by Damien Black
‘Won’t we have to travel through the Argael to get to Northalde?’
Adhelina stared at her impatiently. ‘Yes, what of it?’
‘It’s just that... my family used to say it was haunted – they say it’s inhabited by Wadwos, and that a woods witch lives there...’
‘Well, we’ll just have to take our chances with the Wadwos and the witches, Hettie,’ replied Adhelina testily, stuffing the map back into her bag. ‘As long we stick to the main road through the forest, we should be fine.’
As they turned in for the night, Hettie couldn’t help thinking that this was just what they had initially intended for their journey to Meerborg. But so far, sticking to the main road had proved more than difficult.
Wrapping herself tightly in her cloak, she tried not to think about the journey ahead, or the four dead men in the dell who had gone to sleep forever.
CHAPTER XIII
Bloodshed And Sorcery
‘This had better work.’ Krulheim’s face was anxious as he surveyed his troop formations from the battlements of Salmor, the first castle he had taken in his rebellious campaign.
Standing tall next to him, a full head above his own, the sorcerous priest he called ally scowled.
‘Have my ministrations failed you yet?’ he asked curtly. ‘Did my moat magic not dismay the enemy the last time they sought to relieve this castle? Did I not bid the waves carry our ships more swiftly? Did my shielding charm not protect you on the field of battle? Did the rains not come to aid your escape when all seemed lost?’
His good eye glinted like hoarfrost as he asked the questions pointedly and methodically. It was the last one that rankled most, even more than the penultimate question.
‘It was a retreat, not an escape,’ replied Thule irritably. ‘How was I to know Freidheim would employ such devilish tactics? Pulling out his men only to have them return to the field – he fights like a heathen Sassanian, not a true knight!’
‘True knights don’t use magic charms to protect them from injuries in the field,’ Ragnar reminded him with an icy smile.
Krulheim turned on him at that, his eyes blazing. ‘Aye, that much I know! ‘Twas you who insisted!’ he cried. ‘If it were not for your accursed magic runes daubed on my body, I’d have claimed Prince Freidhoff’s life fairly!’
‘If it were not for the magic runes daubed on your body, it would be a bloodstained corpse by now,’ snapped the Sea Wizard. ‘Everyone saw the High Commander best you fairly – it is only thanks to my runecasting that you live!’
The Young Pretender turned away, stung by the truth of the words. Putting his head in his hands he leaned against the crenelation and groaned. His every chivalrous instinct had screamed out against submitting to the Sea Wizard’s diabolical ministrations, yet he had been so persuasive... in this as he was in everything. In fact the would-be King of Thule found it daily harder to refuse him anything.
‘Why? Why?’ he sighed desperately, looking helplessly at the grim skies up above. ‘I should not have consented to this – our defeat at Linden is the Almighty’s punishment for turning to your sorcerous tricks instead of fighting fairly like real men!’
‘The Almighty only helps those who help themselves,’ replied the Northland priest implacably. ‘And did you not help yourself? My charm made your flesh as invulnerable to a blade as the ocean waters – just as I said it would. And now you have rid yourself of a powerful enemy as a result of it – is this not helping yourself?’
The pagan priest’s logic was relentless, but all the same Krulheim knew in the depths of his soul that he had erred. Perhaps fatally.
‘Leave me,’ he said abruptly. ‘Send for Jord, I would have words with him.’
‘As you wish, Your Royal Highness,’ replied the priest with a nonchalant air before leaving. He still deferred to Thule, but the hapless prince increasingly felt that his blasphemous ally was ruled by no one.
Presently Sir Jord arrived to join him on the battlements.
‘You called for me, Your Highness?’ he asked. His face looked more careworn and lined than usual. He had not sustained any injuries during the battle for Linden, but he looked grave.
‘Yes,’ replied Thule impatiently. ‘I wanted to know how the battle formations were going.’
