Death Knight

by Vaughn Heppner

  Gavin warmed his hands over the fire, pretending that he didn’t care she was dying. “Look at us, my friend.” Their clothes were tatters and slime soiled. “No king or baron will listen to us. We’ll be worse than outlaws to the high and mighty.”

  “Our seer might move them.”

  Gavin peered at Swan. She mumbled, her sweaty face twitching.

  “She’ll live,” Hugo assured him. “The Lord of Light has touched her.”

  Gavin shifted uncomfortably, not used to religious fervor from his squire. In the past, they had laughed at such folk. “Supposing she lives and we brutes drag her into the king’s presence, can she truly touch his royal heart?”

  “If the king orders his men-at-arms to whip us from his presence you must draw your sword. No outlaw or beggar would hold such a prize, but only a true knight.”

  Gavin shook his head. “I must look like a knight before they think I’m one.”

  “You have the jewels in your scabbard.”

  “Enough to equip us?” Gavin said.

  Hugo grunted a negative.

  “Your eloquence states the problem well.” Gavin glanced at Swan, before adding, “Her feverish mutterings would convince few. Supposing she lives, it would have to be done another way.”

  “You’ll help her?”

  Gavin mistrusted the hope in Hugo’s voice and the obvious direction of his squire’s thinking. “Help her get to Albion, yes.”

  “She’ll never board ship, never leave Erin. Haven’t you been listening to her?”

  “She’s delirious,”

  Hugo touched a rag to her cheek. “It’s a seer’s trance.”

  “Nonsense. She raves.”

  “Help her gain an audience with the king. You can do that much.”

  “We barely survived the swamp.”

  “We survived Muscovy,” Hugo said. “You marched in as a condemned thief and left those cold lands a rich knight. Don’t tell me you can’t do it again.”

  “Won’t that stain her crusading?”

  “She needs a healer,” Hugo said, not rising to the sarcasm. “That takes coin. Go. I’ll take care of her and follow when I can.”

  “That means Muscovite Rules,” Gavin said.

  Hugo bit his lip…nodded.

  Gavin drank from the stream and scrubbed himself with sand and cold water. He adjusted his sword belt and studied the moaning girl. “If she dies before I return, wait here.”

  “The Lord of Light has touched her. She won’t die by this stream.”

  “Good luck then,” Gavin said.

  “Hosar bless you,” Hugo said.

  Gavin cocked an eyebrow, but refrained from more words. He set off in a distance-eating stride.

  He worked under Muscovite Rules, meaning that he lived like a wolf, like any wild predator. He would run from the strong, prey on the weak and always use cunning. There would be nothing noble about this, or said another way, the only nobility under Muscovite Rules was survival.

  Several miles later, Gavin spotted a shepherd on a hill. The small man leaned on a staff as two big dogs stood nearby. Sheep milled below, nibbling grass. The Cragsman whistled. The barking dogs herded the sheep over the hill and out of sight.

  Gavin increased his pace.

  In the darkest part of the night, Gavin slept against a boulder. A forest waited in the distance. He wanted to enter it during daylight. A howl awoke him before morning. He rubbed his face and set out. As the sun rose, he recalled the medallion. It was of double weight, pure gold, stamped on one side with a crowned king and strange script. On the other side was a beauty in profile, with eerie symbols around her and a huge moon to the left.

  “The Moon Lady,” he said, feeling then as if someone watched him.

  He had never seen a coin of this sort, and he had seen many coinage in his jousting, his ransoms gained. He pocketed the medallion and entered the woods an hour later. Toward noon he reached a rutted track that led toward the swamp, perhaps that led all the way back to Forador Castle. He traveled in the opposite direction.

  Merchant bells warned him three hours later. He hid behind an oak tree and counted nine mules heavy with baggage. Three spear-armed men walked guard. Behind them followed a hard-bitten peddler on a mule, while a horseman brought up the rear, by the crossbow in his lap a mercenary rather than a knight.

  Gavin remained silent even though they headed toward Forador Swamp. He couldn’t chance the possibility they would rob and perhaps kill him. Many backwoods peddlers were thieves by inclination and had the hearts of brigands.

