The Dread Wyrm (Traitor Son Cycle) (41 page)

There was an explosion—another—then another. Like spring trees full of sap and struck by lightning, each sharp crack deafened the men at the top of the hill and blew new rings of blood and bone into the sunny sky.

Ser John found he was down on one knee, his ears ringing despite a fully enclosed helmet and heavy wool-stuffed helmet liner. There was a dazzle of spots in front of his eyes.

There were a lot of dead boglins at the base of the field. Even as he watched, the arm of a daemon, torn from its body, fell back to the earth.

The black thing now moved as if it was four legged and not two legged. It vanished through a new gap in the hedge.

Another flash of steel, and Ser John was fairly sure he was looking at Lord Wimarc, dismounted, about three hundred yards away. The boy had superb armour and something, even at that range, suggested him and his slim, upright posture.

Not for the last time, Ser John watched, wondering what in hell was happening.

“I think we’re out of the fight,” Ser Dagon muttered.

Ser John got back to his feet. His lower back burned with fatigue and he was soaked through with sweat—and cold.

“Master Archer!” he called.

“Which I’m right here, your honour,” Wilful Murder muttered. “And not deaf, neither.”

“Send an archer for the pages and the horses,” Ser John said, unaware that he was shouting.

Jamie the Hoek coughed. “I’ll go, Ser John,” he said. “My horse is just around the wall—if Rory left it where he said he would.”

“If the imps didn’t get him,” spat one of the knights. Ser Blaise was dead—and partly eaten. The young Jarsay knight, Ser Guy, had six wounds, all where the imps had gotten into his groin and armpits. He was fading fast.

The poor boy was weeping with pain. His arms were barely attached to his body. His legs—his entire lower torso was ruined. Shock could not do enough to protect him from what had happened to his body.

Ser John knelt by him and put a hand on his cheek.

The boy screamed. Something in him had changed, or the full realization of his fate had come to him, and his weeping sobs gave way to bitter screams.

Three hundred yards of mud away, Lord Wimarc waved. And began to trudge, not towards them but along the edge of the hedgerow. He was clearly following the defeated warband of enemy raiders.

“He’s clean mad,” muttered Ser Dagon, who was doing his best to ignore the young knight dying horribly at his feet.

The other squires began to appear—Tomas Craik and his brother Alan and all the rest of them, trudging wearily in good harness.

“Achilles and Hector together couldn’t ha’ driven all they off that land,” said Ser Dagon.

The boy was shouting his screams now.

“I think our squires have the most honour in this fight,” Ser John agreed. He wished he could get up. He wished the boy would die. He wished that there was something—anything—he could do.

He made himself pray, which was hard with the accusations of the boy’s screams so close to his head.

There was another roar—the horn sounded again, one long wind, and suddenly the air was full of
ops.
Workings flew past, balls of fire of various colours flying back and forth.

“Christ and his phalanx of angels,” muttered Ser Giannis.

“Haaaaarrrrrhhhhh!” screamed the mass of pain and fear that had once been a knight of Jarsay.

Ser John picked him up, intending to crush him in an embrace. But Wilful Murder was there first. He leaned down as if tying his shoe and casually drew his ballock dagger across the young knight’s throat.

“Go fast, boy,” he said.

Ser John let the boy’s blood flow down the front of his breastplate. He met the archer’s eyes, and the man shrugged.

“Someone had to,” Wilful Murder said.

And then Rory was back with the war horses.

Ser John looked around, wondering if he looked as tired and haggard as Ser Giannis or Ser Dagon did.

“I’m of a mind to find out what happened, and mayhap play a role before the sun sets,” Ser John said. “But every man here has earned the right to say he has done enough.”

The other seven knights looked at him—covered in their comrade’s blood—and shook their heads.

“Let’s go kill them,” said Ser Dagon.

The road ran parallel to the fight for another half mile. Below them, as the spring sun began to set, they could see shapes moving across the cleared ground. Some of the hedged fields were quite small and Ser John didn’t know the area well enough to guess which lane would get him a view of the fight—if any.

