Crusade

by Daniel M Ford

No, Allystaire thought. They are coming with us to the peace congress.

  “You two are speaking to one another in your minds,” Andus Carek suddenly said. The bard had been sitting with them in silence the entire time, eyes flitting from one to the other. “Don’t look so shocked,” he muttered, when both turned to glare at him. “Idgen Marte has told me of it. It is disconcerting. Even a bit rude,” he added.

  “She ought t’know what t’keep t’herself,” Torvul muttered.

  Andus Carek shrugged. “How am I to write the songs or pen the tales if I do not know the whole truth?”

  “The day you get the whole truth from the dwarf, do let me know,” Allystaire said. “I will want to mark it with a celebration.”

  Torvul sniffed. “I pride myself on keepin’ you confused. Not that y’make it difficult.”

  “The two of you,” Andus Carek said, “are more like brothers than any pair of men I’ve ever known. One minute you’re staring daggers at one another, the next, scoring points with jests like formal duelists. Think on that,” the bard said as he stood up, “while you sleep. Which you both ought to do, if you’re planning on doing as much in the next few day as I imagine you are.”

  “And what do you imagine—” Allystaire began, but the bard began ticking his fingers as he cut Allystaire off.

  “Holding a funeral. Dealing with any other prisoners or faithful the Order and Idgen Marte bring back from Ashmill Bridge. Preparing to leave for the peace congress while also seeing about the defense of the town. How are my guesses?”

  “Not bad for a nosey, two-link singer,” Torvul muttered.

  “I will admit to being one of those, Master Alchemist,” Andus Carek replied, grinning faintly. “And I will simply accept the other as praise from someone whose musical culture is rather different to my own,” he added.

  Allystaire sighed and stood, offering a light nod towards the minstrel. “You are right, Andus Carek. Sleep is something all of us need badly, I would wager.”

  The minstrel bowed lightly, and glided up the stairs almost soundlessly. Torvul was doing his best to mimic Andus Carek’s quiet steps, and was halfway to the door before Allystaire realized it. If Torvul hurried, Allystaire couldn’t see it, but the dwarf was out the door several moments before he was. Allystaire had to hasten to catch up.

  Outside, Torvul was waiting for him, looking at the night sky. “He frightened me, Allystaire. That’s why it all bothers me so much. I do not frighten easily, and the boy scared me. Even he doesn’t truly understand what he’s capable of, or what it was he did last eve.”

  “What did he do? You and he keep dancing around it.”

  “He dragged magic into the world like a man tearing down a dike to let water flood a field. That’s what he did.”

  “Dragged magic into the world?”

  “Remember I told you long ago to think of it like a vast underground river?”

  “That the sorcerers leave half of themselves in, aye.”

  “He dragged it here, or…or punched a hole in the dam, or tore the whole thing down. I don’t know. I could only feel the edges of it, and yet it was the most frighteningly powerful thing I’ve ever known. More so than the sorcerers, or priests of Braech, or the time I sang the Stonesong. I told him I’d stop him, that he needed t’wait. He told me I couldn’t stop him, and Allystaire, so help me, he was right. I’d be as helpless as a babe if he turned on me. We all would.”

  “He will not turn on us, Torvul,” Allystaire said calmly.

  “That much power in anyone’s hands is bound t’corrupt them.”

  Allystaire shook his head firmly. “Not him. Not ever.”

  “If you’re goin’ t’just stand there and say ‘Faith, Torvul…’”

  “Torvul,” Allystaire said. “You do not know what the Goddess hoped for him. Neither do I, truly, but if what you say is true, this may well be it.”

  “You think She wants t’spread magic around, puttin’ power in the hands of anyone?”

  “That is exactly what I think She wants. If we could meet power with love and mercy and hope to survive, then we would—but we cannot. Yet if power could reside in anyone’s hands? Aye, they may use it to gather more unto themselves. Or they might do as we have done, and choose to stand between the hearthfire and the darkness.”

