Godless World 3 - Fall of Thanes

by Brian Ruckley

  "I will see to it all."

  "Excellent. Perhaps you could send me down some of those little apple tarts too? All this worry is terribly unsettling for my stomach. It needs some comforting, I think."

  *

  Joy and despair contended for mastery of Tara Jerain's heart. Her beloved husband was restored to her, and she longed to rejoice in that simple fact. So fearful had she been during those long days when no one could tell her where he was, or even whether he still lived, that she had felt like some fragile vessel of the thinnest glass: a single clumsy word, a single barb of spite, might have broken her. The nights had been the worst, contorted by the agony of ignorance, haunted by the fear of the coming dawn and the possibility that it might bring with it some ashen-faced messenger bearing the worst possible news.

  And now that terrible shadow was lifted. But another had fallen, for the husband returned to her was not the one who had left her. Their lovemaking on the night of his return, which during his absence had been an imagined island of hope amidst despair, had instead been perfunctory: a thing of habit or necessity rather than love. Nothing in the days since had shown that to be an aberration. Something in him had changed. Something had gone, and with the recognition of its departure Tara found joy losing its ever more tenuous grip upon her spirits.

  Mordyn was bent over a table, his shoulders lit by the candles that burned all around. The swan feather of his quill shivered as it scraped across parchment. There was no other sound. He was utterly engrossed in his work.

  Tara watched from the doorway. This was a familiar sight. Many times she had seen her husband at work in just this way, in just this warm light. Yet all was not as it had once, so comfortingly, been. The hunch of his shoulders was narrower, tenser, than it used to be. His hand darted to and from the inkwell with angry impatience. Even the sound was different: harsher, cruder, as if quill and parchment warred. He had always had the lightest and most precise of hands. She felt an aching sense of bereavement as she noted each one of these tiny differences. Yet how could she be bereaved, when the object of all her affections was here before her, alive?

  She walked forward, her slippers soundless on the floor. Mordyn was too absorbed in his labours to notice her approach. When she set her hands gently on his shoulders, in the way she had done countless times before, he started and gave a half-strangled grunt of alarm. He glanced up at her even as he covered over what he had been writing with blank sheets of parchment. Perhaps he thought Tara would not notice this petty act of concealment, but she did. He had never done such a thing before, never shown the slightest sign of distrust or secrecy. What pained her still more, though, was the way he shrugged off her hands with an irritated shake of his shoulders. With that single loveless gesture, he wounded her to the quick. Tara was startled to find her eyes moistening, a premonition of tears. This man bore the face and form of her husband, but she no longer recognised what lay beneath that surface.

  "What happened?" she asked, standing limp and empty behind him.

  He must have heard the hurt in her voice, for he twisted about in the chair to look up at her, and though his gaze was at first unsympathetic, it softened.

  "What do you mean?" he asked.

  "You cannot have told me everything that happened to you. There must be more, to have changed you so much. If you won't tell me, how am I to understand? How am I to ease whatever troubles you if you shut me out?"

  "No, no." The affection in his voice rang hollow to Tara. She did not believe it, and did not know what to do with the horror, the crippling fear, that disbelief engendered. She loved this man with all her heart, and had never doubted his equal love for her. Yet now... now, she felt terribly alone.

  "It's nothing," Mordyn went on. "I am troubled only by the amount that must be done, now that I have returned. There are so many demands upon my time, my thought. I'm sorry. I do not mean to cause you alarm, or concern."

  "You're so thin, so pale. You must be sick." She could hope for that, in this horribly changed world; she could hope that her precious husband was sick, for it might explain, more gently and comprehensibly than any other explanation, why he had become a stranger to her. But he shook his head.

  "I am well. Any pallor is only the mark of my travels, my tribulations. You will see: soon enough, I will have some fat back on these bones, some colour back in my cheeks. Do not worry."

  And he turned away from her again, bent back towards his writing table. That dismissal allowed anger to rise briefly through Tara's confusion and sorrow.

