Crusader

by Sara Douglass

  StarLaughter had turned her head slightly in Axis’ direction, but had said nothing.

  Nor had she moved.

  So Axis had been forced to remove her. A dozen Lake Guardsmen had taken her some ten leagues to the east where they’d left her in a cave in the Icescarp Alps with supplies, clothes and strict instructions to leave the column alone.

  Next morning, a sentry had alerted Axis to StarLaughter’s silent, ghostly presence in the snow some hundred paces beyond the treeline.

  She’d just stood there, ever silent, staring with unblinking eyes at the convoy as it prepared to move for the day.

  Axis had had her moved again, further this time.

  Next morning she was back again.

  Urbeth had roared and snarled, but StarLaughter had not blinked, nor moved, and after a week of trying to drive her away, Axis had been forced to admit that nothing would work. StarLaughter would use whatever power she had to return herself to her silent (hate-filled) vigil a hundred paces away from the column.

  Staring, staring, staring.

  Stars knew what horror she’d bring down on the column! Axis did not know if StarLaughter was still working in league with the Demons and the Hawkchilds, or if she had embarked on a solitary quest for revenge. One night a sentry had reported that a strange shape—half bird, half woman, strangely lumped and as black as the night itself—had been spotted stumbling its way through the snow towards StarLaughter, but when Axis and a unit of men had ridden out to investigate, StarLaughter was once more alone in the snow.

  Albeit with the ghost of a smile on her face.

  So Axis had done what he could within the convoy itself. There were always several units of men detailed to keep an eye on StarLaughter—and for whatever horror she might call down out of the sky.

  WolfStar and Zenith had finally been forcibly separated—to WolfStar’s fury—but Axis was not leaving Zenith with WolfStar when StarLaughter, in all probability, had his daughter’s murder in mind.

  Thank the Stars StarDrifter had not blurted out her name!

  As Axis had men watching StarLaughter, so he also had an equal number of men watching Zenith, as also WolfStar. Zenith to protect her; WolfStar to keep him away from Zenith.

  WolfStar was incandescent with rage, Zenith was unhappy, StarDrifter spent his days in a turmoil of guilt at the danger he’d placed Zenith in, and Axis was damned glad to spend the days hunting down insane cows in the snow rather than spend time with his family!

  “Gods, Azhure,” he muttered one day as he urged Sal into her slide through time and space, “I miss you more than you could ever know. What a muddle our family has got itself into!”

  From the edge of the Icescarp Alps Axis led the convoy ever south, Sal’s power sliding them across the landscape at incredible speed. The Avarinheim was no more, obliterated by Qeteb’s rape of the land when he’d first been resurrected, and Axis almost wept at the destruction. He had never been close to the Avar, although they’d aided him in his final quest against Gorgrael, and he’d never been at home in the forests, but the massacre of the trees deeply saddened him.

  At night, when they camped, the trees surrounding the column murmured and shifted, remembering not only what had been lost, but the pain they’d endured during their death.

  And they whispered of revenge and of an accounting.

  Here, in this drifting plain that had once been a forest full of song and enchantment and fey creatures, the snow thinned and eventually disappeared, and the going became somewhat easier and, unbelievably, even faster. In only two days Axis found himself approaching the valley that connected the Skarabost plains with the Avarinheim (or what had once been the Avarinheim).

  Axis reined Sal to a halt, his war band still some distance behind him, and sat, staring and remembering.

  Here he had chased Azhure and Raum, when he had still thought himself a BattleAxe.

  Here he had seen the woman he’d later discovered was his mother.

  Here he’d had his first real inkling that he was more, far more, than just BattleAxe.

  Now? Now he was just a man carrying too much responsibility leading another war band, and with yet more people to nurture and protect.

  With a twist to his mouth, Axis waited for his war band and their accompanying trees, and led them through the valley.

