The Monster War: A Tale of the Kings' Blades (23 page)

Stalwart realized that he had been shouting louder than ever, because a dull roaring had added itself to the problem of Mervyn’s deafness. Mist laid a chill dampness on his face. The sides of the valley had been rising steadily, and now the ground fell away precipitously right in front of him. The deeper canyon continued on, curving so that its extent could not be seen; it was no wider but it held a river. Coming into sight around the bend, the stream was darkly smooth; soon it frothed over white rapids, vanished in a clear fall into the great pit almost directly under his toes. No wonder nothing ever reappeared! Anything that went down there would be smashed to fragments in the cavern below.

“Not far to the house,” Mervyn bellowed. “You can take a look without being seen. Come on, I’ll show you.”

Without waiting for an answer, he urged old Daisy down the slope and disappeared. Stalwart’s mount declined to commit suicide, balking, tossing its head, backing away. To his intense fury, Emerald easily persuaded her horse to follow the old forester, so she disappeared also.

“You,” Stalwart said through clenched teeth, “are going to go down there if I have to carry you! In pieces!” He drew
Sleight
. A rapier made a very good riding crop, because it was flexible and had no cutting edge. In this case he did not even need to use it; he demonstrated the swishing noise it could make, and Snowbird whinnied surrender and agreed to proceed.

There was a path of sorts, but slippery with moss and tangled with ferns. It angled northward at first, down the steep slope to the canyon wall, and then became even steeper, a ledge with a sheer face above and the ghastly maw of the Hole below. The worst part came after that, when it reached water level and the rapids. Cold spray blew in his eyes and the horse’s, while a terrible roar echoed back and forth until he thought the noise would burst his skull. At that point there was little pretense of a road, just rocks scoured clean and smooth by the river, part of its bed when it was in spate. The passage was obstructed by tangles of driftwood. On his left rose a carved and polished wall of stone, sculpted into fantastic niches and pillars; on the other side white water fell away into nothing.

Why had he ever gone to Ironhall? Why hadn’t he stayed a minstrel?

Worse, Emerald had stopped, blocking the way. Old Mervyn was past the horrors and waiting for them up ahead, perceptibly higher than they were. From him the river fell, swirling and leaping, raising white cockscombs against the rocks, spinning in dark whirlpools. Just behind Stalwart, it disappeared altogether…. His horse was trembling even harder than he was.

It was not a good place for a chat.

Emerald looked around, her eyes wide. She shouted something. He saw her mouth move, but could hear nothing. He yelled back to demonstrate. She understood, and pulled her right foot out of her stirrup as if she was going to dismount.

“Don’t!” Stalwart screamed. “You’re crazy!”

There was no room for such nonsense. The horses were growing more terrified by the second. If one hoof slipped on the slick-wet rocks, the Hole was going to have two more victims, or even four. Fortunately Emerald worked that out and let her horse proceed up the slope, out of that madness.

The path continued upriver, still too narrow for two horses abreast, while the noise gradually dwindled behind them. The trail rose higher above the water as it rounded the bend of the canyon and entered a wide valley, bereft of real trees but shaggy with brush and saplings. Mervyn reined in and pointed a bony hand at a knoll some distance ahead. Its river side was a cliff, but the rest of its slopes seemed gentle enough. It bore buildings on its crest.

“Smealey Hole,” he explained needlessly, then scowled at Emerald. “What was wrong with you, lass, back there? All that tomfoolery?”

“There’s something down there,” she said, speaking to Stalwart. “I can’t see what it is, but I know there’s something. I’m going back to see.”

Whereupon, she slid down from the saddle, knotted her reins around a sapling, and ran back the way she had come. The old man just sat his horse, looking puzzled, but Stalwart was right on her heels.

“What sort of something?”

“Magic, of course. I don’t know what. Not a sort I’ve ever met before.”

