Still, had the werebeasts not battled each other with the same ferocity they gave those who had not changed, they would have made short work of them all. As it was, boar stomped and tusked wolf, a pair of wildcats sprang at a stag. The stag tossed one away with a wicked swipe of its antlers, but went to its knees as the other reached its back. Then the werewolf was beset in turn by a gigantic badger.
The shape-changers, Gerin noted, seemed to keep the same body weight they had possessed as men. A couple of hawks far too heavy to fly stumped about the battlefield. Their cruel beaks gaped as they screamed challenge to all and sundry. Nor were they long without foes. A wolf attacked one, a fox the other. Between beaks, talons, and battering wings, both soon had cause to regret it.
The majority of the werebeasts were wolves, foxes, or wildcats, but deer, boar, bear, badger, and wolverine were all commonly represented. Along with these mundane creatures, though, were several oddities. One of Wolfar’s men must have had some Urfa blood in his past, for a miniature but combative were-camel, moaning, snorting, and spitting, struck shrewd blows with its forefeet at the carnivores assailing it.
Off to one side lay a tremendous salmon, a corselet still round the middle of its body. It flopped and gasped in the air it could not breathe. It could not die, either, because of the vitality of its wereblood.
In the convulsions of the field, two transformed creatures stood out. One was the wolf which had been Wolfar. His passion against Gerin was so fierce that he kept it in beast shape. He fought to force his way through the press and close his jaws on the Fox’s throat. His howls of fury held almost understandable curses buried within them.
Yet even the were-Wolfar gave way before a great tawny longtooth which, from its bulk, must have been the animal shape of the swag-bellied Trokmê commander. It flailed its way through the imbroglio with hammerlike blows of its paws, blows that sent even werebeasts reeling back, stunned.
The monster cat came up to the stalled chariot in which Nordric and his driver still held out. Amgath snapped his long lash at it, hoping to keep it at a distance. It squalled in pain and anger but, instead of being repulsed, ran at him. He dropped the whip and grabbed a short thrusting-spear. Too late. A single cuff crushed his face and broke his neck.
The longtooth’s rush overturned the chariot and tumbled Nordric among the ravening werebeasts. Gerin was sure he was doomed. In an instant, though, he was on his feet, a sword in either hand. His curses pierced the cacophony of beast-noises around him. He seemed to face every way at once, flashing blades keeping death at bay. He drove off one werebeast after another. Trokmoi and Elabonians shouted together.
Their cheers turned to groans as he went down, a wildcat clinging to his back. Van leaped from the chariot and ran to his rescue. The wolf that had been Wolfar bounded toward him, slavering jaws agape, yellow eyes blazing hatred.
The outlander was ready when it sprang. A blow of his spiked mace shattered its skull. The wereflesh healed with unnatural speed, but Van was past by the time the wolf regained its feet. He kicked the cat away from Nordric. It lashed out at the first thing it hit, another, even bigger, wildcat. While they tried to gut each other with raking claws, Van hauled Nordric erect. Side by side, they fought their way back to the chariots.
Nordric was battered and bleeding, but still full of fight. Gerin and Van had to hold him back from throwing himself once more against the were-longtooth that had killed Amgath.
“There’s no vengeance to gain against a beast you cannot kill,” Gerin said. “He’ll be in human shape again, you know—maybe you’ll meet him then.” Nordric let himself be persuaded, a true measure of the punishment he had taken.
Wolfar’s chief lieutenant, Schild Stoutstaff, had not gone were. Now he began to rally to himself such of his overlord’s men as were left. The Trokmoi, too, gravitated toward a pair of their nobles.
Gerin thought it a good time to vanish discreetly from the field. Followed by all his surviving men—Rihwin and Nordric in the former’s chariot and three more warriors in another car—he edged toward the cover of the woods.
Their departure went unmarked by still-struggling men, but one werebeast saw. The wolf that was Wolfar bayed angrily and started to lope after them. Before he could clear the battlefield, the longtooth knocked him down from behind. It tried to bury its fangs in were-Wolfar’s neck. The werewolf tried to twist free, but his foe’s great weight held him down.
