The Fell Sword (48 page)

‘Anyone else? You are all free to go. But if you will stay, I will make you great.’ He nodded his head.

Ota Qwan sighed, as if releasing something he held to be valuable. ‘If I serve you, lord, will you hold your hand from the Sossag?’

Thorn nodded. ‘If they serve me loyally.’

‘Will you give me Muriens? The Earl of the North?’ asked Ota Qwan. The lust that flared in him was like a moth being born from its chrysalis. This naked need for revenge – this was the true man.

‘More – I will order you to take him. That will be your first task. And when he is taken, then you may have him.’ Thorn nodded again.

The tallest of the three warriors was also the youngest. He shook with fear, and yet he stood tall. He stepped out of the cloud of moths surrounding Ota Qwan. ‘I will not serve you,’ he said. ‘I have no power of arm or thought to harm you – b-b-but I will n-not serve.’

Thorn watched him, unmoved. In this form, he could shrug off a bolt from a siege engine. He had.

‘Ota Qwan?’ Thorn asked.

‘Call me Orley,’ he said, and plunged a basilard into the young warrior. He turned to the last man, a Western Door Sossag called Guire’lon, even as the younger man’s heels drummed on the rock, trying to outrun death. ‘Go and tell them that Ota Qwan died here, for the People. Tell my wife. Tell the matrons.’ He smiled a horrible, lopsided grin. ‘I will go back to being Kevin Orley now.’

Ticondaga – Giannis Turkos

Turkos left the great fortress no happier than he had arrived, and headed north as fast as he might go. He’d asked the Earl to support him against the Northern Huran, and the Earl, for his own reasons, had declined. And then ordered him off his lands.

Winter was close – three days of rain had soaked the woods. He was cold before he’d crossed the river from the nigh-on impregnable fort that covered the great castle’s river gate. He paddled himself across the river, drifting almost a league on the swollen autumn current, landed, and walked back to the village that served as their northern landing – forty cabins and some lesser huts, mostly broken men and women of a dozen Outwaller clans or no clan. The Muriens had made their move to rule the Outwallers three generations earlier, and their iron fists held sway over a hundred miles of the northern bank and more of the south bank. Many of the Southern Huran, even the free villages and castles, listened to Ticondaga, served in their raids and sent headmen and matrons to council fires on the great meadow at the base of the castle walls.

For Turkos, the situation among the Huran was becoming a nightmare of divided loyalties.

His information – and gathering information was his duty – told him that the Galles, of all people, had landed a strong force among the Northern Huran. Rumour had it that a great sorcerer had moved into the Sossag lands, and Ghause, the Earl of the North’s dangerous wife, had put a name on that sorcerer: Thorn.

The relations between the Northern and Southern Huran were about to grow very complicated.

He spent an afternoon in the village longhouse, listening, telling stories, and writing letters to other men like him. He hired runners in the village, and sent them off with coded messages.

Then he rode west along the river, as fast as he could go, with three spare horses, food for twenty days and two great black and white birds. As a riding officer it was his duty to report.

The woods were oddly quiet. For two nights, he put that down to the omnipresent rain; five consecutive days of rain meant that Turkos had to use his very limited hermetical talents to kindle fire.

There was a village called Nepan’ha at the place where the north bank of the Great River, which had, for twenty leagues, been mired among a hundred islands and as many swamps, at last sprang clear of all that and opened into the Inner Sea. It was not a Sossag village or a Huran village – the people there were from many Outwaller groups, and they were fiercely independent. They had withstood a siege from the Muriens. It took him five days of hard riding, with very little sleep, to make Nepan’ha and once there he bedded his horses and collapsed on a rude sleeping bench near the open hearth of a longhouse and slept for twelve hours, ate four bowls of venison stew, and enjoyed a long pipe with the headswoman.

She said Thorn’s name aloud.

The longhouse grew silent.

‘Naming calls,’ muttered a voice in the dark upper shelves of the house, where neither heat nor light ever reached. ‘Naming calls.’

‘Shut up, old man,’ muttered the headswoman, Trout Leaping.

