Crusade

by Daniel M Ford

  “People, go to your homes. Bar your doors and fill your hands and do not come out again until one of the Five tells you so,” he bellowed.

  Almost instantly, yet another voice sounded in his head, this one calming, and, he knew, reaching out to everyone in and around Thornhurst.

  Return to your homes, please, for your own good, came Mol’s voice, and Torvul thought he could detect the slightest hint of fear behind his sense of her. Danger comes to us this night, but the Mother will see us safely through it, I swear.

  Torvul watched folk pause and look up at the air and if startled by the words they heard. They started to move back to their homes; then the night was rent by another, all too human scream.

  The people around him panicked, and broke in flight. Some for their homes, some away from the scream, and one or two armed folk, towards it.

  Torvul cursed and ran for his wagon, and the tools he left within it.

  Lass, he thought, hoping Mol would hear him, can you get ahold of Keegan’s lot?

  They’ve already tried to stop them, she answered, and he could feel the grief in her voice. Torvul, you must hurry to intercept them before Gideon. I don’t know what he means to do but I fear it is something dire. Hurry.

  Torvul rarely ran, but he found his legs churning now. His strides didn’t eat much ground, but he churned his legs as best he could, though soon his breath was puffing out of his lungs like a bellows-organ of the Homes. He cursed the size of the village, though it wasn’t large; he cursed his age, though as dwarfs went, he wasn’t elderly yet; mostly he cursed knowing that, for all he jeered at Allystaire’s relentless exertions, the Arm would have been to his wagon and back already.

  Well, the Arm isn’t here, he told himself. You are. The boy is. We’ll do.

  When Torvul did finally reach his door, he was sucking great lungfuls of air, or trying. He fumbled open the lock and darted inside.

  He blessed his organized habits. A half step in the door, there was his jerkin. Another step as he shrugged into it, the potion bottles and other oddments clipped to it jingling, and there was his crossbow, a sheaf of bolts. He patted the pockets clipped to the rings on his thick leather jerkin, his fingertips reading the runes inscribed on the hardened leather.

  Signal. Woundclot. Nighteye. Echoes. He thought briefly of the ingredients scattered about the wagon. He’d once told Allystaire he didn’t use poison out of professional pride, but he knew well how quickly a poison could be wrought from the materials he had. But there was no time; once more he fingered the four pouches he had, and threw open his door, one hand already sliding a bolt home in his crossbow.

  Thirty paces from his wagon’s door, two figures were moving in, one of them dragging a limp form behind him.

  Torvul snapped the crossbow up and fired off a shot. It was pure instinct, and he was no sharpshooter, not by dwarf standards. But it was bright as day to his eyes, the bow was well-made, and at thirty paces, it was an easy shot. As he fired, he registered that the men coming towards him were both not only unarmored, but indeed bare-chested. He felt himself smiling as the bolt loosed.

  Except the man he aimed for knocked the bolt aside with one sweep of a heavily gauntleted arm. Laughing.

  “Put the toy down, little man,” the one who’d knocked his bolt aside laughed. The other, who dragged a limp and bloodied form behind him, laughed along with him. Their mirth was a harsh and grating thing. It was easy to imagine the howl from before coming from men like them.

  “You’re the brewer,” the other said, through his laughter. “You give us a drink, eh. Maybe you live longer.” He shrugged. “Take it anyway once you’re dead.”

  “I’ll give you some of my best,” the dwarf said. “Give ya more if ya like it,” he added, putting a plaintive whine in his voice. “Let me go and I’ll show ya the Temple treasury. Ya can have all the folk o’the village,” he added, taking a half-step back. He unhooked a pouch, the one that read Nighteye, and tossed it towards the berzerker.

  Thank you, Lady, he thought, for not layin’ the same rules upon me as you did Allystaire. He studied the body that the Dragon Scale dropped casually on the grass. Torvul couldn’t identify the villager, but he lay limp, bloodied. His chest didn’t rise, not that the dwarf could see. Then he turned his eyes to the berzerker, who’d ripped open the leather pouch and tossed it aside, and was now eyeing the glass bottle distrustfully.

