The Dread Wyrm (Traitor Son Cycle) (49 page)

Amicia felt she would betray a confidence by answering, but she shrugged inwardly. “I believe Ser Gabriel views himself as the Queen’s Champion. Indeed, I believe she asked him—but before the role had quite such consequences.”

“Against the King?” the Prior asked quickly.

Amicia pursed her lips and snapped, “I have never heard him say aught against the King, or the Queen. He bears no love for the Galles.” She frowned. “I have attended a number of the meetings of his officers. They are open in their derision of the King’s weakness. But then—” She looked hard at the prior. “But then, so am I.”

“Bah,” Prior Wishart said. “It’s no treason at this point to think the King is mad or ensorcelled. Go sleep. Tomorrow will be very hard I suspect.”

She curtsied. “I sense something… evil,” she said.

Prior Wishart paused. “You are much stronger than I,” he said. “Yet I do feel some—
malmaissance.
Where is it, though? Is it Harndon, burning?”

She took a deep breath, steadied herself, and searched with her
aethereal
eye.

“It’s in the sky,” she said quietly.

Wishart looked up. He looked for long enough that her eyelids began to sag.

“Happy Easter, Sister,” he said. “I have to hope that it is a figment of our fatigue and our crisis. I cannot believe we are open here—on this night—to direct attack. Go and sleep.”

She nodded, almost beyond speech, and went down from the wall. It was two or three hours after midnight—most of the abbey was asleep, and aside from the watch on the walls, most voices were stilled. The torches were out, and she took a wrong turn at the foot of the steps and found herself in the inner cloister, but aside from the monks lying on the grass, everyone was gone, and the only other men awake were some servants finishing the wine. She found the low tunnel, richly carved, that led from the inner cloister to the outer and, drawn by voices, she felt her way through the dark.

Halfway, in almost total darkness, she had another shock of apprehension. She thought for a moment it might be her fatigue as the Prior had said, but she closed her eyes and
entered her palace and made a very small working—an open net of woven
ops
to catch the workings of others. It was a working she had learned from Gabriel.

She released it. And settled like a spider in a web to “see” what she might see in the
aethereal
.

She dropped out of her palace
and felt her way forward, a portion of her awareness now tucked away in her palace.

Just at the end of the tunnel, four men were sitting in the shade of a grape arbor in the courtyard.

One of them was Gabriel—she’d know his voice anywhere. The big man was clearly Ser Thomas—a nose taller than any other man she’d ever met.

“Gabriel,” she said sharply.

He rose.

“There’s something—” she said, and extended her hand.

He reached out in the real.

The other two men were almost as big as Ser Thomas—a big red-headed knight of her own Order, who she knew by repute and by the sheer size of his nose. Ser Ricar Orcsbane.

And a black man the size of a small house, or so it seemed. The men rose as she approached and bowed—the black man very elegantly, by putting his hands together and bending at the waist.

“Sister Amicia, of the Order of Saint Thomas,” Gabriel said, and repeated it in passable Etruscan. His smile was tired, but warmed her nonetheless.

In her heart, she thought,
I must get him to pay attention.

“This magnificent gentleman is Ser Pavalo l-Walīd Muḥammad Payam
.
” Ser Gabriel spoke the name cautiously—for once, it was a language he did not know. But the dark-skinned man bowed again and smiled at the sound of his name.

“You went to mass,” Amicia said. “I saw you.” She made herself smile, but she seized Gabriel’s hand and tried to drag him by main force into her memory palace.

“He says he craves your blessing.” Gabriel shrugged. “I have been to mass before and was not slain by lightning, nor do my infernal legions always make trouble.”

“He took the host,” Tom Lachlan said. “I expected the chapel to collapse.”

Between one sentence and the next
he was there with her.

“
There’s something out there—there. In that direction.” She pointed at the simulacrum of her sensory net in the aethereal, which was ripped asunder somewhere above her and to the north. Direction and distance were not the same in the aethereal as in the real.

