Finally he bent and picked up the links, but for perhaps the first time in his life, he found that he didn’t much like the feel of gold in his hands.
* * *
Inside the now darkened wagon, Gethmasanar seethed, the yellow energy that leaked from him growing darker, pulsing visibly.
The other presence in the enclosed interior spoke calmly, though the words were slightly distant, distorted.
“He has left us our raw materials, and we should never run short at the place of a battle anyway. That is the entire point of the procedure. Eventually we will have enough and we will overwhelm them. Now to the matter of Bhimanzir’s lost apprentice.”
Gethmasnar let out a quiet harumph. “On that point at least we may claim victory. I felt him come into contact with one and spring our trap. I am quite sure he is accounted for.”
“Do not be sure till we have the body, and may study it.”
“He is done for, I tell you. I felt his will flee his body.”
Multiple points of blue light moved in the air as the other sorcerer stood. “Yes, but did you feel him die? Know you for certain that his flesh is quiet?”
“There was nothing of him left.”
“On this point, Gethmasanar, we must leave no room for doubt.”
“We’ll sift the rubble after our Wights have done their work, then.”
“That will not be sufficient. When their collapse nears, you shall have to move close enough to make sure of the boy yourself.”
“Iriphet,” Gethmasnar began haughtily, “surely we need not be so cautious over a barely trained boy.”
“Silence.” Iriphet’s voice was barely loud enough to be heard, the echo of it fainter still, yet it hung in the air as Gethmasanar instantly obeyed. Trails of blue streaked across the small interior till the elder sorcerer stood directly before the younger, whose eyes lowered to the ground.
“It was at your insistence, Gethmasanar, that the boy was given to one of the Knowing. Though he was the least among us, Bhimanzir’s power should have been sufficient to clear this land of its threats. Had he been here by himself, certainly he would have succeeded. Instead, we allowed you your fancy and planted with Bhimanzir the seed of his own destruction. You have come perilously close to loosing the Negation upon us by handing it to the very power Bhimanzir was dispatched to counter. That has not gone unnoticed by me, nor by the Eldest.”
Gethmasanar remained silent, eyes upon the floor, letting the power that danced unsubtly behind the words wash over and through him.
“Certainly, Bhimanzir shares some of the blame,” Iriphet went on. “For not realizing and unlocking the boy’s true potential. For his failure, he paid, but do you realize the enormity of what happened? Do you realize that a primate with a hammer killed one of the Knowing? Death does not come for such as us in this way, Gethmasanar. Never.”
Iriphet turned away and Gethmasanar lifted his head, eyes narrowed. The other sorcerer’s retreat granted him new leave to speak. “There are those who have fallen in battle.”
“To infighting, yes,” Iriphet allowed. “To a lucky Thaumaturgist, as those dabblers style themselves. To cursed Dwarfish Stonesingers, though we long ago won that war. And perhaps, under great duress, to a stray arrow or a freak chance of a greater battle. The man was a prisoner, bound to Bhimanzir’s rack, the secrets of his power ours to know, according to his final message to us. And then he is dead. That, Gethmasanar, is unique to the history of the Knowing. And it will remain unique. Go and bend your hand to some useful work now. Likely by now the Baron will have gotten some of his men killed and wounded. Material and fuel. Send some of the men to gather it.”
Chapter 36
Shadows
Allystaire strode into the Temple on legs he expected to go weak and wobble at any moment. That they did not, that the Goddess’s song still sang in him was worrisome, though it had receded to the back of his thoughts.
Mol sat before the altar, cradling Gideon’s slack neck in her lap. Allystaire rushed to her side and knelt. He reached up to remove his helmet, but thought better of it when he imagined it crumpling in his hands.
As carefully as he could, he extended his left hand, and gently lowered the palm onto Gideon’s bare forehead.
He felt the perfect health of the boy, and nothing else.
Allystaire pulled his hand away, gingerly, and straightened up on his knee. Too much flowed and warred within him to notice the pain the joint would ordinarily spear him with.
“Mol? Have you any insight?”
