The Stricken Field - A Handful of Men Book 3

by Dave Duncan

  Inos said, “When we first met, I thought you were a very cold person. Hard, unfeeling. Lately I’ve been catching glimpses of a much nicer man underneath.” Surely moonlight was making her reckless!

  He did not seem to mind her prying. “Gods! I shall have to be more careful in future.”

  “I thought you were a man of war. You’re not, are you?”

  “Not really,” he said. “At least, I believe peace is better. That was my excuse. I thought that once I’d proved I could be a fighter, then I’d be able to choose peaceful solutions without being called a weakling.” He turned his face away from her, as if to study the shadowed doorways nearby. “Perhaps it wouldn’t have worked.”

  “I think it would. Think it will. It does you credit. And some wars are just.”

  “Are they?”

  From Shandie, that ought to be a very surprising question, but she knew him now. He took nothing for granted. “Yes,” she said. “When the jotnar seized my kingdom, I had them all killed, every one, and most of them were not much older than Gath. Well, they were quite young. But none of the thanes has menaced us since.”

  “If a war is just for one side, then must it not be unjust for the other? Have I mangled the problem successfully?”

  “No, you’re right. I’m sorry if I offended.”

  “I enjoy talking with you. Know something? No one has ever spoken to me in my whole life like this. Not the way you do.”

  Poor, poor Shandie! His mother had been the worst sort of bitch, of course. He had had no brothers or sisters, and probably no real friends, even as a child. What of his wife? But to speak of the impress would be too cruel. The man was probably frantic with worry about her. However, there were limits to the amount of comfort Inos was willing to provide lost husbands, even imperors, and this conversation was drawing very close to those limits. She wondered if moonlight had this effect on people. Or was it loneliness calling out to loneliness?

  “Highscarp is not a happy memory!” Shandie said firmly. ”What’s unsettling you?” He moved closer.

  Fair enough. She had wrung confidences out of him, so now it was his turn, and this private little chat was becoming altogether too intense and intimate.

  “Riding in that coach.”

  “I thought maybe it was dinner.”

  She smiled, then chuckled in case he couldn’t see the smile. “That, too. No, I kept remembering the last time I rode in a grand carnage like that.”

  “When?”

  “When I left Hub. Many years ago. We drove all the way to Kinvale before lunch!”

  Shandie sighed. “Then I can guess who was driving.”

  ”Yes,” she said. “You want to hear something funny? The footman on that journey was Death Bird! Me and Aunt Kade, seven hundred leagues in a morning!” She laughed. Rap driving.

  Rap gone. And Kadie and now Gath. Shandie took her in his arms.

  The tears came at last. He held her tight in the moonlight while she soaked his shoulder.

  6

  The journey was the longest Thaile had ever taken on the Way, except perhaps her first trip to the Defile. She had a strange conviction she was going around in circles, so perhaps the archon was having trouble making the Way work backward for her.

  Eventually she saw a light ahead and heard a distant boom of surf. The moon was higher, riding through milktinted clouds. Wind sighed over the bent grass on the dunes.

  A strange group crouched around a bonfire, their shadows writhing on the sand behind them. No, there were two groups, she realized. On one side an old woman huddled, distraught, weeping in the arms of a bewildered boy. On the other sat a couple of young men she knew, novices from the College. They looked at her with pale, strained faces, but she could tell they were greatly relieved to see her come at last. The dying man must be a full sorcerer, and these two would be granted the other two worthwhile words.

  Beyond them was a cottage. There was no light in it, but archons did not need light. She trudged over the soft sand with her heart laboring. One word only! Only one word! The door stood open on darkness. A voice said, “Enter!”

  She recognized him, a blocky man with very gold eyes, and much younger than she would have expected of an archon.

  “Yes, we have met,” he said impatiently, and gestured to the bed. The face on the pillow was wrinkled and pallid, its eyes closed. Under the mundane salt tang of the sea lurked the occult scent of death, old and stale and cruel.

  “You want the Tylon word,” Raim said brusquely. “I will rouse him. Give me a moment.” He strode past her, out the door and away, leaving her alone with the dying man.