Night was falling. Seen from this side, the path they had followed down the great step was barely visible in the shrubbery. It showed as a narrow ledge around the side of the Hole, and then disappeared into that jumble of rocks between the base of the cliff and the plunging rapids. It was hard to know exactly where Emerald had stopped. But there
was
something there, pinned under a shadowed overhang, half in and half out of the torrent.

Hoping for a better view, Stalwart stepped onto a flattish boulder in the stream. He jumped to another beyond it…and another…then a larger one, a tiny island in midstream with water rushing by on both sides. Emerald followed him, tried to join him, and missed her footing. He grabbed; she grabbed. They teetered in mortal peril for a long and horrible moment before regaining their balance. He swallowed his heart back down where it belonged.

She put her mouth to his ear and yelled, “Thanks!”

He wanted to make a joking response and couldn’t think of one, so he pointed instead. Now they had a clear view, except that spray kept blowing in their eyes.

“It’s a body!” she shouted.

He nodded. It might well be a body. If it was a body, he was most utterly, completely, positively sure that it was a
dead
body. He was going to be very surprised if it was not the missing Rhys. To let the old man see his grandson in that position would be horribly unkind. Common sense said to say nothing more, go back to Waterby, and return with a team in the morning. On the other hand, if the water rose in the night, the river would take that corpse away, never to be seen again. Had Emerald not sensed the magic, they would have missed it altogether. Why should there be magic associated with a corpse?

He recalled that Mervyn had a coil of rope hung on his saddle.

On horseback, the old forester had seemed younger than his years. Back on ground level, he was again tiny, frail, and stooped. There was not a thing wrong with his wits, though. His bleak expression showed that he had guessed what they had seen.

“I think it may be a body, grandfather,” Stalwart said. “We can’t get it out, but if we had some rope we could tether it so it won’t wash away.”

The old man turned to his horse. “No forester ever goes anywhere without a bit o’ rope, lad.”

That was a pity. Someone was going to have to do some death-defying acrobatics, and Stalwart knew who that someone was. He was a skilled juggler and tumbler, but he had never performed on the lip of a giant sewer before.

He told Emerald, “It’ll be dark by the time I’m finished. So you may as well go back up that cliff before the light goes. I don’t intend to disappear into that pit, but if I do, one of us must get back to report. And I’ll be beyond help. So no dramatic rescues! You go back to Waterby and wait for Snake. Understood?”

She gave him a hard stare. “Yes, Sir Stalwart.”

He distrusted her when she called him that. “Promise?”

“Didn’t you just give me an order,
sir
?”

“Yes.”

“Then why do you need to ask me for a promise?”

He was never going to understand girls.

He gave her his sword and commission for safekeeping. He stowed his cloak, hat, and jerkin on Snowbird and handed the reins to Mervyn. When the horses set off back down the trail, he followed on foot with the rope slung over his shoulder. He watched them pass safely around the edge of the Hole and start the climb up the big step. As he drew close to the falls, the roar of the waters grew ever more menacing. He was aware of being frightened, and that made him angry. To delay would be cowardice.
Get on with it
!

He clambered along the water-slick rocks to what he thought must be about the right place. Back in his soprano year in Ironhall, he had learned some good knots from Sailor, who had been Prime then—a lesson in knots in exchange for a lesson in juggling. Sailor had died on the Night of Dogs, last Firstmoon, battling monsters in the King’s bedchamber.

For this job, Stalwart needed nothing fancy. A clove hitch was enough to fasten one end around a well-wedged tree trunk. He used a simple bowline to fashion a noose and fitted it loosely around himself under his arms. That might stop him being swept over the falls if he slipped. A running bowline would pull tight and hold more firmly, but might also cut him in half if he was trapped in the full force of the torrent. More likely the river would smash him to a jelly first. Already spray had soaked through his hose and doublet and his hands were aching with the cold; there was so much noise he couldn’t hear his teeth chattering.

