The Dread Wyrm (Traitor Son Cycle) (84 page)

They both glared—and both laughed.

“I think he uses death to power his essence.” Harmodius shrugged. “I really know nothing—I guess everything. I will not tell you what I will do.”

“And Amicia? Lissen Carak?” Gabriel asked. His pulse raced even in the
aethereal
.

“Defended. Amicia wishes to come with the army. I think she should not—but we need every scrap of hermetical talent.” Harmodius set his jaw.

Gabriel nodded. “In as much as I am captain—you are magister. I believe I can defeat Thorn’s material army. In fact, I’ll go so far as to say I can defeat him with minimal losses.”

“You’ve learned a great deal of humility,” Harmodius said dryly. “But I will
add this. If you die and I die, and Ash manifests, and Thorn triumphs, and Lissen Carak does not fall—then we have not wholly lost.”

“I probably lost Ticondaga and all my folk by hubris,” Gabriel said. “I have learned in just a few years making war that to dwell on errors is to make more.” He shrugged. “I am afraid of a battle with so many imponderables. But I will do my best.”

Harmodius nodded. “I will spare you the statement that you should not blame yourself.”

Gabriel shrugged.

“What happens if we win on the ground and lose here?” Gabriel asked.

“We all die,” Harmodius said.

“The converse is also true,” Gabriel said. “You would have me die, so that untold numbers of beings I have never met are protected from Ash holding a gate.” Gabriel shook his head. “I’m not that noble. Let’s just beat him here.” He managed a grin. “And live to tell about it.”

Harmodius shook his head. “At best, our losses will be staggering.”

Gabriel sighed. “I’ll try and prevent that.” But there was doubt in his voice.

In the real, Gabriel was the last but Harmodius to return. He looked around, feeling—rested. He tried to empty his wine cup, but that had apparently already happened, and the fire was down and most of the candles out.

Harmodius grunted. “I’m too old for all this,” he said. “Good night.”

“Where are you sleeping?” Gabriel asked.

“In this chair.” Harmodius stretched. “Which even this body isn’t young enough for.”

“You can share my room,” Gabriel volunteered. “Come, old man. Three flights of stairs and there’s a feather bed.”

“Lead on,” Harmodius said.

They made it to the top with minimal grunting. Gabriel got the old man into his camp bed—the castle seemed to have no beds of its own, or perhaps other guests had them.

Toby didn’t awake any of the times they stepped over him, and he looked exhausted. Gabriel let him sleep. He found the leather case where his wine was stored, and found both bottles empty.

“Damn,” he said.

Harmodius, the most puissant magister in all of the Nova Terra, was already snoring.

Gabriel looked at him for a moment. The cased window was open and moonlight fell on the old man’s outthrust arm, and the night was chilly, and Gabriel got his red cloak off the clothes piled on his chair and spread it over the old man. It smelled of wood smoke. That sparked a few memories.

He smiled again. Then he went out past his solar, where Nell was sleeping with a young man spooned against her. Gabriel nodded thoughtfully
and took his page’s canteen and pulled the stopper. There was water in it. He drank it.

It wasn’t what he wanted, and he went into the hall, his cup still in his hand.

The Queen’s door opened, and Blanche backed through it with a taper in her hand.

A variety of thoughts crossed Gabriel’s mind all at once, and when she turned, they both flinched.

“I’m sorry,” he said, although he had no idea for what he was apologizing.

She paused. “May I help you?” she asked. “The babe’s asleep and so is her grace.”

Gabriel waved his cup.
I’m the captain, damn it. I can be in the hall at midnight.
There was something in her air that damned him for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. “I was only looking for a cup of wine.”

A loud snore ripped out of Harmodius’s throat and echoed down the stone steps.

“He sounds as if he’s choking,” she said, and almost giggled.

They were looking into each other’s eyes. It went on too long.

“I’ll…” he began, cursing himself for ten types of a fool.

“I have wine,” she said. Her voice was husky. “In my room.” Her eyes never left his.

He reached out his hand.

She took it. “I want to see your—griffon,” she whispered.

He laughed. She had no idea why. But he took her to the door and produced a key made of wrought steel.

“Will he scream?” she asked. Suddenly she was appalled—that she’d offered him wine, that she’d been so bold about the monster.

He shook his head. “Perhaps when we leave. Let me go first.”

He opened the door and she was shocked—immediately—to find that the room revealed, which had once been a fine solar, was now roofless to the open night, and a canopy of stars rose above her. There were two chairs, and a heavy iron chain, and a—a—

A monster.

