Stillbright

by Daniel M Ford

  “I rather thought that’s what ya’d say,” Torvul replied, and he went back to his jars and vials.

  “In the meantime,” Allystaire said, “let everyone else get as much rest as they can. You and I,” he pointed to Idgen Marte, “make a sweep of the village. Look for any survivors, anything useful, food and drink. Aye?”

  Idgen Marte nodded. “Yell if there’s trouble,” she said, tapping the side of her head.

  The door opened behind them. Ivar and five more of the remaining eight Iron Ravens filed out, carrying little beside their weapons and armor.

  The captain glared hard at Allystaire as she stalked off, a look he returned calmly and evenly. The others refused to meet his eyes as they slunk off into the morning.

  “I’m not even goin’ t’ask,” Torvul muttered as the men moved at a trot down the road.

  * * *

  Baron Lionel Delondeur had never felt so strong. Not even in the halest day of his life, not even among the elves on the tundra and earning the name Giantsbane, had he been anything like the man he now was. He could simply feel the strength flowing through his arms and legs. All the pain of his age, all the wounds he had ever taken, vanished beneath a flood of power.

  “Remember, Baron,” Iriphet said as if hearing the thought, “this will only last for a day or two. What we will do now will take much of the available time.”

  “It doesn’t take you so long to craft a Battle-Wight,” the Baron countered.

  “If that is what you wish us to make of you then it will take little time at all,” Iriphet said, the barely concealed threat hanging in the air as his voice echoed itself. The sorcerer cocked his head to the side and waited. “I thought not. Now, strip yourself of your common steel. We shall need it.”

  Lionel nodded and began unbuckling his armor. His fingers moved among the straps with long-forgotten speed; no pain clogged the joints of his knuckles.

  No sooner had bits of his plate begun falling to the frozen grass beneath him than it was lifted into the air and unraveled by tendrils of yellow and blue light.

  He tried not to look at the pile of other material the sorcerers had gathered, as it, too, was lifted in the air and stripped. As he watched, bone and steel were melded together in the air, woven inch by inch. The result was the kind of hideous dark metal that ran through the bodies of the Wights and coated the skulls set atop their crudely-knitted forms.

  The process was slow and the sounds of the bodies of his men being ripped asunder, the sounds of their clotted blood being heated and pressed against the bone-steel to quench it, might have sickened him, once.

  As it was, he barely noted the cold and waited eagerly for the tools suited to his new power. “A sword as well, I think, if we have the time,” he said with casual assurance.

  “A sword indeed, Baron,” Gethmasanar answered. “A sword fit to bring down a paladin.”

  * * *

  “The sun’s movement today is not natural,” Mol said as she stood on the steps of the Temple and contemplated the quality of the light filtering through heavy clouds. “It ought not to be so far past noon. It will be dark all too quickly.”

  “Then it’s best you get inside the Temple, lass,” Torvul said. “For I’m about ready to work my Forbidding.” The dwarf clutched a heavy jar that sloshed as he moved. Exotic and unnameable scents rose up from the wide neck as he moved past Allystaire and Idgen Marte.

  “Make sure the people know they cannot come out till it is settled,” Allystaire said.

  “They’ve food enough for a few days now,” Idgen Marte added wearily. In addition to her bow and her knives, Torvul’s cudgel was thrust awkwardly through her belt. “Though I pray the Mother won’t let it last so long.”

  Mol nodded and opened the doors, then looked back to Allystaire. “Is there anything you would say to them?”

  “I have no words left. Only what I can do for them. If you must tell them something, say that if it is to be their last night, let them live it in love and affection with each other. Not to let fear make them forget Her.”

  “Ask them to pray. For us if they’ve a mind,” Idgen Marte added.

  Mol nodded and went inside, closing the doors behind her.

  Torvul set down his jar and pulled an aspergillum from his belt, dipped it in, and began flicking droplets of the liquid all along the walls of the Temple and the ground beneath it.

  “If one of you’d like to carry this for me it might go a bit faster,” the dwarf said, eyeing the jar. Allystaire bent to pick it up.

