The Horse Lord (15 page)

Baiart nodded as curtly as he dared and made for the door. Duergar called him back. “Cause some servants to come up for yonder carrion,” he ordered, indicating the dead sentry. “He was a strong man and should make a useful addition to the ranks of my
traugarin
.” Baiart’s mouth twitched but he nodded obediently and went to go out again. Once more he was called back, this time by Kalarr.

“You can go—but if you should care to stay”—the tall sorcerer paid no heed to Duergar’s frantic hushing noises—”I can promise that what we have planned should be more than entertaining for you. And your brother Aldric.”

Baiart’s face stayed immobile, robbing Kalarr of much satisfaction and pleasure. The
kailin
merely shook his head and fled from the room, but the sound of sobbing drifted back from the corridor. Duergar cringed inside himself, and cringed even more when he could no longer hear Baiart’s weeping—for the noise of cu Ruruc’s laughter.

There were tents all around the enormous competition field beyond Erdhaven, and Kyrin sat in one of them with a pile of silver marks in front of her and a sheet of sums on her knee. The money came to almost a hundred marks, but no matter how she added up the columns, her sums totalled nearer five. The girl added them up again, then subtracted two entries and nodded to herself. If she could persuade Aldric to leave the horses here, they would be able to afford one of the ships to whose masters she had spoken. Except that parting the
eijo
from his Andarran charger was not going to be quite as simple as arithmetic suggested.

Hoofs sounded outside the tent and then the flap lifted to admit a figure wearing Great Harness, the full battle armour which Albans called
an-moyya-tsalaer
. Aldric unbuckled the straps of his flaring peaked helm and laid aside the war-mask covering cheeks and chin, then unlaced his mail and leather coif with a sigh of relief. Under the armour his hair was dark and wet.

“You should wear one of those new over-robes,” observed Kyrin. “All that black metal must absorb a frightful heat from the sun on a day like this.”

“Oddly enough, it doesn’t,” Aldric said, settling into a chair which creaked protestingly. The armour, from Gemmel’s armoury, was remarkably light for Great Harness at fifty pounds, but not to a folding camp-chair. From the helm, mask and coif, through the four-panelled lamellar corslet to the peculiar idea of separate mail sleeves and strapped-on arm-plates—like those Kyrin wore—from neck to knuckles, and the equally strange jazerant scales arranged honeycomb-pattern on leather leggings, Alban armour was unique. Despite its cats’-cradle of laces, straps, buckles, belts and hooks it was eminently practical, for each part could be worn individually as the need arose.

Aldric wore it all, not because he needed protection but because it served to conceal who he was. Besides, wearing
an-tsalaer
for a mounted archery contest was entirely in keeping with the spirit of the Spring-Feast.

“Oh, by the way,”—he pulled out a wallet which had been stuffed for safety behind his weapon-belt—”second prize. One fifty.” Kyrin caught the wallet as it sailed through the air and added its contents to the money on the table and to her calculations.

“Better!” she said. “But be careful—too many second prizes and people will start talking just as much as if you were taking firsts.” Aldric laughed and poured himself some wine.

“You needn’t worry on that account. If young Escuar from Prytenon hadn’t been nursing a hangover, I would have been lucky to manage fifth place. How are we doing for money?”

“Well enough, but slowly. Aldric, if we left the horses—”

“We’d never see them again, as I’ve told you before. I’ll try horse-riding or shooting the
telek
—but I will
not
leave Lyard in the hands of some would-be thief.”

“You don’t trust anybody, do you?”

“Not really. I have been given little reason to do so. But at least we can afford to eat better than we have done during these past few days.” He punctuated his change of subject by standing up with that creak of leather and metallic slither to which Kyrin was still unaccustomed. “I, for one, am famished.”

During festival time, almost all the prices in Erdhaven tripled; however, there were some taverns too proud of their reputations to indulge in such piracy. They were usually small eating-houses, into the fourth and fifth generation of the host’s family—and very few people knew about them. Those who did kept quiet about it and used their chosen eating places purely for epicurean gluttony or a little well-mannered seduction. For reasons Aldric did not question, Kyrin knew the owner of one such car very—he was later to find it was all quite innocent and a matter of family friendship—and was able to persuade the man to find them a table. Comforted perhaps by Aldric’s meticulous courtesy, he did not object to the young man being armoured from the neck down.