  Torvul was silent, looked off into the darkened green, his hands hanging limp at his sides. “Having magic too ready to our hands was the downfall of my people, Allystaire. We did wonders with it, yes, and we also wrought sterile beauty, and frivolous toys, and we undid ourselves with the surfeit of it.”

  Allystaire moved to Torvul’s side and laid a hand on the dwarf’s shoulder. “Then help guide those who come along now, Torvul,” he said. “Could it be that this is part of the Goddess’s work for you?”

  “I’ll have enough work just keepin’ you pointin’ in the right direction,” the dwarf grumbled.

  “Moving ahead has never been my problem; it was seeing to my flanks.”

  “Well, ya’ve got Idgen Marte for that, and none better.” Torvul crossed his arms over his chest. Allystaire could see a disapproving scowl deepening on the dwarf’s face.

  “Torvul, the night that we kept a vigil, the Mother told me that She called to me, that She put Her Gifts in my hands not—and these are Her words, mind—not to make me a better man, but to draw forth the goodness that was already within me. If you find yourself fearing the weight of the Gift She has settled upon Gideon, then I ask you to think of what goodness She must have seen within him. Think of the life he must have led, the endless, loveless cruelties of it, and then think of how willing he has been to learn, every day, how to be better than those who taught him. And then fear him no more. Gideon is learning to love, learning what he is willing to sacrifice, learning what it means to be good as well as great. If any one of us can change this world for the better, if any of us can save it, it will be him.”

  Allystaire turned and walked wearily off, leaving Torvul staring into the night.

  CHAPTER 36

  Dragon Scales No More

  It was the rare morning that Allystaire found himself asleep on a bed, with real morning light pushing through the shutters instead of the weak pre-dawn grey he always expected when he awoke.

  He found it hard to sit up, hard to force his eyes open.

  Two forced rides in two days and you’re a wreck. Get up, you old fool, he told himself. With a groan of effort, his legs and lower back protesting, he sat up.

  “You haven’t got time for lying about.” Idgen Marte’s voice cracked like a whip from a corner of the room, where the light from the window reached only feebly, in thin tendrils. He turned to find her leaning there, half in light, half in shadow, arms crossed over her chest. Her dark blue leathers were grimed with the dust of the road, her knee-high riding boots caked in mud.

  “I never do,” Allystaire muttered as he stood slowly, forcing his back straight despite its cramping protests. “In fact I should have been awake turns ago.” He began hunting out his clothing, the blue trousers and vest a shade lighter than Idgen Marte’s. His own dirty riding boots gave him pause; he held one up, frowning at the layers of hardening dirt. “Contemptible,” he muttered.

  “Need a new squire. Lucky for you I just brought all of them back to you.”

  “They are squires no longer. They are knights.”

  “Better tell them that, then,” she said. “I brought prisoners, too—and some pilgrims. Folk who turned to worshippin’ the Mother along with Shary after we visited back in the autumn.”

  Allystaire nodded as he dressed, hunted up a rag and a brush to give his boots at least the beginning of a polish. Suddenly he paused and looked back to Idgen Marte. “Where is Shary? I have not seen her in an age.”

  “She’s after her own business,” she replied. A little too quickly, Allystaire thought, turning to
face her.

  “Her business, or your business?”

  “The Mother’s work, then,” Idgen Marte said with a shrug. “The less you know, the less you’ll bother me about it.”

  “Idgen Marte.”

  “Allystaire,” she said, raising her hands to cut him of, setting her lips firmly, scars livid against her brown skin. “You don’t want t’know the work in the Shadows. Not all of it.”

  “Fair.” He sat down, set one boot on a rag on the ground, and began to work the brush at the stiff flecks of dried mud.

  “Why’re you botherin’? They’ll be dirty again in a turn.”

  “The first time I let my boots go unbrushed, it becomes easier to do so a second time, and a third. And then it is my armor not scoured, and then it is a weapon not oiled.”

  “If you didn’t take care of your armor and hammer, I think Torvul’d poison you,” Idgen Marte opined. “And you really do need a squire t’take care of that.”

  “They are not squires any longer, and I would ask none of them to brush my boots or curry my horse.”

