Sword of the Bright Lady (42 page)

“And we know he had a mage,” Gregor said, coming up to join them, “and I've found no sign of him either.”

“What do I do with them?” Christopher looked out in dismay over the prisoners.

“Have mercy,” cried one, seeing that they were the object of discussion. “We had no choice but to serve our lord.”

“You killed my horse!” Christopher's anger snapped like a string, and he was suddenly standing over the cringing man with his sword in his hands.

The realization that he had almost killed a helpless man did not chill him as much as the fact that Gregor and Karl stood by, watching, without any particular comment. They weren't going to stop him.

He made his brain function. Would he do this if Royal still lived? He put away his sword slowly.

“It's just a stinking horse!” the man cried, his fear replaced by fury once the dreadful blade was back in its sheath.

“You didn't have to kill it,” Christopher answered.

“We did as Lord Bartholomew ordered. What choice did we have?” The man was groveling again, the switch between anger and fear instantaneous.

“You did not have to become a soldier,” Karl said. “You could have remained a peasant.”

“And left our women and children at the mercy of his whim? Do you not know he beheaded two whole villages to boil their brains?”

Karl was unmoved. “That does not justify the violence you have inflicted on others.”

“If your goal was to protect your families,” Gregor said with brutal ice, “you've failed. He'll drain them first, now.”

“Let us go!” the man cried, and several others joined him. “Let us go home to save our wives and children!”

Christopher was torn, but Gregor was unyielding.

“You're boot-lickers,” the knight said. “If we let you go, you'll lick Bart's boot the minute you see him.”

“Mercy!” they cried back, and Christopher agreed. He turned to the knight, the question in his face.

“You want to show these men mercy?” the knight barked. “Kill them now. Kill them before daylight. If you turn them over to your Church for prosecution, Bart will have a spy in the courtroom. He'll kill the families of every man who surrendered, whether he needs their tael or not. He'll torture them to death as an abject lesson. If these men die now, then perhaps Bart will be concerned with other things. But if they are named as cowards, then he'll punish their families in ways no sane mind can dream of. Send them home to Bart and he'll do the same, but in front of them, before he kills them for being deserters.”

With a cry of inarticulate rage, the kneeling prisoner charged Christopher, who stepped aside and knocked him down with a well-placed knee. On the ground, the man writhed in pain, but not from the force of the blow. The silence of the prisoners confirmed the terrible words of the blue knight, and they hung their heads in despair.

“Every one of them is guilty of rapine, murder, and torture, Pater,” Gregor said. “Your Church will hang them all, anyway. Give them a warrior's death. Conceal their cowardice from the world. That is all you can do for them and their families.”

The prisoners didn't look like they wanted a warrior's death.

“Why did you put me in this position?” Christopher asked them. “Knowing all this, why did you surrender?”

“Because they are cowards,” Gregor said with contempt.

Karl had more insight into the peasant mind. “Because they were hoping you'd gotten Black Bart.”

“So if we'd killed Bart, then I could turn these men over to the Church for judgment, and possibly atonement.”
And I wouldn't have to choose between fueling terrorism or running an abattoir
, his mind whispered. “He's got a long ride home. If we had horses, we could chase him. If you hadn't taken so damn long to get into your armor, we could have saved the horses.” He could not keep the bitterness out of his voice.

Gregor was too insulted to respond, so Karl did. “Without our armor, we would not have carried the field, Pater.” He might have been angry, but with his face torn up like that, it was simply impossible to read the taciturn man.

“I'm not blaming you,” Christopher said, apologizing. “I'm blaming the armor. It's stupid and slow. The fault does not lie in you, but in the armor.” The fault lay in this whole stupid world and its stupid habits.

“It's good armor,” Gregor said defensively.

“Not the armor, itself,” Christopher said with exasperation. “The fact of armor, any armor, at all.”

“Would you change even how we dress?” Gregor asked in surprise.

“Of course,” Svengusta said. “I told you, Baronet, the Pater would get around to you too, in time.”

Karl, ever pragmatic, set aside anger and futility, and spoke to the moment. “There are horses in Knockford.” Christopher must have let his dubiousness show, because Karl felt the need to explain. “The Vicar will aid you, Pater. This was open war on her land. She can no longer pretend to be neutral.”

Christopher still wasn't so sure. After all, no villagers had been hurt, and the only building burned was his.

“He brought those
things
into our lands,” Svengusta said with uncontained disgust. “She'll throttle him with her bare hands for that alone.”

“But how do we get to Knockford?” Christopher asked.

Reflexively they all looked north, to Fenwick's stable. Impossibly, Fenwick was already leading two horses toward them. Royal spotted Christopher and trotted up to him, nuzzling him with a long, soft nose. His mane and tail were badly singed, but otherwise the horse seemed unharmed.

Christopher was too overcome with emotion to speak, clinging to the horse's mane like a drowning man.

It's just a horse
, his mind said. It is a warhorse, a machine of battle, a military asset. Do not get attached. But he could not help it. He was struggling to not get attached to these people, who he must leave someday when he went home. The horse was the one living thing in this world he dared to love. After all, he might even be able to take it with him. It would not feel out of place in the wrong world, homesick and useless.

Do not get attached
, repeated his mind, implacable. But he noticed that Gregor tenderly stroked the muzzle of his own great warhorse.

“When Royal kicked his way out of the barn, he went looking for a safe, comfortable place, so he came back to my stable,” Fenwick explained. “I guess Balance followed him.” Fenwick always knew the horses' names.

“Then who?” Christopher could not finish the question.

“How many horses did you leave in the stable?” Karl demanded of the prisoners.