Gabriel went forward, crooning, and it—It was huge. It seemed to fill the very large tower room, as big as the whole home she’d grown up in with her mother. It put its head on the ground.

And rolled on its back like an enormous cat.

“Come on,” Ser Gabriel said.

She breathed out and moved forward. And then, almost without thinking, she went straight up to the great thing. She reached out a hand and touched it. “How big will he get?” she asked.

“He’s only half grown, aren’t you, laddy?” Gabriel crooned. “He’ll be big enough to ride in a month or two.”

It had feathers on its head and an enormous, vicious beak, downward
and backward curved like a scimitar of horn, and wickedly sharp, and two great black eyes that seemed fathomless. The feathers of its wings marched in endless organic rows, green and black and white and gold—true gold, as if all the gilders in the world had united to work on its feathers. But just behind the mighty muscles of its wings there was a line where downy, almost misshapen feathers marched along with hair, and then, from that line back, it looked to have a coat more like that of a horse or cow—except for the barbaric talons.

It should have seemed ungainly and ugly. Instead, it was—queerly beautiful, like a much-scarred tomcat or a favourite old shoe. She scratched the place on the great belly where the fur and the feathers met, and the great monster made a noise somewhere between a purr and a screech.

“Oh, he likes you,” Ser Gabriel said.

With the purr came some other emanation. Blanche had little experience of matters
aethereal
—none, really. So for the first time, she felt the tickle of something unseelie in her head.

Ser Gabriel gave the beast a slap on the side of his beak. “None of that,” he said.

Blanche suddenly felt a terrible, wonderful upwelling of love.

Inside her head, Gabriel’s voice said, “Stop that.”

Just for a moment she saw him, in a red doublet and hose, standing on a parquetry floor in some sort of cathedral, with statues and numbers all about him, and a beautiful woman on a pedestal behind him, dressed like the statues in churches.

“I’ll do my own courting,” the voice in her head said. “Down, Ariosto!”

The great creature raised his head and both her eyes met both of its eyes. Its impossibly rough tongue brushed her face. She laughed, although she trembled, and although she suddenly had the most intimate—erotic—picture of Ser Gabriel, and she blushed.

She started to turn away and her shoulder met Gabriel’s.

His lips came down on hers. She didn’t feel as if she was controlling her body, but she fit herself against him from her knee to her head. She had never done this with any boy. She felt wanton, deliciously so.

The griffon watched them, unblinking. Gabriel took his lips away from hers and brushed them against her neck, and then his hand tightened and he pulled her—gently—towards the door.

The great monster made a sound very like a sigh.

Blanche turned back, and Gabriel, lightly but firmly, stiff-armed her out the door.

He shut it firmly. Turned away from her, and locked it.

“If you kiss me,” he said, his voice husky, “I’d rather it was of your own free will.” He turned back. “Ariosto is—A creature of the Wild.” He shrugged.

Blanche realized that she was breathing very hard, that her skin was
flushed, and her hands unsteady. She was all too aware that the Queen’s solar was the next door, that they were virtually in public.

She turned to her own door, suddenly quite sure what she wanted.

Utterly unsure how to express it.

“He’s beautiful,” she said.

Gabriel followed her, remaining just a step away.

“Come,” she said simply. She couldn’t imagine a speech that would express her thoughts and feelings. So she went to her door, and opened it.

They walked through the low, iron-bound oak door, and she shut it carefully. She put the small taper in her hand into a travelling stick on a low trunk. Time seemed to pass very slowly. Each of her movements seemed very precious. Graceful. Beautiful. She rose on her toes to fetch something.

I should be asleep
, he thought, along with a thousand other thoughts.

She took the dented silver cup from his hand and poured him a cup of wine. She put something in her mouth.

She looked up at him, and took a sip—more than a sip. Boldly. And then put it in his hands and closed her own around his. “If—” Her voice shook. “If you make a baby on me, swear you’ll rear it as one of your own.”

“Blanche—”

“Swear. Or take your wine and go.” She was shaking.

“Blanche—”

“Don’t cozen me!” she said.

He took the wine, drank a fair amount without taking his eyes off her and frowned. He kissed her. It was effortless—they flowed together and were one, for so long that he almost spilled the rest of the wine.

And then she placed her hand firmly on his breastbone. She was not weak.

“Swear,” she said. “I won’t make you pretend you’ll marry me. Just that you won’t do what some noble bastard did to my mother.”

Gabriel sat on the chest. His mind was going around and around, and half of it seemed to be chasing Amicia. And the other half was utterly captivated.

“It is not that I won’t swear,” he said. “It’s that I don’t like what I see in the mirror if I do.”

