Old Mountain Ice
Torvul stood outside Allystaire’s tent, puffing thoughtfully at his pipe, beneath the cold canopy of stars.
The flap swished open, and Allystaire—having traded his armor for the dark blues, riding boots, and fur-lined cloak—sidled up to him.
“Thank you, Torvul,” he murmured. “I think I might have gotten us killed had it not been for you.”
“Not the first time, boy,” the dwarf allowed from around the stem of his pipe. “Won’t be the last.”
“I did not think I would see you use that bow…”
“Nor did I,” Torvul replied. “We came to an understanding, though, it and me. I needed it. She needed it.”
Allystaire nodded. “I was foolish and overconfident.”
“Aye, that you were. Of course, if your lance had held, it may’ve worked anyway.”
“No wood that I know is going to take two blows like that when the Mother’s Strength is upon me.”
“If I had but a single stalactite of mchazchen I could make you a lance worthy of the songs the bards’d sing of it. Made to your arm, all smooth polished stone, too much force for any shield to stand.” Torvul sighed, tamping his pipe’s bowl with a thumb. “Like all my people, I’m reduced to the poorer earths, the baser metals and common gems.”
“Have you any other thoughts?”
The dwarf shrugged. “The usual. Band it with iron or steel. I could make you one purely of steel, had I enough iron—but then you’d not be able to lift it except when the strength came on you, which has its own problems.”
“Aye,” Allystaire said. There was a silence. “We won the first day.”
“We did. But only just. And it’ll get worse before it gets better.”
“You seem unusually glum, Torvul. Is it simply the coming siege?”
The dwarf made a noncommittal noise in response, pulled the pipe stem from his mouth, and spat on the grass. “No. It’s what I just said, about poorer earths and my folk. It’s likely enough that I’ll die here in the next few days, but all over these baronies and beyond, my people are dying the same way, by one and two. And even those that aren’t lost or exiled or forsaken are trying to make a home in a wagon. Home means stone and smoke, not wood and sky!” He spat again, and said, “Don’t mind me. I’m old. The melancholia is bound to take hold now n’then.”
He looked up, turned his pipe down, and knocked out the dottle by tapping it on the sole of an upturned boot. “Go get a turn or two of sleep. We’ll keep the watch, me and Idgen Marte, and have you awake the instant anything shows itself.”
Allystaire nodded, unable to stifle a yawn, and returned to his tent, disappearing inside the flap.
A few more minutes passed in silence before Idgen Marte emerged from the darkness behind the dwarf. “Still bright?” Her tone was as sarcastic as usual. “How’d you plant that?”
“Every good peddler knows how t’throw his voice.”
“Why?”
“Rolls trippingly off the tongue, don’t you think?”
“Really, why?”
“People need a symbol, knight of legend, a simple phrase they can shout and follow into battle,” Torvul said. “They don’t quite have that yet. If we survive this, they will.”
Idgen Marte murmured something to herself, nodding faintly. “It’ll do.”
“It has to,” Torvul said bleakly.
“It will,” she affirmed, reaching out to squeeze his shoulder. “And Torvul? If I have t’fight the rest of this siege with just knives, I’m cutting off one of your ears.”
He harumphed pointedly. “An artist cannot be rushed.”
She snorted and walked off. “Good thing there’re no artists here, eh?”
* * *
Certainly it wasn’t much more than a turn till Idgen Marte was shaking him awake, a lamp throwing light around his tent.
“They’re circling the walls, staying out of bowshot. Probably time to get you up.”
Allystaire felt the weariness that followed the Mother’s Gift still clinging to his limbs, but he pushed himself out of bed anyway as Idgen Marte hooked the lamp on the ridge pole. “How many?”
“Hard to tell without enough light. Gideon told me he could count them, but…”
Allystaire shook his head. “I do not want him on the walls. Or in the air.”
“He can really? I mean, I saw him disappear that day.”
“Aye,” Allystaire replied. “And I do not want him doing it except at need.”
“Why? It is a tremendous advantage.”
Allystaire held up fingers as he counted off points. “First, we do not know how much or how long he can do it. Second, we do not know who or what can feel him do it. And third—he told me that each time he takes to the air it becomes harder to bring himself back to earth and take up his body again. Says nothing can match the sense of freedom. And a lot of other nonsense about pure thought and no limitations that I do not understand.”
“If we’re going to survive this, you’ll have to be willing to let the boy expose himself to danger.”
