The stick in his hand snapped in two.
‘Holy Saint Eustace,’ he said. ‘Captain – it is right here with us.’ His voice trembled.
The captain backed his horse a few steps to get clear of the huntsman’s horse and then took a heavy spear from its bucket at his stirrup.
Gelfred had his crossbow to hand, and began to span it, his eyes wide.
The captain listened, and tried to see in the phantasm.
He couldn’t see it, but he could feel it. And he knew, with sudden weariness, that it could feel him too.
He turned his horse slowly.
They were at the top of a bank – the ground sloped sharply to the west, down to a swollen stream. He could see where the track crossed the stream.
On the eastern slope, towards the fortress, the ground fell away more slowly and then rose dramatically up the ridge they had just descended, and the captain realised that the ridge was littered in boulders – rocks big enough to hide a wagon, some so large that trees grew from the top of them.
‘I think I may have been rash,’ the captain began.
He heard the sharp click as Gelfred’s string locked into the trigger mechanism on his bow.
He was looking at an enormous boulder the size of a wealthy farmer’s house. Steam rose over it, like smoke from a cottage fire.
‘It’s right there.’ He didn’t turn his head.
‘Bless us, Holy Virgin, now and in the hour of our deaths. Amen.’ Gelfred crossed himself.
The captain took a deep breath and released it softly, fighting his nerves. The ground between them and the rock was tangled with scrubby spruce, downed trees, and snow. Miserable terrain for his horse to cross in a fight. And he wasn’t on Grendel – he was on a riding horse that had never seen combat.
Not wearing armour.
I’m an idiot, he thought.
‘Gelfred,’ he said, without turning his head. ‘Is there more than one? What is downslope?’
Gelfred’s voice was calm, and the captain felt a spurt of affection for the huntsman. ‘I believe there is another.’ Gelfred spat. ‘This is my fault.’
‘Is this our killer?’ the captain asked. He was quite proud of his conversational tone. If he was going down, he would die like a gentleman. That pleased him.
Gelfred was also a brave man. ‘The one upslope is the killer,’ he said. ‘By the wounds of Christ, Captain – what are they?’
‘Stick close,’ the captain said. ‘You’re the huntsman, Gelfred. What are they?’
He began to ride forward, down the trail to the west. He passed Gelfred, who came in so tight behind him that the captain could feel the warmth of his horse. Down the steep slope to the stream, and he could no longer see the boulders, but he could hear movement – crashing movement.
Across the stream in a single leap of his horse. He could feel her terror.
He could feel his own.
He rode five yards, holding his mount down to a trot by sheer force of will and knee. She wanted to bolt. Ten yards. He heard Gelfred splash across the stream instead of leaping it and he turned his horse. She didn’t want to turn.
He put his spur into her right side.
She turned.
Gelfred’s eyes were as wide as his horse’s.
‘Behind me,’ the captain said.
He was facing their back trail. He backed his horse again, judging the distance.
‘I’m dismounting,’ Gelfred said.
‘Shut up.’ The captain fought for enough mental control to enter the room in his head. Closed his eyes – forced them closed against the crashing sound from the top of the ridge to the east.
Prudentia?
She stood in the centre of the room, her eyes wide, and he ran to her, took her outstretched hand and pointed it over his shoulder.
‘Katherine, Ares, Socrates!’ he called. He ran to the door, grasped the handle, and turned the key while the room spun around him.
The lock clicked open and the door crashed back against his leg, throwing him from his feet so that he fell heavily on the marble floor. The breeze was an icy green wind, and on the other side of the door-
It was caught on his shoulder where he had fallen, and the gale was sliding him along the floor as it forced the door open.
He wondered what would happen if the door crashed back against its hinges.
He wondered whether he could die in the small, round room.
Had to assume he could.
I rule here! he said aloud. He put a knee under himself, as he would if he was wrestling with a big man. Used the key for leverage. Pushed the door with his shoulder.