Jord raised an eyebrow at this obvious question. ‘They are just as you see before you,’ he answered with an expansive sweep of his arm. ‘We have a thousand levies and three hundred men-at-arms drawn up before the castle moat and gates. Another thousand conscripts are up in the hills to our right, with seven hundred archers for company. We’ve another two hundred ensconced in the hills to the left – just enough to keep their scouts or any advance sorties at bay. We don’t want them creeping up on us from that direction as they did last time. The palisade straddling the gap between the hills and the castle is nearly complete – we’ll put another seven hundred bowmen behind that. I’ve kept back the last two hundred for the castle walls, along with the original two-hundred strong garrison of men-at-arms you left here.’
Thule nodded grimly. ‘And the knights?’ he asked.
Jord hesitated before answering. ‘They shall be deployed as you saw fit to deploy them,’ he said neutrally.
‘You mean as Ragnar saw fit to deploy them,’ answered the prince reproachfully.
The battle-weary marshal appeared to be about to answer this, then stopped himself. A few moments of silence slid by. Then, abruptly, Jord reached out and put a calloused hand on his liege’s arm.
‘Your Highness, it is not too late to change your mind,’ he said with sudden urgency. ‘I beg of you, do not do this. For too long we have been in thrall to this foreign devil-worshipper – the Almighty is punishing us for it!’
Thule shut his eyes tightly, his face anguished. ‘It is... too late,’ he said resignedly. ‘We have come too far to turn back now. This is my last gambit, Jord – I must and will hold Salmor. It is our only chance of making good our secession.’
‘Then let us hold it as befits true knights!’ rejoined Jord earnestly. ‘Let us ride now to meet them in the field!’
Thule shook his head sorrowfully. ‘I chanced all on a lightning strike, and chance has failed me. Our scouts confirm that they now have twice the number of knights and trained foot as we do. We exceed them only in archers and conscript levies – and half the latter have deserted us, the craven peasants!’
‘We exceeded them when we rode against them at Linden,’ his marshal reminded him. ‘And they managed to defeat us! Come, let us turn the tables on them! They won’t be expecting us to ride out again – let us discuss a real battle plan, you and I!’
But Thule only shook his head again. ‘Nay, Jord, it is too late for such changes of heart. Our scouts tell us the enemy are nigh two days’ march from us – soon they will be upon us. We must trust once more to the Sea Wizard’s machinations and hope they are enough to see us through.’
Jord said nothing. He looked downcast and sullen, like a man who has given up a last fleeting hope of success.
‘Then if that will be all, I’d better return to my duties,’ was all he said.
Krulheim was about to let him go when suddenly he turned and said: ‘One last thing. Tell the seneschal on your way out to have the servants prepare me a bath.’
Jord looked at him askance. Bathing on the eve of war was hardly commonplace – some even held that doing so cleansed a man of the natural oils that gave him his vitality.
‘Aye, my prince, I will do so, if that is what you wish,’ he said in bafflement.
‘I do so wish it,’ muttered Thule, returning to stare across the fields and hills of the land he had so briefly conquered. ‘If this enterprise is to fail then I will meet Azrael valiantly, as befits a true knight.’
Dusk was drawing in when the King’s Army reached the vicinity of Salmor. It was too dark to see the castle clearly: its high turrets and battlements sketched black lines against the dwindling skies, surrounded by the rough humps of the hi
ll-land ranges to either side. Nestled between these, flat colourless fields beckoned sinisterly.
Adelko was saddle-sore: they were nearly two weeks out of the capital, and the novice had thoroughly missed the comfort of his bed in the palace. At least now he was beginning to forget what that felt like – he was well and truly back to a hard life of adventuring.
Next to him Vaskrian fidgeted in his own saddle. Adelko knew him well enough by now to fathom that his hardy friend’s discomfort was anything but physical. Now he was a squire to Sir Braxus he rode with them in the King’s contingent – but that kept him apart from the main body of the army. And Vaskrian did so love to be in the thick of things.
The squire frowned as he watched the army set up camp, deploy scouts and post sentries. He’d lost his helm in the Battle of Linden, and acquired a fresh bandage instead, which he’d removed on the last day of the march. Either he healed quickly, or he prided his appearance above his health. Probably the latter – Adelko had heard knights were full of such bravado.