The girl, her hood pulled back to reveal her features, didn’t respond at first. Her face had lost none of the odd change that had come over it, the strange ageless quality, but some of the wisdom of her presence seemed diminished, her poise ruptured. She looked, in short, more like a girl of twelve or so years than she had since Allystaire had returned to Thornhurst.
Finally, she lifted her head and looked straight up at him, her brown eyes unblinking. “I think it was a trap, meant just for him. I…I don’t know if it worked.” She swallowed hard. “I can’t hear him, Allystaire. And I don’t know if he can hear me.” She paused a moment, then added, “I can’t hear Her, either. For the first time since the reavers.”
“Her? The Mother?” Allystaire tried to keep his voice even. “Have you always?”
“Almost always. And when I didn’t, I knew it was because there was something I needed to understand on my own. I always knew She was watching me. I could feel it. Now, the Longest Night. Gideon seemed to think it would be soon. Perhaps She is weak because of it?”
“Mol,” Allystaire said, leaning forward, reaching for the girl before he remembered the strength that lingered in his hands and dropped them to his sides. “She is still watching. Her song lingers in my mind, and Her strength fills my limbs. That means Her people are in danger, yes—but it means She has not abandoned them. She never would.”
Mol gently slid her legs from beneath Gideon’s head, lowering him carefully to the stone floor. He didn’t respond, just went on breathing slowly, almost imperceptibly. She stood and moved to Allystaire’s side, putting her arms around his neck and leaning for a moment against him. He resisted the urge to return her embrace.
“Promise me it can’t end like this,” the girl murmured as she pulled away. Her eyes were large in her face, frightened, but dry, and their gaze was steady. “We have so much work left to do.”
“So long as any strength remains in my arms, no monster, no sorcerer, no slaving Baron will have Her people uncontested,” Allystaire replied. “I will tell you what I once told Her. If the whole world arrayed itself against us, and I was left to face them alone, I would.” He stood, careful to step away from the girl and the prone boy. “Find him, Mol. Do what you must. Get Torvul if you can. We will need him if we are to see the dawn.”
He watched her kneel beside Gideon again, and lay her hand upon his forehead. He wanted to kneel beside the girl, call the boy’s name, heal him, pull his mind back from wherever it had gone. Allystaire’s hands clenched at his sides, and for a moment he was afraid to move, afraid to touch anything, for the power in his hands had still not abated.
He is as close to a son as I am likely to have, Goddess, he silently prayed. Please.
Allystaire could not finish the thought.
“We remain in danger, Mol. I have to see to the walls.”
The girl nodded, but didn’t respond. She knelt over Gideon, murmuring words Allystaire couldn’t catch. He turned and was halfway to the door when her voice rang out.
“Allystaire—did the people bring their animals inside the walls? Cattle? Dogs?”
“Some, I think,” Allystaire allowed. “Torvul put aside lumber for a cow pen to be built along the north side. Cold, he probably built it himself while he should have been sleeping. Why?” Not sure why, he thought, but did not say. This cannot last long enou
gh for us to be slaughtering cattle.
As if she plucked the thought from his head, Mol said, “Torvul did it because I asked him to. Animals have a great value to Her people, and thus, to me.”
“As you say, Mol,” Allystaire said quietly. With a last look back at Gideon, he slipped out the door, stepping gingerly, trying not to rip it off its hinges as he went.
* * *
“I’ve been on shit jobs before,” Nyndstir said to himself. “I’ve collected corpses and pieces of corpses, dug jakes, hauled garbage, butchered meat,” he murmured as he crawled along. “Dug graves, repaired wagons, shod horses, built pyres, burned bodies on them, built cairns, hauled water, ale, wine, mead, cheese, meat, salt, bread, fruit, tents, lumber, stone, iron, peat, and coal,” he went on, pausing to check the wall, to check his side for cover, and to think of more shit jobs. “Cleaned armor, sharpened weapons, repaired sails, portaged boats, and stood more guard duty’n half o’the soldiers in this barony put together.” On one wonderfully memorable occasion, he’d volunteered on a hunch and found he was guarding the officer’s brothel and that his silver spent there just fine despite having no badges tied around his arm. “What I wouldn’t give to be crawlin’ drunk and dazed outta that place again,” he said.
