The Dread Wyrm (Traitor Son Cycle) (71 page)

Then he saw his sister. To his credit, his face transformed, and from a comic lover he was instantly a caring brother. “Oh, sweet Mother of God,” he said.

Desiderata fell into his arms, and Rebecca backed away.

Rebecca took in the extreme discomfort writ large on Blanche’s face and nodded, even as Desiderata calmed.

“Her grace’s breviary is still, I fear, in her captain’s pavilion,” she said. “Blanche, would you be kind enough to fetch it?”

Blanche curtsied, even as the Queen protested.

“Let her rest, Becca. She has gone through everything I’ve been through but the birth.” The Queen’s sobs were slowing, and with much the same transformation as her brother had shown, the Queen’s face seemed to change. Lines smoothed, tendons were erased, and her breathing slowed.

Her brother held her by both hands. In Occitan, he said, “I haven’t seen you cry like that since you broke your arm as a girl.”

She took a deep breath. “I don’t know where it came from,” she said, her voice lower and easier.

Blanche sighed, accepted Lady Almspend’s smile and nod, and fled before the prince’s eye fell on her again.

She was vexed, and fatigue made her vexation feel like something more serious. The pain was like a splinter in her finger—the more she worried it, the more painful it was.

The prince fancied her and offered her
reward
. It was plain enough—that’s what men of his class did to offset things like pregnancy and shame. They offered lower-class women money.

But the night before, she’d—this was the splinter in her soul—imagined
rewards
herself
.
What did that make her?

Sweet Christ, what did Sukey think?
She stopped in the darkness, halfway across the smooth field of grass that grew for a long crossbow shot outside the city walls and on which the company was camped—camped, if few fires and no tents make a camp. The captain’s pavilion—travel stained and with a slightly sagging ridgepole between its two high points—was the only tent in the camp.

Sukey was gone, of course.

Suddenly Blanche had no interest in going to that pavilion, where he sat. She could see the candle-lit space within—there was Toby, his squire, fussing, and there was Nell. And, her mother’s voice said, what would
they
think?

Men had fancied Blanche since her breasts began to bud. She’d always enjoyed it and never let it drive her, like some girls, whose heads were turned forever—not by love, but by the
power.
But in this case, she bit her lip in annoyance, turning on her heel.

She was close by the pavilion by then, and she missed a tent-rope in the dark. It tripped her, and she squealed.

In a moment, there was a hard arm across her throat.

A tall, thin man glared at her. His eyes were unfriendly, and his face was like a ferret’s. She remembered him from the birthing.

“What you got there, mate?” barked a voice near at hand.

The thin man gave her a hand up. “Never mind, Cully,” he said. “It’s just the captain’s piece.”

Blanche flushed. Her ankle hurt, and so did her pride. She sputtered.

Cat—that was his name—was not unkind. “No need to sneak, Miss. We all know ya now.”

Unbidden, the language of her childhood hissed out. “Sod off, Beanpole! I’m not your captain’s doxy or any man’s.”

Cat laughed. Cully grinned. “Oh, aye. Our mistake,” Cully said. Then, seriously, “He’s not—his self. He’s…” Cully shook his head and his helmet glinted in the darkness and she realized they must be guards.

“Who’s there?” called Toby.

Blanche writhed.

“The Queen’s lady,” Cully said.

The captain—visible as a shape, a very Red-Knight-like shape, right to his profile, on the lantern show of the tent wall—sprang to his feet. In another mood she might have been pleased by his alacrity.

Cully guided her firmly around the tent-stakes as if she were a wayward infant, which made her mad.

“Lady Blanche,” the Red Knight said.

“I’m no lady, and I’ve a-told you so before, my lord. My lady, her grace, has sent me to ask for her breviary, which she left in your tent.” She gave a stiff-backed curtsey. “And I’d appreciate it if any other little thing her grace left might be returned, so that I don’t have to make another trip.”

She could see she’d wounded him. In another mood, she might have relented.

“Toby, I’d like to speak to Blanche, if I might, and then perhaps—”

“No, my lord, I will not be alone with any man, thank you,” Blanche said. She spat it more than said it.

