The Grip of Despair
“You’ll have no rest till you satisfy yourself about the refugees from Bend. I know,” Torvul said, as the five Ordained sat around a table in the Inn sharing a quick morning meal. “Ivar and Renard’ll handle the men, and the digging. I’ve got more than enough work to do.”
“About my armor,” Allystaire began.
“Another few days,” Torvul said. “Take some of the captured stuff if you simply must strap some inferior iron on.”
“Everything is wrong without it,” Allystaire said. “I hardly know how to swing my hammer.”
“You’ll remember how to swing that hammer for years after you’ve died,” Torvul replied, pausing then for a long pull from a mug full of small beer.
Idgen Marte finished chewing a piece of ham and shrugged. “I could use the ride. I’ll join you.”
Allystaire looked up at her as she stood, searching for words, but she cut him off.
“I’ve my bow still, and knives. Don’t even say it.”
Allystaire pushed away his own mug and the scant crumbs of his thoroughly eaten breakfast. “Gideon? Care for a ride?”
“I’m not much of a rider,” the boy offered hesitantly.
“Time to learn, then,” Allystaire said, thinking on his words to the Goddess. There is so much no one has ever taught him. “Come on. My palfrey is still here. It is an easy ride.”
Mol looked up at them as they all stood, then back at the table, saying nothing. At the glimpse of her dark, unreadable eyes, Allystaire felt a slight chill run down his back. He dismissed it, though, and led Idgen Marte and Gideon to the nearby stables.
Ardent seemed to know he was coming, sticking his huge, thickly-maned grey head out of his stall. The destrier stamped and shook his head impatiently as Allystaire neared him. Idgen Marte’s brown courser was a bit more subdued. Ardent quieted down as Allystaire retrieved his tack, entered the stall, and began to saddle him.
The work was familiar to his hands, and his mind drifted, if only for a moment, till he noticed Gideon struggling to lift the palfrey’s saddle. He secured Ardent and went to the boy’s side. After watching him try to lift by tugging on the pommel, Allystaire reached out and laid a hand lightly on Gideon’s wrist.
“Get your arms under it. It is easier to carry a weight, any weight, when it is atop your arms instead of under them, especially when you have not got much to grab hold of.”
The boy nodded and slid his arms under the saddle. He still grunted with the effort, but he lifted it and brought it towards the palfrey. Allystaire gave him a hand settling it on the back and with the various straps and buckles, then lifted him by the belt to help him into the saddle.
“Can I not just ride double with one of you?” Gideon asked as he settled on, trying to fit his feet into stirrups that were just slightly out of his reach.
“No,” Allystaire replied curtly. “Ardent will bear no one else, and Idgen Marte may have need of her mount’s speed.”
Without complaint, the boy nodded. With one hand on Ardent’s bridle and another leading the palfrey, Allystaire walked both horses outside, keeping the lead to Gideon’s mount in his hand as he pulled himself into the saddle.
As soon as he settled on and adjusted his seat, Ardent tensed, the muscles bunching underneath him; the destrier wanted to run. Allystaire held him in check, thinking of Gideon, and with his horse protesting beneath him, he set a mild pace as they headed west.
A few dozen yards out of the village and Allystaire was suddenly struck by memory of a season ago, leading three animals and trying to keep Mol atop the palfrey, tracking a crew of reavers he knew nothing of, wrestling with his natural impulses to leave it all well enough alone. The girl’s stubborn insistence. All the times he could have left her, could have abandoned her quest for justice. What did it have to do with me? With me as I was then, anyway? Allystaire Coldbourne made more orphans than whoever I am now will save, he thought.
Not the point, he answered himself silently, as Idgen Marte rode ahead and the palfrey flowed into an ambling gait that let it keep pace with the much larger destrier. The point is that now someone stands with the orphans, instead of making more.
Suddenly he remembered the heat, the way it baked him, the way it seemed to torture the landscape as he rode out of Oyrwyn and down into Delondeur. Seeking what, anyway? Sword-at-hire work? Getting up a warband? Finding the Ravens? And if the sun is of the Mother, why was it…
“The weight of sin,” he suddenly spoke aloud, causing Idgen Marte and Gideon both to turn towards him. “Mine,” he added, quietly.