  “Speaking of your horse, is he…”

  “Ardent is fine,” Allystaire said, almost absently, as he concentrated on dragging the stiff boar-bristles across the hard leather of the boot, sending dried mud flaking off in all directions.

  “Uncanny. You rode him all night?”

  “Aye,” Allystaire answered. “You must have ridden pretty hard to get back here yourselves. Not that odd.”

  “We did it with a day of rest in between.” She shrugged. “The Mother’s miracles are not endless, but they are many,” she muttered. “We did not get much out of the prisoners,” she added. “But plenty out of the townsfolk. They came in the night, murdered any who’d resisted, rounded up anyone that said anything about the Mother, or the paladin.”

  Allystaire’s brush stopped moving. The leather of his boot creaked as his hand tightened to a fist around it. “The berzerkers that attacked the village killed Chals, and one of Keegan’s men. They meant to do much worse.”

  “You killed them?”

  Allystaire shook his head. “No.”

  “Torvul, then?”

  “Gideon. And he only killed one of them. The other two, he…well, best if you simply come see.” Allystaire gave up the boots as a hopeless cause, pulled them on, belted his hammer onto his hip, and led Idgen Marte out the door.

  In the hallway, they could hear a faint cascade of notes issuing from Gideon’s lute. They were indistinct. Though they sounded fair to Allystaire’s ear, Idgen Marte winced and started for the door to the boy’s room. Allystaire laid a hand on her arm and shook his head.

  “Let him play,” he began to say, and she frowned harder.

  “He’s playin’ poorly,” she muttered. “And his chanterelle isn’t tuned.”

  “Let him be,” Allystaire insisted. “He did something immense the other night, and he needs time.”

  The music had stopped by then, and Gideon’s door swung open. The boy came out carrying his cased lute, eyeing the two of them with disapproval written in his flat lips and lowered brows. “I might as well come with you so I can answer your questions. And look in on the prisoners.”

  “Takin’ Dragon Scale prisoners is no small thing,” Idgen Marte muttered. “They don’t often stand for it.”

  “I didn’t give them a choice,” Gideon said as he hefted the lute case and headed down the stairs. “And, if put to it, they aren’t Dragon Scales any longer. Not truly.”

  Idgen Marte turned a questioning glance at Allystaire, her brows lifted; he shrugged.

  At the bottom of the stairs, Rede paced back and forth, muttering to himself. All three of them paused. In the silence of the later morning—most who would patronize the Inn were about their daily work—eventually his mutterings became clear. “Can’t contain the sea in the firesongs alone. The singing cannot only be blamed. A rain upon all the world at once. The laughing man still buried. The songs remain to be sung to shape the rain.”

  Allystaire carefully stepped around Gideon, descended the stairs and put a hand to Rede’s shoulder. Through the tattered monk’s robe the man wore Allystaire could feel the heat of his skin. “Are you well, Rede?”

  “The Eye. It will not stop. I cannot sleep. I cannot think. I haven’t a moment.”

  Before he finished the thought, Idgen Marte was by his side, pressing a hand to the back of his head. “You can,” she murmured. “For the next two turns, your mind will be clear and free. Lie down upon the floor, or a bench if you wish, and sleep, Rede. Dreams will not trouble you.”

  As if in a trance, the former monk nodded. Suddenly his face was cracked by an enormous yawn. As if he were a child hand-led by his mother, he lowered himself to a bench not far from the moderate hearthfire, stretched his length upon it, and was immediately asleep.

  Gideon and Allystaire watched in silence. Idgen Marte shook her head as she rejoined them and they walked out into the late morning sunlight.

  “It’s going t’come to no good,” she muttered, “keeping him around. Giving him hope that he’ll be one with us.”

  “He has no hope of that,” Allystaire muttered. “Only of providing some service. Despite the hard things the gods have done to that man, he wants to turn his hands to their work, somehow. Even a wretch can be admirable in his persistence.”

  “You’ve not forgotten what he did.”

  “Of course I have not,” Allystaire replied. “Yet how much of that was Rede the man, and how much was the work of the Church of Braech?” He shook his head as they followed Gideon across the village green and up along a path past the small, trim houses. “Braech has been our enemy all along, I think. And now we will face the enormity of His rage.”