“Just help me with the armor,” Allystaire grumbled.
A few minutes later the two of them were heading out of the tent, passing a small wineskin between them.
She led Allystaire to the western wall, and the two of them climbed the parapet, which was really a simple scaffold. Eyes followed Allystaire and his silvered armor as he walked. Torches reflected off of it, murmurs ran among the villagers, armed with spears and bows, who stood along the wall.
Too thin and too green a line to hold this wall, Allystaire thought, though he tried to keep his face calm, his manner casual.
The torches that spread out along the farmland outside the wall spoke to scores of men, but not the overwhelming host Allystaire had feared.
Awaiting him on the wall, Renard gave voice to the very thought. “Something troubles Delondeur that he can put only so many into the field against us.” He leaned, unworried, upon his spear.
“That is assuming we see all of them. Yet it matches with what the Will told us,” Allystaire offered. “Not as many as I had feared.”
“Probably enough,” Renard murmured, voice pitched for only Allystaire to hear.
“Maybe it is simply confidence, then. Lionel Delondeur has never lacked for that.”
“Should’ve killed him when you had the chance, Allystaire,” Renard said, not hiding the reproach in his voice. “Might be that his heir would’ve come after us anyway, but not with the backing the old man has.”
“Mayhap I should have. Yet it felt like the wrong time, and the wrong way. People need to see what he is. Had I killed him in the Dunes, then I would be a murderer, disposing of the rightful Baron in favor of a bastard upstart.”
“That’s what folk’d think. Don’t make it true,” Renard grumbled.
“Oh, but it does,” Torvul said as he made the top of the scaffold behind them. “And Allystaire’s got the right of it. Now, who wants to go on out there and get this over with?” There was a bit of laughter, most of it forced.
“What do we do now?” one of the village men asked, fingering the string of his bow, and the quiver of arrows on his hip.
“The thing a soldier does most,” Allystaire replied. “We wait. We wait for the sun to rise. We wait for Delondeur or his proxy to ride forward and make demands. We wait to laugh our answer in their poxy faces. Then we wait for them to attack, and while we do, we try to figure out where and how. Then we wait for it to be over and to see if we are still standing.”
“What’s t’stop ‘em from simply settin’ the whole o’the wall afire while we’re doin’ all this waitin’?” The villager couldn’t keep his hands still. Allystaire fought the urge to reach out and grab the man’s arm to quiet him.
“I am,” Torvul replied. “You mind the skins hangin’ every three span along the wall, and the barrels under the scaffold. No wall o’mine is going to burn, even if I did have to make it of wood rather’n stone.”
The villager swallowed hard and turned his eyes back towards the dim clumps of men that moved beyond the wall, straining to see them.
Allystaire did a bit of straining into the darkness himself, then snorted. “Torvul. Have you any of that potion of yours for the eyes?”
“Be specific, boy. I’ve got more than one.”
“The one for the dark.”
“Eh. Save it,” the dwarf said, as he swung his reclaimed crossbow up to rest upon the wall, and flipped up one of the sighting rings. Allystaire couldn’t see the color of the crystal that filled it, but he suspected it was a dark red.
“Well, I’ve got the Baron’s standard,” the dwarf said, as he swept the bow slowly and evenly back and forth. “A lot of spearmen. Not too many bows. I don’t see any engines, and we’ve done a number on the timber hereabouts. Heavy horse look few and far between.”
“More trouble than they are worth in winter,” Allystaire reasoned. “Not enough fodder, and the terrain turns bad for it in a hurry.”
Torvul grunted noncommittally and lowered the bow. “I don’t like it. Seems like too trivial a force, like we’re not worth the bother. There’s got to be more coming than this.”
“Gideon said there were some coming from the north, but not nearly as many. Swords-at-hire, perhaps a couple of warbands worth, with wains behind.”
“Don’t like the sound o’that. Got to be somethin’ we’re missing.”
“Patience will show us,” Allystaire said.
Torvul turned around, and Allystaire had the sense of being glared at, then he heard the dwarf’s voice in his thoughts.
You know Idgen Marte could simply sneak out there and slit the bastard’s throat.
I do. And I will consider that at need.
This best not be about needin’ to do it yourself, or any other prideful nonsense.
I may not need to be the one to do it—but the folk need to see it, if they can.