His back went up, she saw it, and liked him better for it, right through her anger.

With a coldness she admired he looked down his nose at her. “Very well. Fetch the Queen’s things, Toby, I’m going out to have a look at our posts.”

“Oh, Christ Jesus,” muttered Cully. “Lady…”

He made a sign to Cat, hidden by the tent flap, and the younger archer ran off into the darkness just before the captain stalked out of the tent and vanished into the darkness.

Nell looked at her accusingly. “What was that for?” she asked.

Toby didn’t meet her eye, but his disapproval was obvious. He had the Queen’s prayerbook, as well as a small reliquary that Ser Ranald had rescued and a ring, and he put them all in a soft bag and handed it to her.

“Look for yourself,” he said, in almost exactly his master’s tone. “We wouldn’t want you to have to come again.”

Blanche sniffed. It was a sniff of dismissal, contempt, the most formidable of all the weapons her mother had given her, and she had used it to put apprentices and laundry maids in their places on many occasions. She took the bag and did indeed walk around the pavilion, giving everything a careful look.

She knew the great tent well from a day spent with the Queen; the inner hangings, the small chest of bound books, the absence of any kind of religious equipment. On the back was a small tapestry of a knight and a unicorn.

She loved the tapestry.

But she was too angry—and hurt—to enjoy it. So she turned, delivered another sniff, and started out.

“I’ll take you back to the bishop’s palace,” said Nell. “I wouldn’t want anyone to do you an injury.”

“I can find my own way,” Blanche shot back.

“Can you?” Nell asked. “Military camps can be dangerous for unarmed women. You don’t want Cat Evil finding you alone. Or any of the others. They’re only tame to some fists, like falcons. They ain’t tame.”

Blanche, who’d survived months of the Galles at court, snorted. “And you’ll protect me?” she asked. Nell was tall and big-boned, but she was fifteen years old to Blanche’s twenty, and Blanche suspected she could drop the younger woman with a single blow. Laundry gave a girl muscles.

They were out in the darkness. “What’s eating
you
?” Nell asked. “Why’d you go and spit at the cap’n? He likes you.”

“He wants me,” Blanche said sullenly. “That doesn’t mean he likes me.”

“Is that the rub? Toby says the two of you…” Nell made a hand motion that was, blessedly, hidden in the darkness.

“Toby doesn’t know shit,” Blanche spat.

“Now you don’t sound like a lady,” Nell allowed, so very reasonably that suddenly Blanche stopped, crouched—and burst into tears.

She found herself crying on Nell’s shoulder. Like the Queen, she shook it off. “You should give me your coat,” Blanche said. She pushed a smile. “It stinks.”

Nell nodded. “I’d be happy—” she said. “I thought we was friends. But then you were—”

Blanche put up a hand. “I’m tired and—” She shook her head. “Damn it,” she said. She knew the fatigue and the worry had sapped her. Last night’s lack of sleep was no help. “I’m not a whore,” she said.

Nell laughed. “No one said you was!” she allowed.

“Cully thought so, and Cat,” Blanche said. They were walking more quickly.

“Aye, well, Cat pretty much hates women and Cully doesn’t think there’s another kind.” Nell shrugged. “I never get close to Cat.” She looked out into the darkness. The gate was close.

“But the cap’n likes you,” she went on. “And people are going to catch holy hell ’cause you spat on him. He’s out there right now, looking at sentries. Hear it? He’s caught someone asleep. Pay lost, and maybe a beating.”

“Very nice,” Blanche said stiffly. “Not my fault.”

Nell’s face, by the light of the torches burning at the city gate, showed a worldly cynicism that belied her years. “No?” she asked. “If’n you say.”

“You love him yourself—you lie with him if it’s so important to everyone.” Blanche regretted the words as soon as she said them.

Nell frowned. “No,” she said, as if considering the proposition. “No, that wouldn’t work. Bad for discipline, I expect.” She shook her head. “You need sleep,” she said, as if she were the older one. She gave Blanche a brief hug.

Blanche didn’t resist.