  "What are you writing?" she asked sharply.

  "Tedious matters. Nothing of consequence."

  "May I see it?" She reached over his shoulder and lifted a corner of the covering sheet. He slapped it down again.

  "Please. I am in haste. Let me finish this in peace."

  Tara left without another word, forcing herself not to look back as she went. She yearned to do so, to indulge the faint hope that she might find him gazing after her with all the old, profound love in his eyes, but she could hear that hateful quill scratching out its black path. He had forgotten her already, she knew; she, and all her concerns, had been expunged from his awareness in an instant. For years she had dwelled in the light of the warmest, most elevating sun imaginable. Now it was being extinguished, and the darkness descending upon her was all the deeper for the glory that had preceded it.

  And, she reflected as she walked along a corridor of white marble, it had not even been his own hand in which her husband wrote. She knew his spidery, flowing script as well as she knew her own. Even that momentary glimpse of his work had been enough for her to know it was in another style altogether. He meant to conceal authorship of the text. Or his hand had changed along with his manner, his mood. His heart.

  She paused at a narrow window that looked out over the rooftops towards the heart of Vaymouth. Gryvan's Moon Palace loomed like a pale mountain over the city. Snow was falling, drifting down in a slow, tumbling dance. Where once Tara might have seen a certain austere beauty, now she saw only bleakness.

  IV

  The Lannis warrior writhed on Malloc's spear like a great, impaled fish. Flopping around, he thought contemptuously. They die like animals. It was fitting.

  The last of the Lannis men had fallen back to a bare knoll outside Kilvale. Only some thirty of them left now. The killing had begun before dawn, and carried on, in fits and starts, all through the grey morning. Most of them had died in the first hour, killed in their tents, beneath their blankets. Since then it had been more hunt than battle, the stragglers cornered in barns and orchards and ditches as they scattered. There had been, Malloc thought, perhaps two hundred of them when the cleansing began; now just these thirty, squatting atop the hillock, behind their wall of shields, their hedge of spears.

  He ducked instinctively as arrows thrummed over his head. He freed his spear and trotted back to the Haig line. There was a great eagerness in him, so powerful it had him trembling, and it would be easy to give in to it, to go howling up the hill and throw himself at these traitors, these craven orphans of a shattered Blood. But he had spent half his life fighting in Gryvan oc Haig's service, and that long experience still spoke loudly enough--just--to restrain him. The final reckoning would not be long delayed. He could wait.

  More than a hundred Haig warriors were massed at the base of the knoll, and more were constantly arriving, gradually spreading themselves out to encircle this last refuge of the Lannis survivors. Malloc pushed clumsily through the line of archers, ignoring the curses directed at him. He found his companions already resting on a grassy bank, sharing bread and water. One of them threw a cloth to him as he drew near.

  "You've Lannis blood on your face."

  Malloc grunted and wiped his brow and cheeks.

  "And you've none, I see," he said to Garrent, his oldest friend, in the business of war at least. "You been shirking?"

  "They run too fast for me to catch them up," Garrent said with a grin, shaking his left l
eg in Malloc's direction. He had twisted his ankle during the retreat from Kolkyre, and claimed it still hampered him.

  Malloc slumped down beside him and grabbed the bread from his hand.

  "Not running now," he observed.

  "More fool them. They'll last no longer than a maiden's virtue in Tal Dyre once there's a few more of us."

  Malloc looked around. A company of Taral-Haig horsemen was thundering up, their hide-armoured horses as menacing as the men who rode them. And behind them another fifty or more Haig spearmen came running, every eye fixed on their cowering quarry above. The archers had a rhythm now, flighting a steady shower of arrows up onto the hilltop. A few would surely find flesh.

  "There's enough of us now," Malloc muttered, tearing at the dry, hard bread.

  "Oh, wait for the order, man. It'll come soon enough."

  "We're getting orders now?" Malloc said through a full mouth.