“Are you talking t’yourself,” Idgen Marte called, over her shoulder.
“No,” Allystaire shook his head. “No. I was merely remembering the first time I rode this way, with Mol. Were those weeks of summer particularly hot?”
“Not to me,” Idgen Marte said, “but remember that I was born a good thousand leagues to the south or so. We’ve got it a bit warmer down there.”
“In my memory, they are the hottest days I have ever lived and I have spent summers campaigning in Innadan dust. I think…I think the heat was the work of the Goddess.”
“What do you mean?” That was Gideon, peering at him with narrowed eyes.
“I think She was testing me, even then. There were so many times I could have turned back. So many times the thought came to me, unbidden, that I could abandon the girl’s kith and kin, if not the girl herself. Take her to a temple, find relatives, even a kindly nearby family, convince her that all was lost.”
“You’d’ve had no luck with that,” Idgen Marte said. “Remember, I was taking your links and drinking on your credit just to watch Mol in a room. She set to talking and next I knew I was skulking around a warehouse full of slaves and watching your back.”
“That was probably the Goddess’s hand at work,” Gideon pointed out. “Mol was the first she called, after all, and we have all seen what Her Voice can do now that she understands what she is.”
Allystaire shrugged beneath his borrowed mail. “Just memories, are all,” he said. “First time I have ridden this way since. Enough tongue-wagging over it.” He looked over his shoulder at Gideon. “Do you think you can manage a run? Keep your hands on the reins and use your legs to stay in the seat. I am afraid if I do not give Ardent some room, he will decide to take it, and I cannot hold him back if that happens.”
Gideon nodded, but swallowed nervously, and tightened his hands on the reins till his knuckles whitened.
“Not like that; a horse understands how you feel about it. Show nerves, it will show nerves. Show fear, it will be afraid. Understand?”
The boy nodded again and relaxed his grip. Mother, keep him safe, Allystaire thought, even as he gave Ardent the slightest prod with his spur. Idgen Marte did the same with her courser, and the three of them were off.
* * *
“Tracks,” Idgen Marte called out, while kneeling where grass met road. “A large number of them, walking off the road, probably to make a camp.”
“We may have to do that ourselves,” Allystaire said, leading his and Gideon’s horses as he strode to her side. “We have gone farther and later than I expected.”
“A night of short rations and cold sleep won’t hurt us, and the mounts can graze,” she replied, standing up and peering at the ground. “Something odd about how they were walking. Slow, dragging steps, like they were clubfooted. And no baggage, no sleds, no wains pulled along behind them.”
“They may have left in a hurry and had no time…”
“How many columns of people fleeing a battle or a siege have you seen in your life? Cold, how many have you sent fleeing? There are always wagons or carts, and animals, dogs and horses and goats and chickens. None of that. Just a half dozen or so clubfooted peasants.”
Gideon, who still sat atop his mount, ordered so by Allystaire to get more accustomed to the saddle, suddenly lifted a hand and pointed.
“They’re back there,” the boy said quietly. “Only…not. I feel something. Sorcery. Be ready.”
Before he had even finished speaking, Allystaire’s hammer was out, and Idgen Marte had an arrow to the string of her tightly curved horsebow. They dashed through the trees in the direction the boy had pointed, Allystaire pausing only to toss the leads he carried towards Gideon, who was surprised as they struck him.
Allystaire crashed through the trees. He knew precisely, without thinking or wondering, where to find Idgen Marte. She stood with her bow hanging limp in her hand, the arrow fallen from the string, her eyes wide in something closer to terror than he’d ever seen in them. She pointed, and his eyes followed her finger.
What he saw was a horrifying tableau of a half-dozen people frozen in positions of twisted, painful horror. Heads were twisted backwards upon necks, knees were bent and locked the wrong way, as were elbows.
All of their mouths were open in silent screams.
Mute and horrified, Allystaire slid his hammer back into its ring, and approached the nearest figure: a man a decade younger than him, wearing warm fisherman’s clothing and a knit cap.