  “I’m not sure it’s even his,” Gideon said. “I think it is as much the men shaping the God as the God guiding the men,” the boy said.

  “If that’s true, then what’s to say the Mother doesn’t change for us?” Idgen Marte didn’t bother trying to hide the doubt in her voice.

  “I believe She has,” Gideon said. “Who, or what, She is now, is likely not what She was eons ago. May not be what She will be centuries hence.”

  Before either of them could press him on the implications, Gideon stopped before a shed. Idgen Marte and Allystaire laughed as they recognized it.

  “What’s funny?” the boy asked, his hand pausing on the lock.

  “I spent a sleepless night sitting outside this very shed,” Allystaire said, “defending the life of a boy I halfway thought should hang.”

  “Aye,” Idgen Marte added. She pointed to the circling timber wall and said, “And I covered him from a tree that, well,” she shrugged, “like as not is part o’that wall now.”

  “Who?”

  “Norbert,” Allystaire said. “Cold, it feels like a lifetime ago.”

  “Well,” Gideon said, throwing open the door, “you’re welcome to try and convert these two the way you did him. I sense you’ll have no luck, though.”

  The opened door allowed a half circle of light into the cramped toolshed. Inside, two pathetic forms lay huddled upon the ground. Allystaire felt little but pity for them; sunken chests and thin arms that ended in mutilated hands; hollows around their wide and unhappy eyes, and now unreadable ink sketched into their loose skin. One feebly raised his head at the intrusion of light; the other merely threw an arm across his face.

  “How were these two a threat?”

  “They were Gauk and Onundr Dragon Scale,” Gideon said. “Years ago, both men pledged themselves to Braech, swore to do sacred violence in His name. In return, Braech gave them a strength that few men have ever known, and other gifts that I did not have the time to study. They are, or were,” he added, with a nod in Allystaire’s direction, “the most fearsome holy warriors known to the world. Perhaps the most fearsome entirely. The
se men have raided Keersvasti ships, fought in wars for Barons, Mercator Princes, and shipping lords, murdered over trifles, and faced danger with a smile, knowing that glorious death would bring them a place at Braech’s side, till His waters rise to claim the world, as they say.”

  “And what happened to them?” Idgen Marte’s hand fell to her sword and she walked into the shed, ducking under a long bundle of dried herbs, one of many hanging from the low rafters. “I took all of that away. I drained Braech’s Gifts from them. Like a knife cutting open a wineskin,” the boy said calmly. “Only instead of running on the floor I gathered it to me and put it towards another purpose.”

  “I tired of askin’ questions, boy,” Idgen Marte said. “So why don’t ya say it all at once, to all of us.”

  “They know what I did,” Gideon replied. “And Mol, at least, understands. I hope she approves. I know that Torvul does not, but that is because he is fearful, and I don’t believe fear is a good enough reason not to take action.”

  Idgen Marte raised a hand, forefinger extended, her lips curling angrily.

  “To take what action, I know, I know,” Gideon said as he turned to peer at the former berzerkers. “I…” He sighed. “I took the power that sorcerers, and thaumaturgists, warlocks, hedge-wizards, and wise women the world over tap into, and I broke open the barrier between it and our world.”

  “What in the Cold does that mean?”

  “It means,” Gideon said, “that more folk are going to learn to do what the people I named can do. More are going to be born who can tap into it, and those who already can will do so more easily.”

  Allystaire, following them with eyes squinted against the sunlight, finally broke his silence. “Are children being born who can breathe fire?”

  “Mayhap,” Gideon answered. “More likely it means the man who has always felt a presence, something lying just out of sight, perhaps something that beckoned to them in the small turns, or the woman who has heard a glorious note hanging in the air but never a whole song around it—they are going to suddenly know more, learn more.”

  “Madmen, then?” said Idgen Marte. One of the prisoners lying on the ground reached for her leg. She took a quick half step away, lifting the toe of her other boot as if she was going to launch a kick, but thought better of it.