  He had encountered no one who could say where the command for this had come from, whose the decision had been to settle with the Lannis men. Some murmured that Aewult nan Haig himself had issued the order, some that one or other of his Captains had taken it upon themselves. Malloc doubted such explanations. The killing had simply begun, in the night, like a rainstorm breaking of its own volition. Sometimes these things just happened because they had to.

  The need for it had been building ever since word reached the army that the Bloodheir's messengers had been massacred in Ive. Lannis and Kilkry were already being blamed, around the campfires, for the mystifying defeats inflicted upon the Haig forces by the Black Road at Glasbridge and Kolkyre. Ever since then, it seemed to Malloc, the few Lannis warriors entangled in the Bloodheir's army had been marked men. The added weight of dead messengers had been too much for what little trust remained.

  The army of the Black Road was not far away, though whether it still merited the title of army was uncertain. Those scouts Malloc had talked to reported thousands of the northerners spread across huge swathes of countryside in loose bands and companies, some of them in good order, some appearing to be leaderless mobs. Whatever their state, they could have attacked at any time in the last few days, but had not. Haig and Gyre thus faced one another in unresolved opposition, neither advancing, neither retreating. Malloc had not realised how agonising the tension had become until this bloody morning had offered itself up as release.

  A single arrow skittered off the helm of a Haig swordsman further forward and spun into the long grass a few arms' lengths from Malloc.

  "Toothless as old dogs, they are," Garrent said.

  It was true enough. It had all been too sudden, too fierce for much in the way of resistance. Malloc's one vague regret was that he had spent all morning struggling through wet fields and marshes in pursuit of fleeing Lannis men while--if the reports he had heard were true--others had found easier prey. Kilvale was full of Kilkry families exiled from their lands and homes by the Black Road's advance. Some of those who had been forced to take shelter in camps or farms outside the town itself, beyond the protection of Kilvale's Guard, had felt the force of Haig wrath today as well. Malloc would have liked to be a part of that. Lannis had never been much more than lackey to the arrogant inhabitants of Kolkyre's Tower of Thrones; if any Blood truly deserved chastisement, humbling, it was Kilkry.

  But he had no complaint. He had killed, and would kill again before the day was out. And once it was all done, the army would be the stronger for it. Cleaner. Unreliable allies--traitorous ones--were worse than no allies at all. There was a healing to be had in this, a making right of so much that had been wrong. It took the edge off Malloc's shame at his flight--and that of so many other good Haig men--from the battle outside Kolkyre. A great deal had been inexplicably lost that day amidst the terrible, causeless panic that took hold of Aewult's army. Some of it, some respect, was recovered by this cutting out of the canker from their ranks.

  If anything did trouble him, it was the unfamiliar joy this carnage engendered in him. He had often found excitement in fighting, in ending a life and keeping his own, but this was different. This killing felt as if it somehow completed him, answered a fervent desire he had never before known. That seemed strange to him, but it was too sweet-tasting to concern him overly much. He wanted to drink still more deeply from this well.

  There was a cry from up above. One of the Lannis spearmen fell forward from the shield wall, an arrow in the notch of his shoulder. He slid on his stomach a short way down the grassy slope as the shields closed up behind him. An arm stretched out, scrabbling at his ankle, trying to get a grip to haul him back. He was too heavy, and a further flurry of shafts quickly deterred the man who sought to help him.

  "All be over soon," Malloc murmured. It was odd that such a thought should stir regret, but it did.

  "The Bloodheir," said Garrent, suddenly leaping to his feet.

  Malloc rose too. Everyone was stirring, making themselves appear ready and willing. Malloc craned his neck to get a glimpse of Aewult nan Haig.

  The Bloodheir came with a dozen of his mighty Palace Shield, great men clad in metal, bearing pennanted lances, astride massive horses. Malloc smiled. Aewult himself was magnificent, cloak flowing from his shoulders, eyes fixed upon the miserable little crowd of warriors atop the hillock.

