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The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright ©2017 by Daniel M. Ford
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express permission of the publisher or author.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Ford, Daniel M., 1978- author.
Title: Stillbright : book two of the paladin trilogy / Daniel M. Ford.
Description: Santa Fe : Santa Fe Writer’s Project, 2017. | Series: The paladin trilogy ; 2
Identifiers: LCCN 2016033042| ISBN 9781939650580 (trade paperback : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9781939650597 (pdf) | ISBN 9781939650603 (epub) | ISBN 9781939650610 (mobi)
Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Fantasy / Epic. | GSAFD: Fantasy fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3606.O728 St 2017 | DDC 813/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016033042
Published by SFWP
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Find the author at www.danielmford.com
For my mother, for everything.
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1: Cost and Memory
Chapter 2: Sounds like Cursing
Chapter 3: The Boy
Chapter 4: A Distraction is Arranged
Chapter 5: A Rescue is Mounted
Chapter 6: The Distraction
Chapter 7: Tasks
Chapter 8: Names
Chapter 9: Mountains, Knives, and Ideas
Chapter 10: Into the Thasryach
Chapter 11: The Cave
Chapter 12: The Will
Chapter 13: Choice, Not Fate
Chapter 14: The First of Many Cooperations
Chapter 15: Homecoming
Chapter 16: A Task is Finished
Chapter 17: A Task is Begun
Chapter 18: A Vigil
Chapter 19: Labors
Chapter 20: Fortune’s Priestess
Chapter 21: Finery
Chapter 22: Temple Politics
Chapter 23: An Old Trick
Chapter 24: Trial-at-Arms
Chapter 25: Who You Are, Not Who You Were
Chapter 26: The Grip of Despair
Chapter 27: Interlude
Chapter 28: The Will and the Dragon
Chapter 29: A Legend is Crafted
Chapter 30: The Minstrel and the Shadow
Chapter 31: Interlude
Chapter 32: Homecoming and Guests
Chapter 33: Battle is Joined
Chapter 34: Old Mountain Ice
Chapter 35: The Feel of Gold
Chapter 36: Shadows
Chapter 37: The Rest of the Message
Chapter 38: The Rite of Blooming Blood
Chapter 39: Stillbright
Chapter 40: The Sorcerers, the Islandman, and the Will
Chapter 41: Two Awakenings
His fair face cold and hard as winter dawn
and as beautiful in its wrath.
His mail mirror bright, all men fearing
the judging reflection.
His steed of purest silvered mane, a beast
light as cloud, swift as wind.
His arms bright bars of fire given shape in
his holy hands alone.
His the hand that drew the fury of the sun
and stilled the ocean’s rage.
The opening lines of the epic poem
Hammer of the Sun, attributed to
Derrinbad of Keersvast
Prologue
The sun shone on Londray Bay with the soft brightness that was particular to early autumn. It bathed the walls of the Dunes in warmth, and filled the towers of Baron Delondeur’s keep with golden light.
The same light fell over the entire city of Londray, spreading from the massive, sand-colored castle walls at its northwest corner. Mixing the wide and regular streets of recent, planned construction with old cowpaths, Londray was one of the greatest cities in the Fourteen Baronies—one of the few that would even be considered a city by a Concordat southerner, much less anyone from the great city of Keersvast, stretching, as it did, across an entire island chain.
Still, it was an impressive place holding thousands of souls—all bathed in that sunlight that marked one of the last truly warm days of the year. Soon enough, the short autumn would give way to a winter that threatened to freeze the harbor for months. Today, the city could rest in its beauty, wealth, and warm breezes.
In the shadows that light cast all over the city, people went about their daily business. At the harbor, they hauled in nets to mend, swabbed decks, or sorted their catch. Foreign sailors, whether the huge, bearded Islandmen from the north or the lithe, fair-haired Keersvasters from the far southwest, rolled off of their ships and into the taverns, ale-tents, wine-shops, bathhouses, barbers, and brothels.
In the rich quarters of the city, knights, lords, and wealthy traders sipped their evening wine or settled in to the first course of dinner. They ate in front of expensive leaded windows from bright plates. Liveried servants stood ready to attend to every wine glass and utensil through every course of soup—chilled at great expense, against this last gasp of heat—fish, meat, fruit, cheese, and more.
At the city’s margins, where the summer sun was broken into shadows by high-piled shacks that leaned into one another as they rose above the street, families jammed together over tables happily covered with what fish or bread they could afford.
At the gates leading out of the city, most along its eastern wall and others to the north and south, clusters of green-cloaked men gathered, awaiting the turn of the glass that officially ended their campaigning season. For a few months, the war was done. The war that had once been the Succession Strife—fourteen Barons alternately supporting a king, pulling him down, or fighting to put themselves on the throne—had now become a simple fact of life. No one under two-score years in Londray had been born in a city at peace. No kings were left to support or oppose; now the twelve Barons that remained fought for their own borders. Some, perhaps, harbored the ambition of a crown. Most claimed to simply be answering the grievances done to them or their people.
