After a tense silence, Aidan shifted and stirred the fire. “So Wirthing retired to his castle.”
Dane shook his head. “I mean, yes, he did, but not to stay. To reprovision. Wirthing is not through yet.” He licked his lips, reluctant to give the news. “I do not know how, but they believe that Brannagh had survivors, and they intend to track us down. I think it will not be long before they deduce our path away from Brannagh. We truly had but one way to go, after all.” He scratched his head. “Also, Wirthing knows that Brannagh was allied with the Dhanani. It’s not a great leap, even for him.”
Aidan murmured the translation to the chief. But something was not right. Wirthing had to know his men could not stand alone against all the tribes of the Kharkara, even without the Brannagh knights.
Tero nodded. “We are prepared. All the tribes of the Kharkara are warned and armed. I should rather engage them in the forest from cover, but that is as it pleases Chief Bakti.”
Bakti nodded. “Yes,” he said, and spoke quickly to Aidan.
“He says he understands your desire for cover,” the shaman translated. “Provided we have sufficient warning, that would be ideal but they may bypass the forest utterly and we must be prepared for that. The forest has been a trap for the Dhanani before.” He looked away, a bit self consciously. “Against the Invaders.”
Tero scowled into the fire.
“There is something else,” Dane continued. “I saw an envoy and a regiment of men arrive at Wirthing’s castle as I was leaving. It seemed somewhat urgent, which made no sense to me, considering––”
“Considering what?” Lwyn looked up at him urgently, his eyes shining an unsettling green in the firelight.
“Considering that it was the Marquess of Moncliff’s colors.” Dane chuckled nervously. “I mean, that is quite a ride, from Moncliff. What could the marquess want that could be so urgent that he should send a regiment? This is a man who can’t choose a side to mount his own bed.”
Aidan and Tero looked at each other. “Damerien,” Tero breathed. “Or Lord Daerwin and Renda, assuming they yet live.”
“They do.” Lwyn nodded resolutely. “They must.”
“Very well,” Aidan said gently. “They may have ridden through his territory. He may even have captured them, may be offering them up for ransom.”
“Capture!” Lwyn laughed heartily. “Mouseheart Moncliff captures the sheriff and my Lady Renda?”
Aidan shrugged. “House Moncliff may be inveterately neutral, but that will not stop the marquess from selling both sides to each other for a profit both ways. I could see where, by subterfuge and trickery––”
“You give him too much credit. Or them, not enough.” Tero stirred the fire. “If he had captured them, he would have brought them along in chains, as offering perhaps or to keep a close watch on them. No, he does not have them.”
Aidan breathed a sigh of relief. “What you say makes sense.” But a new worry made the hair on the back of his neck rise. “But if somehow Moncliffe got word that Wirthing was planning an attack on Brannagh…”
“He may no longer be neutral.” Tero templed his fingers. “He has his own agenda we know nothing about. We should not guess at it. We do know Wirthing’s agenda, and we know the marquess has brought a regiment to him.” He looked around at the assembled men. “Gentlemen. Now we know our enemy and his numbers.”
Nineteen
Lacework
Daerwin slowed beside Nestor and waved the rest of the riders ahead of him. Indeed, just as Chul had said, the entry into the Lacework looked as if it had been cleaned of all magic. Nestor had not even bothered reining in his horse as they came near but merely waved the knights onward, having seen at a glance that they would be safe.
“They were indeed at pains to hide their passage here,” he’d mused as the riders passed them. He pointed across the entire span of the Lacework. “Cleared all across, it is, and for good measure up around the far hills besides. Made rather a panicky mess of it, seems to me. No helping that such a hurried clean even cleared this odd grass away. Lucky for them, up it comes again already,” he’d gestured around them to the new grass shoots sprouting up and shook his head. “An impressive bit of magic, that, to withstand such a cleaning.”