  He drew his horse to a halt and bent to talk to someone in the throng that closed about him. Malloc had never been so close to any of his ruling house. To be able to see every line upon the Bloodheir's brow, the stitching in his great leather gauntlets, renewed his fervour. The urge to loose some wildly adulatory cry, perhaps draw a fragment of that noble attention to himself, was almost irresistible.

  The Bloodheir straightened. He was nodding at something said to him.

  "It's too late to do anything but finish it now," Malloc heard him say. "And if it's to be done, do it well. Make sure none escape."

  Those words were all it took. They spread through the Haig ranks, repeated by every eager mouth, and men began to move without waiting for any further command. One began to run, then another, then tens, then scores. Archers threw aside their bows, drew knives and rushed forward. All swarming up the slippery turf incline, all desperate to be in at the end of this, all filled with unreasoning, consuming hatred.

  And Malloc was at the front of it, feeling as strong, as potent, as ever he had in his life. His legs pounded, his heart soared; they both carried him on and up to meet the waiting spears of a dying Blood.

  V

  Taim Narran could feel sweat slick on his back and shoulders beneath his shirt. Exertion made his face burn against the bitter air. Fatigue was building in his thighs. Yet still Orisian came at him. His Thane, less than half his age, battled on and on.

  Taim retreated, a few quick steps back across the training ground, blocking sword blows with his shield as he went. Orisian came after him, on the very borders of control. It was often this way when the two of them fought. The longer the training bouts went on--and Orisian always insisted on extending them, pushing himself to his limits and beyond--the more aggressive the young Thane became, the more violent and unrestrained grew his attacks.

  Taim let Orisian bear down on him, and twisted aside. Orisian went stumbling through and Taim gave him a smack on the side of his head with the flat of his blade as he went. To his credit, Orisian managed to keep his feet, staggering down almost to his knees before whirling about and surging up again.

  The two of them battled back and forth. Servants had swept the training square free of snow, but the ground was still frozen, almost rock-like. Orisian's knuckles, even his cheek, were grazed from earlier falls. Nothing dimmed his willingness to come forward again and again, but exhaustion was at last blunting the ferocity of his attacks. His shield was drifting low, his feet becoming a touch sluggish.

  Enough, Taim thought. He dropped his own guard just enough to offer temptation. Orisian lunged. Taim sidestepped, and brought his own shield up in a slicing arc. He opened Orisian's forehead with its rim. Orisian
reeled, blood streaking down his face. Taim hooked a foot around the back of his knee, and sent him sprawling.

  "We're done for today," Taim said, kicking his Thane's sword away. "You're not learning now, only exhausting yourself."

  Orisian struggled to his feet, wiping blood from his brow.

  "I can carry on," he said breathlessly. He looked around for his sword.

  "Your mind's not clear enough," Taim said. He sheathed his own sword.

  "You told me once I had to fight by instinct, not by thinking."

  "True enough, but that only works with the right instincts. Anger fouls them up. Fight angry, and you won't fight long."

  Orisian looked downcast. "I know. I try."

  "You do. And for as long as you concentrate and keep calm, you fight well. But something happens. You start fighting something more than just me."

  Orisian stooped to retrieve his blade. He made a clumsy effort to return it to its scabbard, missing at the first attempt.

  "You must get that wound cleaned and bound," Taim said.

  "Yes," murmured Orisian. He grimaced at his Captain. "Did you have to hit me so hard?"

  "Thought it might clear your head. It's not much more than a touch. It'll clean up fine."

  Orisian grunted, and walked slowly off towards the barracks. As Taim watched him go, he felt sorrow for the young man. He could not call it pity, for that was a sentiment Orisian would utterly refuse. Sorrow fitted better, in any case.

  Taim was not certain what it was that came over Orisian when they trained. Some formless fury woke in him. Perhaps he became lost in the punishing rhythm of strike and counter-strike, parry and sidestep, and found himself battling against memories, or fears, or death itself. Perhaps each blow he aimed at Taim's shield was, for him, aimed rather at the whole array of enemies, and of misfortunes, that had taken his father from him, and Inurian. And Rothe.