  Why? Oh, to move out of earshot, of course. Words could only be heard mundanely, not by sorcery. Had she ever been told that, or did she just know? Remembering her great-grandmother Phain, she moved softly over to the bed and knelt down beside it. This would be a much shorter Death Watch than Phain’s. The man’s breath rattled like snakes. She wondered if she would ever know his name.

  Minutes wormed by. If she wanted to pry, she would be able to Feel his agony. An insane urge to do so began to niggle at her like an itch. His features had the immobility of old ivory, reminiscent of the portrait busts in the Library. She lifted a corner of the sheet and wiped the trickle of spittle trailing from his lip.

  His eyelids flickered and opened a little. The mouth pursed as if in pain. What a horrible way to die! She felt like a buzzard, picking at a corpse.

  “Which? “ The word was not spoken aloud. “Can I get you anything? Water?”

  “No. I am in something of a hurry, Novice. Which?”

  “Tylon.”

  He tried to speak, and no sound came from his lips. He ran the tip of his tongue over them; she leaned closer, offering her ear. He croaked, gasped for breath; tried again. He spoke.

  The world exploded in glory and power.

  She reeled out of the cabin, almost knocking over Kweeth, poor kid, only a boy, hurrying white-faced to the dying man to learn a word and become an adept . . . His fear was a luminous marsh fog around him.

  The night was filled with splendor and majesty. It trumpeted. She could ride the clouds, embrace the moon. The ever-restless sea filled her with wonder. Her soul danced in the night wind.

  Raim blocked her path. “Sit by the fire a moment, Archon, until you collect your wits.”

  “Archon?” she said. “Did you call me Archon?”

  “You are to be the eighth archon,” he snapped. He was a very brusque person, this Raim. “That is why Sheef was not replaced. Now go and sit. I am busy.”

  Without moving a finger, she slapped his face, hard. He reeled, astounded.

  “I remember you,” she said, feeling exultant. “You came and snatched poor Mist away from my Place. My guest! Mind your manners better in future.”

  Anger burned red embers in the night. “You have soon become arrogant, Sorceress!”

  “Did you need longer?”

  Raim snarled and stepped away from her, rubbing his cheek. He was engrossed in keeping the old man alive and watching young Kweeth’s nervous efforts, too busy to spare time for squabbling.

  Thaile walked away, over the top of the sand. Sorceress! The sheer delight of power was intoxicating. This was what Faculty was for. This was why she had come to the College.

  Come to the College?

  She had never come to the College! She had been kidnapped, abducted to the College. That first day at the Meeting place . . .

  Leeb!

  As the great breakers offshore, no matter how high they rose, must topple at last in. welters of foam, so memory crashed down upon her: Leeb, her goodman, and the Leeb Place, and their loving. Leeb weaving the walls of the cottage, Leeb building a boat, Leeb teaching her to swim, Leeb’s hands on her body. His skin against hers. The missing months flooded back, months of love and laughter.

  Now she knew where she had first met Analyst Shole. It had been Shole and Mearn who had come to the Leeb Place and abducted Thaile and stolen—
>
  Her baby!

  She screamed to see the full extent of the College’s treachery. Not only her goodman! Her baby, too! With a howl of pain and fury, she gathered her powers for vengeance.

  She entered the Chapel in a blast of thunder, right before the Keeper’s desk. The hall echoed. Dust billowed away across the flagstones.

  “You stole my child! You stole my love! You stole my memories!”

  The Keeper seemed not to have moved at all. She looked up slowly, a blankness in a cowl, conveying sorrow. “You asked me to take your memories.” Her voice was dark as buried rock.

  “The second time I did! After I came through the Defile I did! I was barely sane that morning. I did not know what I was asking! You took advantage of me!” Never had Thaile felt such rage, choking her, beating in her temples. “And I certainly did not ask you the first time!”

  “It had to be.”

  “No, it did not! You could have explained! You could have asked me! You could have told me what was required, and why Thume needed me.” Was that true, though? Would she have given up her man, her child?

  “It had to be,” the Keeper repeated, her voice a rustle of dry leaves.

