The Fell Sword (20 page)

He made his decisions, then. He did not help the Northern Huran simply because they had been his allies. They had been loyal. But the forests were full of potential allies and slaves and he owed the Northern Huran nothing. But now he had goals, and goals led to plans, and the Northern Huran would be his servants – willingly or unwillingly.

Thorn stopped for a day in the deep woods, and practised a new mantle – a body into which he put much skill, making it a form he could wear with ease. It was that of an old, sage Outwaller – one with clear, honest eyes and old scars. An old man with wisdom writ hard on his lined face and chose the name Speaker of Tongues, an old shaman. In that form he visited the smaller towns. He sat at the fires and listened to the matrons, healed children, made medicine. Many benefited from his powers. Word of him spread like wildfire among the Kree and the Northern Huran.

In each village he whispered a few thoughts, and pinned them to the minds of the men and women who were the deepest in greed. He left them like seeds, to grow with time.

Then he shed the semblance of Speaker of Tongues like an old snake shedding a skin, and he moved in great strides, passing through the endless forest like a light wind. He used his new powers sparingly – to contact a man in Lorica, a woman in Harndon, and a man deep in the Wild to the south. For them, he wore no semblance. He was a voice in the ear, and a thought, briefly tasted. It was exhausting, and he spent whole days in rest, standing exposed to the elements, before he would walk on. He had new powers to explore, new venues to work, and this ability to manipulate his shape so easily was disturbing.

He couldn’t remember how he’d achieved it. Nor was he quite sure who he was.

Almost seventy days had passed since he had faced the Dark Sun.

He knew that, for his next move, he needed a secure retreat and a place of power. That without such a place there was no point to his making any further plans whatsoever. The death of the great tree in the Adnacrags had changed him, he now suspected – and the advent of the great power who had left him the armoured egg was enough to prompt him to action. Or that was how he now saw his metamorphosis.

He walked along the northern shore of the Inner Sea in his own guise, and pondered war.

Ticondaga Castle – The Earl of the Westwall

Ghause was not a woman to hesitate. But the ramifications of the Queen’s pregnancy were great enough to give her pause, and she chewed on her spells for long weeks before she knew how she meant to act.

The Earl was launching his usual raids across the Great River into the Outwallers’ country. He raided for slaves and information, and sometimes for Wild honey and pelts. The Earldom of the North lacked the vast resources of Jarsay or Brogat; it had sheep, and cattle, and timber and everything else, as the Muriens liked to joke, was rock. Astute raiding did a great deal to provide agricultural labour and some coin.

This year he had a dozen knights of the Order of Saint Thomas. The order had knights in commanderies along the wall, and more in Harndon – and the latest news suggested that they intended to form a new garrison at Lissen Carrak. But their power of grammerie and their deep knowledge of the Wild allowed the Earl to plan a major raid, and she lost another week to helping plan the food and baggage for it, and in welcoming fifty knights from the south – a few hard-bitten professionals, the rest knights on errantry with girls to impress.

When his raid was all but formed and he was training his conroy in the great fields south of the castle, she was finally at leisure to consider her options and plan her own battle.

She read a great deal for a day or so – delving into texts she hadn’t touched for decades. Then she sent a careful probe south – an old working, called a ‘scent’. From then on, nothing happened as she’d intended.

She was a careful sorceress, so her scent rode south wrapped in layers of deception and cocooned in hermetical workings that would detect any attempt by the young Queen to
see
her
.
And it was one of these that triggered before her scent had even reached the Queen, when it was still fluttering through the
aether
. Ghause suspected that the
aether
worked in utterly different ways than the real, so she felt – rather than knew – that the real distance between Ticondaga and Harndon had very little to do with their distance in the
aether
.

But she was jolted into action moments after releasing her precious working, the fruit of weeks of work, days of research, and a dozen amorous couplings to fuel her needs.

She ran her fingers over the threads of her casting the way a bard would caress a beautiful instrument’s gut strings.

She found him immediately. She frowned.

‘Richard,’ she said out loud. ‘You are such a man – all power and no subtlety.’

Of course, Plangere didn’t answer.

If she called him Thorn he might answer, but then there’d be a fight.