  The other, apparently grown impatient, came to him and ripped it from his hands, jabbering at him in their own tongue.

  Torvul slipped a thumb over another pouch and opened it, palming the bottle inside.

  The berzerker held the bottle he’d tossed them up in the moonlight, studying it.

  In one motion, Torvul slipped a bolt into his bow, raised, fired.

  The berzerkers were fast, but they were concerned about their own flesh—not the delicate glass bottle one held up, framed in the light.

  Torvul’s bolt shattered it. The moment passed slowly. Torvul felt he could see the individual droplets as they burst into the air. The berzerkers were pelted with broken glass, drawing tiny dots of blood on their hard features.

  Droplets of the Nighteye potion the bottle had contained splattered all over their faces—and their eyes.

  Torvul threw down the bottle he’d palmed, the one marked Signal, then ducked his head behind his arm, eyes squeezed tightly closed.

  The night lit up as brightly as the sun itself, even behind closed eyelids and a shielding arm. There was no heat to it, but the brightness left white lines in his vision, blurred it as he hopped from his wagon and sprinted away.

  * * *

  Many miles away to the north, bent over Ardent’s neck, Allystaire saw the brief red flash in the night, the flare rising up and disappearing as quickly as it came. He pulled the destrier to a stop, peered at where he’d seen it, as if he could divine anything from the vague impression the red flare had left on his night vision.

  Sweat streamed down his face, a fact he only noticed now that he’d stopped. “Time to let you walk anyway,” he muttered, patting the horse on the side of the neck.

  Ardent’s chest was puffing like a bellows, breath pouring into and then out of him in great gusts. Allystaire started to ease his feet from the stirrups, but the horse gave his great neck a hard shake, struck a hoof at the road so sharply that a spark flashed in the night.

  Allystaire nudged the war horse with one heel, and the great grey surged forward again, and paladin and mount were off once more.

  Allystaire kept turning his head to where he thought he’d seen the flare, wondering what it could have signaled.

  * * *

  Torvul ran for all he was worth, which, when it came to sprinting, wasn’t much. Another howl rent the air behind him, but it was the cry of a wounded animal.

  An angry wounded animal, Torvul thought, as he ran. His course took him back towards the cluster of buildings around the village green. Finally, his legs burning and his chest aching with the effort of drawing breath, he pulled to a stop and checked his pockets again, thumb scattering over the runes. Woundclot. Echoes.

  He pulled open the former pouch and pulled out the bottle. “Forgive me, Your Ladyship, for the sin of waste.” He flicked it open, while he pulled free a handful of crossbow bolts, and began splashing the liquid onto the broad, flat heads. He shoved them, head-up, back into the sheaf at his hip and slotted one into the bow.

  He brought the weapon up, flipped up one of the sighting rings, and began scanning his horizon, looking for targets.

  Then he heard the laughter. He whirled to face it, saw a third man—Mol had said there were three. This one was dressed similarly to the others: loose trousers, no shirt, heavy gauntlets that covered his hands from fingertip to elbow. They were well-wrought; Torvul found himself noticing the details as the man laughed, spread his arms wide. They were etched, patterned li
ke the scales of some great bronze wyrm, the fingers ending in sharply clawed tips. His torso was covered in a massive tattoo of a wave threatening to swallow a long-keeled boat; on the prow of it stood the crude figure of a man with his arms raised, his mouth open. Whether he welcomed the destruction and uttered a cry of praise, or roared defiance back at the sea, Torvul couldn’t tell. And he didn’t care; the tattoo made a target. He shot.

  This Dragon Scale lowered one arm, trying, Torvul thought, to catch his bolt. He didn’t, not quite.

  But he did slow it. It only just penetrated his skin, instead of punching clean through him and tearing into his vitals.

  The huge man—he was easily a head taller than Allystaire, and built just as broadly—laughed again, slowly sauntering forward towards the dwarf.

  “Did you think you could run from the Father of Waves, little trickster? Even if you bested my brothers, no brewer of poisons is the match of Kormaukr Dragon Scale. Bring me the boy,” the man said, “or I will kill every family in this village. Starting with the children.”