Torvul grumbled and turned back to the wall, and they waited. Waiting, like the fighting earlier that night, was something Allystaire well knew how to do. He let his mind drift, let it seek out the connections and examine his assumptions about what was happening and why, let it work over old sieges and stratagems.
His body barely felt the cold, or the weight of his armor, though weariness yawned under him like a chasm. In time, before he really knew it, the sky was filling with the day’s paltry measure of light.
* * *
Dawn hadn’t fully broken when a small party of mounted figures rode forward, perhaps half a dozen. Three banners were held on equally long poles: the Delondeur Tower, gem-encrusted Fortune, and an even more opulent dragon, picked out in dark-blue gems on sea-green silk. Each banner had a sash of white drawn across its middle, holding it in.
Torvul grunted. “I would’ve that our reception last eve would’ve let us skip all this parley-under-drawn-banners rot.”
Allystaire shrugged, armor clanking as he moved. “It is the form of the thing, the show. Lionel always believed in forms. And showing off, even more.”
Chaddin and two of his knights had joined Allystaire and Torvul on the scaffolding, and the blond-haired sergeant-turned-Baronial-pretender nodded. “Seems like you know my father well, Coldbourne.”
“Stop calling me that, for the last time, Chaddin,” Allystaire grumbled. “I left that name behind. I will not own to it again.”
There was a rustling among the few militiamen within earshot, a whispering that Allystaire couldn’t catch. Torvul grinned but said nothing. Allystaire turned his attention back to Chaddin.
“And I do know your father. I should. I have fought with him or against him—mostly against him—for near as long as you have lived.”
He turned back to the waiting delegation and told Torvul, “We have no banner to answer them with. Can you tell them that the Arm and the Wit of the Mother come forth to treat with them?”
Torvul cleared his throat, pulled a small silver flask from one his many pouches, and took a careful sip, clearly savoring. He resettled the flask, drew in a deep breath, set his hands around his mouth, and bellowed in his deep and powerful voice. The sound that carried across the entire village behind, and to the host camping before them.
“We come forward to answer! Prepare to receive the Arm and the Wit of the Mother.”
Torvul cleared his throat when he finished, and looked to Allystaire. “We takin’ anyone else?”
“You needed a potion for that?” Chaddin’s derisive interjection was delivered with pursed lips.
“No,” Torvul said, his eyes narrowing. “I needed a drop of good dwarfish spirit. I also need you not to speak at me again unless spoken to.”
Chaddin opened his mouth to protest when Torvul suddenly lifted his cudgel threateningly, placing the brass cap against the man’s jaw. “Listen here, boy. You’re here as a guest, and that against my judgment. We’re going t’parley with your loving father now, and if I think for a moment that I can trade you for the lives of the people of this village, I won’t hesitate.”
Both of the knights flanking Chaddin looked to Allystaire, and he shook his head. “Have done, Torvul. Come on.”
Carefully, Allystaire descended the steep wooden stairway that led to the scaffold, the wood creaking under his armored weight. He heard Torvul descending behind him. They waited in silence as two of the Ravens unbarred the gate and dragged it back, then walked out to meet the delegation.
Before they’d even come within a dozen spans, Allystaire recognized Delondeur on the back of a charger that, while not quite as big as Ardent, was certainly prettier, its coat a sleek black. The Baron wore brilliantly green-enameled armor inlaid with gold leaf picking out the Delondeur Tower, a theme repeated in the horse’s tack and saddle. His bannerman Allystaire guessed to be the heir who’d come home to free Lionel, wearing armor made similarly to the father’s, if not quite as richly.
Allystaire also recognized, with a certainty that sank to his stomach like a rock, the delegation from Fortune. Despite the extravagant, spotless white fur robe that she wore, Allystaire knew that the Archioness Cerisia had returned before he could even see the pale green eyes behind the empty sockets of her golden mask. Beside her sat a temple soldier in gold-painted mail and conical helm, carrying the same gem-encrusted banner he had seen on the road to Thornhurst weeks before.
The priest of Braech he did not recognize, though he had expected either Symod or Evolyn. The man was young, with a blond and patchy beard, wearing blue robes over bronzed scales that he seemed unaccustomed to. The bannerman beside him was an Islandman straight out of a coastal villager’s nightmare: all fur and iron, wild-haired and bearded, with three throwing axes stuck in a bandolier across his chest.
The heart of Braech’s leadership is not in this, Allystaire thought, hoping Torvul would hear him. Or Symod himself would have come. They fear us.