She extended her sight and followed her scent as far as she could, but the
aether
was a roil of angry motions – there was a great deal going on beyond her sorceressly reinforced walls, and she withdrew.

She threw on a robe – she always cast naked, which made winter a daunting time to work – and fell into her favourite chair. From there she looked through her window, six storeys above the walls, so that she could see across the Great River, and feel the wonder of the forest rolling away unbroken to the north until it became the ice. She’d been there, and she knew the power of the land of ice.

She took a sip of wine. ‘Why is the Wild so active?’ she asked aloud. She looked at her cats.

They licked their paws, like cats.

‘And why exactly is Richard Plangere watching the Queen?’ she asked. And in the safety of her own head, she said his new name.

Thorn.

One Hundred Leagues West of Lissen Carrak – Bill Redmede

Tyler found his men. He found them amidst the flashing lightning by the bank of the stream. They were all gleaming bones and organic shapes – they’d been dismembered and eaten.

Bill Redmede retched and the lightning went on and on – faster and faster – and the rain fell harder, and the thunder and the rising stream covered all sound. The sight of the corpses, stripped to gristle, was like a shout inside his head.

He put his back to a tree and gripped his spear.

Tyler whirled, wild in the lightning. ‘They’re surrounding us!’ he screamed.

He began to cut at the unseen enemy.

Redmede jumped to help, but even in a long series of lightning flashes, he couldn’t see the enemy. Nat cut and hacked – Redmede had to duck, and leap, and finally shouted ‘Nat – Nat! There’s nothing there!’

Nat turned to glare at him as the thunder ended with a wild series of claps, so close that Redmede felt them like blows.

And then the thunderhead swept past, and the darkness was the more absolute for what had come before. Redmede felt Tyler step past him in the darkness, and put out a hand.

‘Sweet Jesus, we’re done!’

Redmede dropped his spear and threw his arms around Tyler. ‘Snap out of it! They’re gone. Let’s get out of here.’

Tyler was frozen for a moment.

Then he started to sob.

Dawn was a watery grey by the time Redmede got them back to camp. He feared everything by then – feared that the camp had been hit, that the Jacks were all dead too – he was awash in fear as the rain fell and fell, and first light found him stumbling like the greenest runaway serf through the wet woods just a few hundred paces from his fire.

There was no hiding Tyler’s state. The man was moaning, and Redmede cursed himself for leaning too hard on a sick man.

Somehow, with curses and cajolery and all the persuasion he could muster, he got his Jacks to pack their gear and leave the warmth of the fire and march.

By midday they were all soaked to the skin – both by the fitful rain and the wet forest, wet grass, wet ferns. There was no wool, no matter how well woven, that could repel so much water. His shoes squelched when he stepped, and when they had to cross a deep stream swollen with days of rain, every man and women simply ploughed through it, bows over their heads. No one tried to skip across the stepping stones.

By mid-morning, they had to carry Tyler again and there was some grumbling about it. Bess put a stop to it, and she and another woman carried the old ranger without complaint.

In the early afternoon, a boy from Harndon sat down by the trail and refused walk any further. ‘I just want to go home!’ he said.

Redmede was numb. He shook his head. ‘The Wild will eat you,’ he said.

‘I don’t care!’ the boy wailed. ‘I can’t walk! Me feet’s rubbed raw, an’ I haven’t had any food in days. Got the rheum. Let ’em eat me!’

Redmede hit him. The boy looked at him in stunned disbelief.

‘Get up and walk or I’ll kill you myself,’ Redmede said.

The boy got heavily to his feet and started to hobble away. He was crying.

Redmede felt like a caitiff.

Bess stood at his shoulder and shook her head. ‘That wasn’t the way, Bill Redmede,’ she said. ‘You sounded like a lord, not a comrade.’

‘Fuck you, Bess,’ he spat. Then he held up a hand. ‘That’s only weakness talkin’. I was up all night with Nat. The boglins attacked us.’

Bess’s eyes widened. ‘But we’re allies!’

Redmede shrugged.

And they headed west.

An hour later they came to the third stream of the day. The advance guard splashed across and the main body followed, and on the far side they found another abandoned irk village – this one with the roofs intact. In a moment they were inside, drier than they’d been in a day, and within an hour there were fires lit.