Wolfar writhed, wriggled, and clamped his teeth on one of the longtooth’s forelegs. Bones crunched. The longtooth screamed. It tore at the wolf’s belly with its hind feet. Wolfar let go, but only to snap at the longtooth’s throat. Any greater purpose was forgotten in the fighting madness now gripping him. Outmatched physically, he was nearly the longtooth’s match because of the fury that drove him.
Gerin thanked the gods he and the poor handful of followers left him had made good their escape. Giving quiet directions to Priscos, he guided them north through a web of tiny trails. No one who had not lived in the barony could have followed them in the dark.
At last he judged it safe to stop. The din of battle had long since died behind him, but the night was far from still. More than the usual number of animals ranged the woods. Many were men caught in the open by the werenight and now running wild, bloodlust in their souls.
That led to another thought: what hell was the werenight playing in keeps under siege—especially in Castle Fox (always assuming it had not fallen)? “Don’t worry about it, captain,” Van said when Gerin spoke aloud. “Whatever’s going on inside, it’s just as bad out, and that you can bet on. Balamung or no, the Trokmoi’ll be in no shape to take advantage of things tonight. Maybe a weresnake will swallow the cur and solve our problem for us.”
“Such happy endings happen more often in romances than in fact, I fear,” Gerin said, but the outlander had heartened him.
Something else occurred to Rihwin: “Great Dyaus above! I wonder what’s happening south of the mountains?” The Fox shied away from that idea. With even a small part of its populace turned were, the capital’s narrow, winding streets and dark alleys would be a worse jungle than any forest through which he’d pass. He thought of Turgis and hoped the innkeeper was safe.
Not so the Sorcerers’ Collegium. He started to send a curse down on its head, then stopped, suddenly ashamed of himself. “Now I understand why the southern wizards offered me no help!” he exclaimed. “They must have known this was coming, and been making ready to meet it. Sosper as much as told me so. No wonder they needed to keep every man they had in the southlands.”
Despite exhaustion, Gerin found sleep hard to come by. So did his men: they were all in pain from wounds taken fighting the Trokmoi, Wolfar’s warriors, or the werebeasts.
Also, the light of the four full moons seemed to allow the ghosts fuller access to this plane than at more normal times. They floated round the campfire, sometimes darting up to one or another of the men to try to give such advice as each thought important. Thanks to the moons, they were sometimes able to make themselves understood, but that understanding did not always make their listeners see why the wraiths deemed their news important.
“What possible difference does it make to me that the price of barley in the capital dropped two coppers a bushel three days ago?” Rihwin demanded. The spirit that told him did not explain.
The ghost that had been straining for days to get through to Gerin drifted toward him again. “Captain, I take oath it looks like you,” Van said. “Face a little wider, maybe, but leave out that and what looks like a broken nose and it could be your twin—”
“Father Dyaus above!” Gerin whispered. “Dagref, is it you?” He moved to embrace his slain brother’s shade, but it was like trying to hold a breeze.
The ghost withdrew a few paces, slowly and sadly shaking its head. Gerin recalled that gesture well. His older brother had always used it when the Fox did something foolish.
The memory brought sudden tears to the baron’s eyes, thou
gh he and Dagref had not always been close. Dagref was half a dozen years older, while Gerin, as he approached manhood, found the soldier’s life Dagref took to so naturally did not suit him at all. Or so I thought then, Gerin said to himself: here I am living it.
The lips of Dagref’s ghost were moving, but the Fox still could not make out any words. He heard his brother’s voice in his mind, but so windblown and blurred by echoes that he could not grasp Dagref’s meaning. “Once more,” he begged.
The wraith grimaced in exasperation, but started over. This time its meaning, or a sentence of it, was clear: “You still don’t keep the stables as clean as our father would have liked,” Dagref’s ghost said. It shook its head again in the gesture so familiar to Gerin, then, satisfied it had finally got across what was necessary, disappeared into the darkness, leaving Gerin more bewildered than before.
“What did it say?” Van asked. Gerin told him. Van tugged at his beard, gave the Fox a quizzical look. “It’s hounded you for days to let you know you’re a scurvy excuse for a housekeeper? Tell me, captain, was your brother crack-brained?”