They fear Gideon, and they’re smart t’do it, Torvul thought back.
They had time for only that much reflection, for as they approached, Delondeur rose up in his saddle and lifted the visor of his helm.
“Coldbourne!” he bellowed. “I have many grievances to express upon you. But first, I am persuaded by two-thirds of the Temples Major to give them time to persuade you to save some of those who’ve decided to follow you into oblivion.”
“That is not my name any longer, you slaving coward,” Allystaire spat back. “And at least one among your number knows that I will not be persuaded, for she knows what I am, and what is behind me.”
“I do,” Cerisia answered, nudging her palfrey forward a bit. Though her voice was muffled by the mask, Allystaire thought he heard an edge of desperation in it. “Which is why I would ask you to give yourself up—you and the other four among you who claim to have been Ordained by your Goddess. Do this, and the rest of your villagers will be offered clemency.”
“So long as they will be godsworn to the Sea Dragon and to Fortune, of course,” the priest of Braech put in.
“This does not include my bastard son or his followers,” the Baron quickly and heatedly added. “They will all die traitor’s deaths on the gibbets in Londray, and any crow-cages I feel like putting up along the road.”
“Archioness, you cannot possibly believe that any clemency will be offered, no matter what oaths these people take. You also cannot possibly believe that I will abandon them,” Allystaire answered, quietly and evenly.
“The Baron has sworn to it. The declarations are drawn up.”
“The Baron is a liar!” Allystaire’s shout, the heat and the volume of it, surprised even him.
“I will not stand for that abuse of my lordly father!” The Delondeur bannerman spoke up. Clumsily, the knight began trying to unstrap a gauntlet while holding the banner pole with one arm.
Allystaire rolled his eyes, but also set his shoulders and spread his feet, though before he could prepare a response, the Baron had reached over and grabbed his bannerman’s hand with his own. “Stop it, Landen,” the Baron growled.
“His abuse should not stand,” the bannerman protested, voice muffled by the visor. “Let me prove his lies upon him, my lord.”
“Landen,” the Baron said flatly, “I need you to remember something. Whatever it is you think, the man you were about to challenge is still Allystaire. Coldbourne.”
“What of it?”
“He’ll kill you,” the Baron replied. “You’ve some blood on your sword from your summer, but it’s too little, too fresh, and too seawater-thin. His blood is old mountain ice. Oyrwyn ice. He’ll kill you and yawn while he does it. Leave him to me.”
Landen’s hands wrapped back around the banner-pole.
“Allystaire, please listen,” Cerisia said, urging her horse forward a few more steps. “You have a chance to save—”
“Spare your words. You had a chance to see and do what was right, and you have chosen to save yourself, and to soothe your conscience with a pair of bright gems that cannot feed, house, clothe, or arm the people you now come to crush. Absent yourself or silent yourself,” Allystaire said. “But do it quickly.”
He heard her sigh, saw her eyes close behind the mask, then open again, perhaps slightly wet at their corners. But she turned her horse and rode back next to her bannerman, and she did not speak or seek Allystaire’s eyes again.
The priest of Braech straightened in the saddle, though he didn’t gain much height by doing it. It was hard to guess with him mounted, but Allystaire thought himself likely a head taller than the priest, who said, “The Sea Dragon’s Temple will not be as easily si—”
Allystaire swung narrowed eyes to the man. “I think the Sea Dragon has already been turned away from here once,” Allystaire said. “And that neither the Choiron Symod nor the Marynth Evolyn could find it in themselves to face us.” He turned from the priest, who paled beneath his boy’s beard, back to the Baron. “Are we done?”
“Not till I’ve got you drawn and quartered and burning, Coldbourne, or Allystaire, or Arm of the Whore, or whatever you call yourself these days. Yet we are done treating.” The Baron turned his horse and spurred it, followed closely by Landen and the Braech priest and bannerman. Cerisia lingered a moment. Perhaps, Allystaire thought, she was waiting for him to say something, anything else.
Instead, he stared at the retreating Baron’s back, even as Torvul’s voice sounded in his head. I could shoot him from here. That’d be that.
Not under drawn banners, Allystaire thought in reply.
Finally, Cerisia turned her horse and her banner followed. Allystaire and Torvul turned and walked for the gate.
“Never seen a man more determined to repel a comely woman’s attempts to warm him up,” Torvul muttered. “You didn’t have your tackle cut off somewhere in your endless warring, did ya? Or does all that time in the saddle just deaden everythin’?”