There was no food and Redmede couldn’t get more than a handful of volunteers to leave the huts and stand guard, so there he was, standing silently behind a screen of leaves, when he saw movement across the stream. The irk village was cunningly placed and difficult to approach, on a bluff of packed earth with low ramparts and palisades. But Redmede had posted his guards out across the cornfields – these, unfortunately, were bereft of corn.

He watched the movement. They weren’t boglins – they were both cautious and, by comparison, clumsy. He saw a flash of green – and a man emerged into the open. There was just enough light in the sky for Redmede to know him.

The man standing at the edge of the ford was Cat.

Behind him was Grey Cal.

Redmede held on to his whoop of delight and instead whistled the recognition call. Grey Cal straightened up, and whistled ‘Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son’ in response. Redmede called like a meadowlark, and in two shakes of a lamb’s tail, he was embracing his lost sheep.

Cal hugged him tightly. ‘Whoa,’ he said. ‘That was nasty. This loon saved my life.’

Cat chuckled and smiled to himself.

‘We had a deer, but we dropped it when the boggles gave chase,’ Cat said. ‘The little bastards are
everywhere.
’

Cal nodded. ‘I lost my boys,’ he admitted. ‘We had to run. When they didn’t run far or fast enough, they got ate.’

Redmede nodded heavily. ‘We don’t have any food,’ he admitted in turn.

‘We don’t either,’ Cal said. ‘And a body can’t hunt. It’s just giving meat to the boggles.’ He shrugged. ‘Not to mention this fucking rain.’

Cat produced some raspberries. ‘I’ll share,’ he said in his odd, sing-song voice.

Redmede hesitated, but decided that if he didn’t eat then he might as well die. The wiry boy had filled his whole copper with the berries – they were delicious, and the three men ate their fill.

‘You carried them all this way?’ asked Cal. ‘No offence to Bill, but we could’a stopped an et anytime.’

Cat smiled enigmatically. ‘Nope,’ he said. ‘Not until now.’

In the morning, people were hard to wake and slow to rise. The more experienced men went and stripped sassafras by the stream to make tea. Cat, prowling the high ground north of the village, found the hives, and came back sticky and triumphant, and every man and woman had two cups of hot, honeyed sassafras tea.

And six or seven berries.

‘Just enough to make you fucking
hungry
,’ Bess said on behalf of everyone’s thoughts.

And then they went west. Again.

The streams were coming more and more frequently, and their crossings became sloppier with each one. The advance guard no longer stayed a hundred paces ahead of the main body, not even after noon when Redmede halted them in the watery sunlight and reset the intervals.

He pointed at the low hills to the north. ‘There’s boglins in those hills,’ he said. ‘Or worse. Stop slacking off or we’ll all be dead.’

‘Dead anyway,’ shouted someone in the crowd.

Redmede swallowed that and took charge of the vanguard for a few miles. But well before it was time to make camp, Cat appeared at his shoulder and jerked a thumb in the direction of the rear of the column. ‘They’re falling behind,’ he said. He shrugged. ‘More and more of the green ones. Some are just sitting by the trail.’

‘You and Cal go and find me a campsite,’ he said.

Redmede saw Bess carrying Tyler. He patted her shoulder, squeezed Tyler’s hand, and headed back along the column. However far he went, the men at the end told him that they were keeping up and there were more further back.

He’d just found the same boy as the day before, sitting under a tree, when he heard shouting from the front – now far away.

The boy didn’t wait to be argued with, or struck. He got to his feet and started hobbling forward, cursing. He was crying again.

‘Are there more behind you?’ Redmede asked, but the boy just kept going.

Redmede stood on the trail in complete indecision for a long moment – and then unslung his bow and slowly drew it from the heavy linen bags. He’d messed it up properly – he needed to sharpen up the march order and keep his people together. He needed folk he could trust at the front and back. He wasn’t going to lose anyone else. He started to walk back, sure that his headcount was six men short, and equally sure that something was watching him. With practised ease he began to string his bow, the bottom nock firm against his sodden right foot. He pulled and found how weak he was when it was a struggle just to get the string in place. But his string was dry enough, and his bow was dry. He put a shaft on the great bow, and breathed a little easier as he jogged back east into the gloom.