But as the sun’s rays turned from gold to red, one of the huntsmen galloped up and pointed his crossbow south across the fields. “Past the farm gate,” he said, and they rode. An hour of picking their way along the road and stopping frequently to watch or listen had allowed all the archers to catch them up, mounted on their smaller horses. The pages brought up the rear.

Ser John was the first through the gate. It was a fine farm with a good stone house like Helewise’s, only smaller, and it had been spared by the last incursion of the Wild. Draper or Skinner—he knew the folk here.

Old Man Skinner stepped out of his door, a heavy arbalest cocked in his hand. “There’s boglins in my lower orchard,” he said. “I’ve been potting ’em for an hour. Took you lot long enough—Christ on the cross, you look rough, Ser John!” he said in sudden wonder. “Just my mouth a flappin’. I mean no harm. Water your horses—I’ll get water in the trough.”

And indeed, the horses needed water and a rest from men on their backs, and Goodwife Skinner, a big heavy woman with beautiful eyes and a no-nonsense face doled out sweet buns and tart cider. Men drank it without removing their blood-soaked gauntlets or gloves. Ser John looked about him, and they were all blue-red-black with ichor and blood and mud.

The horn—that horn would haunt his dreams—sounded very close.

“Get inside and bar your doors,” Ser John snapped, pushing Goodwife Skinner into her kitchen door.

“An’ don’t we wish we could come in wi’ you?” muttered Wilful Murder.

“To horse!” Ser John shouted.

His great war horse—the best he’d ever owned—seemed to give a human groan as he mounted. He trotted the horse past the barnyard and the farmer met him there at the corner, his heavy weapon spanned and ready. The farmer ran to the next gate and paused, looked around carefully and then opened the gate. He stepped through.

Ser John rode right by him. He wasn’t sure why he did it, except perhaps
the sense that it was his job to protect the farmer, not the farmer’s job to protect him.

He felt the enemy through his horse before ever he saw them. They were in the
next
field, near the base of the valley. They’d come miles north and west, now—Lissen Carak would be only a dozen more miles that way. The edge of the woods was only a mile or two to the north, if that. That’s where the raiders were headed.

Ser John went through the gate, past the farmer, and then trotted up the muddy field. He could see his enemy through the next gate.

The closed field in which he was riding was unploughed, or his horse would have sunk to the fetlocks. But there were only two gates—the one he’d passed through, and the one ahead.

He rode up to the gate. A gout of black fire struck it just as he reached it and it blew clean off its hinges and collapsed.

The four-footed black thing was loping towards him over an unploughed hayfield. Ser John didn’t think. He just slammed down his visor and touched his spurs to Iskander, who responded with all the noble heart any knight could ask from a horse, exploding forward despite the soft, treacherous ground.

The huge black creature—it was almost amorphous, it moved so fast—reared up.

It
was
a troll.

It cast.

The sigil on his chest felt as if it was melting and running over his skin, and he shrieked, but he and his horse rode through a cloud of black-blue fire and he dropped his lance point a hand’s breadth—

His lance caught it in the centre of the head. Even a ten-foot-high stone statue would be damaged by a war horse and rider powering a heavy lance. His strike was so sure, so exact, that his lance tip caught on its brow ridge and bent—and broke.

But the black troll went crashing down.

Ser John never had to give his horse a lead—he was turning as soon as it felt his weight change. He was naked, his back to his enemy—he saw a dozen daemons, streaked with mud and blood, running at him and, behind them, boglins and behind them, at the far edge of the field…

A flash of bright gold in the last of the sun.

He shook his head and drew his sword, prepared to sell his life dearly.

The great black stone troll was sitting, legs splayed, like a ten-foot child who had hurt itself.

It shook its head—paused, shook again…

Ser John smiled grimly. Iskander couldn’t manage more than a stiff trot, but he powered by, put a fore-hoof into the troll with the ringing sound of iron-shod hooves on stone and then Ser John’s war hammer fell with all the power of his shoulders on the thing’s fractured head.

Instead of dying, it reached out, almost casually, and slammed Ser John out of the saddle, breaking his left arm and dropping him behind his horse. Ser John had time to see that his left vambrace was crushed
.

He lay in the mud and waited to die. He couldn’t raise his head.