  They made a long, slow circuit around the walls, across the steps, the dwarf quiet, intent upon his work. Allystaire thought on the coming night, on the Goddess’s words to him. If he closed his eyes, banished all other thoughts, he could almost fix in his mind the image of Her. But then the beauty, the overpowering radiance, would force his mind aside and the image would shatter, leaving behind a surge of desire, a powerful sense of loss.

  As they walked he thought of Gideon lying insensate and mindless upon the floor of the Temple. He’d seen a man kicked in the head by a warhorse once who’d lived a few months in much the same way. Food could be forced down his throat, and water, but it was no life; the mind, everything that made the man up, was gone.

  And are you gone, too, Gideon? Too soon, my boy, he thought wistfully. So much I had left to teach you. So much to learn from you.

  He drove these thoughts away, but they kept coming back. The Goddess. The feel of Her kiss. The desire he probably imagined in Her voice when last She had spoken to him. Gideon, lost.

  Suddenly, out loud, he said, “I should have killed Delondeur when I had the chance.”

  “Aye,” Torvul agreed. “Like as not, you should’ve.”

  “Why did I not?”

  “You said it couldn’t be like that,” the dwarf said, dipping the round head of his silver implement back into the bowl he’d filled with the thick, slightly opaque, and heavily-scented liquid. “Couldn’t be assassins in the night. Had to be public, the world had to know why. All that sort of knightly rot.”

  “Knightly rot is rather the point.”

  “I might argue that the point is seein’ to Her Ladyship’s folk, and Her church.”

  “If I had killed him then, the entire barony would have risen to see us crushed. He would be a murdered hero, a martyr.”

  “Could be. Or maybe our man Chaddin could’ve seized the reins of power more fully and come to an understanding with us. Doesn’t do us any good to wonder. We’ve a job tonight. Which, as Mol has kindly pointed out, is not as far off as it ought to be.”

  “Are the sorcerers so powerful, Torvul, that they can bend the rules of nature?”

  “Depends how many there are,” the dwarf said with a shrug. “Might be Braech and Fortune working with them as well. I doubt their clergies just packed up and went home with no share of spoils or credit. Those bastards are powerful, though, as I recall tellin’ a hard-headed knight some months ago. They’ll not make the mistake of getting within your reach twice, I don’t think.”

  “What are we to do against them, then?”

  “Idgen Marte might have a chance. I…” the dwarf lowered his tool and cocked his head to the side, as if listening to something. His eyes narrowed and his mouth drew into a thin line, crinkling his chin. “I don’t think…I can hold them at bay, maybe. Hold them off. With my craft.” He shook his head as if clearing it. “There were days when they feared my folk, ya know. But I haven’t that craft in my hands. There’s no one who does, and if there were, no songs left to answer them.”

  “Answer them?”

  The dwarf shook his head and wetted his tool again. “Come on. Let’s mark out the path we want the Wights to follow.”

  “Straight up to the stairs. Give me some height. Where will you be?”

  “The roof, I suppose. Don’t look at me like that
,” he responded to Allystaire’s sudden glare, even though he hadn’t turned around to see it. “I can do more work from up there, and if one of them gets t’me, they’re through anyway. You know by now I’m no coward.”

  “Never thought you were. Well, maybe back in Grenthorpe I did.”

  “We haven’t got time for a lot of reminiscing,” Torvul grumbled. “Besides, I don’t figure on dyin’ tonight. But in case you’re thick enough or slow enough to get your own self killed, I want you to know what you’ve given back t’me. Not my life from the noose, mind. Something more important than that.” The old dwarf faced him, eyeing him from beneath cragged brows. “You made me belong t’something again. I can’t make you understand what that means to a dwarf. Family, clan, caravan—that’s who we are. Exiled from that, I was dead already, just takin’ a long time t’notice. It’s why my craft was failing me. You and Idgen Marte and Her Ladyship gave that back to me. A place. A family. I can never repay that,” the dwarf said with uncharacteristic solemnity. Then, grinning, he added, “Well, if anyone can, it’ll be me. I’m sure I’ll manage to save your life again tonight somehow, eh? Come on.” He stretched, and they went back to the work at hand.