“Lord Bartholomew left three,” said one of them. “The warhorses, of course, and another he spat on, saying he would leave the druid to burn if he could.”

Christopher was ashamed that the thought of Niona's gentle mare dying in terrible agony did not affect him like the thought of Royal had.

“The ghoul-hand knight tried to claim that destrier,” offered another prisoner, pointing to Royal. “But when it smelled his new hand, it would not let him near.”

No wonder Hobilar had been so angry. Christopher had stolen the heart of the only creature on the planet that loved him. Or rather, Hobilar had thrown it away by making some kind of unholy pact with Darkness. It all depended on how you looked at it. But that was in the past, now, and it was time to move forward.

Stroking the warhorse's long neck, his mind started working again.

“Lock them in a barn and nail it shut. Let no one in or out. Sven, make sure our people understand how important it is to hide these men's identities, even the fact that we have prisoners at all.” Hopefully the peasantry here would feel some sympathy for Bart's peasants. “Karl, bring the mercenaries in that wagon.”

They still had one of Bart's wagons, with its two draft horses. Come to think of it, Fenwick had a stable full of draft horses.

“How much tack do you have?” he asked Fenwick. A horse without a saddle wasn't worth much to a cavalry man.

“We won't be fighting. We can ride bareback to Knockford,” Karl said.

“Gregor and I will go on ahead and get things started.” Christopher was enough of a horseman now to know that the draft animals couldn't hope to keep up with the warhorses. The plow horses were bred for strength and placidity, the warhorses for stamina and spirit. The warhorses were also fed expensive grain instead of cheap hay, a fact that had not gone unnoticed by Christopher's purse. But they would repay him now, reward him with speed when he needed it.

Galloping without a saddle was deceptively easy, but all it took was one mistake and you had no chance to correct before you were on the ground. Christopher could barely manage it in his light chain shirt. He could not understand how Gregor could do it in full armor. Well, not quite full armor. The knight had taken off his plated leggings and strung them over his shoulder. He looked ridiculous, but the horse's naked back was spared the hard metal.

Thinking of the armor prompted an apology.

“I'm sorry,” he shouted at Gregor over the pounding hooves. “I didn't mean to insult you.”

The blue knight had been surprisingly complacent since the horses had appeared. Christopher wasn't sure if that was because he was hiding his anger or just relieved to have his horse back.

“You owe me no apologies,” Gregor shouted back. “You are favored by the gods and must follow the path they have set you on.”

“We got lucky,” Christopher objected. “It was just luck.”

“That's what I said,” the knight repeated mildly. “The luck, bye the bye, is not that our horses escaped a burning barn. They are trained not to panic, and an ordinary stall cannot hold an animal this strong. The luck was that Black Bart holds no free loyalty. His barns are built like fortresses, to trap the creatures he owns. So he did not see that your barn was built to house, not cage. If your other horse had not panicked, she might have followed ours out.”

If Bloodfire had been there, she would have followed him, Christopher realized sadly.

“This is how we defeat Evil,” Gregor said with satisfaction. “It cannot comprehend Good. Well, that and fireballs. I had no idea you were a wizard of such rank.”

“I'm not a wizard.”

But the knight was chuckling. “I'll bet that put a weasel up Bart's butt. He wasn't expecting fireballs. His mage could only do sleep. In one stroke you wiped out his secret army of soul-trapped and shattered his battle plan.”

Christopher shuddered to think what would have happened if the monsters had gotten into the chapel while everyone was asleep and unarmored.

“But Svengusta drove them from the chapel with his . . .” Christopher didn't know what he'd done. He'd skipped that chapter in the book. It hadn't seemed important at the time. “How could they help Bart if Svengusta could drive them out?”

“How did Bart control them in the first place?” the blue knight growled. “Who knows what plans that twisted mind laid? But I grant you, his recklessness stinks of desperation.”

“Where did he get them?” Christopher was still drowning in questions. He could deduce that magic had animated the bodies, and presumably Bart numbered a practitioner of the necromantic arts among his allies. “Where did he get so many corpses?”

Gregor looked at him, surprised or perhaps envious of his innocence.

“He had two whole villages' worth at hand, last I heard.”

On that ugly note they fell silent, the sun rising on the horizon, a promise for the end of the darkness in the sky, though not for the day.

23.

AS THE CROW FLIES

Vicar Rana was waiting for them in her office, despite the early hour.

“I dreamed badly,” she explained. “Like a child, of the Black Harvest. Monsters of the Dark come to take all our heads. I left my bed chamber to escape the nightmare, and now here you are.”

Her stony face showed no reaction to Christopher's report. Perhaps her dreams had been worse. At the end he broke down in desperation.

“We have to catch Bart. We have to,” he pleaded.

“Is your appetite for blood and tael so great now?” she asked, a stone speaking.

“If motive is the issue,” Gregor said, “I'll forfeit my share. We must stop Bart. He is gone, Lady, sunk into Black. He no longer acts from profit or even fear but only violence. I fear his retribution on his people will be terrible, a blow to the strength of the Kingdom itself.”

“Then the high lords will replace him,” she answered.

“Only after,” Gregor said softly.

“Me too,” Christopher said. “I'll give up my share. Just give me horses.”

“Mere horses cannot catch him,” Rana said. “My stable does not hold zephyrs.”

She had a point. The prisoners had told them that Bart had brought eight horses with him. Adding Christopher's, or rather Bart's original, eight meant he would be doubled up on the ride home. Christopher wasn't even certain how they could find him, let alone close the gap. He really missed the druid and her kittenhawk now.