Daerwin nodded thoughtfully and guided the last of the riders into the Lacework, casting a quick glance behind him before he rode in after them. Before long, the riders were deep in the labyrinth of the Lacework. High above them towered mighty spires and cliffs of coral jutting upwards for hundreds of feet through the fissures in the stone, joining here and splitting there, running in great ribbons in places, but mostly just standing like great trees in a forest, obscuring the sunlight in all but a few patches along their way. The way was narrow enough in places that they’d had to ride single file and a few times, they’d had to deviate from the obvious direct path to find an opening wide enough to accommodate the girth of the horses. But when the path opened up, they rode as many astride as they could.
Heaps of sharp, broken coral lined the edges of a few open fissures in the stone of the Lacework. These were all that was left of the heavy monoliths that had crumbled and fallen away, sometimes leaving open crevasses in the grassy floor and sometimes leaving unstable beds of broken coral that were slowly being overtaken by grasses. Occasionally, the Lacework rumbled and shuddered as others of the coral towers collapsed in the distance. The reefs were drying out and becoming brittle, and in the freeze and thaw of the late days of the Feast of Bilkar, without the sea water to help support their weight, they were slowly crumbling away. Occasionally a dusting of crumbled coral would fall over the riders as they passed uneasily between them.
The sheriff searched the narrow blaze of sky above them as they rode, watching for Colaris. The bird had been ordered to make his return below the Lacework, but the sheriff reasoned that once he reached the camp and saw that they’d moved on, he knew how to search for them just as he had in the war. It would be simpler than during the war, he told himself: they had not bothered to hide their tracks. Colaris would find them, if he yet lived.
He would find them.
Daerwin was not ready to accept yet another loss, not now. He simply could not. He refused to let his thoughts wander back to Brannagh, back to all those lost there. He felt a lump of emotion rise in his throat, and he angrily battled it down. Since when had he become so soft, that he could not hold discipline in his mind to stay on the mission at hand? He caressed Revien’s neck and rode on, only occasionally allowing himself a glance upward.
“Hold by the gods!” cried Peringale. His horse skittered to a halt and danced nervously for a moment before regaining composure.
A flock of seagulls fluttered and screeched angrily, upset to have been disturbed in their meal. The gulls were tearing meat from dead bodies in tatters of seamless robes––mages, which quite unnerved all the horses, especially the spare Brannford horses that followed behind Jath. It was all the boy could do to sooth them enough to lead them past the carnage and out of sight and feel of it.
The gruesome spectacle was no worse than anything the knights had seen in the war, but after several miles without seeing anyone but themselves, to stumble upon such a thing was enough to shake their nerves, especially considering that those mages could as easily have been alive.
Once everyone was well clear, Damerien suggested calling a brief rest to help calm both horses and riders. Daerwin would much rather have waited to call a halt until they were well clear of the Lacework and any likelihood of being ambushed in this inhospitable terrain, but he thought it wiser to have the horses and knights alert and calm than to press them.
Only Laniel had stayed back among the bodies, and Daerwin assumed he was seeing to them as was his place as the only priest in their midst. Then again, he was Bilkarian, not Verilionite, so his reasons were likely far more pragmatic. When he returned, he told them that he had spied a gull tugging at a medallion round the neck of one as they passed, and he thought to see if any of the rest ca
rried anything similar that might lend them some insight as to why all these mages had come to Syon after four thousand years.
At the very least, he said, he had hoped to recover artifacts from those who’d died at Brannagh, and he had. Laniel had brought back two medallions and a gold ring, as well as a torn bit of parchment with a strange design on it. A vision mark. Damerien immediately took the parchment from Laniel and looked at it closely. The knights watched him and waited patiently. They could as easily have looked upon it themselves, but as curious as they might be, they had little trust for such things, and it were better the duke should be the one to look at it if anyone should.
At length, Damerien rubbed his eyes. “It was not an official dispatch,” he murmured, tucking the still visible vision mark into his glove. “It was but a journal: a soldier’s diary, kept for him that loved her and their children.” He looked up at the assembled knights and smiled sadly. “She speaks of the boredom and the ceaseless marches, and the mindlessness of those giving the orders. She laments being ever subject to the dangers but never in position for the glory, which always seems to fall to others. Above all she marks the loneliness of being so far from those she loved.”
