PROLOGUE (12 page)

the
rats came out at night to gnaw on the bones. The whispering scrape of their claws on stone alerted him, brought him instantly out of his doze. Most of the dogs slept; one whined in a dream and thumped his whipcord tail against the cathedral floor. The Eika slept, sprawled across the stone as if it were the softest of featherbeds to them. They loved the stone the way a nursing child loves its mother's breast, and nuzzled near it whenever they could.

Only
he
did not sleep. He never slept, only napped, caught moments of dream and then bolted awake as a muzzle nudged him, testing, or as Eika laughed and poked him with their spears, or if he heard a human voice cry out in agony and hopeless pleading. That was the worst, the slaves
—for he knew the Eika had brought human slaves into the city when summer came and that he could do nothing to help those poor souls.

Gent had fallen, and he would have died protecting her, only he could not die. That was the curse his mother had put on him at his birth:
"No disease known to you will touch him, nor will any wound inflicted by any creature male or female cause his death."

He could not sleep, and when he was lucid, he wondered if the periods of madness, the shaking, the fits of insensibility when he would come to suddenly and realize it was night when last it had been dawn, were a mercy set on him by the Hand of Our Lady. An educated man might have known disciplines of the mind with which to combat this prison that was as much of spirit as of chains. But he had only been trained for war. That was his lot, the bastard son of the king, the child whose birth gave Henry the right to be named Heir to the throne of Wendar and Varre: to become a fighter and defend his father's realm.

He had always been an obedient son.

Would his father send soldiers to rescue him? Yet surely Henry thought him dead. It was
Gent
they must rescue. No king could leave such an important city in barbarian hands.

And even if he were rescued, what if his father no longer wished to acknowledge him, seeing what manner of creature he had become?

He vaguely recalled a dream in which two children had visited him
—except there were no children in Gent, not any more.
She
had led them to safety, long ago.

Once children had flocked to him, but these two children had been afraid of him. They had seen not a prince but an animal; he had seen their reaction in their eyes. Were they only mirrors created in his mind? A vision through which he could see himself and what he had become? Or had they really been here?

As rats scurried through the refuse, he searched under the rags that were all that was left of his clothing
—and found knife and badge.
Their
knife.
Her
badge, the badge of the Eagles. Only it was not her badge, it was another badge, that of a man who had fallen and whose name he could not recall. But it represented her, it held her warmth, for she had been like a warm thing, like a star fallen to earth and trapped in a human body as he was trapped in these chains.

The rats scrabbled among the bones. Slowly, he eased the knife out from under his torn and ragged tunic. This knife had been a gift, of sorts, an exchange
—though he would have told the children the secret of the saint's tunnel without any gift. He would have told them because it was his duty to aid them, to aid all of the king's subjects. He was captain of the King's Dragons and obliged by his oath to the king, his father, to protect and defend the king's possessions and everything and everyone that the king ruled.

Rats were not subject to the king.

The bones lay within reach of his chains, and he was quick and silent but for the scrape of chains as he moved, sticking one on the point, grabbing another by the tail. It squeaked wildly and scrabbled helplessly at his fingers. He killed them. The dogs stirred, waking. The Eika slept on.

He growled the dogs down, and they subsided. They fed better than he did, because they did not scorn human flesh. He skinned the rats and, because he had no fire, ate them raw.

No better than the Eika, less than a man, more than a dog, he would have wept at his own savagery, but he had no tears. He never got enough to drink. Sometimes the priest remembered to set out water for him. Once a slave had done so, and been killed for her pains.

The Eika slept on. He sawed at the chains with the knife, but the work only dulled the blade. At last, he tucked it away again and curled up among his chains. The iron collar at his neck chafed his skin, and he shifted to ease the raw ache. The Eagle's badge lay cool against his skin, next to his heart.

Ai, Lady, if only he could sleep for one night, soundlessly and without dreaming, without interruption. If only he could rest. But the dogs panted, wakeful now, smelling death.

AWAKE.

Something was wrong. Hanna knew it instantly, but it took her three breaths to identify what it was. A cold hard wind blew into the loft, scattering hay and chilling her limbs, and a soft cold
thing
settled on her lips. Without thinking, she licked it.
Snow.

More snow settled on her face, blown in from outside as the wind rose and moaned in the beams. The unlatched loft door banged incessantly. A dog barked. Distantly she heard voices shouting an alarm, and then the wind gusted so hard it shook the very timbers of the stables and jarred the Lions awake.

She rolled up onto her hands and knees, groping in the blackness for her boots. She found Wolfhere's blanket with her hand.

He was gone.

A bell began to toll, a dull reverberating sound that shook through her. It seemed to call in a thick oppressive voice:
Fire! Storm! Attack! Awake! Awake!

She got hold of her boots and tugged them on, then crawled, found the trapdoor and the ladder by touch, and eased herself over and climbed down. Above, one of the soldiers called to her, but the wind howled and screamed at such a pitch outside that she couldn't make out his words. She found the floor and stood, clutching the ladder, trying to get her bearings. The horses had gone wild with fear; the voice of the monk in charge of the stables was a murmur running beneath the roar of the storm as he attempted, in vain, to calm them. The bell tolled on and on as if for a hundred newly dead souls being rung up through the seven spheres of Heaven to the Chamber of Light above.

"Hanna."

She jerked around but could not see Wolfhere, for it was utterly black inside.

"I'm at the door," he said.