He started down the rock pile. It was not a long climb, no more than the height of a cottage, and the river offered him a convenient ladder—a tree lodged almost vertically inside a smooth circular chimney that the falls had carved out of bedrock. It had not been in the river long enough to lose all its branches, and the stubs stuck out like rungs. All in all, it seemed so handy that he wondered if it could be some fiendish trap. It worked, though. He made his way almost to water level without trouble, but there his view was blocked by the sides of the chimney.

With silent thanks to the memory of Sailor and that knot lesson, he bent the line around the tree and secured it. Then he let the noose take his weight while he braced his feet against the trunk and leaned outward. He ended almost horizontal, with his head practically at water level. Downstream there was nothing except a ghastly, shiny-smooth black slide down…down…down….

Shuddering, he turned to look upstream. There was the body, just out of reach, and higher than he was. It had been swept in under the overhang and run aground on a sloping rock, but most of it was still underwater. It looked very precarious, ready to cast off at any minute. Its feet were toward him, and the legs were moving in the current, as if Rhys were marching, marching, marching to the country of the dead. That it was Rhys there could be no doubt. What was left of the clothing was visibly a forester’s green, even in that gloom.

Meanwhile, Stalwart was soaked and exhausted and a long way from home. Also a long way from that corpse he had come to save. He hauled himself upright with rapidly numbing hands. He untied the rope from the tree and started climbing. The rope kept snagging, of course, and delaying him.

He really ought to leave Rhys where he was. The man’s spirit had already returned to the elements, and the underground river might dispose of his corpse even faster than a proper funeral pyre would. It was wrong to risk a live man for a dead one. But the body was important evidence against the Fellowship of traitors. Also there was old Mervyn, who had been helpful. There were Rhys’s wife and three children…

Reaching the top of his rope, Stalwart crouched for a moment on his hands and knees, catching his breath. Then he secured the rope to a boulder, a few steps farther upstream. He paused to plan what he would do. Even if he could get close to the body—and he had no great confidence that he could—he was certainly not going to crawl in under the overhang. It was lying with its head upstream…. He would have to try to lasso it with a hangman’s noose. A gruesome way to treat a corpse, yes, but he had no other means to secure it by himself in near darkness. He tied a slip knot, put the loop around his upper arm so he would not lose it, and started down the cliff again, this time working his way spiderlike, with his face to the rocks.

A savage tug at his right boot warned him that he had put it in the river. He returned that foot to its previous position and then clung there, sprawled on a rock face, not quite vertical and very insecurely attached. An adjacent boulder was flattish and stuck out over the water—he was almost certain that it was the one pinning poor Rhys. Of the body itself, however, there was no sign.

Inch by inch, Stalwart transferred himself to the ledge, which was just barely wide enough for him to stand on. Once he was on it, he then had to lie down. Having achieved that, gripping tight to the rope with one hand and the rock with the other, he wriggled forward and hung over the edge to peer in under the overhang. He found himself staring into two lifeless eyes just above water level.

It wasn’t Rhys after all. It was Lord Digby. Stalwart was so startled that he almost let go of the cliff.

The horse they had given Badger was a mean, ugly piebald whose high, hard trot made him ride like a sack of rocks. Badger barely noticed. His mind was roiled by the staggering realization that
now he did not have to die
! Eventually, yes. Of course. Everyone must die, but for most people it was a distant prospect, something that need not happen for fifty years. Facing certain death in a month or two changed life considerably.

Beset by his thoughts, he reached the ford over the Swallowbeck long before he expected it. He reined in Sack-of-rocks and sat for a moment, debating. Fortunately the Buran road here was a mere track through trees and presently deserted, so no one observed the young traveler’s strange indecision. This was his moment of choice, the turning point of his life. Why had that young pest given him the jeweled star? The decision would have been easy without Wart’s unwelcome display of trust.

If Badger carried on to Buran he would catch the evening ferry, then do as the uppity kid had ordered—ride to Grandon and the court, tell Snake what had happened. And the next time Ambrose came to Ironhall, Badger would die.

