He did not recognize those who approached, not at this distance, though the step of some few of them bespoke military training. As they came closer, he could tell that their skin tone was fair. Invaders. Whether Bremondine bards or Syonese traders, he could not tell from here. “Aidan,” he said quietly. “Go to them. Carefully. And Aidan…”
The shaman looked up at Bakti and saw the painful mixture of hope and fear in his eyes. “My chief?”
“If…” he said, choking back the hope and fear in his voice––hope that the boy had survived the plague, but fear that he would be foolish enough to try to return to the tribes, “if somehow the son of Dree is with them…”
Aidan nodded. “No fear, my chief,” the healer said cheerfully. “You will not see him.”
Bakti watched Aidan hike up his doeskin alb and run out at full speed to meet them, vaguely disapproving of the clumsy lumbering steps of one not used to physical exertion. True, Aidan was not a warrior of the tribe, but he was still Dhanani. The chief raised a brow and looked around at his people. It was not just Aidan. Perhaps, he allowed to himself, it was time to move the tribe. They were growing complacent in this Invader peace, and they were becoming slow and fat. He himself was becoming slow and fat. It was disgraceful. Challenge would do them good.
Slow minutes later, he watched the tribe’s shaman hug these people close to his body with that strange Invader intimacy, talking to them earnestly and beckoning them toward the camp. Aidan recognized them, then. This came as a relief. But as they approached the camp, Bakti could see the deep concern in Aidan’s face. Something was wrong.
The chief recognized three warriors among them, not by face, as they were still too far to see that clearly, but by their bearing. They were knights, in spite of their mismatched clothing and lack of armor. They were clearly well trained and carried swords at their sides, swords without scabbards that were simply thrust through their belts, as if in haste. With them came a few glowworm priests, probably B’radikites, along with a handful of ragged household servants, it seemed, and a lady. As the woman entered the glow of the tribe’s fires, her hair glowed a silvery red, and for a moment, he drew up short, thinking the woman must be Lady Renda. But no, this lady was older and more careworn than even a few years of peace could have made such a warrior. Old enough to be perhaps the hero’s mother…
Three weak knights, a handful of household servants, a few priests and…Brannagh! The plague! His heart seized in his chest and he lowered the Verge of Anado toward them. “Trineh bwakra!”
They stopped, bewildered. He had called to them in Dhanani, but his meaning was unmistakable. They dared not approach.
“What…carries you?” the Chief called in broken Syonese, his eyes wide. “Are we…fetch death…from you?” His frustration at trying to find the strange words shown in his face, as did his fear.
The Invaders looked at Aidan, who explained that the chief had heard about the plague at Brannagh. After a few hasty words back and forth, Aidan cleared his throat. “No fear,” he called back in Dhanani, to be sure the chief and the people of the tribe would understand. “The plague is defeated.”
The Dhanani behind him cheered, but Bakti silenced them. “Who are they,” he called, “and why do they come to us?”
“These are all that remain of Castle Brannagh, my chief. The castle is…fallen. They seek refuge among us.” Aidan looked pleadingly at the chief. “We have space enough, and food. They’ve nowhere else to go.”
Brannagh, fallen. Bakti looked over the expectant faces of his people and saw there only sympathy and charity for those who had saved Syon and the tribes of the Kharkara from Kadak, and he loved them for it. But as chief, he had to fear for them, to worry for them, to wonder what they would not think to wonder: What possible force had been strong enough to destroy Brannagh? And more importantly, would it follow these refugees to the Plains, among the tribes? But he allowed that these were questions better asked close at hand about his own fire than shouted across the plain for all to hear, since, if something evil followed them, it was already on its way. Besides, he knew firsthand how quickly the tribe’s excitement could turn into panic. He beckoned the Invaders closer with more welcome than trepidation, he hoped, then returned to his tent to finish his meditations to the god of mercy, trusting to his people to make them welcome.
* * *
The battering against the great doors of Brannagh had gone from a futile thudding of green wood against the ancient oak of the castle doors to a dry splintering, and at the prospect of victory, the attackers’ pace had redoubled. The outer gates had long since failed, and the heat of the mages’ attacks combined with the battering ram had finally begun to defeat the protections set upon the castle so long ago.