He was enumerating these things to himself because no matter how dangerous, boring, or odorous any of those tasks had been, none of them had compared to crawling around in the dark looking for pieces of those things the sorcerers had unleashed upon the town.
It didn’t help that there was at least one bastard up on the distant wall who could see him and his detail and had already put a bolt through one of the two southern lads he’d brought with him, if the southerner’s distant, wheezing cries were any clue.
If they were after real bodies in order to give them a proper grave, Nyndstir would’ve had no qualms about standing up weaponless, waving a hand, and asking for a brief truce to gather them. He’d done it a dozen times before.
Nyndstir knew that he didn’t deserve a truce for what he was doing.
Cold, he wasn’t real sure he wanted one.
So they crawled, staying behind what cover they could, and picked up bones and bits of metal, but more often things that looked like bone and felt like metal.
He shivered every time his hand closed over something like that. Him, Nyndstir Obertsun. He hadn’t shivered in the cold since he was six summers, or thereabouts, and he couldn’t remember shivering in fear.
But there was a kind of wrongness about these things that he hated, hated from deep down, and he didn’t want to be putting them in a sack and bringing them back to the sorcerers. No good would come of that.
Nyndstir gave a brief longing look at the wall that loomed in the dark in front of him. Being honest with myself, I’d rather be the other side o’that, he thought, and he found himself wondering how good his throwing arm might be with his sack of bones and bits, only to realize it was all he could to do to lift it.
Besides, you took their links. You take a man’s weight, you do the task he sets you, he told himself.
Maybe it wasn’t much of a code. It wasn’t something the bards sang or told stories about. But going against it had never done him any good.
So Nyndstir crawled and ducked and hugged the earth as tight as he could, feeling the cold seeping into his bones like an old friend—there was no cold here like island cold, anyway—and he kept finding pieces of Battle-Wight and stuffing them into his sack.
Nyndstir found himself reaching for something—a hipbone that glittered like tarnished silver despite the dark. His fingers brushed it and it was numbingly cold. It stung.
Then something whizzed out of the darkness. He felt it brush past his knuckles, drawing a burning line across them, and impact the bone he held. Sparks flew. He tried to shut his eyes but his night vision was ruined, so he pulled his arm back tight to his body and curled behind the fold in the ground that offered cover.
“Cold and salt but that hurts,” he bellowed, more in surprise than pain, really, though it did hurt, the flesh ripped open in a thin but deep cut.
Much to his surprise, a deep and powerful voice answered him from the darkness beyond. “Then don’t be skulking around outside my wall!”
“Braech’s scaled balls, man, I’m not bringing the fight to ya. I’m not even armed!” Nyndstir had to summon his wind and work to project his voice.
“I can see what you’re doing,” the voice replied. “And if you think being armed changes anythin’, you’re talkin’ to the wrong one of us!”
“Well which one am I talkin’ to?”
“You’ve got the pleasure of addressing the Wit of the Mother and the best crossbowman you’re ever likely to meet. Pull your head but half a span to the left and I’ll make sure that hand troubles you no longer,” he added with a rumbling cackle.
Cold, how can the bastard see that well at this range? Nyndstir wondered to himself.
“I already did for your men. Well—one of ‘em might be alive still, but not for long,” the voice called out. “I was aimin’ for his heart and got a lung and I’m sorry for that. The other one died fast and clean. I’d do the same for you.”
“Both of them? Now I’ve got to carry three times as much of this back t’our camp,” Nyndstir yelled. “If my man’s hangin’ on I don’t suppose you could take him in and treat him, eh?”
“I’ll check but I wouldn’t count on it. And I can’t just let ya walk away.”
Nyndstir didn’t answer. Instead, he hunkered down and began gathering himself, tensing muscles and stretching them without moving much, taking in quick lungfuls of air and pushing them back out.
In one fluid movement he rolled up onto his knees, heaving the sack of bones onto his back, and then levering himself upright onto his feet.