For a long set of heartbeats, it was like pushing a cart in mud. And then he felt the shift – minute – but the tiny victory lit his power like a mountebank’s flare and he slammed the door closed as his net of power wove itself like a giant spider’s web across the stream.
The horse was fighting him, and the thing was halfway down the hill, coming straight down the track, its bulk breaking branches on either side of the trail while its taloned feet gouged clods of earth out of the ground.
His mind shied away from looking at its head.
He couched his lance, timing his charge.
Horses are complex animals, delicate, fractious and sometimes very difficult. His fine riding horse was spirited and nervous on the best of days, and was now terrified, wanting only to flee.
Gelfred’s crossbow loosed with a flat crack and the bolt caught the thing under its long snout and it shrieked. It slowed.
Thirty yards. The length of the tiltyard in his father’s castle. Because this had to be just right.
The adversarius – the captain had never seen one, but had to assume that this was the fabled enemy of man – lengthened its loping stride to leap the brook.
A daemon.
The captain rammed his spurs into his mount. Sometimes, horses are simple. His riding horse exploded forward.
The adversarius leaped again at the edge of the stream, its hooked beak already reaching for his face, arms spread wide.
It seemed to slow as it crossed the water – vestigial wings a blur of angry motion, maned head with a helmet crest of bone curving above it, spraying spittle as the thing tried to snap at the fine web of Power he had cast over the near bank. It would only last a moment – already the daemon was blowing through the mild restraint the way a big child, angry and frightened, tears through spider web.
He tracked the thing’s right eye with his lance tip like it was an opponent’s crest; the brass ring; the upper left corner of the shield on the quintain. Held in place like an insect pinned to a page, it tried to rear back just as his spear point glanced off the ocular ridge and plunged into the soft tissue of the eye, the strong steel of the long spear head breaking the bone above and below the eye socket, driving the point deeper and deeper, the whole weight of the man and horse behind it.
His lance shaft snapped.
The creature’s legs spasmed and its talons tore into his horse’s forequarters, raking flesh and tendon from bone, flaying the poor animal while it screamed. The captain flew back over its rump on force of the impact, with no brace against his back from a tilting saddle. The horse reared and the talons eviscerated it, its guts spilling onto the road in a great gout.
The daemon got its feet on the ground and its forearms shredded the last of his web of power-
It turned from the ruin of his horse and he saw the damage he’d done, the angry orange of its remaining eye – no slit, no pupil. Nothing but fire. It saw him.
The terror of its presence pounded him like a hammer of spirit – for a moment, the terror was so pure in him that he had no self. He was only fear.
It came for him then, rising up fast on its haunches – and, like a puppet with the strings cut, it collapsed atop the corpse of his riding horse.
He gagged, clamped down on the vomit, failed, and heaved everything in his stomach down the front of his jupon. When he was done he was sobbing in th
e backwash of the terror.
As soon as he had any control over himself, he said ‘Ware! There’s another!’
Gelfred approached him slowly, holding a cup in one hand and a cocked and loaded crossbow balanced carefully on his arms.
‘It’s been a long time.’ He shook his head. ‘I’ve prayed the whole rosary, waiting for you to recover.’ He was shaking. ‘I don’t think the other one is coming.’
The captain spat out the taste of vomit. ‘Good’ he said. He wanted to say something witty. Nothing came. ‘Good.’ He took the cup. ‘How – long did I kneel here?’
‘Too long,’ Gelfred said. ‘We need to ride.’
The captain’s hands shook so hard he spilled the wine.
Gelfred put his arms around him.
The captain stood in that unwanted embrace and shook. Then he washed in the creek. He felt violated. And different. He was suddenly afraid of everything. He didn’t feel at all like a man who had faced a daemon, the greatest adversary to the rule of man, in single combat, and the adoration in Gelfred’s eyes made him sick.
Tomorrow, I will no doubt be insufferable, he thought.