Gabriel looked at the screen of
aethereal
force she had projected.

In the real, Amicia put a hand on the dark-skinned man’s hand and said a small prayer for his soul.

“I tried to get the infidel to come to mass,” Tom said. He grinned. “I mean, if the captain was there, what would one more damned soul matter?”

Amicia had suddenly had enough. “Don’t mock what you do not understand,” she snapped.

Tom was seldom baulked. But like most very dangerous men, he was not a fool. He bowed his head. “Sister?” he asked quietly.

“Something is wrong,” Ser Gabriel said. He was back in the real. He turned to look north. “Toby—my spear.”

Toby detached himself from a wall and ran for the stables.

“Amicia, get behind us,” Gabriel said. He still had her hand—and something about his instant willingness to believe her, to obey and react—

She turned to look.

Turned back to speak to him. She opened her mouth to say something neither of them would ever be able to forget, and she knew better—fatigue, religion, love, danger—it was a heady potion that transcended day-to-day and common sense, her usual guideposts all thrown down. The sense of
wrongness
now filled the air around her. Whatever it was, it was aimed for him, not her. She cast a protection, a mirror to confuse whatever the malevolence was; she borrowed his aura and put it on.

She raised a shield of glowing gold with a twitch of her be-ringed hand.

Something black fluttered out of the darkness onto her face, right through her shield.

At its touch, she screamed.

The Red Knight saw the change in her posture. He tossed the first working in his arsenal—

Fiat Lux.

Golden light leapt from a point fifty feet above them.

It revealed a beautiful horror—six magnificent, shimmering black moths, each the size of a great eagle, their wings the purest black satin shot with veins of blue-black that throbbed with
ops
and thick velvet-black bodies with elaborate black filigree and lace antennae—and probisci of obscene dimensions, long as baselards and swollen with a velvety hardness that made the skin crawl, tipped with adamant that shone like blued steel.

One of them fluttered against Amicia even as the light burgeoned.

Its probiscis throbbed with power and bit—and she screamed.

The Ifriquy’an’s long, curved sword slipped from the scabbard and flowed out and up like liquid metal in the silver-gold of mixed moonlight and mage light. He was a pace behind Amicia and his sword struck at an angle from the scabbard—severed a great, rapidly beating wing
and the probiscis at its base
in one strike—the sword passed through its target and swept back, was reversed, and swept back up, almost the same line, cutting off a lock of her hair as her knees gave from the poison and opening the velvet body from base to eye-cases in a shower of
ops
and
potentia
and black acid blood.

Amicia fell in the loose-limbed sprawl of death.

The Red Knight’s sword snapped from the scabbard and cut into another of the monsters—this one intended for him, wings spread and virulent poison already dripping. His sword slammed into it—and bounced off.

He’d had a clue that they were
aethereal
from the sparks. He rolled, a leather-soft wing clipped his thigh and something disgustingly velvety touched his hand—his arming sword reached out, striking a panicked blow. But as his point came on line he thrust—the blade tip snagged its material belly and because it was flying and had no anchor, it rebounded. The point, sharp as one of Mag’s needles, had still failed to bite. But it was pushed, tumbling, through fifteen feet of darkness to slam into one of its mates.

Ser Gabriel realized then that they were
all
coming for him—but his attention was on Amicia. “They’re magicked!” he shouted. “No mortal weapon will bite!”

He rolled under the table where the men had been sitting. One of them slipped past Ser Pavalo and landed awkwardly on the table—cups exploded out, and it flipped the table.

He saw Bad Tom, armed with the dragon’s sword, split another one in half, the two sides lit in a white-veined horror for one beat of a frightened man’s heart, the two wings each beating separately once, ripping the two
halves apart and spraying black ichor. Ser Pavalo rolled, passing under a gout of the foul stuff, and rose to strike from beneath a moth with a rising cut—then whirled, and struck again as if gifted with eyes in the back of his head.