“To the crypt, go!” Nara appeared in the east gallery on the mezzanine overlooking the main hall of castle Brannagh where the few remaining members of the household had gathered to defend the castle with whatever they could find. The nun, so long no more than a governess in a childless house, had just come from the east chapel where her rite had driven out the last of Xorden’s desecration against B’radik, and the force of her faith and her goddess’s grace shone around her. Her habit blazed like a star, and the long, thin veil of her hair writhed and crackled with the goddess’s power around her wrinkled face. She was terrifying in her full radiance, so bright that they could not look directly upon her. “You cannot defeat them. For your lives, I charge you in the name of B’radik, run! I will hold them here as long as I can.”
Three men, Lwyn, Tero and Dane, were the last survivors of the plague, and they stood below her on the stairs, still weak, wearing only the clothing and weaponry they could scavenge along the way, but there was no mistaking them for any but what they were: Knights of Brannagh. Once the servants and priests had gone, they turned toward the doors, swords ready, to face the enemy.
“No. Get you to the crypt, as well,” commanded Nara. “I will see to this. If I fail here, there you will fulfill your final duty to the House of Brannagh. But if we, any of us, should survive, we will need your strength for what comes next.”
The knights looked at each other for only a moment. How would Lord Daerwin and Lady Renda react, knowing they had abandoned an elderly nun to defend the castle alone? Still…she was clearly no ordinary nun. Tero, the most senior of the knights, bowed his head in obedience, and the rest followed. “For Brannagh, Damerien and all Syon,” he shouted over the pounding at the door, “we will trust and obey you, madam.”
“Fear me not,” she said, the glow emanating from her habit increasing, filling the hall around them as they ran, and her words echoed in the sudden terrible silence as the pounding stopped. “I follow hard upon. Go now!”
All at once, the doors splintered to pieces and shattered inward under the force of the mages’ volley, blasting over her, around her, past her, embedding bits of the wood into the walls of the gallery. Yet the volley held at the doorway, faltered, withered, and ultimately shrank to nothing, just as the glow of Nara’s habit faded to an eerie restless glow and slowly, with an act of incredible will, winked into darkness.
Minutes passed while she stood high in the gallery, silent, unseen, watching the great gaping maw that had been the castle entrance, and sweat beaded her brow. Sure these conquerors would not be long in coming to gloat. She hoped they would not. She moved down the stairs quickly but cautiously, watching the doorway.
She saw the movement in the dawning light beyond and sped her step. She looked through the opposite doorway to the hall leading to the old chapel and to the tunnel leading to the crypt. Still too far. She could not possibly reach it from here, and she cursed herself for a feeble old woman. Ah well, she told herself, so be it.
“Gya cwara! Cwara!” a voice called to her from the doorway, and she drew up short.
“Brymandyan?” she answered in the same tongue, turning to look. It was perhaps the last language she might have expected to hear from these men, these mages, who were now s
treaming into the entry hall. The language was the precursor to Bremondine, and it was the language spoken by most of those who came over from Byrandia before the Liberation. She had had to learn it as a postulant in the convent in order to read and translate the ancient Byrandian tomes, and the elder nuns had taken great care to preserve the pronunciation carefully, but even so, the sound was slightly different from what she’d learned. Still, she could understand it, and facing this unforeseeable circumstance, she found herself absurdly grateful for the sisters’ diligence.
She smiled weakly, letting her aged lips twitch. “Thy pardon, child. My Brymandyan is the Brymandyan of thine ancient fathers, so it will perchance strike thee wondrous strange, but methinks we may yet be heard, one to the other.”
“Yield your castle or be destroyed, Old Mother,” the foremost among them called, apparently unsurprised that she understood, or perhaps not caring. To her eye, this arrogant one seemed some sort of captain, a leader among them. Good. Her disdain would likely not be wasted on him, then.