Released, she fled in past the town guards. She thought that if she met Prince Tancredo in the corridors she’d kill him, but everyone was asleep but a handful of servants. She put the Queen’s treasures in her outer room, found that Lady Almspend had rather thoughtfully made her up a pallet with a sheet and blanket next to her own, and lay down on it.

She wanted to go to sleep. Instead she lay thinking about what a fool she was for a long time.

The Company

D
awn found a surly company, sour from too much wine and too much marching. The horses were tired, and the oats were not enough to raise their spirits. Pages stumbled, half asleep, along the lines.

To add insult to injury, a light rain began to fall on men who’d slept with no tents and a single blanket.

Dropsy, one of the archers, was chained to the captain’s wagon, the only wagon left in the camp. Before they marched, the captain sat in judgment on him, and invoked the lesser penalty for sleeping on duty; not death and not a flogging. Instead, when all the men were formed, Cully stripped Dropsy to the skin and made him run down the ranks, and all the archers took a slap at him with their bows, or with arrows or leather belts or whatever they fancied. Running the gauntlet was a punishment as old as armies, and Nell, who hadn’t seen it done before, might have expected that the archers would go easy on one of their own.

She might have expected it, but she didn’t. The average archer’s capacity for cruel humour exceeded his kindness on the best of days—nice men stayed home and farmed. Nor was Oak Pew any different—her heavily studded belt slapped into Dropsy’s buttocks with a sound that made men wince and miss their blows.

Dropsy wailed at the pain and wept for it, but he didn’t fall down and he didn’t protest, and he was fast enough, when awake. He made it to the end more injured in pride than body. Cully was waiting with his filthy hose and his braes and shoes and a surgeon’s mate, who put a salve in the deeper welts.

The captain watched it all like an angry hawk watches rabbits.

“Mount,” he said to his trumpeter.

The men and women of the company were in a better mood for having punished Dropsy, and while the man still sobbed, which was disconcerting in a grown man and a killer, the rest ignored him, made dark jokes about his name and habits, and got their horses.

Mounted, they formed quickly, aware of the captain’s mood. The Occitans were slower off the mark, and the captain sent Ser Michael to move them.

Then he rode over in front of the company.

“We’re going into the worst place we’ve ever been,” he said. “If we’re lucky, we’ll only have to march two hundred leagues and then fight once. But my friends, the fun is over. I was gentle with Dropsy. In a day, a man asleep could be our deaths and the failure of our cause.” He looked them over. “The sorcerer has taken Ticondaga. To the best of our knowledge, he’s going for the Inn of Dorling—and after that, Albinkirk.” He sat back. “We will endeavour to stop him. But for the next few days, we will move very fast through country that may already be hostile. The next man or woman asleep on duty will be flogged—even if it is a knight.”

Silence.

“Good. Company will wheel to the right by subsections forming a column of fours. March.” The company’s many subsections made quarter wheels, so that the whole manoeuvred like Moreans from being a long line three horsemen deep to a column four wide facing off to the right, down the road.

“Halt,” he called, and each section alligned itself.

He raised his hammer over his head and winced. Most of his body hurt this morning. He shook his head and lowered the hammer.

The captain rode to the head of his column, where Toby and Nell and the rest of the
casa
waited. To the east, the sun crested the mountains of Morea. Ser Michael cantered up.

“The prince hasn’t even awakened yet,” he said.

The captain nodded. “Then we leave him behind.”

Ser Michael nodded. “That’ll go over well,” he said.

The captain frowned and raised his hammer again. “March!” he roared.

D
e La Marche died in the storming of Ticondaga. He didn’t die on the battlements, cutting his way in. He died in the sack, when children were being destroyed and eaten, when men who’d begged for quarter were fed to monsters by cheering sailors, when a hundred atrocities passed in a few beats of a terrified victim’s heart.

De La Marche stood in the yard running slick with fresh blood and tried to stop it, and a stone troll made a pulp of his head. Boglins ate part of him as he lay there and, later, something with too many legs ripped one of his arms off his corpse and took it away into the darkness.

