Weatherwitch: Book Three of The Crowthistle Chronicles (55 page)

Mac Brádaigh was the only onlooker permitted to survive, other than Chohrab, who, a whimpering wreck, could speak no sense at all, and had developed a form of delirium. Mac Brádaigh slew the desert king’s butler and his doughty executioner as well, stabbing them both in the back. The Paladin was the last to die, he having been the misguided agent of most of the other killings. The king of Slievmordhu had it bruited about that the dead had all fallen in battle against the weatherlords, and no one dared illuminate the inconsistencies in this story. It was a bloody night, a darkness of smoke and death and storm. Raw red gore mingled with the black rainwater swirling in ditches and gutters.

Thereafter, Uabhar was confident that he would be safe from possible reprisals, at least until he achieved his great ambition, after which he would be all-powerful, and no man would dare accuse him. To his knowledge, all witnesses had been accounted for.

Yet there was one other who had seen.

At sunset on the previous day, the aged itinerant, Cat Soup, had stowed away on a wagon departing northwards from Cathair Rua. He had hoped to make
his customary journey to King’s Winterbourne in relative comfort, because lately his feet had been mightily sore. The wagon, however, had turned off the main road one league from the city, and struck out to the east along a narrow track leading deep into the countryside. Cat Soup deduced he had erred in his judgment, and had boarded a conveyance heading for some smallholding in a rural area. This circumstance, though not uncommon for a vagabond such as he, did not suit him. As soon as he reached this conclusion he slipped out from beneath the tarpaulin and began to make his way, hobbling, back to the metropolis.

There were unaccountable disturbances in the weather, which had earlier promised fair. The beggar sensed rain in the air. His joints ached, and a fractious wind niggled at his garments. He was glad of the oilskin cloak on his back, which he had stolen from a careless patron at a horse-race meeting that day—it was the very reason he was making a quick exit from Cathair Rua, in case the cloak’s owner should stumble upon him.

As he made his painful way back to the royal city, trudging over the bracken-covered hills, he became aware that a fire had broken out atop the hill of the Red Lodge. Indeed, it looked as if the knights’ stronghold itself were burning. This fact piqued his curiosity, and he plodded a little faster, spurred also by the sight of rain-clouds massing overhead. Some while later several troupes of horsemen thundered past, quite close, so that the old man quailed and hid behind the mossy trunk of a great oak tree that had fallen, several decades ago, amongst the ferns and nettles. A crowd of tiny grigs pinched him and pulled his hair for a while before scampering off, but he curled up and covered himself with the travel-stained oilskin.

Beneath stars and gathering clouds and veils of smoke the horsemen were gathering on a nearby hillside. Druids appeared amongst them, and laden wagons were driven up. Then more fires were kindled. Rough winds sprayed brilliant bursts of sparks through the darkness. The old man saw all this from afar, and wondered at it. “Trouble is afoot,” he muttered to himself. He was torn between risking danger by creeping forward to investigate, and simply continuing on his path to the city. For a few moments he hesitated. Cat Soup had never been one to plunge headlong into peril; he had lived for so long by avoiding it. On the other hand, knowledge was power; he had often profited by spying, by learning other people’s secrets. In the end his inquisitiveness bettered him, and he scurried towards the bonfires on the ferny hill.

One advantage of being a miserable beggar was that people rarely noticed you. Cat Soup, aided by his mottled garb, excelled at being unobtrusive.
Thus it came to pass that he succeeded in stealing close enough to the scenes of royal felony to see everything, while remaining unobserved.

He witnessed it all; the mages of Rowan Green and the Shield Champions overcome by the fumes, their sleeping forms being dragged before the two kings, the exchange between Uabhar and Chohrab and the hideous denouement.

That the noble company of weathermasters and knights should be slain in cold blood seemed so incredible that for an instant the beggar entertained the notion he had contracted some fever, and was hallucinating. Revolted and terrified by the spectacle, he decamped with all speed, heedless of his aching feet. He rushed through the wind and rain, slithering and slipping, throwing himself flat on the ground whenever lightning smote the hills like weapons of steel, lighting the landscape with its cruel blue glare.

“Halt! Who goes there?” an Ashqalêthan knight shouted at him above the storm’s noise, but Cat Soup crouched, cowering, beneath his cloak, hidden by the deluge and darkness, until he heard a second voice say, “ ’Twas merely a coney. Do not dally.” Whereupon the paladins rode away.

The ancient beggar dared not move. He scarcely dared to breathe. Water was running into his nostrils, but it could not wash away the stench of death.

He had seen it all. What now was he to do?

Far away to the north, in the village of Silverton that night, Asrathiel planted her feet firmly on a mound of slippery scoria, and steadied herself. The weathermage, heedless of the local curfew, had quietly left her lodgings and fared forth, yet again, during the lightless hours. She had special dispensation in her position as weathermage to the king, and she feared no unseelie killers that visited in the dark. Besides, if the mysterious assassins should come tonight she would be able to steal a look at them at last, and perhaps blast them with a fireball or two to prevent them from wreaking harm.