His fingers slid against a smooth, hard surface, like marble. Cold, as though it had absorbed the chill of the air. He placed his left hand against the stone-like cheek, closed his eyes, reached for the Goddess’s Gift. As he pushed his senses into the man, he felt the faintest spark of life, a tiny, barely glowing coal amidst a bed of ash. He reached for it, puffed it back to a flare.
The cold smooth skin turned suddenly warm, and with a creak of grinding bone, the man’s neck turned, painfully, awkwardly, and wide eyes now suddenly aware focused on him.
“Palllllladinnnn,” the man groaned, even as Allystaire felt that lifespark drain utterly away, snuffed out like a candle. “You are nothing to us,” the corpse then said, and was suddenly joined in a chorus as all of the frozen bodies started to life and began to speak.
“Your goddess is nothing.”
“You saved none of them.”
“You cannot hope to stand against us.”
“Your ruin lies at the end of this year.”
Allystaire, briefly taken aback, moved to the next closest one, a fairly young woman, who snarled and babbled as he drew closer. His hand flew to her pox-marked cheek, but he felt nothing, no life within her. He moved towards the next as he heard Idgen Marte’s bowstring stretch and tighten.
“Where were you?”
“They needed you.”
“As if it would have mattered.”
“We will kill you in the end.”
“To live among the weak is to become weak.”
The groaning, the creak of their bones as their bodies twisted more and more viciously, the feel of their very lives, of some very slim hope they had draining away even as he moved among them trying to bring the Goddess’s Gift to bear, to save them, began to eat at him.
Suddenly Allystaire thought the twisted dead things were right. I could not save them, he thought. Who can I save? The more I try to protect, the fewer I can help. Who have I saved? Mol, he answered himself.
“And yet so many more died,” one of the corpses said, twisting its neck unnaturally to look him in the eye as he began to sink to a knee.
“So many more will die,” another said.
“So many.”
“And for what?”
“A deity from where?”
“A deity who means what?”
“A power that pushes you about like a stone on a gameboard.”
“Like cards on a table.”
Allystaire began to shake, to tremble, feeling his resolve cracking, feeling the need to call to the Goddess’s Gift, to try and save them, waning. He heard Idgen Marte speaking behind him, but not her words.
The air was a weight upon his neck. If I led the weak and the poor in an uprising, thousands would die, and for what?
The cold burned his lungs. It is not about revolt.
The noise of the groaning blended into a sustained and unintelligible cacophony that threatened to burst his ears. Then it is pointless. Nothing will change. Born into misery and toil, ending in futile death.
His heart pounded, then faltered. So many have already died so pointlessly at my urging.
The world started to grey at the edges.
Then, suddenly, the noise stopped. But the weight of it was still on his mind and his heart, and he grasped at his throat, his fingers feeble and clumsy. The words echoed in his ears still.
The futility of his life threatened to crush him.
He heard Gideon speaking behind him, but again, could make out no words.
Then he felt Idgen Marte’s hand upon his cheek, and her whispers floated through the echoes. “Sorcerous lies,” she said. “They cannot hurt you.”
Color returned to the world. His heart stuttered back into a steady beat. “The Mother offers safety and refuge, and you are Her bulwark,” came another whisper. “Her shield and Her sword.”
His lungs filled with cool autumn air, and the burden of despair that weighed on his mind dissipated like fog under the morning sun. “No darkness can stand against Her sun, before the hammer She can make of it.”
Allystaire remembered himself, and despair gave way to anger. He stood, whirled to face Gideon, still shivering slightly. Idgen Marte stepped away from him, her hand dropping from his neck. “What was that?” he said.
“A trap,” Gideon said. “Laid by a sorcerer. For you.”
Allystaire looked back towards where the refugees had stood, and saw only bodies. Bent and tortured, their necks twisted and backs broken, but truly dead.
“How? What?”
“I’ll need time to examine them and the area,” the boy said “Take a moment.”
Allystaire collapsed onto one knee, pressing a hand to his chest. Idgen Marte squatted next to him, laid her hand companionably on his shoulder. “I couldn’t feel what you felt, but I knew it was hurting you,” she said. “They were wind, empty sounds. You heard them, though, didn’t you?”