  In the eastern Skarabost plains, the numbers and ferocity of the demented Demonic creatures were far worse. Axis and his war band had been attacked by a force of some nine or ten thousand large creatures—cattle, horses, bulls—almost the instant they’d emerged from the mouth of the valley alongside the still-rushing Nordra River.

  Without the trees, Axis knew they could very well have been overwhelmed.

  His men fought well, but it was difficult to kill a cow or a bull, even with the sharpest of swords, before it had a more than good chance of killing you, and Axis lost several score of men before the trees roared in.

  It was the only verb Axis could find to describe their action.

  One moment they were fighting desperately, surrounded by a sea of maniacal livestock which had grown horns and teeth far sharper than nature ever intended, when there was a rumbling and roaring such as Axis had never heard before.

  He’d twisted in his saddle, staring back towards the valley, and had been so amazed that he’d left himself vulnerable to deadly attack from a cream and brown bull. If it hadn’t been for Zared’s quick pike thrust, Axis would have died.

  But at the time, Axis had no idea of what was going on behind him. All he could see were the thousands of ethereal trees pouring through the gap of the valley mouth.

  They were literally roaring, waving their branches wildly about the air in a crackling cacophony of snapping twigs and leaves.

  In an instant they fell upon the mob of animals, seizing them with hungry woody fingers and tearing them apart with a crackle of snapping joints and rib cages.

  Axis had time only for a few more strikes against the creatures himself before they were all dead.

  And when the animals were all dead, the trees stood there, literally shaking with emotion that was, Axis thought, a sadness so deep that outsiders could only barely comprehend it.

  Within the hour the column had joined them, and even Urbeth had stood shaking her head at all the slaughter.

  Ur had simply stood there, clutching her terracotta pot, and grinning from ear to ear.

  Once Axis had buried the dead, he moved the war band and column to Sigholt.

  The primary purpose for travelling to Sigholt was to collect Gwendylyr—Theod was a mass of nervous impatience for the day it took them to move across the WildDog Plain and through the Holdhard Pass—but there was more to it than that.

  Gwendylyr had undoubtedly attracted hordes of creatures to Sigholt, and thus there would be good exterminating there, as there had been at the valley mouth.

  Sigholt was also Axis’ home, and he wanted to see it again…see if it had managed to survive the Demons’ attentions.

  What he eventually found made him bow his head and weep.

  Sigholt had been utterly destroyed. Sigholt! Axis could not believe it. All the magic, the laughter, the happiness, the memories; all had been turned to dust and rubble.

  The bridge was gone.

  The town of Lakesview was gone.

  The lake itself was a dry, dusty bowl. (Axis was not to know that Gwendylyr’s victory at the Lake of Life had at least turned the putrid virulence into more palatable dust.)

  Everything had gone.

  The war band had hung back as Axis slowly rode forward, tears streaming down his face. Even Pretty Brown Sal hung her head as if in sorrow.

  Axis let Sal pick her own way as she walked towards the pile of rubble that had once been the enchanted castle. Gods, the memories! It hurt so badly Axis was not sure if he could bear it, and just as he thought that, he became aware there was a woman standing at Sal’s shoulder. So lost was he in his grief, Axis gave a great start, thinking it was Star
Laughter come back to deal him a mischief.

  But it was Gwendylyr, one warm, comforting hand resting on his leg as she looked up at him.

  “Trust in your son, and in my other four companions,” she said, “and you never know what happiness we may achieve.”

  Axis opened his mouth to say something, but then there was a thunder of hooves from behind him, and a whoop, and then Theod was flinging himself down from his horse and grabbing Gwendylyr into his arms.

  Axis turned his head away, and stared at the rubble.

  Chapter 54

  A Troubled Night’s Dreaming

  In the hour before dawn they had lifted from the cliffs and the heaps of rubble where they’d roosted during the night, and they’d flown north, harking to StarGrace’s call.

  He is here. He is here. He is here.

  StarLaughter had found WolfStar for them, as she always said she would.