Gelfred cut the head from the daemon.
He threw up again, a stream of bile, and wondered if he could ever face a creature of the Wild again. His bones felt like jelly. There was something in the pit of his gut – something that had gone.
He knew exactly what this felt like: like being beaten by his brothers. Beaten and humiliated. He knew that feeling well. They’d been younger than him. They’d hated him. He’d made their lives a misery, when he learned that-
He spat.
Some things are best left unexamined. He held the line at that memory, and felt his fear recede a little, like the first sign the tide is in ebb.
It would pass, then.
Gelfred couldn’t get the horse to bear the head. The captain didn’t have enough concentration to conjure anything to help them with it. So they tied a rope to the head and dragged it.
It would be a long walk back to camp. And after an hour, something behind them began to howl, and the captain felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise.
Lissen Carak – Mogan
Mogan watched her cousin’s killer as he mounted slowly and rode up the road.
Mogan was a hunter, not a berserker. Her cousin’s death terrified her, and until she had understood it she was not going down to face the men on the road. Instead, she edged cautiously from rock to rock, keeping well out of their line of sight, and she watched them with her superb eyes, made for spotting the movement of prey a mile across the plains to the west.
When they were well clear of the scene of the fight, she trotted down the ridge.
Tunxis lay in a pitiful heap, his once mighty frame hunched and flattened by death, and there were already birds on the corpse.
They cut his head off.
It was horrendous. Mogan threw back her head and howled her rage and sorrow.
After her third howl, her brother came. He had four hunters with him, all armed with heavy war-axes or swords.
Thurkan looked at his nest-mate’s corpse and shook his great head. ‘Barbarians,’ he spat.
Mogan rubbed her shoulder against his. ‘One man killed him. I chose not to try him. He killed our cousin so easily.’
Thurkan nodded. ‘Some of their warriors are terrifying, little sister. And you had no weapon to open his armour.’
‘He had no armour,’ Mogan said. ‘But he had Power. Our Power.’
Thurkan paused, sniffing the air. Then he walked to the edge of the stream, and back, several times, while his nestmates stood perfectly still.
‘Powerful,’ Thurkan said. He paused and licked his shoulder where a mosquito had penetrated his armoured flesh. Insects. How he hated them. He batted helplessly with a taloned forefoot at the cloud that was gathering around his head. Then he bent over his cousin’s form, raised his talons, and turned his cousin’s corpse to ash in a flash of emerald light.
Later, as they ran through the forest, Thurkan mused to his sister. ‘This is not as Thorn thinks it to be,’ he said.
Mogan raised her talons to indicate her complete lack of interest in Thorn. ‘You seek to dominate him, and he seeks to dominate you, but as he is not of our kind your efforts are wasted,’ she said scathingly.
Thurkan took a hundred running steps before he answered. ‘I don’t think so, little sister. I think he is the rising power of the Wild, and we must cleave to him. For now. But in this matter he is blind. This fortress. The Rock. Here we are, masters of the woods from the mountains to the river – and he would have us leave our winnings to assault this one place. And now the Rock has a defender – one who is also a power of the Wild.’ Thurkan ran on. ‘I think Thorn is making an error.’
‘You seek his throat, and his power,’ Mogan said. ‘And it is we who wish to return to the Rock.’
‘Not if the cost is too high. I am not Tunxis.’ Thurkan leapt a log.
‘How can the Rock have a defender who is one of us? And we not know him?’ Mogan asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Thurkan admitted. ‘But I will find out.’
Chapter Four
The Captain The Abbess
South of Lorica – Ser Gawin
Gawin Murien of Strathnith, known to his peers as Hard Hands, rode north along the Albin River in his armour, a knight bent upon errantry. And the further north he rode, the deeper his anger grew. Adam, the elder of his two squires, whistled, bowed from his saddle to every passing woman, and looked at the world with whole-hearted approval. He was not sorry to be leaving the court of Harndon. Far from it. Far from the great hall, far from the rounds of dancing and cards and hunts and flirtation, squires lived in barracks under the absolute domination of the oldest and toughest. Younger men got little food and much work, and no chance of glory. Adam was the squire of a named and belted knight, and on errantry, he expected to have a chance to win his own place in song. At Harndon, all he got was black eyes and bad food.