  When the sound of bells dwindled, he once again took to the muddy trail. By mid-afternoon, low clouds threatened rain. That’s all he needed. A quarter hour later as several drops splattered his cheeks he was surprised to find that the rutted track turned into a cobbled lane. He knelt, touching a brick. Someone had paid for each one and painstakingly laid them down. They built such roads through forests and across wastelands on the continent, but not, he had thought, on any of the Western Islands. He hurried, certain this road meant nearby civilization. The woods thinned and he heard a trickling stream. Soon he spied a small arched bridge and on the other side a booth. He frowned. Two armed men talked by a chain that barred their side. Most likely, they demanded a toll for anyone using the crossing.

  He noticed a nearby castle. It stood on a lone peak, the turrets half of mortar and stone and the other half, rocky formations. Gavin tapped his teeth. His beard had been short and well groomed before Castle Forador. Now it was shaggy and with his exhaustion and the impacted grime on his face, he was certain he looked wild.

  Aha! He spied a horseman cantering along the castle road—the cobbled lane. The rider rode toward the toll bridge.

  Gavin slipped back into the forest, jogging for a time. When he judged that he had gone far enough, he loosened the blade in its scabbard. Then he reconsidered. Looking about, he found a heavy branch. He put his boot to it and yanked, hefting a stout, lengthy piece of wood just the right size.

  The clopping hooves warned him of the rider’s approach. He peered around trees and spied a lean rider. The man wore leather garments, a long knife, a sword and a pouch that could only contain coins. By his green cape Gavin judged him to be a forester, a man who hounded peasants if they slew their lord’s rabbits, deer, boar and such. This then would be a wary man, alert for forest sounds, for peasants blundering through the brush. One of the rider’s hands loosely held the reins; the other was under his tunic, no doubt scratching his belly.

  Gavin roared a battle cry, leaping from hiding. The forester yelled in surprise as the branch connected with a mighty wallop. The forester tumbled onto the road. Gavin came on fast. The forester rolled out of the club’s path and scrambled under his horse. He jumped to his feet on the other side and looked ready to run. Gavin drew his sword and rushed in. The forester yanked out his blade.

  “Who are you, man?”

  Gavin leveled the silver sword. “Drop your coin pouch and your sword and I’ll let you live.”

  The forester’s eyes widened as he looked at Gavin’s weapon. “Is that blade silver?”

  “Never mind about that.”

  The forester looked Gavin in the face. “You’re no outlaw.”

  “Decide!”

  The forester nodded grimly. “Come on then.”

  Their blades rang once, twice, three times. The forester was good. Then his eyes grew round with fear as he realized that Gavin was better. Gavin stepped back and indicated that the forester lay down his weapon.

  The forester swallowed. “You’ll kill me anyway.”

  “You have my word that I won’t.”

  “How can I believe you?”

  “I am a knight of Ulm.”

  The forester seemed to consider it. Then with a desperate cry, he charged. Despite his resolve to govern his actions by Muscovite Rules, Gavin attempted a foolish scheme. He parried hard so sparks flew, and then he stepped in close. The forester had a knife in his other hand, which
he had kept hidden until them. He stabbed upward. Gavin blocked wrist against wrist. Then, before the forester could leap out of range, Gavin struck him on the side of the head with his sword’s pommel, knocking the man unconscious. Gavin stripped him, bound his wrists and gagged him. The forester soon came to, propped against a boulder near the trail. Gavin sat on the man’s horse.

  “When you free yourself, tell your lord not to go into the swamp unless he wishes to battle darkspawn. If he doesn’t know what those are, tell him to ask his devotee of Hosar.” With a nod, Gavin headed back the way he had come.

  He found Hugo and Swan the next morning. With the horse, they made better time, even though a summer rain soaked them. The second horse came as Hugo and he bounded into a nighttime camp. They tied a lady and her secret lover together, and thanked them for the small leather tent. Two days later, they came to Ennis. It was a middling-sized village for Erin. No one spoke about darkspawn at the inn, although one man said it was unhealthy to enter Forador Swamp. No swamp dwellers had sold their eel ropes for a fortnight.

  That night a fire startled the innkeeper and his guests. The blaze roared nicely, chasing everyone into the muddy streets. The Ennis mayor rang the fire bell. In time, wagons rattled back and forth. Men dipped buckets into the wagon-troughs as the fire-line of peasants fought the flames. Luckily, there seemed to have been more smoke than fire. Only a quarter of the inn burned down.