Allystaire snorted. “I have no wish to be bound to that one. Too many games, too much at stake.”
“Stones above. If I hadn’t seen quite so much of your blood myself, I’d be inclined to think it was ice.”
“I think that was the highest compliment Lionel has ever paid me. Frankly, I am a little touched.”
“So long as it doesn’t stop you from killin’ him, you get the chance.”
“There is very little in the world that could.”
* * *
Allystaire and Torvul clambered quickly back up the scaffolding and watched the banners depart.
“How long d’ya think he’ll make us wait,” the dwarf muttered.
“Not long. Now that the form has been observed, Lionel will want to stamp on us, and fast.”
“Not sure he brought enough men t’stamp.”
“I think he brought as many as he could raise. None of Delondeur’s major lords, save the Baron himself, are present. Had Ennithstide or Tideswater Watch or Salt Towers been here, their banners would have been present at the parley.”
“You people need t’think a little harder on the names of your fiefdoms.”
“Be that as it may, the fact that they are not brings us a little closer to understanding the constraints the Baron faces. He has the largest barony, half again as large as Oyrwyn and as big as Innadan once you consider the Telmawr fiefdoms Delondeur has swallowed up, and old barony Tarynth. He can field thousands of men. Why bring three hundred or so?”
“You’re forgettin’ that Idgen Marte sent them all running while you were a guest at the Dunes. They’ve gone to winter quarters now, and they’re not coming back out.” Torvul said.
“Yet some of them would have come, surely, if Delondeur commanded,” Allystaire pointed out. “He has not. And that can only mean that he does not trust them. Surely word that he was deposed and imprisoned spread. How many rode to his rescue? How many turned out their knights and men-at-arms? He has to show them something. Some strength, or power. The longer we can hold, the more his position erodes.”
“As if his lords and their knights don’t know about the slavin’? Who’s rowing their galleys, after all?”
“Mayhap,” Allystaire said. “Yet they surely do not know of the folk being cut to pieces in the dungeons of the Dunes to feed the power of a sorcerer. And even if they do, they cannot be seen to know it. The longer we hold, the more they are forced by circumstance to distance themselves.”
“How’ve you people let these wars go on so long, anyway? I’d’ve thought a war-loving son of a bitch like Delondeur would’ve been thrown off the parapet of his keep years ago.”
“I cannot answer that. I was on the wrong side of it for too long. Some sickness, mayhap, some malaise that settled over us.”
“Where’d you learn a word like malaise?” The dwarf turned to glare up at Allystaire with one eye, then sighed heavily. “I think it’s just power. Those who have some and want more of it, and those who’re afraid of it and do as they’re told. I’ll give ya two guesses who’re the ones with the spears in their hands marchin’ on enemy walls.” The dwarf spat, shook his head, and reached into a pouch on his belt, pulling free a brass-bound tube with glass on either end much like the one that had shattered in Allystaire’s hands back in the mountains. He held it up to his eye and moved it slowly across the camp on the farmland before them.
“Where did you get another one of those?”
“A prepared dwarf believes in redundancy. Looks like they’ll be tryin’ fire first.”
He held the tube out to Allystaire, who peered through the smaller end in imitation of the dwarf. Indeed, a square of infantry was forming up. Heavily armored in scale, with green tabards, and carrying thick oak shields with the sandy Delondeur tower crossed behind by a white spear.
“Must be the salt spears Leoben talked about.”
“Salt spears?”
“Name of the battalion. My guess, it is something Lionel threw together out of what guards and garrison soldiers he could find. Never heard of them before.”
He watched as the infantry hefted their shields and began advancing. In the middle of the square, three braziers, flames flickering at the edges of the bowls, had been placed on a cart, and it was trundled forward as the square moved. The shields went up in front, to the flanks, and above, but there was a gaping hole in the center, open and vulnerable, where the fire was.
“You are sure that fire is not a problem?” Allystaire asked, as he lowered the glass and handed it back to Torvul.
Torvul grinned up at him. “Faith.”
Allystaire glanced at the bulging skins, reached out, and took one in his hand. The skin itself was not well-tanned, for it stank, but it held tight against the liquid within. And that liquid felt heavier, denser somehow than water or wine would have. They hung at regular intervals, and the cauldrons and buckets below were, he knew, filled to the brim with some liquid that looked like water, but did not quite smell or feel like it.