“This castle is not mine to yield. Truly, thou shouldst return when the master is at home.” She watched him, watched the cloud brewing on his brow. “Thou couldst wait, an thou wouldst,” she offered, needling him further, “since he’s only off defeating thy master and shan’t be long away.”
“Defeating my master?” The mage captain seemed genuinely concerned. “How is it he knows whom we serve? How could he have reached Byrandia so quickly…?”
Byrandia. She tried not to let her surprise show on her face. Ah, so they did not serve Xorden. No wonder B’radik was not concerned with defeating them. A few more minutes, and she could probably wring from him the name of his master, but time would not allow, she feared. The armies without the castle grew restless. She watched the men streaming in around him, stayed from looting the castle by the spectacle of their captain bantering with this old nun.
She smiled. It was a pity, she mused to herself as she pointedly turned her back on them and shuffled away, that no more than a few hundred of them could fit in the great hall at once, to say nothing of the army outside. Still, she supposed it would be enough. It would have to be. She glanced up at the magnificent ancient frescos in the ceiling of the great hall with a deep pang of regret.
“Old Mother! Do not turn your back on me!” The mage captain screamed with rage. “Yield now or we will be forced to destroy it all!”
When she made no answer, he threw steaming daggers of ice at her back in a fit of pique. But the thick shards slammed against her protections. Suddenly her habit blazed with the light of the sun, and the attack released all the energy of the mages’ seemingly stymied volley which she had absorbed into herself and suppressed. The combined power of a scant thousand mages burst outward over them, their own attack returned to them, searing through them and blasting apart what remained of the castle in a flare of white hot light.
Her last clear sight before she faded into unconsciousness was of Arnard and the three knights pulling debris and rock away from her.
“She is still alive, praise B’radik, though barely,” Arnard was saying to the knights. “Come, bring her––
“––into the crypt. It was a near thing, as she was very nearly crushed to death,” Arnard finished Nara’s story. “Had she fallen elsewhere but in the very doorway, I doubt we could have saved her.”
Aidan translated the story for Chief Bakti at the fire, part of his mind occupied with finding the words and part horrified by what he’d heard.
“Comes after all,” added Sir Lwyn in his strange northern tones, “by Her Ladyship’s bidding, we rest hiding for a few days acrypt, to survive on what the servants hoard. We await the sheriff and Lady Renda to return, but…” he faltered, casting a glance toward Lady Glynnis, who merely rocked back and forth where she sat wrapped in her filthy shawl, seemingly oblivious to the conversation around her.
The shaman followed the young knight’s gaze to Her Ladyship and frowned. She was not the powerful, gracious Lady of the Castle he had known only a few years before, and he wished he could help her. But she had found a way to leave, a way not to have to face her loss, and he wondered if he would do her any favor to take that from her. He asked finally, “How did you all breathe for so long, sealed in the crypt?”
Sedrik shifted on the rock where he sat. “The crypt itself is sealed against the elements, my Lord Aidan, but the tunnel leading to it is vented, as you might expect. While we would seal away the honored dead, it would not do at all to have funeral parties suffocate during the rites. So as the doors ‘twixt the tunnel and the crypt stood open, air flowed, albeit with less verve than one might wish. It were better to leave the stairway open into the chapel, but we could not do that, of course.”
Greta nodded. “Many’s the meal of bread, wine and cheese we served right over the Lord Borowain’s bones,” she said with a nervous laugh. “Lord Borowain, a ready eater, he was, so I hear. Sure he’d not mind. That is, I hope he’d not mind…”
“No,” murmured Glynnis with a faint smile, “he did not.”
Aidan looked at her quizzically, but it seemed she was once again lost to her own thoughts.
“We are scant a tenday in the crypt ere we take our leave.” Lwyn continued. “What remains of the army is leery to approach the ruins for a while comes after the explosion, which waiting-for tries our nerves because we know they are near and want to pillage. But they do not and do not! Comes after, their greed defeats their caution, and they come taking all. We only wait for quiet to know they depart.”
Aidan translated for Bakti, who had a question. “How many of this army fell?”