  “Why?” Thaile yelled. “What evil do you battle that is worse than that? Who are you to commit such crimes against me?” She ripped away the shielding to see the shriveled face—and recoiled from the agony in it.

  She froze as the sheer immensity of the College registered upon her for the first time: the vast complex pyramid of power and service, the centuries of noting, planning, watching, guarding. Spiders! She sensed the web that enfolded all of Thume, a web of ancient, implacable purpose. Horrible, lifeless, stultifying denial!

  “Not just me! All of us, the whole race of pixies!” And in those terrible stark eyes she read what Woom had wanted to know, what made a Keeper. She saw the suffering, and the warning.

  She saw the future.

  “No!” she screamed. “Not that! I never will!” She fled the Chapel in another roar of thunder.

  Leeb! Leeb and her child—now she would go to them! Now they would be reunited and she would spurn the College and all its works.

  She rode the night sky like a wave among the clouds. She brushed the stars, soaring higher than the icy peaks of the Progistes until she saw the great river far below, a thin scar of silver. She plunged down into blackness as a sea beast seeks the ocean floor.

  She came to the Leeb Place quietly, soft and silent, like a hunting owl. In the dark clearing the cottage stood deserted, the door flapping loose in the wind. No light shone through the windows or the chinks of the wicker walls. No chickens roosted in the coop that Leeb had made for her, exactly as she had asked. No goats waited in the paddock to give milk for her child. Weeds flourished over the vegetable patch.

  The cottage was a hovel. Now she saw what Jain had tried to tell her once, and she had not believed. Such life was squalor, utter poverty. The Leeb Place had held only three metal tools and virtually nothing else not made by the goodman himself, or his goodwife. Compared to the elegance and comfort of the College, this was a sty for beasts. And oh, how happy she had been here! The only tears she had shed had been tears of happiness.

  Oh, Leeb, Leeb! Leeb with his clumsiness, his pure-gold eyes, his silly sticking-out round ears. Leeb with his selfmockery, his quirky smile, his gentleness. Leeb, where have you gone? A pixie never leaves his Place! Have you gone to seek another goodwife to bring back here? Or did you take our child and go searching for me?

  No, of course not. The Keeper had explained that. Leeb thought she was dead. He had buried a body.

  She moved through the darkness surely. She saw all the heart-wringing familiar things—the chopping block, the clothesline, the stone Leeb sharpened his ax on. The boat he had made with so much labor, pulled clear of the water . . . would he not have found it easier to travel by boat than by land when he had a child to take?

  Or had he left the child with old Boosh at the Neeth Place? Thaile peered upriver with sorcery and saw the two old folk asleep in their decrepit little shanty, and no child or sign of a child.

  The night was empty. The night was cold.

  Then she knew what she must seek, and in among the trees she found what she expected, three of them, one of them very small.

  Behind the graves stood the Keeper like the God of Death, leaning on her staff, darker than the darkness. For a moment sorceress and demigod confronted each other in silence, while Thaile struggled to control her sobs.

  “It had to be,” the Keeper said quietly.

  Fury and hatred bubbled up in Thaile’s throat like acid. “Why, why?”

  “You know why,” said the Keeper. “We can never love.”

  ”Evil!”

  “Do you think I do not know, child?”

  And again Thaile screamed what she had screamed in the Chapel: “No! Not that! I never will!”

  She tried to flee. Great as her power was, she was only human, and was pinned by the Keeper’s greater power. “It is prophesied!”

  “Then unprophesy it!” Thaile rent the night with a blast of sorcery that flattened the cottage, igniting it in a blizzard of sparks. She would wipe away the remains of this awful crime. A second blast struck woodshed and chicken coop to fiery fragments. A third smashed the burning ruin of the house and fired the shrubbery around.

  “Stop!” the Keeper shouted. “I say be still! You are willful! You disobey! You are sworn to obey me!”

  Again Thaile smote the Place with fire. Thunder echoed back from the hills.