‘The Sacred Island was for all,’ the man muttered. ‘Now the magic is sucked away as if by some sorcerous leech, and soon our souls will follow until all is black and dead.’

‘You see what I have to put up with,’ Trout Leaping said and shook her head. ‘The ones with talent – they feel it worst. He’s only about seventy leagues away, across the water. Much further by land, of course.’

Later, Turkos reached out with his own art and he felt the void and the feeling of desolation almost immediately, and had the fleeting impression of moths swirling in mist.

Turkos was not a strong talent but he had been trained well. He masked his work and, in the rich garden of his memory, he marked his own location with reference to three of the University’s beacons, and then he laid a vector to the desolation.

After another meal and twelve more hours’ sleep he went west into another day of autumn rain, riding hard. The trail worn into the ground by fifty generations of Sossag and Abenacki and Kree was broad enough for his horse to find even in the dark – not that Turkos was foolish enough to travel in the dark.

On his third day out of Nepan’ha, he spotted a pair of Ruk on the horizon, across more than a mile of tangled beaver swamp. At first he thought they were Great Beaver, but as he picked his way closer, watching the footing not only for himself but for all his animals, he realised that they were not industrious forest giants but the dirtier, more humanoid variety. He retreated as quickly as he could, almost losing a horse in deep mud.

The three Ruk spotted him when he was almost safe, and gave their roaring hunting cry and came after him. The speed with which they could cross a swamp was matched only by the ferocity with which they crashed through heavy brush that would have been impenetrable to men.

He strung his Eastern horn bow, cursing the weather and all sorcerers everywhere, and wishing that he had a partner. Or his wife.

He remounted and rode west along a stream whose deep grass banks offered an escape route. The stream opened into a long meadow over which he cantered, standing in his stirrups and staring at the ground. There were sinkholes made by the spring run-off and he rode like a circus performer, keeping his horses moving with calls and whistles.

He was negotiating the banks of an old beaver pond when he saw the three Ruks. He turned his riding horse and loosed three arrows, but he didn’t pause to see the result, and rode west again.

The problem with Ruk was not that they were particularly good trackers, but that they never gave up. The term, ‘stubborn as a Ruk’ referred to their tendency to prefer following their prey until they killed it, no matter what distractions or opportunities were offered.

Turkos found another trail, this one headed east-west, too. He performed a small working to determine the locations of the Academy beacons and, on comparing them, he decided he was as close as was required and cast another seeking, this one his wife’s way, masking his technical skill with Outwaller charms. When he had his vector, and the sick sense of having contacted something uncanny, he walked his spare horses a league east along the new trail, and then walked his riding horse back, carefully, with an arrow on his string. The Ruk were making poor time in the open ground after his arrows – as he’d hoped – and he paused where his own tracks joined the trail and took three vermilion-dyed feathers from his pouch and tied them in an elaborate web of red yarn to a bush and cast a glamour on them. There was no working under the glamour – but to a raw talent, the whole might appear as a trap.

Then, sitting on his riding horse in a light freezing rain, he waited behind a newly downed spruce, hood up over his beaver fur cap, green cloak pulled over his bow which he held against his body to warm the sinew.

When he heard the Ruk, he cast a light illusion to cover his own scent.

He waited until they were on the trail, in the open, just the length of a large house away. He watched them as they stopped to look at his feathers. They gathered around his bush.

He stood in his stirrups and loosed the arrows he had in the fingers of his left hand – five quick shafts with barbed heads, and every one of them hit. The first three were poisoned.

The Ruk didn’t even grunt when they were hit. They turned as one, bellowed, and gave chase.

He loosed over the rump of his horse four more times, and then he’d lost them. They were not as fast as a horse by any means. By the time he reached his pack horses, they were far behind – but still coming.

He rode east. He trotted for as long as his horses could manage, and then he walked – slowly, but surely – all night. The emptiness of the woods was now explained – when the Ruk walked abroad, the other big animals were cautious.