Toma, the younger squire, rode with his head down. Adam could make nothing of him, beyond his mumbled answers and his clumsy work. He seemed young for his age and deeper in misery than a boy should be.
Gawin wanted to do something for him, but he was having a hard time seeing through his own anger.
It wasn’t fair.
The words were meaningless. His oaf of a father had beaten any notion of fairness from him from birth. Gawin knew that the world gave you nothing but struggle. That you had to make your own luck. And a thousand more such aphorisms all with the same general message, but, by God and all the saints, Gawin had done his time, faced his monster and killed the literally damned thing in single combat with his gauntlets after his sword broke. He remembered it vividly, just as he remembered going to fight the damned thing out of sheer guilt.
I killed my brother.
It still made him sick.
He didn’t want to have to face the foe again, not for all the pretty ladies in court and not for all the lands he stood to inherit. He was no coward. He’d done it. In front of his father and fifty other men. There probably weren’t fifty knights in all Alba – from one end of the Demesne to the other – who had bested a daemon in single combat. He certainly hadn’t wanted to.
But he had. And that should have been that.
But of course, the king hated him, as he hated all his brothers, hated his mother, loathed his father.
Fuck the king. I’ll ride home to Pater.
Strathnith was one of the greatest fortresses in the Demesne. It was a citadel of the Wall, and the Muriens had held it for generations. The Nith was a mighty river – almost an inland sea – that defined the ultimate border between the Demesne and the Wild. His father ruled the fortress and the thousands of men and women who paid their taxes and depended on it for protection. He thought about the great hall; the ancient rooms, some built by the Archaics. The sounds of the Wild carrying across the broad river.
The constant
bickering, the drunken accusations. The family fighting.
‘Good Christ, I might as well go find a cursed monster and kill it,’ he said aloud. Going home meant returning to a life of constant warfare – in the field against the daemons, and in the hall against his father. And his brothers.
I killed my brother.
‘They can have it,’ he said.
He’d been sent south, the young hero, to win a bride at court. To raise the family in the estimation of the king.
Another of his father’s brilliant plans.
He had fallen in love, but not with a woman. Rather, he’d fallen in love with women. And the court. Music. Card games. Dice. Good wine and wit. Dancing.
Strathnith wasn’t going to offer any of those things. He couldn’t stop himself from thinking about it. In retrospect, maybe his loathsome brother had a point.
His mother-
He banished the thought.
‘Lorica, m’lord,’ Adam sang out. ‘Shall I find us an inn?’
The idea of an inn helped douse his moment of self-doubt. Inns – good ones – were like miniature courts. A little rougher, a little more home-spun. Gawin smiled.
‘The best one,’ he said.
Adam grinned, touched his spurs to his horse, and rode off into the setting sun. Drink. And maybe a girl. He thought fleetingly of Lady Mary, who so obviously loved him. A beautiful body, and, he had to admit, a fine wit. And the daughter of the Count. She was a fine catch.
He shrugged.
The sign of the Two Lions was an old inn built on the foundation of an Archaic cavalry barracks, and it looked like a fortress; it had its own curtain wall, separate from Lorica’s town wall, and it had a tower in the north-east corner where any soldier could see the original gate had been. Built against the tower was a massive building of white plaster and heavy black beams, with a hipped thatch roof with expensive copper sheathing around the chimneys; glass windows opened onto the porches that ran all along the front and sunlit side, and four massive chimneys, all new masonry, rose out of the roof.
It was like a piece of the Palace of Harndon brought into the countryside. Lorica was an important town, and the Two Lions was an important inn.
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