  Torvul quickly slipped another bolt into the crossbow and raised it. By the time he fired, Kormaukr had nearly closed the distance. The bolt skittered away into the night, deflected by a gauntleted hand.

  The berzerker sent the dwarf tumbling with a casual, backhanded blow. Crossbow bolts skittered out of the sheaf; he only held to the bow because of the sling over his shoulder.

  Kormaukr was on him again, lifting him from the ground. Torvul fumbled for a bolt from his pouch, jammed it hard into the berzerker’s torso.

  It was like trying to push the bolt through rock. It was possible, but only just. It made no more of an impression than the one he’d fired.

  The berzerker laughed again, and threw Torvul in a high arc. The dwarf landed roughly, felt one of his shoulders go numb after a loud pop, found himself looking up at the stars. The potion in his eyes had begun to fade, so the sky was becoming that of a spring night once again, with a strange distortion hovering between it and the dwarf’s eyes; Torvul almost lifted a hand to feel for the damage.

  The berzerker laughed and drew forth the bolt Torvul had stabbed him with, held it up to his eye. “Your poisons are nothing to the Dragon’s Scale, dwarf. Our blood is as the sea itself; can you poison the sea?”

  “No. But the sea can freeze, and the will of man can direct it where and how he chooses.”

  The strange hovering cloud become the slim figure of a bald boy clad in bright blue robes, a plain wooden staff in one hand, standing between Torvul and the berzerker.

  Gideon raised his free hand, lightly, almost casually. “What happens if your blood freezes, Kormaukr Dragon Scale?”

  The berzerker suddenly stopped, one arm outstretched, inches from Gideon’s unprotected neck. Torvul watched in shock, and not a little horror, as ice crystals formed on the outside of the gauntlet that reached for the boy’s throat. The metal of the gauntlet cracked, shattered, fell away from the arm beneath it.

  The berzerker’s hand itself was, Torvul thought, scaled and clawed in the same way the gauntlet had been. And now cracks were moving up along his arm, to his neck, to the wide, terrified animal’s eyes that rolled in fear.

  “Gideon,” Torvul whispered, pain shot through his usually strong voice. “No.”

  “How much would I truly love the world, Torvul,” Gideon said, “if I did not save it from men like this?” The boy did not turn to look down at the wounded dwarf; he stared hard at Kormaukr Dragon Scale, and shook his head. “A man who has traded all that makes him a man for the power to bring terror, the strength to rend the flesh of anything unlucky enough to come within his reach? No,” the boy said, and if his voice was sad, it was also firm, as if he had made a decision.

  Gideon closed his open hand, and Torvul watched as the towering Kormaukr Dragon Scale was suddenly sheathed to his very eyeballs in ice that rose up from underneath his skin. Cracks appeared, starting at the tip of his clawed, outstretched fingers.

  Then the Will opened his palm, splaying his fingers, shoving at the air with his wide opened hand. And the frozen berzerker, his eyes still wide and rolling with fear, shattered.

  Torvul awkwardly shifted his weight to one side, leaned close to the ground so he could push himself up with his good arm, but before he’d even gotten halfway, Gideon was standing over him and helping him up. The boy’s arms had a surprising strength in them, the dwarf thought.

  What was more surprising was the light that blazed briefly in Gideon’s eyes as Torvul met them. For just a moment, they were a hard-edged gold without iris or pupil, then they were once again soft and brown. “Where are the others?”

  “Blinded,” Torvul said. “Perhaps forever. That way,” he added, pointing. “What do you mean to do with them?”

  “Make what use of them I can before sending them on their way,” Gideon said. Torvul clutched at the boy’s robe with his good arm, but Gideon disappeared through his grasp, vanishing like smoke.

  * * *

  The world may have gone dark for Onundr Dragon Scale, but that did not mean he or his brother Gauk were dead or beaten.

  Onundr’s thoughts were wordless rage. He had one arm wrapped around Gauk’s ankle, while the other Braechsworn crawled ahead of him, his nose bent to the ground.