“Of course not.” The news Dagref’s ghost had given was plainly important to it. Gerin cursed himself for failing to see why. He turned the ghost’s enigmatic words over and over in his mind, but came no closer to understanding them.
Half a night’s sleep brought no new insight. He was glad, though, when he woke, to see the sun shining through the trees to the east and all the moons gone from the sky.
“You look like death warmed over,” Van said. “There’s dried blood all over your face.”
The baron scrubbed with his fingers, saying, “I must have done enough tossing and turning to open up a cut or two.” He pounded left fist into right palm. “Damn everything, what was Dagref trying to tell me?”
He got no good answer to that, either from his own wits or from his comrades when he put the riddle to them. “Perhaps he wants you to have a good storage place for my cheap barley,” Rihwin suggested. Gerin glared at him, but it made as much sense as anything else.
Not long after they left camp, they came upon the mangled and partially eaten carcass of a brown bear. Beside it slept a naked Trokmê. Awakened by their approach, he leaped up and fled into the woods, red hair streaming behind him.
Rihwin stared in disbelief. “No man could—”
“And no man did,” Van said grimly. “Look at the tracks: bear and wildcat. It shouldn’t have been too hard. In were shape, the woodsrunner would have taken no hurt. Then he had his feast, curled up afterwards—and changed back when the moons set.”
The forest path was punctuated by random death: another bear, horribly torn; a Trokmê with his throat ripped out; a pair of Elaboninan warriors so mutilated as to appall even Gerin’s hard-bitten crew; a crofter’s cottage, its flimsy door torn from leather hinges, a blackened puddle of blood luring flies at the threshold. Gerin did not need to look to be sure no one was alive inside. He hoped the deaths there had been quick.
Live Trokmoi still lurked in the woods. An arrow from hiding grazed the side of Gerin’s helm. He and Rihwin shot blindly into the undergrowth. The sniper, unhurt, let fly again, hitting Priscos’ left arm just below the shoulder. The driver cursed and tore out the arrow, then ripped at his tunic for cloth to bandage the wound.
The rest of the Elabonians jumped from their chariots. They ran for cover, then stalked the barbarian sharpshooter. The Trokmê, no fool, held his well-concealed position until he had what he thought was a good shot at Van. But in his cramped quarters he could not draw bow to his ear, only to his chest. The outlander’s stout cuirass turned his shaft.
Van shouted in rage and rushed at the thicket from which the arrow had come. The Trokmê fled. A blow of Van’s mace felled him from behind before he had taken ten strides. Like a charging longtooth, the outlander was deadly quick in a short rush.
He surveyed the sniper’s corpse without a hint of remorse. “A pity the craven bushwhacker didn’t die slower,” he said. “If he wanted to fight, he should have come at us like a man.”
Gerin had planned and executed enough ambushes in his time to keep a discreet silence.
When they returned to the chariots, Priscos was matter-of-fact. “Did you get him?” he asked. At Gerin’s nod, he said, “Good,” and jerked the reins to get the horses moving north again.
They returned to the Elabon Way no more than a couple of hours’ journey south of Fox Keep. Gerin was sickly aware he was returning without even the ragtag army which had set out from Ricolf’s holding. The werenight had seen to that. His main hope now was that it had disrupted Balamung’s men more than the Elabonians.
Then that hope died too. A shout rang out from the flanking forest: “Here’s more o’ the buggers!” A score and more of footsoldiers charged from the woods, spears ready to cast, swords bared.
But the Fox was still reaching for his bow when he realized the cry had been in his own tongue, not the woodsrunners’. And when the onrushing warriors spotted him (or more likely spied Van and his distinctive armor), they stopped so abruptly that one man stumbled and fell to his knees. Then they came on again, but now in friendship and joy, raising a cheer to chill the heart of any Trokmê in earshot.
Gerin recognized them as Drago the Bear’s men; their commander was one of Drago’s chief retainers, Fedor the Hunter. The Fox did not know Fedor well. He usually stayed behind at Drago’s keep as deputy when his overlord went to Castle Fox. But Gerin had never been gladder to see anyone than this heavyset, scar-faced warrior.