The alternative was to head up the Swallowbeck, the road to Smealey Hole. Then he would not have to die, because there, too, he would deliver news: news that the Fellowship was suspected of murdering Lord Digby and conspiring to assassinate the King; news that there was a White Sister in the area, sniffing out magic, and also a swordsman of the Royal Guard—even if he did stand shoulder high and still had his milk teeth.
Not fair
! whispered his conscience.
Stalwart is not as young as that. In a fair fight, rapier against saber, he would beat you every time
.

If he went home to Smealey, Badger might not die.

Home
?

Yes, home. To see his home again, even if it must be for the last time…With a groan, Badger turned his horse’s head to the north and set off up the Swallowbeck.

Few people would have noticed that road. The streambed itself was the path, a winding course of shingle holding a few small ponds. In the spring the stream was more evident, but rarely fierce enough to bother a horse. Pebbles crunched under his mount’s hooves.

The cards were dealt, the decision made. He was
not
going to die in the Forge at Ironhall! As wild relief surged through him, he rose in his stirrups, waved his hat in the air, and let out a long howl of triumph.
He would live
! Sack-of-rocks whinnied in terror at this madness and broke into a gallop. Badger gave him his head and went racing along the Swallowbeck, screaming with joy.

All too soon he had to regain control and soothe the stupid animal, for he came to the second turning. The Smealey road branched off, becoming an obvious man-made track through the trees. It seemed smaller and meaner than he remembered, though, more overgrown. It climbed steeply to cross Chestnut Ridge, then plunged down into the valley of the Smealey.

Only now did he consider the possibility that Owen might not be there. Owen might very well be somewhere in or near Grandon, preparing to strike down King Ambrose as he had struck down Lord Digby. Never for a moment since Wart had told him of the murder and the connection to Smealey Hall had Badger doubted that the Fellowship was guilty, or that Ambrose was its true quarry. Digby, he assumed, had seen or heard something that had tipped the Fellowship’s hand. They had perhaps been forced to strike before they were completely ready. The Blades kept nattering about the Monster War, but the Monster War was less than a year old. Owen’s campaign went back a lot further than that. Owen’s implacable purpose had always been to kill the Chivian tyrant.

But if Owen wasn’t
here
, right
now
, then things might become complicated.

No matter, he had made his decision….

Halfway down the slope, the trail went by the ruins of a massive beech tree, perhaps a hundred years dead. Long ago it had rotted, or been struck by a lightning bolt and burned. All that was left was a huge columnar stump about three man-heights high. It was also hollow, although the opening was not visible from the trail.

Badger reined in with his sight blurred by tears and a lump in his throat big enough to choke him. He remembered the day Lloyd and Kendrick had decided to turn the hollow tree into a castle and had lit a fire in it to clean out the ants and make it bigger. They had come so close to setting the whole forest ablaze that the Baron had whipped them till they howled, sending little Bevan into a fit of screaming terror. Then there was the day little Bevan, grown old enough to apply the family talent for devilry, had hidden in that tree until the entire population of Smealey had been turned out to beat the woods in search of him. Memories—much later memories—of leaving food there to feed an outlaw Ceri…

He dismounted and led Sack-of-rocks over to the verge. The hollow tree would still be an excellent hiding place. Its wormy, dirty interior looked as if no one had been there since the last time he had peered in and found a pathetic cache of Ceri’s personal treasures: his pouch, his sword, his hunting horn, his dagger. Ceri had left them there on the day he rode off to Waterby to die, knowing that Bevan would find them. Ceri, twelve years dead.
Vengeance is coming soon now, Ceri. One way or the other, you will be avenged. You and the others
…

To ride into Smealey Hole today wearing a cat’s-eye sword might be fast suicide. Badger laid
Durance
in the tree; it could endure there until he returned for it. If Owen sent him back, he would retrieve it on the way out. If not—if he was to live—then an Ironhall sword was worth a fortune anywhere outside the country; only in Chivial were cat’s-eyes reserved to the King’s Blades.