Allystaire nodded. “They spoke of futility. Convincingly.”
“You started to fade from my senses. As if you were disappearing.”
He said nothing. Gideon knelt by one of the bodies and grabbed it by the wrist, closing his eyes. He placed a hand upon the ground, then suddenly started, standing upright, his eyes flying open.
“This took a great deal of power,” he said. “Someone a good deal more powerful than Bhimanzir ever was. His master, Gethmasanar, may have been capable of this, but I doubt it.”
“Who, then?” Allystaire asked.
“I don’t know,” the boy said, shaking his head. “Think of the planning this speaks of, to know these folk are fleeing Bend, and coming here.”
“Or to have been told by the Choiron,” Idgen Marte muttered darkly.
“I doubt that,” Allystaire said. “Symod is capable of much, but not this. An attack with steel and flame, yes. Casual cruelty, yes. But this? No, I doubt he would condone this. Too complicated.”
“Aye,” Gideon said, “it certainly was that. The sorcerer took over their minds, their very bodies, then preserved them, feeding his spell with their own life force, banking it like a fire that has to last for days on limited fuel, so that it would last as long as possible as it drove them on towards Thornhurst. The second half of what was done to them would engage only if someone came along who sought to heal them, who reached into their bodies to begin repairing them. You,” the boy added, pointing at Allystaire. “And then came the Grip of Despair.”
“Is that—”
“A powerful enchantment laid upon the mind,” Gideon replied. “With it, a sorcerer with enough will, enough knowledge, enough sheer power, can make a target simply lose any connection to the world, any will to live. It can strike a man dead without hurting him. That it nearly worked on you— your will and vitality are far stronger than most—well, I’d not like to confront him. Not if he knew I was there.”
“Could you expend this much power? Not to achieve this goal, but at all?”
Gideon thought a moment, then nodded slowly. “Yes. But it would expend most of the power that remains in me from the God of the Cave.”
Allystaire stood with Idgen Marte’s help. “If they wanted him dead, why not a simple thunderbolt or a ball of fire?” she asked.
“The Grip of Despair is a statement,” Gideon said. “If a sorcerer’s power is so much greater than your desire to live, it demonstrates how insignificant you are.”
“Well, I hope the bastard knows I am not dead,” Allystaire said raggedly. “I will remind him of that fact, eloquently, with my hammer, when I find him.” He looked down at the corpses, and said aloud, “We have not the tools nor the time to bury them.”
“I can set them upon a pyre,” Gideon said. “Of sorts.” A pause. “Not a literal pyre, made of wood. I’ve no need of that.”
“Fine. Do it. Then we start back.”
“Are we sure of traveling in the dark?” Idgen Marte hesitated a moment before going on. “I’m not some child afraid of hobs waiting in the night, but it’s dangerous for the horses.”
“I am sure,” Allystaire said. “All three horses can use the work, and he can see in the dark,” Allystaire said, pointing to Gideon. “We will walk if we have to. I do not care if it means we are up all the night. I will not sleep till I am back in Thornhurst.”
He knelt on the ground once more. Dimly he was aware of the bodies being lifted from the ground and moved, felt the tiny hum of power emerging from the boy behind him as he did it, then a flare of light as the bodies were consumed. His mind, though, was elsewhere.
Mother. Goddess. I do not know how to fight a power that can make me forget all that I have felt and known in my life as your servant. Please, if you have any answer, tell me.
He was met with silence. He thought back to his encounter with Bhimanzir, how he had drained the power from him with the Healing Gift. I will never get that close to one of them again, he told himself. They will be prepared. If just one of them can come so close…
Stop. The voice that he heard within his head was not his own, nor was it that of the Goddess. He looked up saw Idgen Marte standing over him.
“They’re powerful, but they fear you. Why else would they set this trap?”