Braxus gave the order for Vaskrian to see to their tent and horses. Vaskrian nodded and dismounted. The Thraxian repeated the command in his own tongue for the benefit of his compatriots. There were only four of them left, besides Braxus. Sir Regan had been left at Linden to recover from his injuries. His squire had stayed behind to tend him. That left Sir Bryant and Sir Vertrix and their own squires. They seemed to have escaped the fight largely unscathed – except for Bryant’s squire, who had earned himself a gash running the length of his cheek. Another inch and he would have lost an eye. The cut had been crudely stitched up – if he felt any pain the lad was putting a brave face on it.
A liveried squire to the House of Ingwin hustled over to see to the monks’ needs as he had done throughout the march. He was some young lordling from the House of Vandheim; of an age with Vaskrian, he could not have been more different otherwise. Looking at the pudgy youth, whose physique was scarcely better than his own, Adelko supposed that not all the scions of Sir Torgun’s house could be heroes.
As an esquire assigned personally to the King, at least he’d get to stay out of trouble – for now.
When the pavilions had been set up the army settled down to bivouac. Ale and wine were strictly rationed – enough to dull the nerves and get a good night’s sleep before fighting, but no more. The evening meal was a subdued one, but lack of drink wasn’t the only reason for that.
The journey south had been enough to dampen even the brightest of spirits.
They had found both Rookhammer and Blakelock burned-out shells, part of the scorched-earth tactics the enemy had adopted in retreat. Worse, the garrison at Blakelock been put to the sword, sharing the earlier fate of their brethren at Rookhammer. Hewn and rotting corpses disgraced the precincts of both castles, another grisly feast for the crows and the flies and the worms. Of Thule’s own troops there had been no sign.
‘A ruthless tactic, but a sensible one,’ Braxus had sighed as they rode past, leaving the corpses in their wake. ‘Thule knows he’ll need every advantage he can get, now his own numbers are dwindling.’
‘It’s unchivalrous!’ Vaskrian had raged, unable to hold his temper. ‘Those men had surrendered, at the original siege of the castle!’
‘Then perhaps they should not have surrendered,’ replied Braxus, unsmiling. ‘War does not always have a place for chivalry – think on all those men your King hanged at Linden. And it’s chivalrous notions on his part that led to this uprising in the first place.’
Vaskrian had said no more at that, and ridden on in sullen silence. Adelko had glanced sidelong at his mentor, half-expecting him to chime in, but he’d held his peace. And yet something in the way he had looked at the Thraxian then had suggested a new-found respect for the young knight.
But it wasn’t the slaughtered garrisons that troubled Adelko most, bad as that was. During the week-long march from Linden they passed scores of burned villages, mass gallows like the one just beyond Lindentown screaming a silent testimony to the ugly privations of war. A once bountiful land had been reduced to a living hell on earth. Adelko found himself making the sign repeatedly.
Here and there the odd cluster of white-robed Marionite monks could be seen doing their best to tend the sick and wounded. But perhaps worse than the bite of blade, the awful desperation of starvation was setting in, for the attackers had pillaged all the ready food they needed before slaughtering livestock and burning fields of crops. As the unyielding spectacle of desolation unfolded around him, Adelko fancied that the Fallen One’s city of burning brass could not have furnished worse.
‘In fact this is just what Abaddon lusts to see when he peers from his dark kingdom into the mortal vale,’ said Horskram when Adelko gave voice to that thought. ‘For though he had a hand in the world’s making, he would rather see it ruined and laid waste than suffer us to live in it unruled by his will.’
‘But why doesn’t the Almighty do something?’ Adelko had wailed. ‘It’s His creation that’s being ruined!’
‘His creation, that He gave to us, to do with freely as we will,’ Horskram reminded him. ‘If we choose to wreak havoc on His gift, He cannot intervene – He has only done so once in all of human history, as you will recall. And even that was not without great cost and human suffering.’
‘But... why could He not have made us better?’ the novice persisted. ‘Why give us all this bounty and make us so flawed?’