The slag-heap, though old, had not coagulated much over the time since the ore had been smelted out of it. It was treacherous; still liable to give way and send her careering down. Over the years, dirt and dust had sifted into the nooks between the loose cinders, but few plants would take root in this vitreous aggregate. Only the weed crowthistle was hardy enough; here and there a prickly leaf stubbornly poked through.

Throughout those northern regions, curious mists had begun rising between
sunset and sunrise, coiling in and out of the forests and pouring along the ground. They turned Silverton’s river valley into a nebulous dreamscape, a flowing cloud-river that never rose high enough to obscure the sky. The vapours were supernatural; of that the weathermage was certain, for her brí-senses were numb to them and could not penetrate to their essence. She had never encountered such imperviousness before; it was a surprise, and an unpleasant one. Such phenomena, she conjectured, were probably connected with the unknown scourge. Still searching for answers to the enigmatic killings, she was putting forth her weather-senses to ascertain if she could pick up any clues from the atmosphere, when all at once a terrible shock went through the brí, as of some catastrophe. Immediately she knew that some kind of unprecedented turmoil had erupted in the troposphere towards the south. The patterns shifted in violation of natural laws. It was as though some careless weathermaster had inflicted sweeping changes, affecting every component of the meteorological system, yet too vast to be the act of a single mage. So violent and abnormal was the tumult that Asrathiel had to assume it was due to some mighty accumulation of weather-working.

Reeling from the impact, the damsel barely kept her balance on the rocky heap. She struggled to regain her poise, both physical and mental, at a loss as to what had caused the anomaly. What could have happened? Perhaps some-thing had gone awry with her senses. They might have been overloaded; maybe she had been too intent on extracting the maximum amount of information from her surroundings. Or else some phenomenon she had never encountered in her lifetime had occurred somewhere in the world; the near-collision of a comet or meteorite, for example, or a particularly strong and sudden bursting open of the world’s crust beneath one of the great oceanic trenches. Asrathiel felt unaccountably frightened, and also, suddenly, terribly alone and vulnerable. With all her heart she longed for High Darioneth. She had never been this homesick before. . . .

After slithering her way down from the heap with all speed, she ran towards her lodgings, hoping that a message from Avalloc would soon arrive from the nearest semaphore station to explain this new mystery.

On the damp and dreary morning after the betrayal of the weathermasters, while the bodies were still being carted to their graves, a meeting of three
men convened around a small table in a thick-walled chamber. It was then that the Druid Imperius discovered the truth.

“Where are the Councilors of Ellenhall?” he demanded of Uabhar. “What have you done with them?”

Wearing an expression of smug satisfaction, Uabhar informed the elderly sage of their fate, while Commander Mac Brádaigh leaned back in his chair and privately smirked.

On hearing of the deaths of the weathermasters Virosus could not contain his wrath. He jumped up with alacrity, astonishingly nimble for his age. Leaning across the table, he pushed his face into Uabhar’s. “You are mad!” he shrieked, disregarding all royal protocol. “What of the vengeance of the Maelstronnar and his granddaughter, eh? What of the response of the populace if they find out? You are forsworn, Uabhar, forsworn and condemned for what you have done!”

“What
I
have done?” Uabhar said nastily. His attention seemed abruptly riveted on his embroidered sleeve, and he began ripping threads out of it. “You have misheard, druid. Perhaps you are getting deaf in your dotage, in which case I will forgive you for your offensive accusation. I remain a man of honor. I kept my word. It was not
I
who ordered the execution of the weathermasters, but Chohrab Shechem.”

The primoris said, “Beware how you equivocate with me, my
Liege
—” he spat out the latter word as if it were some venomous insult “—for I am in a strong position. If I make known your secret, you will bear the blame. What would your sons do if they knew, eh? How would the peers of the realm react? They might rise against you!”

But Uabhar coolly replied, “If you make this issue public, druid,
you
will bear the blame along with Chohrab, for it was your
fell noxasm,
your Leaves of Sleeping, that brought about the weathermasters’ downfall. By which you will see,” he went on, paying no heed to the expression of hatred twisting the raddled visage of the primoris, “that your
fate,
ha ha, is closely bound to mine. If I fall, you fall with me. You have a choice:
’to fly with me or die with me,’
as the saying goes. Choose to fly, and when I am High King we will
both
govern the Four Kingdoms in our different ways—you by fear of death, me by justice and fear of pain.”

Virosus’s lust for power was strong, and he possessed common sense enough to know which side of his bread was buttered. He was also cunning enough to wish to distance himself from whole event. “So be it,” he said after a pause. “I will not betray your black deeds, and I will support your invasion of the west
and north kingdoms, but from this moment I will have no more truck with you in person, and—” he stood up as straight and tall as his hunched posture would allow, pointing a bony finger at his sovereign like a weather vane that has swung about to accuse the wind “—for your perfidy, Uabhar, I will pronounce a curse upon the house of Ó Maoldúin—a curse to endure for all time.”