  The only guests to have died seemed to have been the feverish girl, the one-eyed man and the big warrior guarding them. For no one could find them. Then a knight ran into the Town Square. He shouted that his stallion, arms and armor were missing, as well as the bag of coins he had hidden under his bed.

  ***

  Several miles outside of Ennis, Swan’s fever broke. She was thin and looked dreadful, but her eyes were clear at last. She stared at the smoke billowing into the moonlit sky.

  “That was ill done,” Swan said.

  Upon his new steed, Gavin shrugged mail-clad shoulders.

  “No more thievery or arson,” she said. “We are crusaders.”

  Gavin decided not to remind her just yet that he wasn’t going to help her build a fool’s army. “No more thieveries,” he agreed. He had enough equipment to joust for whatever more he needed.

  “I know your heart is right, Sir Gavin, but we mustn’t use ruses or theft or we shall become the darkness we battle.”

  Gavin looked away.

  Swan pursed her lips, glanced a last time at the smoky night and then clucked her tongue, urging her palfrey down the trail. “We go to Banfrey!”

  “To see the king,” Hugo said.

  To flee Erin, Gavin told himself.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  No birds winged over Forador Castle. The usual kingfishers, swallows and crows had departed the swamp fortress. Perhaps it was because a miasma of death drifted from the gory pits in the yard. Or maybe it was because in places blood had splashed upon the barracks walls, or perhaps it was the clawmen who snatched any living thing they could find, crunching bird bones and picking their fangs with the quill of flight feathers.

  Deep in the main keep, out of sight of the greedy wolf-men and away from the stench of the gory pits, revulsion twisted Vivian’s stomach. Her hands trembled as she held onto the former baron’s cured skin.

  The thing that had once been Joanna the Healer lifted her waxen features. They were devoid of emotion, devoid of any facial movement, twitch or tick. When the healer moved her body or limbs, it was mechanically, with a puppet’s jerkiness.

  Joanna opened her mouth like the jaws of an animal-trap. “Hold tight. I must cut exactly.” With scissors, she cut along the tattooed line of the baron’s leathery skin.

  Vivian couldn’t fathom why Leng had sent her here to help. The terrible transformations horrified her. A squire she had spoken with before the feast had become a clawman. A once gangling page stood rotting in the ranks of the undead. Leng had named Gavin’s mule boy a fravashi. Why had the sorcerer sent her here? What was his hidden purpose? She had learned more about him than she cared to know.

  In time, Leng ushered Joanna and her into the castle’s sanctum. A massive stone altar stained by gore dominated the fouled Great Hall. Gaunts waited, holding trembling swamp dwellers.

  Numbed by premonition, Vivian swooned, as it were, while standing. In her stultified state, she didn’t witness the strange rites or hear the screams. She heard, however, Leng cry out, “Take up your sticks, Death Drummer!”

  Joanna stretched out her hand, taking the sticks from on the heart-stained altar. She beat once upon the drum, the one made with the baron’s skin. It caused a wicked thrum to vibrate through Vivian. The sound woke her, woke her to the scattered hearts, one yet thumping and bleeding, and it woke her to wretched smells.

  Vivian shrieked, and she fled. She sprinted, panting, her feet pounding on the bricks. She ran crazed with fear, crazed by the wicked sights and feeling a foul magic. She ran down stairs, through the yard and past the gatehouse and over the drawbridge. She fled weeping to Cuthred’s boarded hole, sobbing upon the planks. He awoke with a bellow, an incredibly loud sound, too loud for any man to make.

  It was there the clawmen caught her, and despite her protests, they dragged her to a sweat-soaked Leng. He sat in his room, a tiny cubicle above the Great Hall where once the baron’s chief devotee of Hosar had slept. The room had a narrow slit window, a bed, an oval rug, a table and two ornate cedar chairs. Clad in a sarong, Leng showed off his skeletal body, the ribs sticking out like a starvation victim, parchment-thin skin and wasted, stringy muscles. He shouldn’t have been able to stand, but only slump against a tavern wall as he begged for food.