“What do we fight them with?” Allystaire pushed himself to his feet. From the corner of his eye, he saw the twisted, tortured forms of the folk who’d fled from Bend consumed in a soft but powerful light that Gideon seemed to conjure from the air. It could have been awful, yet somehow it was not. There was no reek of flesh, and with each flare of light, the sense of gloom, the powerful interior darkness that infected the area, was lessened. The corpses straightened and uncurled themselves, lost their grimaces of pain.
“Him,” Idgen Marte whispered, pointing at the boy, who seemed absorbed, peaceful, even relaxed. Allystaire could feel the suffering ease out of the bodies as Gideon’s light touched and consumed them.
“Will he be ready?” Allystaire’s voice was barely audible.
“That’s up to you, isn’t it?”
The last body lifted into the air at Gideon’s will, and was cleansed in the light he moved along it. He turned towards them. “They’re with Her now,” he said. “I cannot do that endlessly, but for a few poor folk like these…”
“I understand.” Allystaire thought a moment. “They have gone to a rest, and it was the best you could offer.”
“Let’s head home,” Idgen Marte said. “Can you take the lead, Gideon?”
The boy nodded. They followed him out of the small screen of trees and found the three mounts more or less where they’d been left. Idgen Marte’s sleek brown courser and the palfrey had wandered, nosing at the scrubby, browning grass. Ardent had remained exactly where Allystaire had left him, and whickered as the paladin picked up his reins.
“That horse is uncanny,” Idgen Marte said, as she gathered her own horse and gave its reins a gentle tug to start leading it on.
“Not the first time you have said that,” Allystaire pointed out.
“Doesn’t make me wrong.” She paused. “You know, the stories the songs, they often mention the paladin’s mount.”
“Aye, and usually it is a dragon or a great wolf or a bear or some celestial creature in equine guise.”
“Well are you sure that thing isn’t a bear, maybe wearing a horse’s skin?”
Gideon, without looking back at them, spoke up. “Are you two going to do this all the way back to Thornhurst? It’s going to be a long night as it is.”
Allystaire smiled despite himself. “You have been spending too much time with Torvul.”
“There’s much I can learn from him,” Gideon smoothly replied.
“Aye, and when you get bored of mixing tinctures and old lies, and you’re tired of standing in the cold and hauling rocks and learning to get hit with a stick,” Idgen Marte put in, “come to me and I’ll teach you something useful.”
“Like?”
“How to lift a purse or spring a lock,” she said. “How to woo a girl and stomach your drink. Cold, get just the right amount of wine in me and I might teach you the lute.”
That declaration brought a moment of stunned silence. Allystaire and Gideon stopped in their tracks. Ardent bumped his nose into Allystaire’s shoulder, surprised by the sudden halt.
“You play the lute?”
“It’s not that uncommon,” Idgen Marte responded, and the hint of evasion in her tone made Allystaire wish for more light to make out her features. “You’ve said you had music lessons as a page or a squire.”
“Oh, they tried,” Allystaire said. “The harp. But I had no hands for it. My fingers were too thick and clumsy to find the right string without two or three wrong strings coming along. Then they banned me from trying it at all after I broke one.”
Idgen Marte spat to the side, started walking again, forcing the other two to keep pace. “On purpose?”
“Aye,” Allystaire admitted.
“Breaking an instrument with intent is a sin.”
“If it makes you feel any better, I broke it by hitting a young Casamir over the head when I saw him try to shove a charcoal boy into a live fire.”
“Cold, he was a piece of shit, wasn’t he?”
“Who’s Casamir?” Gideon asked.
“A dead man,” Allystaire said. “And well deserving of it.” He paused, looking over at Idgen Marte, imagined he could see the faintest trace of the white scar that curled down her lip and around her throat.
“Going to have to hear the lute some day, Idgen Marte,” he murmured.
“About it, maybe,” she answered softly. “Me play it, though? No.”
* * *
The walk was long and cold and dark, and the sun lit the eastern sky as they approached Thornhurst’s outlying farms. The horses were drooping. Once, Allystaire placed his left hand upon their necks and did what he could to ease their weariness.
“The horses will need a good rub, then rest and fodder,” Allystaire said. “Gideon, you stay with me so you can learn how it is done.”