The signs of war were all over the city. Of course there were the gathered hundreds of men waiting to be released to their homes, hopeful of pitching into the harvest or the last months of fishing, or hopeful of heading to the drinking, dicing, and wenching with their pay. There were the armed and armored men who patrolled the walls of the Dunes still, green cloaks blazoned with a sand- colored tower; there were the ballistae that dotted the walls; there were the ram-prowed ships berthed in the harbor.
Yet there were quieter signs, as well. Men and women, lamed or missing legs, blind or one-armed, slumped against tavern walls with shallow wooden bowls in one hand and simple signs in the other. In the poorest parts of the city, the sign might be a crude charcoal drawing of a horse on a piece of hide, or a drawn bow, or a spear. Whether this signified the nature of their service or the source of their injury was never entirely clear.
These were the most numerous.
In tradesman’s streets, the veterans slumped in the same way, holding the same bowls, but their signs were more l
ikely to be lettered. Most contained only a word or two.
Aldacren.
Green Forks.
Thasryach Pass.
The Vineyards.
Giant’s Winter.
One particularly elderly man, who managed a knobbed wooden crutch, a bowl, and a sign—by the expedient of having the latter looped over his head with a bit of string—had crossed out the last word upon it and written a new one. It had read Vale of the Kings. Now, it read Vale of the Graves.
Many walked past them without seeing them. Others, near their own age, who bore a scar or lacked a finger, tended to pause and drop links and bobs into the bowls, or to hand out stale half-loaves.
If such folk were seen on the streets of the richest parts of the city, it never took long for green-hatted, truncheon wielding guards to move them on.
In the Temple District, Fortune’s white-surcoated guards in their conical helms were not shy about moving them on with the flat of their blades.
Guards at the Temple of Braech didn’t always use the flat. If word spread that a ship of Braech’s Dragonscales—the crazed holy berzerkers—had put into the harbor, most folk avoided the Temples altogether, and the beggars doubly so.
One man, his age hard to tell, stood up from his spot along such a tavern wall. Matted and overgrown brown hair fell into his dark eyes, which were ringed and clouded and stared into the distance while seeing nothing. He tossed aside a sign that read “The Crossing” and tipped the contents of his bowl into an older man’s, seized up a crutch, and began walking, dragging a badly twisted left leg behind him.
Slowly, painfully, sweating profusely before long, the man made his way towards the docks as night slowly fell over Londray. He didn’t turn aside to the calls of women walking in the streets in flimsy dresses, or to the ale and whiskey sellers in tents. When he passed by a stall where a man sat with beringed hands folded over an ample stomach straining against dirty robes, beneath a sign promising healing tinctures and mystic oils to soothe any pain or rheumatism, his hand moved instinctively to his belt for a weapon that wasn’t there.
Not that it would’ve done him any good; the charlatan had leather-clad, heavily armed guards to either side of him. Still, the man spat in the direction of the alchemist’s stall in a last small gesture of defiance.
He set his faraway eyes on an empty quay and kept walking. Each step was pain, but each step was closer to ending it.
When he reached the long stone quay he tossed away his crutch, heard it splash in the water, wished he could’ve turned to see the hateful thing sink. Instead, he hurried on.
At the first sufficiently far spot, where nothing was tied, he paused and gathered himself, leaning against a post for support. Ought to pray, he thought. Then aloud, he said, “Braech, Fortune, Urdaran…Cold, even the Elven Green, if any of ya hear me, then freeze you and yours for all you ever did for me.”
Then he lifted his bad, twisted leg towards the small dark waves below, ready to plunge towards them.
He could’ve sworn that no one shared the quay with him. With the harbor not yet full, nothing had tied up on it; it was too far from the warehouses and known to be too shallow for the biggest ships. Yet, before he could fall, a hand seized his shirt and pulled him backwards. In his shock he fell upon his bad hip and bit off a yell, prepared to swing his fists wildly and fight for the life he’d been about to end.
Then he saw a woman appear out of the darkness of the air, the night’s shadows simply peeling away from her like a dropped veil. In a surprisingly deep and raw voice, she said, “Water’s still warm, but I take it you weren’t out for a pleasure bath.” One of her hands, rough and calloused, settled lightly on his head. “Why?”
It was a simple question. The simplest. And also the most complex. Yet he found an ease entering him, a warmth that began to spread from the woman’s hand as soon as she had spoken.
“It hurts,” he admitted, in a faraway voice. “I’m tired. And hungry.”
“I’ve a friend who can help with the last one right now,” the woman said. Despite the huskiness of her voice, there was a hint, nearly hidden, of a rich music behind it. But only a hint. “And the second takes but a few turns sleep.”
“I don’t sleep well,” the man responded.
The quay was silent for a moment but for the play of the water against the stones. Her hand against his head still exuded warmth, and he felt himself dropping towards sleep, then abruptly yanked away from it.