Blanche’s breath caught. “I know you’ll marry the Queen,” she said suddenly. “I know what I am, and what you are.”

Gabriel didn’t catch himself. He laughed.

“No,” he said. “I can imagine many outcomes, but those pips are not on the dice.” He smiled at her. “And I’m at least as much a bastard as you.”

She leaned back, as if to look at him more closely. “Really?”

He got up. He was overcome with her—the palpable reality of her, her smell, her unwashed hair and the taste of her mouth and the clove she’d just chewed and what that said.

“State secret,” he whispered.

She licked her lips. “I know who your parents are,” she said.

He froze. She felt the tension in his muscles, and he took a step for the door, but it was as if he was in the
aethereal.
He
meant
to step to the door, but instead he was holding her. Her warmth went through his hands. Without a conscious thought, he pulled the veil off her hair and put a hand behind her head. Her kirtle opened at the side, and fit like a glove, but he managed to find the skin where her shoulder met her neck.

“Swear, damn you!” she said. She pushed him hard enough that he fell back across the chest. “Or leave,” she said.

“That hurt,” he said, and meant it. “I swear on my sword that any baby we make will be reared as my own.” He caught his breath. “I’m only promising so that you won’t hurt me again.”

She laughed.

The taper gave up—a last flare of light that showed her laughing at his discomfiture, and then darkness. The moon was on the other side of the tower, and her window was closed and shuttered. There was some rustling.

“I feel I should tell you—” he said to the darkness.

“Stop talking,” she said, very close.

Her lips found his.

After a pause, she said, “It’s side opening, I’ve already unlaced it.”

His hand finally found bare skin…

Gilson’s Hole—Sauce

T
he first wave of boglins hit their new defences just after first light. It wasn’t really an attack or even a probe—the boglins had a hard time with the marsh and the ditch at the base of the ridge was worse, already filled with swamp water. They milled about and threw sling stones—a new trick—and made skittering noises.

Then they began to move off into the newly forested land west of the Hole.

By then, the camp—well back from the barriers, between the old village and the old fort—was awake.

Sauce took a pair of lances to the top of the first wall of earth and Mag came up behind her.

Without any drama, she pointed a finger at the ground to the north and there was a flare of heat—the sort of shimmer that warm rock can give on a hot summer day.

Mag smiled. “I have sewing to finish,” she said. She went back to camp.

Young Phillip—one of her Morean knights—looked a little pale.

Sauce made a face. “I used to think Tom was the scariest of the bunch,” she said.

She walked off to look at her pickets.

She had to walk a long way. Given two full days and some farm labour, Ser John had managed a small miracle of construction. The low ridge—not so low in places, either—that hemmed in the Hole on the south and west was now crowned with a long, winding earthworks well-reinforced
with lumber, and in front of it the trees were cleared to stumps for almost a hundred paces—right down to the marsh—and then piled beyond in a tangle of spruce and maple.

Closed redoubts watched the ends, with trenches. On the west side, the ridge ran to the very edge of the creek that helped define the position. On the east side, the ridge petered out into a deep, wide bog. Behind her there was the higher ground with the old fort. They didn’t have the manpower to hold it—but it would take a determined assault willing to take heavy losses to get round the east end and past the redoubt—and the covered, secret surprise.

She knew the smell of roast boglin and it was heavy in the air. She wrinkled her nose and exchanged salutes with the armoured men in the south redoubt. They’d clearly stood to arms, and now looked sheepish and bored.

“Plenty of fighting later,” she said. “Christ, only a fool looks forward to it.”

She peered out over the wall. Someone out there was alive—a very accurate sling stone buzzed past her head.

“Fuck me,” she muttered. But she was on display, and she enjoyed the salutes. They never got old. She grinned. “Don’t get hit,” she said. “That’s an order.”

A generation of very young Jarsay knights grinned back at her. She’d been, to all intents, the
primus pilus
for three weeks. Everyone knew her.

“Don’t stand there like gowps,” she snapped. “Get a couple of archers behind a mantlet and scour the killing ground. You know the drill.”

The second attack had more meat in it. There was a directing intelligence behind it—at least, they heard horns and bellows—and a boiling mass of boglins threw surprising amounts of wood and grass and ferns and other organic matter—including charred boglins—into the ditch. They’d crossed the marsh silently, mostly the new imps and more boglins.

A heavy crossbow coughed from a covered position well up the ridge. On one of the few small mounds of dry in the swamp, a daemon was struck right through his body. His screams went on until one of his mates finished him. The boglins crossed, climbed up the revetment, and died.