Then Nyndstir engaged in an act he typically found distasteful: he ran, a bagful of bone and Battle-Wight on his back providing cover. He hoped.
His hopes proved fruitful when he felt something punch him in the back with enough force to nearly knock him over. Thank Braech and Fortune it was nearly, because if he’d gone down he probably wasn’t getting back up. Instead, he was able to keep his feet, zig and zag between bare trees, and finally gain the cover of the more thickly wooded road.
All the while he was anticipating another punch in the back or a burst of pain at the back of the skull.
He slumped behind a thick tree trunk, slinging the bag off his shoulder and heaving for breath. He felt sweat on his forehead and cheeks cooling in the winter air, and gave a snort of disgust. “Young man’s foolishness, this,” he muttered, then spat in disgust.
“What has a young man got that I haven’t?” He stood back up, slung the heavy bag defiantly onto a shoulder. “Fewer scars, less know-how, and a smaller cock,” he muttered, answering his own question. The hike the rest of the way back to camp was easy enough, though it tried to elude his eyes again. The big boxy wagon was still there, and in the darkness he thought he could see hints of color through its doors and shaded windows. Not of torchlight, but of unearthly blue and sickening yellow.
Still outside the camp, he reasoned. Doubt the idiots on guard have seen me. Could just sod off into the woods, dump this lot into a stream, and tell them the bowshot was too strong and they had the range.
Nyndstir looked into the woods, then back at the wagon, considered the bag on his back, and spat again. Then he squared his shoulders and took an angry, stomping step towards the wagon.
“Took their weight,” he muttered as he shifted the burden he carried.
He neared the wagon, paused as he heard raised voices, two that he didn’t like hearing and a third that he didn’t recognize.
He suddenly realized there was a fully armored knight standing in front of the wagon. Cloaked in green and wearing a surcoat with the Delondeur Tower quartered with a symbol he didn’t recognize,
a ship sitting atop a spearpoint, the knight was only up to his shoulder, but that was typical; Nyndstir was used to being the tallest man in sight.
Nyndstir chuckled inwardly as he studied the knight’s arms. Inlanders and their pretty pictures, he thought. As if any of ‘em know the first two things about seamanship anyway.
A shout, followed by quieter murmuring, came from inside the wagon. The knight standing at the door started to reach for it and Nyndstir cleared his throat.
“I wouldn’t. Ya don’t walk in on such as them uninvited. Trust me.”
The knight turned to him. “Mind how you address me, man. I am Landen Delondeur, Heir of the Baron and one of your employers.”
Nyndstir dropped the bag at the knight’s feet. It landed with a heavy metallic clank. Then he fixed the steel-clad youth with a hard stare, to see if he could get that visor up. Nyndstir wanted to see the knight’s cheeks pinch, his skin flush, his eyes cut away from the force of an islandman glare.
The visor did come up, but Nyndstir was the one whose skin flushed. Instead of a young knight’s affected mustache and pale cheeks, he was staring at the sharp cheeks and sea-sky grey eyes of a young woman.
Nyndstir Obertsun was ill-equipped for the series of recalculations he was forced to make in the moment. Landen Delondeur never stopped staring back at him, never moved.
So he inclined his head—not a true bow, but just enough to satisfy—without lowering his eyes.
“Beggin’ your pardon, m’lo…m’lady” he rumbled. “I’m sure the sorcerers won’t mind bein’ interrupted. By all means.”
The door of the wagon swung open, spilling blue and yellow sorcerous light across the camp. Another armored, green-cloaked fellow stomped out. Him, though, Nyndstir knew by sight. White-haired, but sizable, back straight despite the steel he wore, wearing a cloak and surcoat of fine green silk over his green and gold armor, and the sword he’d won fame with at his side.
Lionel Delondeur took in both of them with a moment’s glance. A smile creased his features, split his beard, as he clapped Nyndstir companionably on the shoulder, saying roughly, “Good to know we’ve Islandmen with us, eh Landen? Toughest men around. Tougher than Harlachan mountaineers even.”
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