Gavin had no magic sword. He leapt onto the back of the one on the table. It was low and slow, and it didn’t seem to have any weapons that could reach its back—Gavin got his arms
under
its wings as if putting a small man in a head lock, and pushed the body away from him with both hands and all the passion of abhorrence, and the wings seemed to shred.

It was all perfectly silent.

Gabriel saw two of the black velvet horrors unengaged—one attempting to rise over the melee, and the other settling on the prone figure of the dying nun.

“Amicia!” he screamed.

He threw himself towards her. In
the
aethereal
, he flooded her bridge with light—and, improvising heartbeat by heartbeat—tried forcing
ops
back down the bond—first through the ring, and then the strange working on his ankle.

He refused to accept that the pale corpse on the bridge was hers.

He poured his power into their bond…

One of the moths had him. He was on his stomach, stretched over her body, and the moth was settling on him, the weight like that of a dog—he felt the…

In the moment that the thing’s probisicis penetrated his back, he took his hate and terror and pushed it right up through the contact, into its body.

The moth exploded.

The poison
was lethal, but slower than hermetical counters—he set a construct to cleanse the wound with fire even as he reached for her—

—
and found her.

“Anything!” he shouted at the universe. “I will give
anything
.”

Then, desperation winning over mastery, he pushed her
aethereal
form off the bridge and into the torrent of green
potentia
that rushed under it.

The power—the raw power that she channelled so often—washed the caked, burned flakes off her face and left new, fresh skin. Her green gown was gone and she was naked.

He knew his myths, and when he’d held her in the stream long enough, he hauled her by main force onto the bridge, rolled her over and held the leg by which he’d held her in the power.

He had his arms under her arms, his hands clasped under her breasts, when her eyes opened.

She took a breath.

And another.

He pulled her back onto the bridge.

In the real, she was fully clothed. But her eyes were open.

“I thought I was dead,” she said aloud.

The last moth, struck repeatedly by two Fell Swords, tried to reach its prey once more and was spitted on the spear, wielded by Toby, who levered the corpse away from his captain and the nun.

“You’re alive,” Gabriel said. He backed away, his voice strange, his arms still clasped around her as if he was unwilling to let go, and he dragged her away from the corpses of the moths even as Prior Wishart and half the monks of the abbey came at a run, a forest of vengeful swords. There was a long scream from the direction of the cloister.

He was reluctant to let her go. Aware that he had just made a pact with—something—for her life. He could feel it.

He heard the screams. He hauled her into a chair and let her go—one hand lingering on her hair.

It was foolish—stupid—but he had not touched her in so long…

He snapped himself to attention and
fell into his own palace.

“There are more of them,” Prudentia said.

He nodded. Having immolated one at point blank range, he had their making in his head, and he knew how to unmake them. More, his rage was such—

“Take a breath,” Prudentia said. “You are badly hurt yourself.”

Instead, he reached out into the darkness, and located them—only three, and those without the ferocity of purpose that had so nearly defeated him.

One was in the town, having killed two women and a child and a cat.

One was in the cloister hunting monks.

One was high in the air overhead, watching. Or rather, monitoring.

Prudentia said, “by offering such a promise you have given something a back door into your soul.”

Gabriel reached out into the night with the same working he had used at the Inn of Dorling. He layered it with a simple working of identity from his intimate contact with the one that had landed on him.

In a flash of golden fire, a low stone house in the town exploded.

To his left, in the cloister, the moth was suddenly outlined in an angry red—and then fell as ash over the rose garden.

High overhead, the largest of all the moths turned away for home.

But Gabriel was sometimes an impatient hunter, and he followed it across the sky with his thought, leaving his wounded body to collapse to the cobbles.

He had never tried this particular form of
aethereal
movement, and it was terrifying—like being at court while naked. He was bereft of many of his powers—a thing of wind and fancy.