Some of the farmers from the valley and the Brogat, working away at clearing trees and digging dirt, were appalled by the wave of boglins. Some ran. A few deserted.

A few started killing boglins with shovels.

“Sign ’em up,” Sauce said. Both men proved to be farm labourers—men who owned nothing and were almost slaves.

“How’d we get all this farm labour?” she asked Ser John.

Ser John was watching the sky. They had four towers going up, all holding new-built torsion machines. He was wondering where the wyverns were. “The Captain of Albinkirk offered a year’s remission of all taxes for ten days’ digging,” he said.

Sauce grinned. “That Captain of Albinkirk, he’s one smart man.”

A little after two in the afternoon, and the mess kettles were on for dinner. A convoy rolled in from Albinkirk—forty wagons full of food and munitions. Sheaves of new arrows, already on spacers in linen bags, and new tinned-iron kettles. Some new brass kettles made in Genua.

“Miss me?” the captain said, and Sauce threw her arms around him and kissed him. Some of the newer members of the company and some of the knights with Ser Ricar were appalled. Others cheered.

She leaned back to look at him. “You look like you got the cream.”

He laughed. “We’ll see,” he said. “The cream may yet get me. In the meantime…”

He spent two hours with them, outlining the new alliance, quelling their fears of having a Wild ally, and riding along the two ridges south and west of the Hole and one high beech-tree-covered ridge north and west of the little stream.

When he was done, he bowed in the saddle to Ser John. “You’ve done it. It’s beautiful.”

Ser John was hesitant. “I was only going to be here until today—tomorrow at the outside.”

The captain nodded, his eyes on the distant Green Hills. “I expect we’ll fight tomorrow, but the real fight will be the day after.” He kept watching the hills. “I may have this all wrong. The sorcerer can still just go north into the woods and come at us on the old Ticondaga road or across West Kanata.”

Sauce raised an eyebrow. “But?”

“But he has much greater supply problems than we do,” the captain said with his breezy confidence.

“A million monsters…”

“They still have to eat. And no supply train, no wagons, nothing.” The captain was watching the woods. “He can go around—but will he have an army at the end?”

Ser John whistled. “You give me joy,” he said.

The captain shook his head. “He could still decide to march into Morea. Then
—
” He sighed. “Then it’s all for nothing, and we start making stuff up.” He looked down at the first ridge, below them. “Every attack by boglins makes me happy. Bad Tom ought to reach you at sunset.”

Sauce started. Ser John raised
both
eyebrows.

“Messengers. All the white banda will come in—here. Tom’s Hillmen will stay out—off our right flank, in the ravines to the east, on the other bank of the Albin.” He looked back at both of them. “I’m not going to repeat Chevin. I can only hope that Thorn
is
.”

Ser John chewed the end of his moustache. Sauce chewed her hair.

Sauce said, “Why not hit one end of our line or another and roll us up?”

The captain shrugged. “Then we have a battle. I’m trying to
be
the
sorcerer. He can’t have much control over his minions beyond ‘stop’ and ‘go.’ I don’t think the stone trolls can form fours and march to the flank. But we’ve had time to prepare and we’ve used it. It
should
prove a decisive advantage.”

Sauce said, “But you have doubts.”

The Red Knight nodded. “I always have doubts.”

Sauce glanced at him.

“My military tutor had an interesting definition for this situation,” the captain went on. “He said that a battle was a situation where two commanders each thought they had a decisive superiority and one was wrong.” He was still watching the distant hills. “I keep putting myself in the shoes—or what-have-you—of the sorcerer. Why’s he even here? He should go home and declare victory.” He frowned. “I’m missing something.”

“He killed your mother, and you think he should just go home?” Sauce said. “Don’t you want to fight?”

He looked at her as if she had something hideous springing from her forehead. “That’s amateur talk, Sauce. You taught me better than that. This is strictly business.”

Sauce laughed. “I never said any such thing.” She shrugged. “Maybe I did.”

“You did. You were talking about johns, and sex. But it’s the same lesson. No room here for hate. Strictly business. War is about mess kettles and latrines and having the last set of warm, dry fighters in reserve.” He nodded. “I think the sorcerer hates us. That would be excellent.”

“He killed your ma,” Sauce said.

“Drop it, Sauce.” His eyes were suddenly on her, and there at the edges was the red she’d expected all day.

“You’ve got to be human,” she said.

“I’ve been very human recently. Right now, I’m the captain.” He played with a glove.

She looked out over the wilderness that stretched away—everywhere—for miles.

“Why are we fighting here? You said Albinkirk.” Sauce found that she was angry. He was up to something. She thought of all her conversations with Mag.