The boy, who’d found the determination to walk every step of the way back, and was now on the fading edges of consciousness, looked wearily back at Allystaire. “Can’t we just feed them and then sleep?”
“The first rule of keeping an animal, any animal, as a partner in your work, be it a horse to ride, or a dog or a pard or a falcon in hunting, is that you see to the beast’s needs before your own. It eats before you, sleeps before you, drinks before you. You never break that rule except at utmost need.”
“No would have sufficed,” Gideon tiredly muttered.
A brief flare of anger brought sharp words to Allystaire’s lips, but he bit them back. He’s not a lord’s son in need of breaking, he reminded himself.
The three of them wearily trudged their last yards to the stables outside the Inn. Allystaire sent Gideon to fetch water while he and Idgen Marte unbuckled saddles.
“Boy saved your life tonight,” Idgen Marte pointed out, as she fetched a pair of stiff brushes, tossed one to him, and began to comb her courser’s coat. “Ought to make sure he knows that you realize it.”
“I will. When the time is right.”
“The praise comes dear and the list of tasks never ends, eh? He’s not a squire.”
“No, but that is no reason to abandon a sound method.”
“I suppose.” She continued brushing and Allystaire did the same, and for a moment there was only the sound of the thick brushes against the coats of their warhorses, pulling free tangles, cleaning out the mud and dirt of the road. “How long do you usually get to teach a boy to be a man?”
“Wrong question. You can never teach that. You can only teach the things you think a man ought to know, mayhap have some say in the kind of man he becomes on his own. Yet, to your real question—they would come to Wind’s Jaw as young as seven or eight summers, and become knights at sixteen, seventeen? Most would start marching on campaign at fifteen.”
“So eight years or so. With Gideon, how long do you think you’ll have?”
“Can it be more than two months till Longest Night?” Allystaire sighed. “So, that long.”
“It’ll have to do.”
“I suppose I can skip the finer points of the list and getting accustomed to armor.”
“How does a boy get accustomed to that, anyway?”
“In my day, we had chainmail thrown on and had to climb the highest tower in Wind’s Jaw if we wanted to eat that night.”
“And what did your charges do?”
“The same, but carrying sword and shield as well.”
“Cold. You must’ve made some hard knights. How’d your barony not conquer?”
“Well, we did, a bit. Lord Mornis, one of Harlach’s primary liegemen, was swallowed up entire by the Old Baron, and I carved a good third of Harlach away in my time. We took pieces of Delondeur or Varshyne or Telmawr, but rarely held them. And if our knights were hard, well, Delondeur knights were just as hard, as were Harlachan. Never enough of us.” He paused. “Enough of them,” he added, with a snort.
“Hard to forget who you were,” Idgen Marte muttered.
“Could be that it is easier for me because I was already walking away from it,” Allystaire offered after a diplomatic pause.
“I’ve learned that lesson. No need to dance around it. I tried to be my old self. She decided to let me. It was no accident that my sword got broken, after I spent all that time blathering over what it meant t’me.”
“Torvul can make something out of it. Something new.” He stopped in his brushing, having mostly gotten the tangles and mud out of Ardent’s coat. “And that would be the point, aye? Take the parts of what we were to make something new.”
“Leave the explanations to the bards and the minstrels,” Idgen Marte said.
“Have I not been saying that, or near enough, since we met? On with the work of the day,” Allystaire replied as the door of the stable swung open to admit both clear autumn daylight and a cold gust of wind.
Gideon entered with them, hauling a full bucket manfully with both hands around the handle. Allystaire took it from him, nodding his thanks, and emptied it into the trough. All three horses came forward to nose into it and began noisily drinking.
Allystaire handed Gideon the comb he’d taken. “Now,” he said, “we have work to do. Your horse wants brushing, combing, and feeding. Hold it like this,” he said, adjusting the boy’s grip on the comb, and then pointed him towards the palfrey. “Careful with any knots.”
“I could probably do this with magic,” Gideon mumbled. “Carefully, but I could.”
“You will not. A certain amount of working with the hands is good for everyone. And it is especially good for a man and his horse when you have the time,” he added. “Now to it, and no more delays.”