The knights looked down at their mounts, not wanting to meet their duke’s eye. Yes, it was the song of soldiers in every war, in every age, and it made them uneasy to see this dead enemy now as being so much like themselves.
“Yes, she is like you,” Daerwin said to them, his voice strong and firm. “She felt as you feel, she loved as you love, she lived as you live, but do not believe for a moment that she would not have killed you on sight for being her enemy. She and those with her entered Syon and committed acts of war against us. They destroyed everything that we hold dear!” His voice broke. “Do not lose sight of that fact or your weakness will keep you from surviving to return to your own loved ones.”
His words had the desired effect. The knights nodded to each other.
The smaller medallion Laniel had brought back was from a priest of B’radik––silver, an acolyte’s medal––and the other was, as Daerwin feared, one of the Brannagh Knights’ medallions, taken, no doubt from the body of one of the slain.
Daerwin scowled bitterly, picturing the plague-weakened priests and knights being slaughtered like children in their beds. Intellectually, he supposed he had known the castle would not fall without deaths, but these pieces taken from the bodies of those who had destroyed his home, which they in turn had taken from the bodies of those at Brannagh, made it inescapable to him now. Without a word, he accepted the ring from Laniel and put it on his daughter’s finger. The ring, a simple band of gold with a modest emerald and two rubies, had been one of Glynnis’s favorites. Had she been wearing it when…? What else had they done? He forcibly wrenched his thoughts away from his grief.
Renda squeezed his hand but did not meet his gaze. If she had, they both might have released all the grief they’d stored for the last month, and they could not afford to do so, not with an enemy perhaps around the next turn in the coral, not with their few remaining knights watching them and looking to them for strength. Daerwin gave the call to mount, surprised at how strong his voice sounded in spite of the tightness in his throat, and mercifully, they resumed their journey.
The riders settled into the journey again, the images of the destroyed mages and the gulls tearing at their flesh forgotten, or at least relegated to fodder for nightmares. Daerwin had expected as much from them. Like the disciplined soldiers they were, they had put the very personal story of the dead mage behind them. They had taken his words to heart, that she was an enemy, just as Kadak’s demons had once been the enemy, and the Anatayans and later the Hadrians who allied with Kadak, however briefly, had been the enemy. He hoped it gave them peace. For his part, he felt nothing for her. For all he knew, she might have been the one who killed his Glynnis. The ring Laniel brought back may have come from her finger.
The duke had sent Gikka and Chul even further ahead to scout their way and plot their most direct course through the Lacework, but even so, the journey was tense and silent. The sound of the horses’ hooves clattering over the stone, even damped as it was by the knee high grasses they trampled, echoed unnervingly, hemmed in as they were on all sides. Above them, occasionally, they could hear a strange crackling noise in the pillars, a sound that none would admit to hearing, since to do so would be to admit that the thick cliffs of coral around them were crumbling from within and that they were in grave danger of being crushed. It was enough to speed their pace even as it silenced their talk. He was grateful that so far, at least, there had been no ambush and no great tumble of coral down upon their heads.
Worse yet, a ride that should have had them off the Lacework and out of this peril in no more than half a day was stretching on well past midday, and the riders even more than the horses were fatigued with their constant vigilance.
“Laniel,” Renda murmured softly, aware that her voice would carry in the stillness, “while my father is at a loss for words, I would not have you think him ungrateful for your pains,” she smiled sadly, touching her mother’s ring thoughtfully. “We would rather not have known the certainty of those at Brannagh, but better we should have these than that they become trophies in Byrandia for our enemies.”
The priest looked up at the knight, a bit startled after so much silence to hear her voice. He nodded without speaking.
After a time, she looked at him. “Laniel, how now? You seem…contemplative.”
“I am a priest, my Lady. It is my place to be contemplative.”