Dawn brought bright sunshine. Turkos drank water from a stream so cold that the water hurt his teeth and rode east, passed a burned village clearly destroyed by Ruk. And later in the day, another.

At evening, his trail ended abruptly in a deep swamp right at the edge of the Inner Sea. He cast north, trying to get around the swamp, and found a pair of canoes but no path and no good ground.

Just after nightfall, he heard a tell-tale crashing along his backtrail. He filled the canoes with his goods and released the pack horses. He was quite fond of his saddle horse and he tried to entice her out into the black water and, eventually, she followed his canoe as he paddled and she swam. He knew she wouldn’t go far, though, and cast desperately for dry ground in the dark.

Twice, he had to balance his canoe to rest a hand on her head and offer her his store of
ops.
But as the stars rose, clear and cold, finally he heard the swishing sound of small wind-driven waves on gravel, and she was ashore before he had carefully grounded his canoes. His little mare was none too happy to find herself on a rocky islet with a little shelter and no grass, but she wasn’t drowned and he’d saved all his goods. He put his small wool tent over her and when she was drier and warmer, he pulled her down, threw all his blankets over both of them, and curled up against her back. He fed her oats by hand.

They both slept, and he didn’t wake until she pushed herself against him and got to her feet. The world was nothing but a grey mist; and as soon as he was awake he could hear the Ruk. They were splashing in the fog, and he was afraid – deeply afraid. He had no idea how well they moved in deep water. Could they swim? His experience of them was limited – he’d never been pursued, only read about it.

He folded his wool blankets and his small tent while his poor horse stood and shivered, and then he packed his canoe as quickly as he could. The splashing noises went on, the Ruk seemed to be all around him.

He had a notion, drew an arrow from his quiver, and used it as the basis of a very short-range spell of finding.

As quick as he cast, he felt the three, each still wearing one of his arrows. The widest gap among the monsters was to the east so he got the canoes tied together and paddled the lead east. His little horse stood on the islet for a long time, and then, with a horse noise of panic, plunged into the water and swam powerfully after him.

The fog closed in, and he paddled hard, praying to Saint Mary the Virgin and all the saints to preserve him and his horse against the cold, the water, and the giants.

Liviapolis – The Red Knight

Ser Michael had kept the journal since the opening of the siege at Lissen Carrak. He’d changed the format and moved the journal into a large volume bound in dark red leather, acquired using his restored allowance in the endless bazaars of Liviapolis, and he’d decided to count the days from their first contract and work from there. Since he didn’t plan to share the journal with anyone, he didn’t have to account for how he kept it.

Military Journal – Day one hundred and eleven
The defeat of the Etruscan Fleet has had every result that the Captain promised, despite our having failed to entice any part of their squadron into the arsenal after No Head loosed one of his precious engines too early. We captured a single over-bold galley, thus doubling the Imperial Fleet. But the capture of Ernst Handalo, the Etruscan captain, accomplished what his death would not – the near total capitulation of the Etruscans. Handalo is a senator of far-off Venike. Apparently, he has begun to negotiate a peace on his own behalf.

Closer to home, our little victory had procured a certain good-will – or perhaps, as the Captain likes to say, merely the foundations on which future good-will might be laid. The Captain also released all of our prisoners from our battles under the walls; he has arranged with the Princess Irene for all of the prisoners to be cleared of treason. If the knights of Morea have consequently grown to love us for our clemency, they are extremely adept at hiding it.

However, the gates are open, the markets are open, and the harvest is in. Perhaps most importantly, convoys have begun to reach us from over the mountains, via the Inner Sea and the lake country. The Captain has plans for the fur trade and for Harndon. And on that topic, the Captain has arranged a series of loans against our profits that have paid the men, which cured a good deal of grumbling.

And finally, our victory seems to have won us the approval of the Patriarch and the University. The Captain is to meet the Patriarch on Sunday after mass. We have collectively crossed our fingers.

Ser Michael leaned back and licked his fingers to get the ink off.

Kaitlin came and leaned heavily against him. ‘Could you carry this little bastard for a week or so while I have a rest?’ she asked.