Fedor led his men up to the Fox. “We thought you dead, my lord,” he said accusingly. “The Trokmoi and their cursed wizard claimed you were, when they tried to get me to yield the Castle of the Bear to them.”
“Drago’s holding stands?” Gerin said. “You beat back an attack the wizard led himself? Great Dyaus, Fedor, how? His magic has leveled more keeps than I can count.”
“Oh, he tried to shake the holding down after I said no to him, so he did. Fires and smokes and flying demons and I don’t know what all. But the Castle of the Bear is good and solid, and it sits on bedrock. As for the rest”—he shrugged with the same stolidity Drago would have shown—“we were inside and they were outside, and that’s the way it stayed. The wizard’s lightnings blasted one breach, but no woodsrunners came through it alive. They paid a lot more than half the butcher’s bill, my lord. After a while, they’d had enough and went away.”
Listening to the bald report, Gerin decided Fedor had not had the imagination to see he had no chance. And, going on phlegmatically where a more perceptive man would have despaired, he had endured. Something to be said for dullness after all, the Fox thought.
But Fedor was not yet done. “You need not look so surprised, my lord. Fox Keep still holds too, you know.”
The baron’s heart gave a great bound within him. “No,” he said softly. “I did not know.”
“Aye, it does.” Fedor seemed oblivious to the impact his news had on the Fox. “They’re under siege, true, but they managed to sneak a messenger to us through the woodsrunners’ lines: some trick of your wizard Siglorel, I understand. Sixty men set out from the Castle of the Bear two days ago, but after last night—” He shrugged again. “For a while I thought I’d lost my wits, but I was too busy staying alive to worry about it.”
“Weren’t we all?” Gerin said.
Thanks to the footsoldiers, the final approach to Fox Keep was slower now, but Gerin would not have traded them for all the treasures of Ikos. A final fear gripped him: that the keep had fallen after its messenger went out, Then Van pointed north. “Right on the skyline, captain—the very tip of your watchtower. And I think”—he squinted—“aye, I think it’s your banner atop it.”
As his men exulted, Gerin tried to follow his friend’s pointing finger. He had to say, “Your eyes are better than mine.” But that Van saw what he claimed, the baron had no doubt. He had surmounted every stumbling block now, save the last … putting an end to th
e mightiest mage the world had seen in two thousand years. And even as he quickened his pace toward his castle, he realized he still had no idea how to do that.
XII
Castle Fox had taken a fearful beating, Gerin saw as he and his men sped toward it. Part of one wall had fallen, to be replaced by a lower, makeshift bulwark of timbers and earth. For some reason, the logs of the palisade were painted a sour dark green. Though the watchtower still stood, gaps had been bitten into some of the upper stonework of the keep.
Still, on the whole the Trokmê investment was a shabby job. Mighty sorcerer or no, Balamung was only a woodsrunner when trying to besiege a holding his magic could not flatten. He knew nothing of engines or stratagems, but had to rely on the ferocity of his troops—and ferocity counted for little against a fortress with determined defenders. Broken bodies littered the ground below the palisade. Here as at the Castle of the Bear, their bravery and inexperience were making the Trokmoi pay more than their share of blood.
But what ferocity could do, it would. Just out of bowshot from the palisade, Balamung harangued his men, nerving them to yet another charge against out-wall and gate. Despite the repeated maulings the Elabonians had given them, despite the horrors of the werenight just past, they waved their weapons and cheered at his speech, for all the world like so many outsized, destructive children.
The Fox’s men on the palisade caught sight of Gerin before the Trokmoi did. Their yells made Balamung pause in mid-word. He looked up. An evil orange glow lit his eyes. His voice sounded inside the Fox’s head, scornful and exasperated at the same time: “It’s infernally hard to kill that you are. Well, so long as you’re here, you can watch your fine castle die, for I’m fresh out of patience with your puppydog of a wizard, indeed and I am.”
The lean sorcerer gave quick orders to his men. Fifty or so loped toward the Fox (“Just to make sure you don’t joggle my elbow, now,” Balamung said). The rest advanced on the palisade. The baron found their discipline remarkable—and alarming. He’d hoped his sudden advent would draw all the barbarians from the walls and free his men inside to sally against them.
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