  * * *

  The notes of Torvul’s song hung in the air as the dwarf stood before the closed doors of the Temple. They could feel the power that resonated from his words, feel as it settled into the stones around them.

  For a moment the droplets he’d blessed the building with glowed. Thousands of tiny pinpricks of bright white light flared with the power the dwarf gathered and released, and then sank into the stone. Torvul stepped back, stumbling and falling to one knee.

  “Stones above but I need a good lie-in,” the dwarf muttered.

  Idgen Marte helped him to his feet, and the dwarf, with the crossbow slung over his back and a heavy bag of potions in one hand, began clambering nimbly up the side of the Temple.

  Allystaire studied the stones of the wall for a moment. The lights Torvul had created pulsed faintly within it, shifting and moving and eluding his eye if he looked too closely.

  He settled his hammer in its ring on his belt and flexed his hand within his shield. Next to him, Idgen Marte unlimbered Torvul’s cudgel and gave it a few experimental swipes in the air.

  “Still with me, Shadow?”

  She grinned humorlessly. “You even have to ask?”

  Allystaire smiled, though the expression was equally grim. “No. But it fills up the silence.”

  “That it does.” She paused, tapped the cudgel against her open palm, and said, “The story doesn’t end here, you know. It can’t. It doesn’t. I won’t let it.”

  “It was never a story, Idgen Marte,” Allystaire replied softly. “A dream of one, mayhap.”

  “No, but it will be,” she answered with sudden forcefulness. “And in it, you’ll have some foolish name or title that the children think is bold, and that old men secretly thrill to hear. You’ll not be a broken nosed old warlord, nor a bachelor, and that armor you wear will be magic, not just look it.”

  “If you say so,” he answered, laughing without much feeling in it. “I am not a bachelor by choice, you know.”

  “Out with it. We may be dead soon. I want one damned piece of your story finished before we are.”

  “Fine. The woman I wanted to marry? Her name was Dorinne. She was the natural daughter of Lord Joeglan Naswyn, of the Horned Towers. Her father acknowledged her but would not dower her, and my marrying her was out of the question, according to my own father. I went to the Old Baron to plead my case, but he refused to listen to me. Told me I was a young man looking to marry for the wrong reasons, my head turned by a comely shape. That I needed to think of the future of my line and so forth. It was the only time I ever had harsh words with Gerard Oyrwyn. Not long afterwards, he ordered me away on a campaign. While I was gone, my father died. He’d lost a leg a few years before, and was never strong after that. A flux had come to the barony and he succumbed to it. When word reached me, I rode for home, determined then I could marry whomever I wanted, dowry or no.”

  “And why didn’t you?”

  “The flux was particularly savage.”

  The words hung in the air for a moment before their import settled fully on Idgen Marte.

  “Allystaire,” she murmured. “I’m sorry. I had no idea it was…Cold. It’s awful.”

  “It was fifteen years ago. A lot of time for it to heal.”

  “Then tell me it has. Tell me the sting has gone out of it.”

  Allystaire fell silent, looked off into the fast-falling darkness.

  “I’m sorry, Ally. I didn’t realize it would be that way.”

  “It is how things end most of the time,” Allystaire shrugged. “Ugly, painfully.”

  “Well let’s make it ugly and painful for them, eh?” She pointed with her cudgel at the path leading towards the Temple. No shapes crowded upon it yet, but as the unnatural darkness settled around them, they both seemed to know, somehow, that Wights lurked just beyond their sight.

  * * *

  Nyndstir hated skulking. Hated it. But he’d proven to be damn good at it, and now found himself huddled against the wooden wall he’d climbed over, gnawing on a loaf of stale bread and swigging from a jar of beer he’d pilfered from an abandoned house. He’d hidden from the paladin as he’d moved through the village, unsure of getting the time to explain himself.

  Nyndstir was no coward, but he wasn’t an idiot, either.

  He suddenly lowered the bread as he heard a faint wet scream float over the village from the west.