  A candle burned on the table, one strewn with papers whose symbols bore no meaning for Vivian. A half-filled wine bottle stood by the candle. The goblet in Leng’s hand and the gleam in his eyes indicated that he had already been drinking.

  “Join me,” he said.

  Her hands shook as she poured so red drops splashed onto a paper. He remained silent. Before, he had beaten her for touching one of his parchments. She lifted the cup, her breath so fast that it was almost like hiccups. Swiftly, she drained the cup, and she felt a heady stirring of alcohol, a soothing of her nerves.

  “Again,” he said.

  She poured steadier, and she drained this goblet, too. Her breathing slowed to something normal.

  He smiled, asking, “Do you wonder at your strength?”

  She stared at him.

  “Most people seeing what you have would have retreated into madness or been driven into apathetic despair.”

  A bitter laugh tore from her throat. She tossed back more wine.

  “I’m quite serious,” he said. “You have an amazing strength of character. Perhaps as a harlot, you’ve become hardened to adversity.”

  She didn’t like his slurs. “What are you, Leng?”

  “What you see.”

  The wine gave her courage. “A sorcerer?” she asked.

  “Nothing more, nothing less,” he said.

  She raked her gaze across his emaciated torso. “I’d say more.”

  His smile became sly.

  “I have no effect upon you,” she said.

  “Quite untrue, I assure you.”

  “When we’re together, you do not act like other men. So I ask: What are you?”

  His remote face lost its smile. The inky eyes became brooding. “That will be enough.”

  She was reckless with wine. “You fawn and grovel to Kergan, yet sometimes I think—”

  He slapped her across the face, a hard blow, and he waited, watching her.

  She touched her lip, staring at the blood, and she retreated to the bed, sitting on the edge.

  He donned his robe, and he told her, “The campaign will soon begin. So sleep well while you can, harlot.” Then he strode from the room.

  Her cheek throbbed, and a fierce resolve filled her. No one slapped her with impunity. As the wine continued to fuel
her courage, she vowed to watch, learn, and wait for her one chance to strike back. For she remembered something Gavin had once said. You always got at least one chance. He had meant it during a joust, but surely, it worked just as well for real life. She soured thinking about the knight-errant. Running out on her to save the girl, the one that he had risen for at the feast, that bastard. All his words of love had been lies.

  She poured a last cup. Let Leng throw all the horrors he could think of at her. Somehow, in some manner, she was going to hurt the sorcerer and then she was going to find and hurt that dishonorable knight, Sir Gavin.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Gavin, Hugo and Swan rode through the Midlands and into the Redwald Range. Gavin hated the pine tree scent, for it reminded him of the cold wastes. They reached the headwaters of the Fangohr River, following it as the days passed and the Fangohr deepened as the tributaries Aine, Lokkur and Nye emptied into it. In the early mornings before the sun burned away the mists, fishermen in leather coracles plied the shores. Out of their round little boats the fishermen cast nets and dragged in grayling, shad, perch and eels. During the day and along dusty paths, teams of oxen drew flat-bottomed barges that hauled cargoes of pine, flax, quarry stone and ingots of iron. A few times, riverboats with a billowing sail cruised through the middle of the ever-widening stream.

  The countryside became smoother and soon cultivated fields appeared. Fences protected alternating strips of wheat, barley, oats and fallow ground, and those fields surrounded villages of stone-built cottages. Watermills also appeared. Most were wooden-built, maybe a quarter of them fashioned out of quarry stone. The giant wheels spun endlessly, propelled by the river’s current. Most of the mills crushed wheat and sieved flour. Others fulled cloth, beating it with water-driven bats. Where the stench was strongest, Gavin was certain they used the mills for tanning, turning cow and sheep hides into leather. One mill in particular clattered noisily and chugged black fumes into the air. Gears transferred the power of the giant waterwheel into rising and lowering hammer forges for blacksmith work. At one stop where the beer was cheap, Gavin learned that the mill activated bellows for the flames that heated the vats in which beer was brewed. The woods they passed changed from pines and evergreens to oak, beech and birch. These woods were smaller and contained less brush than the Redwald Range. Foresters no doubt cleared the forests, while verderers enforced the poaching laws. During the day, village-owned pigs scavenged through the woods searching for acorns, beechmast and the occasional truffles. Swan warned Gavin and Hugo from butchering any of the pigs.