He had that look she hated, where he, in fact, had all the answers and all his talk was just bullshit.

“I thought we’d fight at Albinkirk, but things changed. I changed my mind. The Faery Knight, Bad Tom—the Emperor.” He shrugged. “What
is
eating you?”

“We’re going to fight the Wild with Wild things inside our own ranks, and on
their
ground.” Sauce looked at him. “Everything I know about war, I learned from you, Jehan, Cully and Tom, and
everything
tells me this is the wrong place. In a swamp? In the woods?”

He looked at her and nodded.

“Yes,” he said.

She frowned. “Suddenly, you are the Queen’s Captain,” she said. “I thought we were a free company. On adventure. Making our fortunes. Not making you King.”

“King?” He laughed. “Oh, Sauce, I promise you I do not want to be King of Alba.”

That relieved her. “Or King of the North?” she asked.

“Nor that.” He smiled.

She still thought the smile was too charming and too false.

“What are you after, then?” she asked.

“After the battle,” he said. “There’s so many angles now, I can’t remember them all. Let’s win the battle. Then—we’ll have a command meeting.”

This made her smile. “Unless we’re dead.”

“Right, in which case the meeting is off.” He smiled back, and for a moment, they were who they had once been.

Before he left, the captain spent another hour closeted with Mag. Neither of them shared what had been discussed.

At sunset, the white banda marched into camp from the east, along the same set of low ridges over which Bad Tom and his Hillmen had disappeared. They were on foot and all their wagons were gone—left on the other side of the river to the east.

The celebration was muted, and nearly ruined by the last-light assault of a mixed force of creatures of the Wild. But darkness did not help them negotiate the traps; superior night vision was of little use in seeing stakes dug in days before, and a pair of torsion engines dropped baskets of rocks on the beaten zone.

No Head watched it all from the westernmost tower with a bottle in one hand and a stylus in the other.

Half an hour later he reported to Sauce and Ser John, on the forward wall overlooking the Hole.

“Gelfred says they’re well around us, and working up to an attack on the back of the camp.” No Head opened his wax slate. “I have a whole forest of suggestions and additions to the current scheme.”

Sauce looked smug.

Within ten minutes the whole camp was standing to arms. The farmers were drawn up well back from the walls, with improvised weapons to hand. There were archers in the towers and men-at-arms lining all four sides of the camp wall.

Just at moonrise there was a cacophony of horns. Mag was sewing away, making mess kettle bags for the new kettles at a great rate.

On the wall, Ser Bescanon sounded a horn.

Mag bit off her thread, took up a small piece of char and snapped her fingers. The char burnt to ash.

Sixty yards from the ditch of the camp’s back wall, there was a deep hollow, almost a long bowshot from end to end, fully covered from the firing positions on the camp wall. All along that hollow, there were clay jars buried deep in the soft earth, each sealed with wax and with a piece of the very same char cloth—linen woven on the same bolt—in the midst of the jar.

And bits of rusty metal and old nails and the like.

And several pounds of Master Smythe’s powder.

Mag’s tiny working produced six prodigious explosions.

Immediately, the back gate of the camp opened and a mounted sortie went out—first a dozen Vardariots under Zac who spread like a magick curtain in front of the knights, and then forty knights armed cap-à-pied. Behind them came another forty men-at-arms who shook out into a loose line with two paces between armoured men.

The mounted men cleared the road by torchlight, and the dismounted men-at-arms did most of the killing. In the dark, a man in armour was very hard to injure, and anything without armour—especially stunned, wounded cave bears and irks—were easily dispatched.

The smell of hell come to earth—sulphur and saltpeter—hung in the damp night air.

In the night, Mag exchanged workings with something out in the darkness. She left two great golden shields over the whole of the camp when she went to her blanket roll. The golden shields caused as much lost sleep and consternation among the newer men and women as irks and boglins might have done.

Mag awoke to find the young Mortirmir was releasing fireballs from a tower—one working that loosed one small ball from each fingertip, where they hurried out into the darkness like malignant glow flies. By the time she climbed the tower to him, he was showing off, casting complex arcs of light and tiny focused beams of red.

“You could save some of that for when it matters,” Mag said.

With a dramatic
swoosh
, Morgon produced a magnificent, gurgling bundle of focused
ops
like a tiny sun, complete to straying arms of white-hot gas. He flung it so far that it simply vanished.

“What was that for?” Mag asked. There was a precision to the way he used
ops
and the way he focused that she admired—more as a seamstress than as a magicker.

He turned and smiled his ingenuous smile. “Just because I can,” he said. “Ser Milus says by now the woods are full a mile or more deep around us.”