Over his head, sorcery flew. He caught a piece of something and was showered in mud, then a wave of incredible heat passed over and he tried not to breathe.

Heavy arrows began to fall. He saw two come down, but he had trouble moving his head—some muscles in his back were damaged, or perhaps he was gutted and dying. It was hard to tell. There was no pain, even from his arm, so he knew that he had no way to tell.

And then, silence. He could hear very little inside his helmet. But he could feel the ground move as something big came up the field. His uninjured right hand went for his dagger.

It was heading for him.

Deep in Ser John’s throat was a whimper, and he knew if he let that whimper out, it would be the way he died. So instead, he tried to see Helewise—see her wonderful naked body, see the cheerfulness of her, the fullness—

Helewise’s breasts were a better thought with which to die than brother Christ, whatever the priests said.

The thing was coming. The ground shook.

He couldn’t do it. His eyes opened.

Over him was a great furry creature covered in mud. It looked like a giant rat, but in a flicker of thought he knew it for a very dirty Golden Bear.

He exhaled.

The bear leaned over him. “You—again?” it asked, its voice deep and raspy and majestic.

Ser John thought he might laugh forever. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” he said.

The day was not yet over, but it had ended for Ser John. The pages and archers had to fight off a pair of bargests that came—too late to turn the tide of the rout—out of the setting sun. They caught the pages on horseback and killed two, but their interest in feeding on the horses gave the archers time to drive them off.

Ser John lay in the roots of a great tree, his back against its old bole. They were just at the edge of the woods.

The old bear was as tall as the troll, and just as heavy. He wore a great bag dense with red and black porcupine quillwork, and had an axe—a heavy soldier’s axe—from far-off Etrusca.

He sat—very like a man—back curved in fatigue, legs splayed. A very cautious Jamie the Hoek brought the bear water.

“I am called Flint,” the old bear said.

Around them, in amongst the old maples at the edge of night, moved two dozen other bears. Even covered in mud—and they were caked in the stuff—they gave off the occasional gleam of gold.

Ser John extended his good hand. “I’m Ser John Crayford,” he said. “The Captain of Albinkirk.”

“You are the lord of the stinking houses,” the bear said.

Ser John swallowed his pain. “I suppose. And you?”

“I lead the Crooked Tree clan,” Flint said. “I have for fifty summers.”

“You saved us,” Ser John said.

“More than you know!” Flint nodded. “But in the winter, you and the Light that Shines came to the deep woods and saved
me.
And many of my people.” He looked away—again, a very human head movement, but Ser John could not read the thing’s face. “That was an army—going to raid all the way around your stinking houses.”

Ser John bit his lip. When he could master the pain, he said, “Yes.”

“The sorcerer is marching on Ticondaga with all his force,” the old bear said. “We have refused to submit. But most of my people hate men—all men—more than they hate the sorcerer. Or at least as much.”

Another bear came and squatted by the old bear. Ser John had the sense that the second bear was much younger—lithe, almost thin from winter.

“We awoke to find his spies in our dens. He had massacred a clan, merely to show that he could.” Flint seemed to be talking to himself.

“How can I help?” Ser John asked.

The old bear looked at him, its muzzle weaving side to side. “Let us pass west,” he said. “We have friends to the west.”

“The Abbess?” asked the wounded knight.

“Is the Light that Shines not one of her mates?” asked the old bear.

Ser John groaned with a desire to laugh that conflicted with his obviously broken rib. Or ribs.

“The Abbess is a nun. Nuns are women who do not take mates.” Ser John took a careful breath.

“Yes—some bears are the same, loving only their own, she-bear with she-bear,” Flint said.

Ser John nodded. “Yes—but no. They take no mate at all.”

“I have heard of this,” said the old bear. “But assumed it was just one of those rumours of hate that young people concoct. You mean some humans choose not to mate at all? What do they do in spring? Hibernate?”

Ser John took another careful breath. “You speak the tongue of the west very well, for a bear.”

“Some of us meet with men,” the bear admitted. “At N’Pana, or even Ticondaga.” The bear growled. “We do not work with fire, but a steel axe is a fearsome thing indeed.”

“Then—if there is trade, you must know something about us?” the man asked.