‘Our flaws come from the hand of the Fallen One,’ Horskram sighed. ‘Perhaps it is true as some sects claim that the Almighty is not truly omniscient, not so far as his archangels are concerned anyway. For it is written that in the Dawn Of Time He trusted Abaddon, the wisest of all archangels, and could not foresee the poison he would inject into His creation by making mortalkind so clever and so… individual.’
Horskram paused, as if not entirely satisfied by the last word. Then he continued: ‘Others hold that Abaddon did not even realise it himself at first, but rather thought he was augmenting mortalkind – whereas in truth he served nothing more than his own vanity and pride. These cankered traits grew in him, as this theory has it, until they had thoroughly corrupted him, and before long his lust for power turned to frustration and anger. The rest, as they say, is history.’
Adelko had pondered that long on the rest of the march. But all he did was turn circles in his head, which came to hurt from too much thinking. The tradition his mentor spoke of held that Abaddon had corrupted man by making him capable of higher thought. But if that meant more lethal weapons, cunning intrigues, skilled deceptions, did it not also mean greater poets, better healers, wiser sages?
All he could conclude in the end was that the world – indeed both worlds – made little sense.
Presently they were all seated in the King’s pavilion to take the evening meal. True to form, Freidheim insisted that on the eve of war his board be no more lavish than the rest of the army’s – but the muster had provided well, and there was food aplenty.
Adelko was too nervous to eat much in any case. He wished he could see Arik one last time before tomorrow’s battle. He had tried to seek out his brother again during the march from Linden but Horskram had forbidden him: Arik would be far too busy for reminiscing. Adelko supposed the old monk was right, but resented him all the same for stopping him.
When the meal was done the tent was cleared in preparation for a war council. It was hoped that it would be the last; that tomorrow’s battle would be decisive. Despite the general mood of optimism throughout the camp, fuelled by desire for revenge for the atrocities committed by Thule’s men, Adelko felt anxious and subdued.
As he lay down to sleep he found his mind drifting back to Tintagael again. The strange faerie-forms loomed before him in his mind’s eye, reaching towards him with distended fingers.
He heard their eerie voices in his head, pronouncing the same cryptic words they had uttered in their sylvan palace:
What perils did you hope to flee, to seek the silen
ce of the trees?
So many perils. It seemed madness looking back on it now: they had come through all of that and lived, their minds still intact. The noise of knights and soldiers drifted across the camp. Adelko had retired early – it was an hour before curfew. He shifted uncomfortably on his pallet.
Oh mortal wise beyond your time, gifted with reckoning sublime!
The Fays’ false flattery of his mentor – or was it false? Horskram had gotten them this far in one piece after all, and the faerie kings seemed willing enough to help them…
A crooked path you now must tread, gloom gathers on the road ahead…
Not his favourite part of the faerie stanzas, not since those words had returned as if to mock him after his discourse with Horskram on the morality of befriending a swordsman...
He shifted again on his pallet and opened his eyes. Why was he thinking about this now? He wondered if this were some last trick of the Fays, a way to afflict his sanity even though he had left Tintagael far behind. And yet they had helped them – their words about the warrior-prophet’s blood and bloody strife barring the way south had been both apt and useful… possibly even to the point of saving their lives.
Sighing exasperatedly he focused his mind, repeating the Psalm of Spirit’s Comforting in his head to achieve a meditative state. From there he hoped to drift into true sleep, unhindered by the memory of the Fay’s unsettling couplets.
It must have worked, for soon the words diminished and he felt his mind empty and slip toward blissful darkness. But even as it did, the last words spoken by the spectral kings echoed at the penumbra of his fading consciousness:
Sanctuary-subterfuge-sanctuary-subterfuge-sanctuary-subterfuge…
The morning dawned clear and cloudless. Adelko had half expected another sorcerous elemental trick, to see the sun obscured by thick clouds or heavy rains, but the clement skies and dry earth presented no obstacles. After a hasty breakfast the army began drawing up into formation while outriders scouted ahead for signs of Thule’s forces.