  “Sworn? What choice did I ever have? When did I ever agree to serve you?” Smite! “Your evil infected my parents so that they would infect me, and I infect my own children in turn, slaves commanded to make slaves.” Smite! “You have bred this iniquity from generation to generation—”

  Bolt after bolt of sorcery struck boat and paddock, log pile and midden, everything. The ground was melting, but still the Keeper endured and held Thaile there, also. The graves were gone. The last glowing remains of the cottage whirled away in the blast. Storm roared through the forest Far off upstream at the Neeth Place, the two old folk were wakened in terror by the rumbling and shaking of the earth.

  “Iniquity?” the Keeper screamed. “You would compare me with the Evil that waits Outside?”

  Still Thaile hurled destruction, fighting against the power that pinned her. On both sides of the river, trees crashed down in flames. Wind howled, and the icy peaks of the Progistes reflected the fountains of fire spouting in the valley.

  “I say you are a greater evil! You slaughter babies in the name of love!” Maddened beyond reason by her pain and anger, Thaile threw power at the Keeper herself.

  The ground erupted, rocks flew, glowing like coals, and the Keeper recoiled before the outburst. “Fool! You will bring the usurper upon us!”

  “Then let him come! How can he be worse?”

  The river had begun to boil, the Progiste Ranges glowed red in the night. ”Fool!” the Keeper cried again, and released her. Thaile rushed into the sky and hurtled away, up over Thume and the darkness, and was gone to the Outside.

  Afterwards remember:

  Yet if you should forget me for a while

  And afterwards remember, do not grieve:

  For if the darkness and corruption leave

  A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,

  Better by far you should forget and smile

  Than that you should remember and be sad.

  — C. G. Rossetti, Remember

  NINE

  Pricking thumbs

  1

  The sun was still high, but it glowed red. The goblin army jogged steadily northward, while the smoke of their passing drifted away to the west. Finding the unwooded country of South Pithmot not to his liking, Death Bird had changed direction at last, and turned east. Now he had come upon a river and was heading up it, seeking a place to cross. His horde filled the plain.

  Kadie rode in a mindless daze, as
she always did now. Often she felt as if she had never lived any other life except this dawn-to-dusk horseback existence and it would go on until the Gods died. Poor Allena was worn away to bones, yet she was still willing, and Kadie could not bear to seek a replacement for her, because goblins ate horses. They were not eating many these days. The imps had stripped the countryside—gone themselves and taken their livestock with them. They had not torched the crops and buildings, leaving that pleasure for the invaders. She suspected the goblins thereby betrayed their whereabouts to the Imperial Army, but she had not mentioned that theory, even to Blood Beak. And where was the army? Why had the Impire let the barbarians ravage unmolested for three whole months? There must be a reason, but she could not imagine what it was.

  “Kadie?” Blood Beak trotted alongside her stirrup as he always did, untiring. His bodyguard followed.

  “Yes, Green One?”

  “This river? Where does it go?”

  “To the sea, of course.”

  ”Which sea?”

  “Home Water, or the Dragon Sea. I’m not sure. Ask someone before you burn his tongue out.”

  “Don’t burn tongues out. Spoils the screaming. Do you still want to escape?”

  She almost fell out of the saddle. He had offered to help her escape once, weeks ago, and then changed his mind. Was he serious now, or was this some sort of cruel joke? She glanced behind and noted that the bodyguard was farther back than usual. They were a new detachment, and none of them understood impish. Perhaps Blood Beak had thought of that.

  “Yes, please!”

  “I shall camp by the river tonight, then. In the dark, you could slip away and take a boat.” He was not looking up at her, and she could see nothing of his face except a sweaty cheekbone. He was thick and meaty, but there was no fat on him at all.

  “They use the boats for firewood.”

  “Then float on a log. It is too wide for wading. If you can come ashore on the far bank, you will be free.”

  She had never thought of escape by water. She did not know how to swim. No one in Krasnegar knew how to swim, but she would not freeze here. Goblins avoided water whenever they could—they would not even cross the causeway at Krasnegar—and they would not think of a prisoner escaping that way. Yes, it might work! Allena could swim and would be even better than a log. How supremely obvious and simple!