  He had thrown them through the Star Gate.

  He had murdered them.

  Uncaringly and coldly and only for the sake of his own personal ambition and lust for power.

  They had lusted themselves now for many thousands of years, and that lust consisted of only one thing.

  Revenge.

  Now it was at hand.

  Silently, purposefully, they descended through the pre-dawn gloom, great black leathery shapes, the hands at the tips of their wings opening and closing in silent anticipation.

  StarLaughter had allowed her hatred and disappointment and unending mortification to consume her. It was the only comfort she had. For days she’d trailed after the massive convoy of animals and peoples and trees, drifting just beyond arrowshot, hoping for a single glimpse of the woman that WolfStar had abandoned her for.

  The whore!

  If only she were disposed of! WolfStar would surely come back to her then…

  No. No! That was wrong! She should not think that!

  WolfStar would never come back to her. StarLaughter could finally see that. He’d made a fool of her in front of his trifling companions, all for the woman that he now thought to love, and for that StarLaughter would not forgive him.

  StarGrace, and all the other Hawkchilds, had been right. WolfStar was unredeemable. He would never love her, and he would never help her regain her son.

  He must die.

  And, in dying, suffer as much as he’d made them to suffer.

  And so StarLaughter drifted along the margins of the convoy and she waited and watched and planned.

  And finally, after days of watching, she understood.

  It had not been difficult, truth to tell. WolfStar was kept under watch by the guardsmen who wore the ivory tunics with the peculiar knot of gold in the central panel.

  And so was a woman—a woman kept well guarded and well away from WolfStar, as if she might be a danger to him…or he to her.

  StarLaughter’s mouth had parted in red-lipped joy. She understood.

  And she knew what she had to do.

  WolfStar’s night dreams were troubled with discomfort. He found himself drifting disoriented through cold stars. He did not know their patterns or their movements—he was lost in a distant and unknowable part of the universe.

  It frightened him beyond measure.

  Strange voices touched him, but they were afar and uncaring, and after a while they left him alone.

  He drifted, alone and lonely beyond measure.

  Until a voice, far stronger than the others that had touched him, reached out and sent sharp knives into his soul.

  I have her.

  WolfStar twisted about in the cold void, trying to find the speaker of the voice, and trying to beat down the black wings of despair that threatened to envelop him.

  I have her.

  “Who are you?” WolfStar screamed into the universe, but he did not require an answer, nor even desire one, because he knew very well to whom that voice and that hatred belonged.

  StarLaughter.

  I have her.

  WolfStar groaned, and twisted himself out of the dream.

  I have her.

  The words still echoed about WolfStar’s mind as he struggled into wakefulness. He lurched up on one elbow, and looked about, his eyes widening at the scene.

  The Lake Guardsmen assigned to watch over him were lying twisted and ugly, their faces contorted as if something heavy and dark had taken hold of their minds and twisted them until they could bear no more.

  They were dead.

  Beyond the circle of WolfStar’s immediate campfire, the rest of the convoy’s sleepers lay twisting and murmuring, as if something troubled their dreams as well.

  I have her.

  “You bitch!” WolfStar snarled, and sprang to his feet. “This time you will die!”

  Only soft, mocking, echoing laughter answered him, and WolfStar lifted into the sky, so furious he’d locked his hands into white-knuckled fists at his sides.

  That bitch-wife of his would cause the collapse of all his plans. He would not lose Zenith now! Not after all the work he’d put into getting her!

  And he most certainly would not let StarLaughter have the satisfaction of thinking she’d succeeded in annoying him. She would die, here and now, and this time he’d do a better job of it than the last time he’d tried.

  Zenith was gone, her watchers equally twisted and dead.

  WolfStar hovered for a heartbeat or two, then he gave a powerful flap of his wings and lifted higher into the darkened sky.

  Where was she?

  This way.

  WolfStar followed the voice.

  He did not see the other birdman lift into the sky behind him, following at a distance of several hundred paces.