Thorn stood like a great stone tree in the courtyard, watching. He did not move much—a waste of energy. He merely observed. The storming and consequent workings had robbed him of a great deal of his power, at least temporarily, and he had not had the replenishment from Ghause that he had anticipated.

The sack went on around him.

He saw De La Marche protest—saw him stand between predator and prey, and saw him go down. And later he saw the trenoch—a swamp thing—feast on the corpse and take some away for its disgusting young.

Thorn was also digesting a feast, but his feast was one of the mind.

Ser Hartmut came and stood beneath Thorn’s great form. He said nothing, but also watched as men behaved worse than beasts and predators fed.

The garrison of Ticondaga provided a great deal of sport.

And eventually, when the attackers were sated, when even Kevin Orley’s warriors sank on their haunches in disgust or shock or merely fatigue, Ash came.

His presence seemed to fill the yard, and Thorn had the disconcerting
notion that the entity was feeding there, too. But he again manifested as a pair of fools, in filthy motley, who spoke with one brass voice.

“Look at them,” he said. He pointed a stick shaped like a snake at where two sailors, Etruscan mercenaries or Galles, were tormenting a man whose screams had almost been exhausted. “Look at them. Give them license, and they show what they really are.”

Thorn didn’t turn his head. “What are they, Master?”

“Worse than anything the Wild ever conjured,” Ash said. “Men are the cruellest and most vile creatures that have ever come to this place. Servants only of their own corruption and wickedness.”

Thorn did not disagree.

“One of my other plans has miscarried,” Ash said. “So I must ask you to march sooner, on Dorling.”

Thorn was still working on the things he’d learned in the moments during and after Ghause’s death. The out-welling of power—the incandescent
ops
—

He had learned much. And he was still pulling at some of the twisted ends, even as he wove others into new barriers.

In fact, Thorn was busy knotting and splicing around the black hole that stood somewhere in his mind. The cascade of thoughts by which he’d reached certain conclusions was hard to reconstruct, but he knew he’d taken some of Ghause’s memories in his unsuccessful attempt to subsume her. One of them had triggered something.

The black hole in his mind was the same size and shape as the black eggs he carried. It had been put there at the same time, by the same hand.

For the same reason.

He was, himself, incubating something. He had an excellent idea of exactly what that was.

He had begun to take the steps required to deceive his master, and perhaps—to survive.

And more.

“One of your plans miscarried?” Thorn asked gravely.

“I cannot be everywhere,” Ash hissed. “And the bitch Queen and her servants were there before me.” The jesters—shaped like misshapen children with fat bodies and long, thin limbs—both giggled. And spat.

“Can you not?” Thorn asked, trying to mask his interest. He was weaving a net of the insubstantial stuff in which the mind built the palace, and he was endeavouring to use it to build a deception, so that Ash would see only what he expected.

Ser Hartmut grunted. “To whom are you speaking, Sorcerer?” he asked.

Thorn pointed a stony finger. “Do you not see two capering children, dressed in motley?” he asked.

Ser Hartmut shook his head. “I see many terrible things,” he said. “But no jesters.”

Thorn considered this.

Ash said, “No, even I cannot be everywhere. And you must have learned by now how opaque everything becomes—like muddy water—when too many fingers stir it.”

Thorn considered this statement, too. In his head, his will was madly building, throwing up beaver dams of obfuscation behind thickets of deception between his thinking space and the area around the blackness.

“It doesn’t matter much,” Ash said. “I’ve out-witted her anyway, and she’s left with her concentration on the wrong moment and the wrong avatar. So the loss of a few pawns—even my favourites—is no great loss.”

Thorn thought that if the mad jesting twins were, themselves, people, then in fact, Ash was betraying fury, humiliation and loss.

“Be that as it may,” the darkness said. “It’s time to reveal a little more of our hand and limit the damage. Have you seen this?” Ash asked, and disclosed a nested set of workings, a box within a box within a box.

The whole was so labyrinthine that Thorn’s head reeled.

“I had no idea,” he said. “That life was so small.”

“Small, and wild, all the way down to the smallest,” Ash cackled. “And sometimes the manipulation of the smallest is of the greatest moment. On to Dorling, Journeyman!”