The food was even better than Kyrin had promised— and her claims had been so extravagant that Aldric had thought them exaggeration. All the wines were imported— red from the Jouvaine Provinces, white from the Empire— and Aldric was interested in how they had gotten through the various blockades and embargoes which made life so difficult for merchants. Then his steak arrived and he forgot the question. The meat was just as he liked it: scared, but otherwise not so much cooked as well heated, and he sliced into the fragrant almost-raw beef with a delicacy that totally belied the speed with which it was devoured.

“One thing I do intend to try, even if it has some risks involved,” the young
eijo
said once the edge was off his hunger, “and that’s
yril’t’sathorn
—the Messenger’s Ride. It’s a kind of mock battle; obstacles to jump, targets for sword, spear or bow and a moat you have to swim your horse through. It’s from an old story about a courier in the Clan Wars.”

Kyrin drank white wine and smiled at him. “It all sounds faintly childish,” she said.

“Perhaps; but you’re allowed to bet on it all the same.”

“Indeed?” Kyrin’s eyes lit up; like most Valhollans she was fond of gambling, but being prudent disliked long odds if they could be avoided. “Tell me, Aldric,” she crooned at him, filling his wine-cup to the brim, “who do you think will win?”

The Alban sipped his drink with relish and smirked like a cat with cream on its whiskers. “Who else but me?” he answered brightly.

Kyrin rather pointedly drank the rest of the wine herself.

Clocks in the town of Erdhaven were chiming for the sixth hour of evening when a man sat down at a bench and put fire to a bowlful of crystals. The stuff, sparkling like crushed diamonds, burst into brief flame and then settled to a slow crawl of sparks. Grey smoke coiled up, not dissipating but hanging at eye level, growing thicker and more opaque with every wisp that joined it. The man lowered his head and began to mutter in a soft monotone.

The cloud began to glow from within and an image formed, moving and distorting as the vapour shifted. Its half-seen mouth formed words. “You are late,” said Duergar’s voice, thickly warped by sorcery and distance.

“Pardon!” The man abased himself hastily. “I beg pardon!”

“It is of little matter. You have the holiday as your excuse, of course?”

“Yes, lord. I couldn’t close my shop at the usual time and—”

“Enough. The article I sent you remains unharmed?” Glancing behind him, the man swallowed and nodded affirmation. “Excellent.”

Filling most of the shop which fronted his small bronze-foundry was an equestrian statue, life-size, of a warrior scale-armoured after the style of an Imperial
ka-tafrakt
A masterpiece of casting, it was exclaimed over by everyone who entered the foundry, but the bronze-smith himself preferred not to go near it. There was an eerie quality about the image; its armour was not a hauberk, what the Alban stories called lizard-mail, but fitted more like a lizard’s skin and gave the figure a scaly, reptilian look. The rider leaned back in his saddle, war-mask in hand, and stared into an unknown distance from under the peak of his helm. Goat-horns curved from that headgear and the essential inhumanity of the piece was completed when the face was made visible by the lifted mask. There was no face!

In profile the features were of classic, perfect beauty; from any other angle they became merely geometrical shapes, cold and precise. Shadows suggested a soft roundness to mouth and brows and chin, but clearer light revealed only stark hollows and harsh, flat planes. There was no mouth other than a flaw in the verdigrised metal, no eyes at all. Only a bleak power, like the desire for conquest given palpable form.

Duergar’s eyes were closed as if in concentration, but the bronze-founder still felt as if he was being watched— and that by someone without his best interests at heart. Despite the threat of his master’s anger, the man rose and backed quietly towards the door.

Then a vast shadow fell across him and he spun, mouth gaping in a shriek which never left his throat.

That throat was clamped shut by the inexorable pressure of a bronze hand as the statue leaned down from its pedestal and clutched him by the neck. “I can give it movement for a little while,” came Duergar’s voice from behind him. “But it must have a life of its own. Yours will suffice.” If there was more, the founder did not hear it.

