The Gathering Storm (63 page)

The ground had been worn away to expose a wide, flat rock. The silver griffin lay draped along the warm stone, sunning itself with its head resting on its paws and its wings folded back over its body. Its tail flicked up and down, up and down, as though its bodily repose concealed a restless heart.

A scan of the landscape revealed only grass, the spearlike tops of a trio of lonesome fir trees, and a scattering of gray rock outcrops thrust up here and there throughout the grass. He heard no birdsong, only the sigh of the wind. He was alone with the griffin. He took a step, and a second, as he shifted his grip on the spear and edged sideways.

His keen hearing saved him—that, and the unwieldy mass of the second griffin.

The scrape of its footfall rang out like a scream in the silence. He spun, throwing up the spear to protect himself, but her body bore him to the ground and the spear shattered under the force of her swiping claw. She was immense. He jabbed his knee up into her belly. That beaked head sewed around to get a better look at him. He clawed desperately at her throat, but each time he closed his hand, each time he scrabbled for purchase at her neck as he tried to squirm away out from under her, her feathers cut him. Blood streamed from his hands from a score of fine incisions. She reared back her head and struck.

He jerked sideways, but not far enough. Pain ripped through his chest and his vision hazed. His bleeding hands flexed impotently as they sought any kind of weapon to grip, but their feeble grasp closed on nothing, only air, and even that weak movement sent waves of pain flooding through his body until he could neither think nor move. He could not even see. Agony blinded him. He could only wait for the deathblow.

He could only wait.

A flash of heat and fire exploded around him. Had the griffin struck again? Was this the pain of dying? Or was he already dead, ascending through the spheres toward the cold bright eternity of the Chamber of Light?

I don’t want to die.

I’m not ready.

Pain, and this billowing heat that washed over him in unending waves, tore away his thoughts.

The shadow of the griffin moved off him. The sun’s blazing light scalded his face and made him blink.

Liath stood over him, golden-brown hair fallen all untidy over her shoulders. It needed combing. He loved to comb her hair. That steady stroke in the lush thickness of her hair was one of the few things that could soothe the restlessness that ate at him.

“Pray God I am not too late,” the vision of Liath said, although she could not possibly be kneeling beside him. She had abandoned him four years ago, left him and the child without a word. He had a lot of things to say to her, hoarded up over the months, some of them festering and rancid and others painful and sweet.

An actual physical body blocked the stabbing of light that tormented him. A touch brushed his brow.

“Sanglant, I pray you, answer me if you can.”

Her lips touched his parted mouth. It was like water to a parched man, giving him strength for the fight ahead.

Never let it be said that he did not fight until his last breath.

“You will never kill me,” he said to Bloodheart. Some days, those were the only words he remembered how to say.

“He lives.” A fire burned behind her, or perhaps it was the setting sun streaming golden light across grass troubled by the wind. A knife flashed, but he could not struggle against the killing blow. He was paralyzed, staring at the knife in her hand. She cut away his tunic from his torso and bared his flesh to the air. So much color leached from her face that she looked gray when she saw what lay beneath the cloth.

“I was too slow,” she said. “Too late.”

A few solitary raindrops splashed on his cheek, although
he saw no clouds in the darkening expanse above. Nearby, a griffin shrieked its chilling call.

“Beware,” he whispered, trying to warn his benefactor, who had taken Liath’s shape. Pain made him hallucinate. “The griffin stalks. Her feathers …”

“Hush,” she said. “Rest.”

“Griffin feathers cut the threads of magic.”

She sat back, surprised, her expression an odd combination of fear and startled, joyous revelation.

“Griffin feathers cut the threads of magic!” she repeated. Blue fire sparked in her eyes, the wink of fire caught and contained in her deepest heart. That spark blinded him, sent him falling and spinning although he lay supine on the ground.