  That Dragon Scales were reduced to sniffing their prey like hounds was a disgrace. It would not last, he was sure, but even with their eyes taken from them for now, Onundr and Gauk would see the Sea Dragon’s work done. Their eyes may have betrayed them, but the strength of their arms had not, their skin was still as hard as fine mail, their throats still full of bloodlust and rage and if they had to sniff his enemies out, they would.

  No dwarf was going to best them. Onundr knew that as certainly as he knew that the sun would rise, that the oceans would roll against the beach, that Braech’s waters would some day rise and claim the world.

  Already, the berzerker thought, his eyes were starting to clear, and the dark of the night was beginning to move in on the edges of his vision.

  “You should be able to see what happens next.” The voice came from nowhere, and the berzerkers recoiled in surprise, if not fear, for neither had heard nor smelled this man until the moment he spoke.

  Then Onundr’s vision suddenly cleared, filling with the mud and grass of the ground close beneath him; he saw the dirt crusting the etched scales of his gauntlets and recoiled in anger.

  Dragon Scales did not crawl.

  Onundur tried to bring his feet under him and stand, only to find himself suddenly lifted from the ground. He cast his eyes towards Gauk, saw that his brother was similarly being pulled into the air, bound in bands of bright golden fire. He looked down at himself and saw the same flames, binding but not burning, then heard the voice again as he was turned in the air, until he found himself facing a mere stripling, a thin, bald wisp of a boy in a robe.

  “If it is any comfort to you,” the boy was saying, “for the first time in your lives, the power that resides within you is going to be used for the good of the world.”

  Onundr knew in that moment that it was the boy whom he’d been sent to kill who had trapped him, trussed him like a pig going on the spit. What was more, he knew now how foolish, how vain that goal had been, because the power that spoke through the boy was an ancient thing, and vast.

  “You will have your lives, when I am done,” the boy said calmly. “If you want them.”

  The boy turned and started walking calmly, casually, and Onundr found himself floating helplessly in the air behind. He opened his mouth, tried to pull the air into his lungs to roar, and found that he could not; something the boy had done had robbed him of that as surely as it had robbed him of everything else.

  “Men like you do not even realize what you have become, do you?” The boy spoke slowly, chidingly, as if trying to correct the missteps of a child. “You have no idea of what y
ou have lost in pursuit of the power you have. It could be that what I mean to do will remind you, and that will not be a kindness.”

  The boy suddenly stopped and turned to look at them, coming close, first to Gauk, and then to Onundr, peering closely at his brother’s face, then at his.

  The boy himself was bald, his hair shaved carefully away, and his eyes were wide, brown and oddly shaped to Onundr’s eye. He was from somewhere far from where they now stood, he was sure.

  “He draws from you even as you draw from Him,” the boy murmured, almost curiously. “Surely on some level even you understand that.”

  Then the boy turned and walked again. Onundr imagined they were being taken to the local Temple, to be cut apart and sacrificed to their heathen goddess, so he found himself shocked to find himself floating to rest upon his feet on a bed of soft green grass, facing a tall building with a stone face and a high peaked roof, covered in tiles rather than the thatch that the rest of the village showed.

  The boy turned and looked at the two berzerkers and then lowered his head, extending both hands towards them, fingers splayed open.

  Almost instantly, Onundr felt a pull deep within him. His mouth filled with the taste of brine, his ears echoed with the roll of the waves.

  And something began to issue forth from him, slowly, inexorably.

  In each of the boy’s hands, small blue-grey balls of light began to grow.

  As they did, Onundr felt the strength Braech granted him waning. Already, the gauntlets formed around his hands were growing too heavy, too large, the claws no longer fitting snugly around his fingers.

  Slowly, the claws slid from his hands and hit the ground with a heavy thud. Panic rose in him, and he looked to his brother. Gauk’s claws slid to the ground slowly as well, slipping away from arms grown thinner.

  Onundr watched as his brother’s chest seemed to draw in on itself, slowly collapsing, till the huge, muscled berzerker was hardly recognizable. He turned his eyes down to his own body, saw the pact he’d made with Braech vanishing before his eyes.