“Indeed it is.” She glanced over at Kerrick riding beside her. “What I mean to say is that you seem more contemplative than usual. Is something troubling you?”
Laniel frowned, and from the tension in his body, Renda knew that the answer was assuredly yes. Something was bothering him. But whether he would speak of it was the question. She was certain he would not, but finally he spoke.
“My Lady,” the priest all but whispered, “I am missing a medicine vial from my saddlebag.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“I see you do not understand.” Laniel looked around him before he went on. He looked between Renda and Kerrick. “I wondered how the prisoner might have gotten one of my vials with which to cut himself because, in my pouch, I still had all those I had gathered to treat him. I had chosen them carefully.”
Renda nodded. “Well, perhaps you miscounted and took one more than you thought. Is it possible?”
“Indeed,” offered Kerrick. “The camp was in something of a mad dash to accommodate him when Gikka rode in. With all the chaos, I could certainly see such a benign error going unmarked.”
Laniel shook his head. “I chose three, one for pain, one to fight infection, and one to sedate. If the missing vial had been the sedative I used to treat him, perhaps I could believe I’d taken two. But the missing vial was the ano for the sedative.” He turned to Kerrick. “I was slow to realize this. It should have been obvious. My Lord, you should have been unconscious or dead if he had stabbed you with glass tainted with the sedative. Instead, you were lightheaded and, begging your pardon, my Lord, your manner was uncharacteristic.”
Kerrick laughed softly. “Was it, indeed? Well, I admit, I felt rather giddy.” He smiled. “Better lightheaded and giddy than dead, I suppose. I should count my blessings. I only hope I did not embarrass myself.”
Renda considered. “And you are full certain this vial of ano was not already in your pouch, perhaps hiding in the bottom ere you filled it, or perhaps in passing you decided to bring it as precaution and forgot that you had ?”
Laniel nodded. “I am certain. The sedative I use is derived from Verva copita. ”
She waited for him to continue, but apparently he thought that explanation enough. She shook her head. “Forgive me, Verva copita?”
“Copita is gentle on the body but powerful and not prone to cause ill reactions. It is the same that I used with your father at the abbey. As
gentle as it is, I had no expectation of complication that I should need the ano, so I did not carry it.”
They rode on in silence for a time.
It made no sense to take a vial of ano for a sedative unless the thief, or someone who charged a thief to take it, intended to remedy the sedative and moreover knew exactly which sedative Laniel was apt to use. She did not like the implications. On the other hand, it could have been a random theft. She cautioned herself against reading intention into dumb luck.
“Are your vials marked as to what they contained?” she asked.
Laniel looked down and nodded. “In Bremondine script.” He laughed. “I doubt there’s a soul among us who cannot make it out.”
“Well, an we were not certain before, sure we can be now, that the prisoner himself had no hand in it.” She looked at Kerrick who did not understand. “Of all of us, he is the only one unable to read Bremondine,” she explained.
“Ah, indeed.” Kerrick frowned. “You say nothing else was missing?”
At this, Laniel smiled darkly. “This, more than the missing vial itself, worries me most: no. Nothing else was touched.”
The knights exchanged a worried look. It was bad enough that someone had taken a vial from Laniel’s bag, but that person must have known exactly what he sought, and then that person had given it to the prisoner to wake him, ostensibly so he could escape, or worse….
“Kerrick, was anyone in with the prisoner when you approached, after the duke sent you to mind him?”
He shook his head. “But then, there was a period of time before the duke set me to guard, while we spoke with him, that I confess, I was not yet watching. Gikka was with us, and she had a better vantage from which to see.”
Renda shook her head. “Gikka would have challenged anyone she’d seen. This is indeed worrisome.”
She was certain Damerien had been in there with him alone. What if the prisoner had already been given the ano, before Damerien even went in to question him? He might have been lying there with his shard of glass in hand waiting for the opportunity to strike.
Guardian Last (Lords of Syon Saga Book 2) Page 30