Thorn listened to the benighted children cackle and thought,
He has, somewhere, lost a battle. And he means to betray me. He is not God, nor yet Satan.

I can do this. Very well.

“We must march to Dorling,” Thorn said to Ser Hartmut. “As soon as we can.”

Ser Hartmut chuckled darkly. “Perhaps when all the women are dead and the fires are out, you’ll get this—horde—to move again. My experience is that most creatures, and not just men, take what they can and return home. Most creatures do not see war as a means to an end. It is merely an end.”

Indeed, over the next day, almost as many creatures of the Wild left his army as joined it. New creatures and bands of men came in every day—Outwallers, bandits, cave trolls, small tribes of boglins under their shamans and many of the bigger creatures, too—a whole flight of wyverns Thorn had never seen before, from far to the north, and a new, strong band of wardens, big, heavily built saurians from north of the Squash Country—hereditary enemies of Mogon’s and her ilk.

Many of the northern Huran who had come as volunteers left; some in disgust, and some merely because they had good loot, or a captive to adopt or torment.

Despite the shifting, Thorn’s host was immense, and the loot of Ticondaga could not hold them long. Nor feed them. Hartmut’s men and the sailors made a camp and fortified it, ate from their own stores and refused to share with any but Orley’s warband.

Orley’s warband were now so well armed and armoured that they appeared a regiment of dark knights with scars and tattoos and deerskin surcoats. Most had heavy bills, or axes, and some carried crossbows as well. Kevin Orley was already a name. Men flocked to his banner now, and he called himself the Earl of Westwall. The armoured fist of the Orleys now floated over the smoking ruins of Ticondaga.

Ser Hartmut was a good teacher in the ways of war, and Thorn listened to him as he planned. Then he ordered his horde to break up—to feed off a larger swathe of the Adnacrags and to inflict more terror and more damage.

“Meet me under the Ings of the Wolf’s Head in five days,” he said, his voice like the growl and roar of summer thunder. “And we will take Dorling and feast again.”

Ser Hartmut organized the men—Galles, sailors, Outwallers, Orley’s warband and all their camp-followers. On their last day at Ticondaga, they were joined—late—by the expected reinforcement from Galle—another hundred lances and a strong company of the routiers with their own captains; Guerlain Capot led the brigans, men as hard and as rough as Orley’s men, and Ser Cristan de Badefol led a hundred Etruscan lances under a black banner. On his armour was the motto “
Enemy of God, Mercy and Justice”
in gold. It was said he had once been a member of the Order of Saint Thomas.

As soon as he arrived, he approached Ser Hartmut. They embraced—carefully—and de Badefol examined the ruin of Ticondaga.

“I told d’Abblemont that you’d take it,” the Etruscan said. “I brought what I could. There’s a lot of shit going on.”

Ser Hartmut wrinkled his nose fastidiously at de Badefol’s coarseness.

“Oh, don’t be a choirboy,” de Badefol said. “Just before we left port we heard that the King of Galle had been badly beaten in southern Arelat. There’s a rumour up in Three Rivers—since a pair of Etruscan merchants came in—that the Etruscans have asked the Emperor for help, it’s so bad.” De Badefol watched a wyvern taking flight off the water—its great, slow, laboured wings brushing the water at every stretch so that, as it lifted into the grey morning air of the mountains, its wings left a succession of perfectly round spreads of ripples. After sixteen great heaves of its wings it was airborne—just clearing the distant tree line across the lake, where Chimney Point came down from the Green Hills’ side. “By God, Ser Hartmut, I rejoice to see that we are directly in league with the forces of Satan. I’ve always been a devotee.”

“You speak much nonsense and little wisdom, my friend.”

“Does d’Abblemont know we are supporting the very side that makes war on the King in Galle and Arelat?” de Badefol asked.

“I care nothing for that,” Ser Hartmut growled. “I have orders, and I obey them, until they are complete.”

De Badefol nodded. “How very simple,” he said. “Well, my bravos will probably take a few days to—Black Angels of Hell, what is that?”