As the metal
katafrakt
straightened up, the workman’s wildly dancing legs left the ground in a hanged-man’s jig as he was lifted with no effort at all and held dangling at the end of the creature’s arm. The last thing he saw was the flawed mouth cracking into a smile, and then the hand on his neck closed to a clenched fist. Though flesh and sinew gave way like wet paper, there was hardly any blood from the frightful wound and what little spurted from the dead man’s nostrils to fall upon the bronze armour was absorbed as if by a sponge. The corpse shrivelled in that icy grip, shrinking and contracting as life was sucked from the deepest marrow of its bones. When at last it was released, it fell not with the sodden thud of a body but with a clattering of dry sticks wrapped in a bag of skin.

The ponderous bulk of horse and rider left their pedestal without a squeal of stressed metal, or indeed any sound other than that of an ordinary
kailin
. Only a certain massive deliberation to every movement betrayed that this
kailin
was far removed from the ordinary. The horse stopped and knelt before the smoke-cloud as the warrior astride its bronze back raised one arm in a salute. His voice was deep, resonant as a flawed bell in an empty place of prayer.

“Command me, Lifegiver, my master.”

“First you must be named,” said Duergar. It was necessary; even such a creature of sorcery was incomplete without a name—but this was not “man” for its flesh was cold bronze, yet nor was it “statue” for it moved. It was Duergar’s servant and more than servant—like an extra limb. “You are as one of my hands,” the necromancer pronounced at last. “Your name shall be Esel, which is to say ‘sword-hand’ in the old tongue.”

“It is a good name, my master. What is thy will?”

“My will is in your mind, Esel my servant. Seek Aldric Talvalin on the weapon-field tomorrow. You will know him. Yet do not slay him—in this the weapon that you bear will aid you—unless there is no choice. And if he must be slain, then destroy him and everything he carries. Utterly.”

“Thy desire shall be fulfilled in all ways, Lifegiver, my master. Thy enemy is my enemy. My victim is thine.”

Glancing down at himself, Aldric smiled wryly;
yril’t’sa-thorn
really did seem like an elaborate children’s game after all, for though armour and harness remained, most of his weapons had been replaced by wooden ones edged and tipped with dye-soaked wadding. He, Lyard and his opponents all wore white overmantles so that any impacts would show up like ink on paper.

The competitors had received instruction earlier that morning from one of the Prefect’s officials, a small man over-full of his own importance. “Each rider will be given a scroll,” he had announced fussily, “representing important despatches. This must be carried to the judge who sits on this moated island, representing Torhan-
arluth
in his fortified camp of Gorlahr. In various places there will be targets for spear and bow—the Great-bow only, sirs, since the lesser bow is not historically speaking correct—and five mounted
kailinin
of the Prefect’s guard representing—”

“—five men on horseback… ?” speculated somebody, provoking laughter. The official reddened, coughed, rustled his notes and then continued in a less patronising manner. “Representing enemy forces,” he said emphatically. “There is only one bridge to the island. It is guarded. A rider may, if he wishes, swim the moat. He will not then be attacked by any defender, but may I point out that swimming takes longer than galloping and each rider will have his riding timed by turn of sandglass. That, sirs, is all.”

That, thought Aldric, was enough. Personally he con-, sidered the best way to stop a courier was to shoot the horse from under him, but that was much too practical for a sport like this. He watched through narrowed eyes as Escuar the Pryteinek galloped out to ride the Courier’s Ride.

A hidden target came up on its counterbalanced arm and Escuar, twisting in his saddle, drove an arrow neatly into it. Aldric pursed his lips thoughtfully; the young man’s mounted archery was very good, but his swordplay was as wooden as the mock
taiken
he used. The fifth and last of the hidden warriors burst from ambush in a clump of trees where a leaf-strewn net had hidden him, and charged with levelled spear. Escuar half-turned, flinging up his shield—and his attacker threw the lance aside, whipped wooden sword from scabbard-tube to white-clad thigh in a single move and left a blue blotch visible all over the field. Somebody not far from Aldric groaned and swore, making the Alban grin as he recognised the sound of lost money. He wondered whether Kyrin would be loyally backing him or sensibly doing no such thing.

“Kourgath-eijo,” said a voice at his elbow, “you ride now.” One of the Prefect’s retainers presented him with a small scroll. Aldric was tempted to pretend to read the thing and then destroy it, but fancied that such humour would not be well received and tucked it into the cuff of his shooting-glove instead. For a moment he wondered what his odds might be, then as the trumpets blared he dismissed all other concerns and kicked Lyard into a gallop.