“Can’t let you pass out on the quay…ah, what is your name, anyway?” There was a pause as the woman sighed and he thought he heard a few muttered words. Something about someone else, a name he didn’t catch, who was better at this.
“Tibult,” the man replied, slowly, as if the word was slow in coming to him.
“Well, Tibult,” the woman said, “I can help you with some of what troubles you. But I need privacy just now.”
She raised her hand from his head and the warmth it had brought began to recede. Her fingers clasped his forearm with a grip as strong as any he’d ever felt and hauled him to his feet, seizing him with pain. He found himself leaning on the woman’s shoulder and was surprised to note that she was taller than him, even if he could stand upright.
“Privacy was what I was after,” Tibult muttered. The warmth and calm that had filled him dissipated, pressed out of him like juice from a grape. Pain and hunger and despair wrung it from him as they welled back up.
“I’m willin’ to pay for it,” the woman said, reaching for her belt. Her hand came back with silver dangling in it, three links. “Now I can give you this and you can watch the quay for a turn or two and then you can hare off and get drunk and fed. But if you’re willing to earn a little more, tell me, Tibult—do you still know soldiers, where they’ll be gathering tonight, and where to drop a word that’ll get ‘round?”
“Aye. What d’ya mean?”
“I mean, friend Tibult, for a rumor dropped in the right places, gold. And if all goes well, I have a friend who can do something about that hip.”
Chapter 1
Cost and Memory
Allystaire, formerly Lord Coldbourne, War Leader of Barony Oyrwyn, favored knight of the Old Baron Gerard Oyrwyn, Castellan of Wind’s Jaw Keep, currently the Arm of the Mother, Paladin and Prophet of Her Church, was intimately acquainted with pain. Pain was the price of the life he had lived before his Ordination. It seemed to him that pain was the cost of the life he lived now.
And at the moment, he was readying himself to pay a great deal of that cost. Bound to a rack in a lightless room in the bowels of the Dunes, at the mercy of Baron Lionel Delondeur’s pet sorcerer, he was anticipating pain. On what scale, he wasn’t entirely sure yet.
There’d been a beating on the way down to the lightless room in which he languished, after he’d been stripped of arms and armor. With his body held immobile by the sorcerer’s power, and even the release of yelling or screaming denied to him, the Delondeur soldiers escorting them had taken a bit of their own back. His name had usually been foremost among the army that had killed their friends, or brothers, or, when he realized how young some of them looked, probably their fathers. He didn’t begrudge them the odd thud of fist or boot. It was really just professional courtesy. Had better from your sisters, he might have said. Only I had to pay them in copper, he might have added, had he the use of his mouth. Though it didn’t seem the knightly thing to say, it was customary to say something.
The guards had lost interest quickly when they saw they could earn no response, and none were eager to linger around Bhimanzir. That much was plain. So once he was secured, the chains pulled tight, off they’d gone, taking their torches with them. The features of the room barely impressed themselves upon Allystaire’s vision as the door sealed the last of the light away. He knew he was bound to a rack of iron and wood by loops of chain and that his sorcerous bonds had dropped a
way once the chains had been looped taut. He’d seen an oddly shaped table for a moment. There’d been a rack of tools upon it. Sharp tools.
Submitting to fear earns me nothing, Allystaire told himself. Think on how I got here. Down a lot of freezing stairs, yes. Some new construction? Near the keep’s own dock, out over the water? He felt entirely uncertain of any of these guesses. Making guesses and developing a possible response is better than waiting for the cutting to start, he told himself, but he’d just run out of guesses to make.
The sorcerer suddenly appeared, revealed in the darkness only by the light emanating from his hands. Allystaire strained to make out his captor’s features, but could see only that he was bald, and that his skin appeared entirely smooth and unlined.
“No doubt you are steeling yourself to resist my blades and hooks, my whips and hot irons,” the sorcerer said. “I have no need of such crude tools for such a simple task. No doubt you will end your life upon one of them.” There was no more feeling, no more expression in the man’s words, than in those of a bored child reciting a lesson for a tutor who wasn’t listening.
“What I am interested in is inside you, yes. Yet I think the hook would not show it to me,” the sorcerer went on. One of those fingers, warm with the promise of agony, reached out and pressed against Allystaire’s bare chest.
The sorcerer uttered a single syllable that vanished before Allystaire’s ears could reach out for it.
Then the fingertip ignited against Allystaire’s chest and burned unbearably. He screamed, surprising himself, as the world collapsed around the brand of fire that pressed against him.
Unloosed, unfocused, his mind sought some way to comprehend what was happening. Memories flashed, battles and wounds he’d taken. Then suddenly an image flashed into clarity.
Michar, the Old Baron’s chirurgeon. A stump of a dwarf, his hair gone grey, beard in three thick, short braids bound with caps of silver, gold, and a metal Allystaire couldn’t name. The plain workingman’s clothes and thin gloves, the apron with its pockets of gleaming instruments.
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