A few yards away, a pair of boglins emerged from the ground. They had bored through the earth, as they did when it was soft, and now appeared within the human encampment. In moments they’d caught a goat and begun to devour her.

Ser Hartmut drew his sword, which burst into flame. He killed both of the boglins, the sword slicing effortlessly through their carcasses and leaving them in the same unjointed state to which they had rendered the goat.

Within seconds, carrion birds began to descend.

“Where the fuck am I?” de Badefol asked.

“This is the Wild,” Ser Hartmut said. “Best get used to it. Here, one is either predator, or food.”

Sixty miles east of Dorling, the Emperor mounted his horse, took his helmet from the junior spatharios, Derkensun, and his sword from the senior, Guntar Grossbeak, and rode to his officers, gathered to review his magnificent army. Derkensun was still unsure of his rank, cautious in ceremonial. Grossbeak—tall and with fading copper hair and the biggest nose of any man Derkensun had ever met, was a lord, a Jarl. From home. He had no experience in the guard—but a great name as a killer.

Derkensun liked him, but he was a symptom of the imperial army’s greatest problem—too many new men.

The Emperor’s army broke camp and marched in a damp dawn. The Meander flowed on their right and to the south, the outposts of the Green Hills rolled away into long downs, some crowned with ancient hill forts, complex rings of earth, and some with standing cairns so ancient that no man remembered who had built them.

The Emperor watched the head of his army, guarded today by his Nordikaans, each carrying a great axe or a long-bladed two-handed sword, and wearing hauberks to their knees or below—some of steel, some of dull iron, some of bronze. Many of the Nordikaans now sported Etruscan or Alban breastplates over their maille, and some wore the new-style bascinets with maille aventails to pad the axed hafts on their shoulders. Almost every man had acquired full plate leg armour since last year’s bloody victory in Thrake. But the magnificent cloaks on their shoulders were the same, and many helmets glinted gold in the rising sun.

Behind the Emperor’s person, today, rode the Scholae, the elite cavalry of Morea, with horn bows scabbarded by their sides and coats of plates or steel scale over light maille, with gold brocade surcoats and billed helmets, new made in distant Venezia from hardened steel. Each troop of the Scholae rode matched horses; black in the first troop, bay in the second, and grey in the third. The scarlet-clad Vardariotes were already far ahead,
moving across the hills in a nearly invisible skirmish line that covered the front and both flanks of the column.

Behind the Scholae rode two regiments of the Emperor’s stradiotes—his semi-feudal cavalry; the men of southern Morea and the men of the city. The northern Morea and Thrake would need a generation to recover from treason, stasis, and battle. But already since last year the stradiotes had changed in armament, and more of them rode larger horses and had heavier armour—made available at very favourable prices by the Etruscan factors.

Behind the stradiotes came a banda of mountaineers from the slopes between Alba and the Empire—tall, strong men and women with heavy javelins and heavier bows. They wore no armour at all beyond skull caps of iron. Many carried small round targets, but none had a knife longer than his forearm. The mountaineers had their own officers, bearded men on small ponies, and they marched quickly enough to keep up with the horsemen.

Behind them came a banda of Outwallers from south Huran, around Orawa, the extreme northern outposts of the Empire. They had come south to Middleburg and many had already shadowed the hosts of the sorcerer. Janos Turkos rode at their head, smoking. They kept no sort of order and sometimes left the column altogether.

Last, in the rearguard, came Ser Milus, with the company’s great banner of Saint Catherine, and with him rode Morgan Mortirmir and fully half of the company, and perhaps half again—Ser Milus had been busy recruiting.

All totalled, the Emperor had five thousand seasoned veterans to march to war in the north. If he was worried, his beautiful, bland face gave none of that away.

The army cheered him, and then turned, almost as one man, and moved off to the west.

Morgon Mortirmir had enjoyed a pleasant semester polishing his skills—really just a few weeks—before the Emperor’s messenger and Ser Milus’s had collided on his inn’s stairs summoning him to war. But he’d learned some fascinating things, and he’d used the first ten days out of Liviapolis on the road to work them into practical designs.