  Zenith sobbed in terror. She couldn’t understand what had happened, and how everything had gone so wrong, so quickly.

  She’d woken to find the Lake Guardsmen assigned to her care twisting and convulsing at her side. As she’d scrambled to her feet, hands had seized her from behind, their fingers digging into her flesh.

  “You have been whoring about with my husband,” a flat voice whispered in her ear, “and now, like all harlots, you must pay for your adultery.”

  Zenith twisted frantically, but she could not escape StarLaughter. The demented birdwoman physically dragged her through the sleeping convoy—past people and animals, past trees whose branches drifted gently in the wind, and even past a snoring Urbeth—and none had wakened.

  None had opened even a single eye to see Zenith being dragged past weeping and screaming.

  At Zenith’s back, StarLaughter grinned in crazed satisfaction. The kernel of power the Demons had given her was proving useful, even to the end.

  From the convoy StarLaughter dragged Zenith deep into the Urqhart Hills, refusing to respond to the woman’s cries or questions.

  StarLaughter didn’t give a damn about the woman. She had committed adultery, and she must die.

  As soon as the harlot had performed her final task: attracting WolfStar to his death as well.

  And so now Zenith sat hunched uncomfortably on the ground, her hands tied to a pole behind her, listening to StarLaughter pace back and forth in the dark.

  An hour before, the Hawkchilds had arrived to populate the ridges of the Urqhart Hills.

  “Not long now,” StarLaughter said somewhere behind Zenith. “He has woken, and thinks to come to your rescue.”

  Zenith lowered her head, no longer weeping, utterly resigned to her death.

  “Axis.”

  Axis woke with a start at the word and the hand on his shoulder. He’d been lost in a dream of Sigholt, a dream filled with laughter and love and frightful great bats that beat at his head and settled in smothering droves over both laughter and love.

  “Zared?” Axis accepted his brother’s aid to rise, silently cursing his stiff limbs and sleep-fuddled mind.

  “There is something you need to see,” Zared said. “Fast.”

  Axis jumped to his feet, reaching for his axe as he did so, and allow
ed Zared to lead the way toward the edge of the camp.

  “Look.”

  Axis squinted into the faint light now staining the sky.

  He opened his mouth to say that he could see nothing, and then he shut it with a snap.

  There were strange, dark shapes huddling on the craggy ridges of the Urqhart Hills that ringed the camp.

  And then, as if listening to a silent voice, each one of the shapes lifted into the lightening sky.

  “Hawkchilds!” Axis said.

  “And worse,” Zared said at his side, and Axis turned to stare at him.

  “Worse?”

  “WolfStar and Zenith have gone. Their guards are dead.”

  Chapter 55

  A Tastier Revenge Than Ever Imagined

  Axis turned his head and stared at Zared. His eyes were as cold as the interstellar wastes. Zared took a half step back, even though he knew Axis’ emotion was not directed at him.

  “Zenith is my daughter,” Axis said, and Zared shuddered at the combination of flatness and desolation in his brother’s voice.

  “Damn all stars into dust!” Axis screamed, and Zared cried out involuntarily. “Where is my power when I need it most!”

  DragonStar turned, and would have moved, but Qeteb’s hand snaked the distance between them and caught him fast.

  They were sitting at a small tea table covered with a snowy cloth under the blackened skeleton of a tree on the ridge above Fernbrake Lake.

  Small blue cups and saucers, and tea and sugar pots sat innocently on the linen.

  “We are tied in our own immortal combat now,” the Demon said softly, hardly. “And neither you nor I can leave it.”

  “Zenith is my sister,” DragonStar whispered.

  “Then what bad luck she should get herself into so much trouble right now,” Qeteb said, “just when her brother can’t leap to her rescue.”

  Qeteb grinned. He was suddenly glad he hadn’t managed to catch up with StarLaughter after all. She was doing splendidly, just when Qeteb needed it.