  When it died, another followed it. And another.

  And with each one, it got noticeably darker.

  “Braech,” Nyndstir muttered haltingly, his tongue unused to prayer. “I don’t think ya bless this, priest in their camp or no. I think ya bless those who’re brave with no more than steel in their hands.”

  Another scream. Night fell, all at once, in a manner so clearly unnatural that Nyndstir felt his hair standing on end.

  “Bless me tonight, Braech, if ya would. I set a bad course. Every man is bound to do that now’n then. Bless me and help me set it right.”

  With that, he downed the last of the beer, dropped the jug, hefted his axe, and skulked off into the night.

  * * *

  The quick, awful screams and the falling dark raced each other across Thornhurst to the steps of the Mother’s Temple. From behind the stone walls, Allystaire heard the sudden cries of dismay.

  He set his feet and unlimbered his hammer.

  Battle-Wights swarmed down the road, dozens of them. Not as large or as fierce as the Wights that had assaulted the town the first time. They seemed more carelessly made, loosely stitched together. Well behind them, what remained of Delondeur’s men marched on. The crowd of them seemed improbably small, but Allystaire didn’t have time to think on that at the moment.

  The entire world, the darkness that crowded in on the Temple, the scores of people crammed into it, fearful and crying, all of it melted away from Allystaire’s mind.

  There was only his hammer, only his arms, and the Wights that pressed upon him. Bone flew away in chunks whenever he struck. Limbs were shattered, exposed spines severed with a blow.

  Funneled towards him by Torvul’s Forbidding, they came in twos and threes, loping awkwardly to their destruction. Some tried pushing themselves against the line Torvul had drawn around the Temple, and one or two were crushed against empty air by the press of their own fellows.

  He had his feet planted on the stones of the Temple he had helped to raise, the Temple that had started with a pile of rocks in a field. The song of the Mother flowed still in his limbs, though fainter than it had. No matter, though. What strength it still granted him would be enough.

  In the place he stood now, with the Shadow of the Mother at his right hand, they could
come as long and in as many numbers as they wished. They could come and be crushed upon his hammer. He could feel cracks in the stout oak haft lengthening towards the head.

  When it broke, and it would, he would have his fists.

  Allystaire felt as though the proud boast he had given to the Mother was closer to true now than when he’d made it. Let the whole world come. Let the Choiron Symod bring the Sea Dragon’s devoted berserkers, and the Marynth Evolyn bring all the assassins she dared to hire. Let Fortune bring Her hired blades. When they came within the range of his hammer, they would die.

  He realized, only then, that he was speaking aloud, bellowing his rage at the mindless Wights that crowded in on him. A small one, barely cobbled together out of mail rings pulled and spliced into wire and hastily wrapped around bones scuttled at him, swinging broken blades from the ends of its arms. He smashed its skull contemptuously. He saw the others pull back, and he laughed raggedly.

  “Even your abominations fear us, sorcerer,” he yelled, and he heard the cold wind carry his voice, sending it ringing over the ruined village. “Even the dead will not face the Mother’s wrath! Do they learn their cowardice from you?”

  Many of the Wights continued to press upon Torvul’s barrier. He saw one, suddenly bathed in a chilling blue light, begin to push a bladed hand purposefully through it. The lights embedded in the stone began winking and dying.

  I can’t hold it, Allystaire. Torvul’s mental voice sounded thin and worn in his mind. I’ve got…we have to drive them off.

  Suddenly the Wights that had scuttled away were bathed in an intense, pure white light. Allystaire had but a second to wonder before he heard Torvul’s voice from the roof bellowing above even his, and he spared a glance back to see the dwarf holding up his lantern in one hand, the wide beam it threw unnaturally bright.

  “The Arm still strikes for the Mother,” the dwarf yelled, his voice thunderingly loud. “He stands still and bright!” he roared. “A lamp in the darkness! No mark upon him! Why does he stand alone?” The dwarf jumped nimbly from the roof, landed hard on his feet on the steps, and charged to Allystaire’s side, yelling again. “Still. Bright!”