Gingerly, she crossed to him. Bitter cold air streamed in through the cracks in the plank door. With each gust the door shuddered and shook and even, once, bent inward as if the wind were trying to break it down. Wolfhere had to lean hard against the door to keep it closed. Upstairs the loft door stopped banging abruptly.

A heavy object slammed against the stable door. Wood ripped and splintered, but the door did not give way, though she felt Wolfhere press farther into the door to hold it shut. Then, like the whisper of mice in the walls, she heard a voice from outside.

"Please. I beg you, if any are inside, let me enter." It was the guest-master.

At once Wolfhere unlatched the door. Wind blew the door open. It smashed into Hanna, a haze of pain all along her right side, and as she stumbled back, it slammed all the way open and hit the inner wall so hard the top hinge tore free. A hooded figure staggered in, propelled by the tearing wind.

No
wind,
this. No
storm
either, not as she knew storms. Half stunned, Hanna stared in disbelief. Outside she could not even see the shadows of the other outbuildings or the cloister. She could see neither sky nor moon. The world was a ghastly gray-white. They stood isolated in the middle of a howling blizzard. She could no longer hear the bell. Snow spun into the stables, blasting her face. Within, in the darkness of the stables, a horse broke free. She heard the swearing of the stablekeeper as he fought the animal back to its stall.

"Hanna!" Wolfhere had to shout to be heard above the gale. "Help me!" They grasped the shattered door and together yanked it back to the broken hinge to shove it closed against the cold hand of the wind. Despite the cold, she was sweating with fear and exertion. Her hand slipped on the weathered wood, and a splinter jabbed in just as Wolfhere grunted and put the pin through the latch.

"I can't risk light," he said, turning. "A broken lantern in this storm would burn this place down around us."

The guest-master had crumpled to the floor, and now Hanna could faintly discern his shape, made manifest more by the thin coating of snow on his robe and hood than by his own substance. He was muttering a prayer in Dariyan, the language of the church. She could not follow the words. He sounded half delirious, like a man raving with fever.

A man cursed above; one of the soldiers, a bulky shadow in armor, came down the ladder, swearing with such a foul string of curses that it took her a few shocked moments before she realized he was not angry but terrified.

"Did you see them?" he demanded as he thudded into the ground. Outside wind screamed, and hail peppered the walls like pebbles flung in volleys; the stables, the very wood structure of them, groaned under the onslaught.

"Things,"
said the guest-master in a terrified voice as the wind battered at the stables and hail pounded on the roof and walls. "Ai, Merciful Lady protect us from such visions. Protect us from such creatures. Such creatures as must be conceived in feculence and expelled from their dam's soiled flesh in base darkness. So came they down from the mountainside. So fell they down upon the wind. And such a stink they had to them that the hair on the back of my neck stood on end and my body shook with terror and the guests came rushing out of their chambers all crying and sobbing and one indeed could only babble like a child and he glowed as if he had been lit afire."

"Brother, take hold of yourself," said Wolfhere sternly. "Tell me what you saw."

"I have told you! They were living beings and yet like no creature I have ever seen. They had no limbs but only a thick dark body like an incorporeal staff as thick around as my own poor flesh. They sang in dire voices but in a language most foul-sounding if it was language at all. The wind bore them down from the mountain and the storm came with them as if they had raised it out of the air or from corrupt magics, for it is like no storm I have ever seen and I have lived here at this hostel for almost twenty years and served God in Unity faithfully, so help me. Ai, Lord in Heaven. That this terrible sight had never been given me for I have not the strength..."

"Hush," said Wolfhere. He shifted. "Lion. Watch over this good brother. Hanna. Dare you walk outside with me?" Her shoulder and hip throbbed from the pain of being struck by the windblown door. Shifting to her right leg brought stabs of pain bad enough to make her wince.

"Hanna?"

"I can go," she said.

First Wolfhere found rope hanging on the wall, which he tied round his waist and then, by touch, round hers. The Lion braced himself against the door as Wolfhere unlatched it, but even so, the wind flung the soldier backward, and he skidded back, dragging his heels against the dirt floor. Wolfhere tugged Hanna after him. Together they forged out into the blizzard.

They staggered under the press of wind. Not six steps out Wolfhere began shouting at her, though she could scarcely hear him over the roar of the wind. She looked behind. She could not see the stables; night and storm buried them in darkness. Panic gripped her. She could not breathe. Her hands curled tight, so cold so fast she could no longer feel them.

Wind struck. She had to lean, hunched over, in order not to be thrown down by the force of wind and snow and
— more than that—a peppering against her skin, stinging and harsh, as if the gale were stripping the mountains themselves of all their earth, scraping soil and rock off them to reveal the bones beneath.

Something brushed her. She screamed. She could not help herself. Some
thing,
some creature, but like no creature she ever seen or dreamed of. Then it was gone, vanished into the night, but there was another, and a third, streaming past her, borne on the gale. Towers of darkness, they were blacker even than the night itself, like a glimpse of the Abyss, the pit of the Enemy in which the wicked fall endlessly, never reaching bottom. With them,
of
them, around them swirled the stench of burning iron. Hanna heard their voices like the muttering of bells beneath the tearing wind, wordless and yet sentient.

From out of the blackness she heard a low rumbling roar that surged and swelled to a terrible crashing booming shuddering thunder that went on and on.

The rope at her waist pulled taut as Wolfhere reeled her in and shoved her back toward the stables. "Go!" he cried. "We dare not
—"