He has wings, or must have, because he rises above the earth and above his body, above the grass like a dragon launching itself into flight, a little slowly, somewhat ponderous, but determined and powerful. He sees a man lying on the ground, his torso horribly slashed. His dragon’s vision is so keen that he can actually see the heart beating in that torn cavity, pulsing and darkly red. Blood spills over shoulder and arm, staining the cloth of his tunic, staining the grass and the soil. A beautiful woman kneels beside the body. Although she looks exactly as Liath looked three years before, she must be a witch able to conceal herself in the form of another. Yet she speaks with Liath’s voice and moves with Liath’s nervous grace and stares up defiantly as an owl glides into view and comes to rest a body’s length from the two humans.

Behind, griffins prowl like sentries, circling at a distance just beyond a scorching ring of fire now burning down to ash. The griffins are such magnificent creatures that his attention wanders away from the woman and man and the peculiar circle of dying flame. The larger griffin is darker in color, and its wing feathers boast the gleam of good iron. The other has a more silver cast and a smaller stature, but its feathers look just as wickedly sharp. The feathers glint where the light of the setting sun catches in them. As the silver one turns to pace back toward the sunning stone, it flexes its wings and several loose feathers shake free as a bird might molt. They
do not precisely drift on the wind toward the ground as would a common bird feather, but neither are they as heavy as iron, and so fall straight down as would a sword or knife. A living griffin would provide an endless although not plentiful supply of its feathers while a dead one provides one set of feathers only. One could husband griffins as a farmer husbands geese, he supposes as he, too, drifts on the wind, thoughts shredding into insubstantial bits.

“I need help,” says the woman to the owl, although it is strange to think of a person talking to an owl, who is after all only a dumb animal. “I have no power against such a wound. I am helpless. I pray you, aid me now, if you can.”

A hand jostled him. The pain jolted him into awareness, and for a moment he was sorry that he was looking out of his own eyes up at the woman he loved most in the whole world.

“Liath?” he whispered.

Tears streaked her face. “My love,” she said.

Pain swallowed him, and the world went away.

AT the end of the second day’s journey their party took shelter with a minor lordling on a minor estate that barely had room for their entire company to sleep in the hall and stables. Lord Arno greeted them by name; the clerics had stopped this way traveling north toward Hersford. Although the road north and a rutted track leading west remained clear, a barricade made up of handcarts, a wagon, and felled logs had been thrown up across the road where it continued southward. The barrier was manned by a dozen field hands armed with staffs sharpened to a point, a single metal-tipped spear, shovels, and scythes.

Over a meager supper of tart cider, roasted chicken, and spring greens, the lady of the house took it upon herself to warn them.

“Go not down the southern road, Your Excellencies.” She looked exhausted, face pale, eyes dark with strain, and she rested trembling hands on her pregnant belly as she glanced at her husband, who was, it transpired, lame from a wound taken in the battle of the guivre, fought near Kassel.

“The western road will serve you better,” the lame man added. “You will not ride more than ten days out of your way.
It is safer.” As he spoke, he gripped the arms of his chair so hard that his knuckles turned white.

“I must turn west, as I have already suffered unreasonable delay,” said Brother Severus, “but their road lies south to Darre.”

“I pray you, do not go that way, Your Excellency. All the farms are blighted with the murrain. We’ve heard that not one farm in ten has sheep, cattle, or pigs left to them. We turned back two families yesterday. They were trying to escape north with their flocks. We pray morning, noon, and night that our own herd has not caught the contagion.”

“Yet you let us pass these six days past. I saw no barricade then.”

“The blight had not come so far north, Your Excellency.” The lord called for more cider and apologized for the fourth time that there was no more wine to be had. The long hall in which they feasted was only scarcely longer and wider than Aunt Bel’s house in Osna village. Although the floor was swept clean, the tapestries on the wall had a shabby look about them and all the children, huddled under the eaves on straw mattresses, had runny noses. “We only blocked the road three days past. We’ve heard rumors that bandits have come into the countryside as well. We’ve heard dreadful stories—”

“Speak no more of it,” said Severus, turning back to his food. He examined the gamy chicken with a prim frown. “My companions will continue south. God protect the righteous.”

