the reflection of a single consumptive star floated wanly on the surface. In the dimness, something crooked shuffled towards the patch of water. Its shambling gait belied a remarkable swiftness of progress.

  Down below, Tahquil’s heart pumped frantically. The veins of her temples stood out, cords binding a skull turning inside out in agony.

  Down below, the nygel felt a stirring at his side and remembered.

  He sloughed her, then braced himself underneath her expiring form and pushed. As she broke through the roof of his liquid haven he boosted her up, out and sideways, depositing her on the shore before subsiding anxiously and immediately. Had his recollection of her presence and mortality arrived an instant later, it must have been too late.

  Tahquil lay helpless, coughing up water with spasms of violence, retching, vulnerable, her eyes unfocused. A huge, stooped figure in grey rags bent over her. It swung a voluminous net off its back, dropped it on the ground and unclosed it. The net contained a large, irregular object. To this object, Tahquil was added, still racked and convulsed. The scavenger closed the net, lifted it on its humped back and shuffled away.

  The dirty clouds moved north to muffle the entire sky. Only a greenish corpse-candle faltered along the marshy places of the Landbridge.

  In this obscurity an urisk was standing beside a murky well. He knocked three times on the brackish water. A familiar long head came up and looked around.

  ‘Vanished,’ it said, in gloomy astonishment.

  6

  TAPTHARTHARATH

  Smoke on the Water, Fire in the Sky

  Red Taptharthar: magma’s pumping

  Through below-ground veins, where jumping

  Pressure points like hearts are thumping,

  Setting mighty boulders bumping.

  Up past thinner crusts they’re humping,

  Pushing past to swell the tumps. Stings

  Of lapilli rain in lumps; rings

  Opening in lava sumps bring

  Boiling vomit for the dump, fling

  Rock bombs high, to fall down crumping

  And the slow morasses slumping;

  Creeping ooze congealing, plumping.

  Flames for trees, rock-melt for lakes—

  Red Taptharthar burns and quakes.

  NAMARRAN BARDIC CHANT

  Metal beaks had embedded into Tahquil’s ribcage, her left arm, her thigh. Over miles of jouncing, they had pecked their way in—the nodes, projections and sawing ridges on which she lay constricted by the tensile web. Throughout a long, strange journey she had lain stupefied, fading in and out of consciousness, shuttled between real nightmares and the nightmare of reality.

  The effects of her ordeal had been compounded by the Langothe, whose intensity apparently ebbed and flowed at random, or perhaps was driven by the whims of the various exigencies of existence. During her moments of awareness the longing for the Fair Realm seized her. Images of its star-jewelled mountains, its forests of mystery and its clear, singing rivers formed before her inner gaze; images of such power they seemed to haul the blood from her thundering veins, the tears from their bitter wells behind her eyes.

  Hunger had not troubled her, nor thirst—she having lately swallowed enough to quench a hundred thirsts—nor, despite her damp condition, had cold. What she was rammed down upon, that amalgam of iron rims and studs, was warm. In places it gave way to the yielding suppleness of skin—slightly hair-roughened but sensuous, as the metal was agonising; as though she reclined upon a cruel lover.

  Nor could she, during periods of awareness, understand where she was or how she had come there. When the jouncing and jabbing ceased, there came a descent, a bump, a groan, the tension of the net slackening, a disoriented rolling, the beaks withdrawing and new ones digging in new locations. She stifled a cry.

  The groan had not been hers.

  A large presence hovered nearby. Its carrion stench hovered also. Perhaps it noted the paucity of life signs exhibited by its most recent catch. Yet unwounded, merely stunned and temporarily helpless, Tahquil retained a measure of hidden vitality. Presently her captor withdrew to the left. A juicy tearing and a crunching emanated from its proximity. After an aeon, the author of these munchings shambled away with footsteps like anvils being dragged through a quarry.

  A moan welled again, close by Tahquil’s ear. She tried to open her eyes but discovered that she had already done so. Bleary red smudges crowded in at the edges of sight, illuminating nothing. Her hands explored.

  Across a landscape both unfamiliar and well known her fingertips travelled. Metallic ridges of armour, yes—and the sleek adamant undulations of living thews. A thicket of hair, a contoured field of stubble. A Midsummer breathing, irregular and strained. A slick syrup that might have been blood.

  ‘Who are you?’ she whispered, but the armoured man made no reply.

  Once, in Gilvaris Tarv, Tahquil-then-Imrhien had seen Namarrans passing by. Now, by the shape of the armbands and the earring of this warrior, she knew him to
be one of their kindred. His breathing deepened, bubbling and stewing in his chest. The unnerving rattle of it seemed to echo hugely, as though reverberating off the interior of some spacious hollow, a chamber of rock and stone. Perhaps she and her fellow captive had been dumped in some cavern? This did not matter to Tahquil. Of more immediate concern was the tangling snare which bound her to this doomed lover and his accoutrements, this warrior with his overlapping metal scales who, by the sound of his breathing, soon would be cold and breathless as a netted fish.

  Her hand slid down his chest to his hip, to the scabbard belted there. A haft protruded. Hampered by ubiquitous cordage, she slid free the blade, groped for a strand and sliced it through. The dagger was keen. It severed the fibres with short, easy strokes. Feverishly she worked in the dark, once stinging her own hand with the paper-thin metal edge. Her fingers slippery with blood, she dropped the dagger, almost. Another cord sprang apart and another—now the gap was big enough. She wriggled through.

  Cramp disabled her and she did drop the dagger. Falling, it rang on stone. She doubled over, gritting her teeth, trying to loosen the rigid spasms in her sinews and chafe sensation into seized-up limbs Reviving ganglions prickled like pincushions, shooting outraged spokes from centres that had been crushed by armour’s brazen knuckles.

  Somewhere nearby, the Namarran stirred and sucked in an almighty gasp.

  ‘Six heads have I broken this day,’ he wheezed with foreign pronunciation, ‘and yours shall be the seventh.’

  After that he made some choking sounds and fell silent. She touched his chest: there was no rise, no fall.

  Heat thrummed from the stones upon which Tahquil crouched. A vibration arose like the thump-thump of a powerful engine. The carrion stink curdled in her nostrils. How long would it be until the monstrous presence returned, dragging its anvil feet? She swung her head around. A dull red patch hove into view—a sulky smear of crimson chalk, not flickering like flames, but steady. For want of a better course, Tahquil began to crawl towards it. The floor of this chamber or cavern was littered with objects. She brushed them with her seeking hands, climbed over or around them, or swept them from her path; things of rock, things of metal, things of bone, scuttling things with articulated carapaces.