He swung himself up into the saddle and urged Sack-of-rocks into a canter. The sun was very close to setting as he forded the river. Memories came thick as midges at twilight now…the meadow where Kendrick taught him to ride, where Aneirin taught him to shoot a longbow…the hayloft where young Bevan hid to watch Lloyd kissing the plowman’s daughter…the still pools of the Smealey, where the Baron went fishing.

The valley was a bowl enclosed by a rampart of rock, lowest on the west. Its bottomland had long since been stripped of trees, but it had never been fertile enough to farm. The Smealeys had grazed cattle there. Evidently the Fellowship of Wisdom did not, probably because herds needed herders, who would be unnecessary witnesses to things better left unseen. Bracken, saplings, and man-high thistles had taken over the pasture. The river snaked across the plain in a steep-sided channel, plunged along a canyon cutting through that low western side, then vanished into a bottomless pit.

Smealey Hall stood on a flat-topped knoll. On two sides the ground dropped almost sheer to the treacherous river; to north and east it sloped gently. Some of the mismatched cluster of buildings had been built by Baron Modred or his father, others were centuries old. It was not a castle, because fortification required royal permission to crenulate and King Ambrose would not grant that to Smealey Hole in the next ten thousand years. A site so defensible must have been a fortress many times in the past, though. Traces of ancient walls could still be found in the turf.

No dogs barked as the stranger rode up the trail, which was another change from the old days. No guards challenged, but Badger was certain his arrival would have been noted. Thoughts of archers waiting with strung bows made the back of his neck prickle as he rode across the flat summit to the residence door. He could hear chanting coming from somewhere, voices taking turns at evoking spirits, in the way of conjuration everywhere.

There was not as much as a cat in sight when he halted Sack-of-rocks beside the steps. He swung his leg over the saddle, dropped down, turned, and found himself facing three grim swordsmen. He could almost believe they had used magic to make that dramatic arrival, except that magic was too valuable to waste on party tricks.

They were not wearing armor. Even this backwood scholastic retreat must receive visitors sometimes, and the Privy Council would jump cloud high if it heard rumors of a private army in Nythia. So they bore no visible steel except their swords and daggers, but their jerkins and britches were of stout leather, padded to deflect all but the heaviest or most skillful strokes. There might be metal under their floppy plumed hats. If he had kept
Durance
with him, he could have demonstrated what an Ironhall man thought of three scowling yokels. But then four more came strolling around the corner of the house to take up position in the outfield. Even an Ironhall man must shun those odds.

“Identify yourself,” growled the one wearing a sergeant’s red sash. He was big, powerful. His face was a hideous ruin, an untidy wad of hair and twisted leather, decorated with old scar tissue. One eye was a gaping hole and half his nose had gone. He looked as if he had been used for broadsword practice by all the Ironhall fuzzies at once.

“I am a friend of Brother Owen.”

“No brother here by that name.”

“Have I misjudged his title? Have you another Owen?”

“None.”

Owen might be using another name or the man might be lying.

“Identify yourself,” the sergeant repeated, laying a hand on his sword hilt.

Badger cursed his folly in coming unarmed. He could not hope to fight so many, but they would not bully him like this if he bore a sword. The distant chanting had ended, he noticed.

“My name is my business,” he said stubbornly. “Go to Owen and describe me.” He removed his hat.

He had worried that Owen might have started losing his hair now, but it was clear at once that the gamble had paid off. All three jaws dropped.

The Sergeant recovered first, a sneer pulling up his scarred lip to display wide gaps in his teeth. “If you’re not who I think you are, sonny, I’ll rearrange you until you look worse than I do.”

“I am.”

The man grunted. “Gavin, run and tell the Prior his brother’s here to see him.”