Husband and wife glanced at each other, but there was nothing they could do. Simple country lords could no more change the chosen path of the skopos’ own clerics than they could prevent the tide from coming in.

Brother Ildoin was the youngest of Severus’ clerics, a slight young man with a blemished face, an amiable if often inattentive expression, and two fingers on his left hand permanently twisted from a childhood accident. He had not yet had every last drop of compassion wrung out of his soul, although it certainly seemed to Alain that Severus had burned any such wasteful and inconvenient sentiments out of his own heart.

“We have no livestock with us,” Ildoin said to the lady, “only horses. Horses do not take up the contagion, so you are
safe from us as will be those we seek shelter with in the days to come.”

With that their hosts had to be content.

In the morning Severus took a dozen men as attendants and rode west, leaving his factor, by name of Arcod, Brother Ildoin, and ten rough-looking clerics who seemed as much at ease with a spear as with a holy book to escort Alain on the southerly route.

“Where is Brother Severus going?” Alain asked Ildoin as they left the besieged manor house behind. “I thought he meant to return to Darre, too.”

Ildoin had a way of lifting his chin, like a man recoiling from a sharp blow, when he was surprised by any comment or unexpected sight. “Brother Severus is a great and holy man, one of the intimate counselors of the skopos herself, may she remain hale and hearty and live many long years under God’s protection. We do not question him! However, he is a
powerful
man in more ways than that of intrigue and wise counsel—”

“Brother Ildoin!” Arcod drew up beside them. “Idle chatter is a breeding ground for the Enemy’s maggots. We will ride in silence, or sing Godly hymns, if you please.”

Alain was content to ride in silence. They made a peaceable caravan with the pack mules ambling along in the middle of their group and the hounds padding alertly to either side of him. It was a lovely spring day, the sky strewn with broken clouds. At first, birdsong accompanied them and a skeane of geese honked past above. But as the morning passed, Alain noticed that the joyous noise gave way to an uneasy hush. Midmorning they passed an abandoned hamlet, where a scatter of huts lay empty beside the road. A thread of smoke drifted heavenward a short distance off the road; otherwise there was no sign of life.

“Should we investigate?” Alain asked.

“No,” said Arcod. “It’s none of our business. Our business is to take you to the skopos.”

They hadn’t gone much farther through open woodland before a second clearing opened before them. Judging by the well-thatched longhouse, fenced-in garden plot, rubbish pit, and three pit houses, a prosperous farming family had once lived here. Stakes lined the roadside, four posts staggered on
either side of the track, set there as a warning. On each stake a sheep’s skull was affixed, glaringly white against the lush green eruption of spring growth all around. Some of the skulls had a bit of flesh left, but most had been picked clean by carrion crows still flocking among the buildings. Here, too, they saw no movement, heard no welcoming hails, but the porch of the longhouse was swept clean as though its occupants had only recently departed.

The clouds drew in darkly. A chill wind blew up from the south as a mist began to fall, trailing off at intervals only to spatter down once again, inconstant and irritating.

“Another one!” shouted the cleric riding at the front of their party. He’d been chosen for this duty because he could speak Wendish. “Ho! Well met! Are there any folk living here?”

As they rode into a new clearing, they saw a scattering of huts, an empty chicken coop, a small roofed paddock, a trough half full of water, and an abandoned plow sledge. Four stakes pounded into the ground at the four corners of the paddock bore animal skulls, one sheep, two horned cattle, and something that looked remarkably like a dog with a patch of skin and pale fur hanging from the muzzle. Dried plants had been woven into the eye sockets, and a tangle of tiny carved wooden figures dangled down from the gaping jaw on a leather strip.