“Where did you find the time to make so much of it?”
“I made the time.”
“Even you cannot conjure time from the day, Wit of the Mother though you are,” Allystaire said.
“No, but I can steal it back from the night.” The dwarf tapped a pouch on his belt. “I’ve not slept much these weeks. Haven’t needed to.”
“Is that safe?”
Torvul glared up at him, one eyebrow cocked. “We’re about to be set upon by men who outnumber us five to one at least, and you’re wonderin’ whether somethin’ is safe? Tend your patch, boy. Let me tend mine.”
Allystaire shrugged and drew in a deep breath. “Looks like they will try fire! Look to your weapons! Bowmen, nock arrows but do not draw!” Allystaire’s command rolled powerfully over the scaffold. Half of the Ravens and half of Renard’s militia began adjusting their armor, resettling grips on their weapons. The black-mailed warband soldiers did so much more casually than the villagers.
“Mind yer skins and the cauldrons below,” Torvul yelled.
“Bowmen stay on the scaffold,” Allystaire called out. “Spearmen and others will refill the skins as needed.”
Allystaire eyed the bowmen—a dozen of them, mostly villagers. He smiled to see Norbert and Henri standing a few spans apart, both drawing arrows from the quivers on their hip. Mother, let him live to finish the sentence I set him, Allystaire prayed.
Then he turned his senses inward, projecting his thoughts to Idgen Marte. He had a brief image of her pacing the more thinly manned scaffold at the other gate, nearer the Temple, her own bow held lightly in her hands.
They are going to try the front door, he thought. With fire. Torvul assures me. What do you see?
Nothing, she fired back. No swords-at-hire, no soldiers, no wains.
How are your men?
The Ravens are a bored lot of murderers, to be sure. Keegan’s bunch won’t speak t’anyone. And Renard spends most of his time trying to keep the militiamen calm even though we’ve seen naught but our breath. Are you sure Gideon was right about what was coming this way?
Do you think Gideon was wrong? No doubt the picture has changed since the last time I let him go aloft. Where is the boy, at any rate? Allystaire felt a brief mix of shame and anger at himself for not keeping track of the boy this morning.
In the Temple with Mol. He said he’d know if we needed him, that he needed to make some calculations.
I will let you know if we need you. Be well.
He could feel her chuckle. I’ll know if you need me before you can arrange the thought.
Allystaire’s attention snapped back to the present. The square of heavy foot was still out of bowshot, but they could see it advancing slowly.
“Why does he send three-score if he has three hundreds,” Allystaire murmured. “This is starting not to feel right. Like a feint.”
“Let me know when it starts to feel like a punch,” Torvul said. “I’d hate to miss it.”
The last few moments of waiting were terrible. They always are, Allystaire thought. Even as the square of foot picked up speed, as shieldless men in the middle began lighting brands, they seemed to crawl.
Allystaire raised an arm and bellowed, “Draw!”
He heard the pathetically small noise of a dozen bowstrings drawn back.
He waited, waited till the last possible moment, and dropped his arm, a dazzling gleam of sunlight rippling off of it from pauldron to gauntlet, and yelled, “Loose!”
The arrows arced into the sky, not the thick torrent Allystaire would’ve liked, but instead an all-too-thin trickle.
The Salt Spears broke into a run, and the first torch, thrown far too early, was hurled out of the square, arced up, and hit the ground with a puff of sparks and smoke.
The Battle for Thornhurst was joined in earnest.
* * *
Though she could feel the turmoil at the other end of the enclosed village, Idgen Marte tried to close herself off from it, to focus only on the side of the wall Allystaire had asked her to take charge of. She had the slightly smaller portion of such forces as they had, with less wall to guard and, they reasoned, lesser threat given that the better part of the barony lay west of Thornhurst.
“Watching the back door is an important job,” she reminded herself, as she paced along the thin line of scaffold that served as a battlement. Ivar and the remaining Ravens, longbows unstrung in their hands, lounged at intervals, with the bored competence that only professional soldiers knew how to demonstrate.
She spared a glance towards the Temple, wan winter sunlight palely resting on the stones of its oval dome and the thick, leaded windows dimly glinting as if in reply. She brushed her fingers through the arrows on her hip, shuffling them in their quiver.
There was a sudden snap in the trees beyond the gate; her head whipped around. She saw nothing.