He looked at the other two knights for a moment. “Me, I guess at numbers only. From where I stand, the hall looks to hold about four hundred or five, comes before it falls, mostly magen but a few of knight and farmer besides: those who cannot abide to miss glory. My guess is that none of those within gets out alive. But of their number without, I cannot see.”
“The whole army was about two thousand strong, is all,” added Sir Dane. “I watched from the tower before the gates collapsed. A lot of men, to be sure, but surprisingly small force to take down a castle, especially as protected as Brannagh was. But I know little of such things. Of their number, a bit more than half were farmers and townspeople and Wirthing knights––”
“Forgive me,” Aidan interrupted, “but Wirthing knights? Are you sure? Wirthing was our ally in the wars.”
“Wirthing.” The Chief spat into the fire angrily.
“Wirthing, aye,” said Lwyn. “Himself is among them, I see, comes before the castle falls. Not inside when it comes down, more’s the pity, but near.”
Glynnis nodded. Her bitterness toward Wirthing seemed to cut through the clouding of her wits. “He would not miss Brannagh’s fall for all the gold in the Hodrache.” She recounted the story of how Wirthing knights had kidnapped her granddaughter and sold her to Bishop Cilder for a foul sacrifice and the resentment the kidnappers had expressed to Renda before their deaths. Her normally crystal blue eyes shone almost black with rage. “It was this foul rite that bound B’radik, and Wirthing is to blame.”
“Do not forget,” spoke Nara gently, “that this same rite, desecrated and rendered false as it was by Damerien blood, created Pegrine undead and allowed the goddess to act through her. Otherwise…”
Lady Glynnis’s voice was cold. “This does not excuse Wirthing.”
“No, it does not, Lady,” the ancient nun agreed, “and there will be a reckoning. I only say this because, while I deeply grieve the loss of my dearest charge and every single death since, I give thanks to my goddess that, because it was her blood spilled and not another’s, we discovered this wretchedness and defeated it.”
Defeated it. Aidan looked between the old nun and the sheriff’s wife. Nara sounded so certain, as if she’d seen the battle herself, and yet the sheriff and his daughter had not returned. He hoped she spoke from knowledge and not from hope as was the wont of healers.
The shaman looked over to see Lwyn scowling into the fire. Lwyn had been raised by the Anatayans, with their distrust of gods and magic and those who put too much store in such things. No doubt Nara and even Aidan himself made Lwyn nervous. He was very much a man of what he could see and touch, here and now.
“The other thousand,” Lwyn continued a bit awkwardly in the silence between the two women, “these are magen. It pleases me that these are the most of those inside the castle as it falls. We still have a guess of six hundred magen alive, but they move in caution now, comes after the sting of losing not only their captain but a scant four hundred of their number at a stroke.”
“Six hundred mages,” Aidan whistled softly. “I cannot even imagine it.” His gaze took them all in. “You must have been terrified.”
“Not terrified. We were overwhelmed. ” Sir Tero spoke up, his deep voice no more than a growl in the darkness. “There was no run, no fight, no indecision, no terror. There was only ‘keep everyone alive’ at Nara’s order, and that is what we did. Terror is a luxury for when you have nothing left to do. By the time we had nothing left to do, there was nothing left to fear. We had succeeded.”
Aidan looked into Tero’s eyes, thinking to see there the malignant taunts he’d seen in Vaccar’s eyes whenever the shaman had said something embarrassing and unwarriorlike, but no. This man was a knight through to his marrow and one who had taken many lives in the war, but he was not a brute. Tero was a creature of duty and honor, one whose blood froze rather than burned in a crisis. Aidan nodded to him, and he returned the nod.
Arnard shrugged. “From there, I’m afraid the story grows duller still. We waited until we could no longer hear them scratching around the great stone that sealed the tunnel to the crypt and then waited a bit longer before we came out. With enemies in every direction, we went the only way that seemed sensible. We struck out into the Bremondine forest and hid there until our provisions ran low, and then, once we were fairly certain we had not been followed, we came here.”
Guardian Last (Lords of Syon Saga Book 2) Page 21