Keegan climbed up the scaffold, shuffling towards her, occasionally looking north and craning his neck, lifting his nose in a movement reminiscent of a cat sniffing at an unfamiliar scent in the air. His band had kept to themselves since they’d come inside the walls, bringing the bows they’d found or been given, and an impressive cache of nuts, acorns, wild tubers, and smoked and salted game—far more than half a dozen men would’ve needed for the winter.
“Somethin’s comin’,” he half-growled. “Somethin’ that don’t smell nat’ral.”
She slipped an arrow from the quiver and nocked it, but did not draw the string, eyeing the man uncertainly.
When he turned towards her, his eyes were wide and white. “You don’t believe me.” His voice was low in his throat. “But something…”
Her concentration was interrupted by Gideon’s suddenly loud warning in her mind. Sorcery! the boy yelled, and she whirled back to the Temple to see him emerge from it, running faster than she’d thought him capable. She had but a moment to reflect, absently, that Allystaire’s training must have done him some good after all, when there was suddenly a louder snapping, as of trees being felled.
She turned back to the treeline just in time to see a knot of trees explode, as an ordinary-looking covered wain rolled through them like a knife through hot bread. Some wedge of force was projected around the wagon; she could see the faintest outline of it, practically feel the air thrumming with it.
She drew her bowstring, yelling commands as her eyes searched for the driver.
There was none.
She loosed anyway. The arrow came no nearer to it than a yard away when it suddenly tumbled off its flight and skittered to the ground.
Gideon! She felt, not panic, but a kind of despairing anger rise within her. The wagon, and whatever was projected around it, was headed straight for the wall—and there was nothing, she knew, that her arrows or her knives could do about it.
Then she bared her teeth in anger, turned and blurred with unnatural speed to Gideon’s side, wrapped an arm around the boy’s thin chest, and appeared back on the scaffold, panting with the exertion of dragging another body through the shadows.
Gideon was not thrown by being suddenly moved so fast across the dozens of yards, or if he was, he didn’t show it. He closed his eyes, flung out an arm, and Idgen Marte felt the power in the air buzzing towards him, draining into his extended hand.
The wedge that surrounded it seemed to disappear, and Gideon relaxed, looking suddenly sleepy.
But the wagon itself did not slow.
“Gideon!” she yelled, and the boy’s tired eyes snapped open. He flung his hand out again and she felt force again project from his hand, saw a hazy line drawn in the air at the height of the wagon’s axles.
The carriage of the wagon flew off the axles. The wheels spun crazily away in four directions, rapidly losing force and speed. The top crashed heavily into the wall with a thundering sound of splintering wood.
The wall buckled, and those on the scaffold reached out hands to steady themselves. Idgen Marte heard the creaking screech of stressed timber, but the wall held.
Those on the parapet, Idgen Marte included, nocked and drew, holding the points at the canvas covered wreck below them.
Suddenly the wagon’s cover was torn open from the inside by a long, ugly blade, then another, then two more, and the defenders recoiled in horror as monstrosities poured forth began climbing straight up the wall.
* * *
Allystaire ducked beneath the wall as arrows sailed back and forth, staring in amazement as flames hit the wall, then guttered and died as they came in contact with Torvul’s thick and viscous concoction.
For his part, the dwarf cackled madly each time one of the Delondeur soldiers darted forward with a flaming brand, or hurled it, yelling insults at them in Dwarfish. At least, Allystaire assumed they were insults. When opportunities arose, Torvul would pop over the wall and unloose a bolt. Allystaire had not yet seen him miss.
He heard a voice on the wall cry out after the impact of an arrow, saw a village man go down, and began rushing across the parapet to his side.
As he bent next to the man, pressing his left hand to his sweaty, stubbly neck and pouring health and warmth into him, he wasted no time in pulling the arrow free from the ribcage with his right. Allystaire winced in empathy as the man cried out in pain, but he could feel the quickening of his pulse and the healing of the muscles and bones that the Mother’s Gift sped along, and knew he would live.
An arrow clattered off the back of his own armor, the impact more surprising than painful, though it would likely bruise.
“Back on the wall,” Allystaire yelled, as he helped the village man to a knee. “Good man!”
He was turning back to his own position when he heard Idgen Marte and Gideon’s voices both in his head.
Allystaire! To us! Your wall is a feint! The real fight is here, came Idgen Marte’s silent voice.
Gideon’s message was much simpler, but much more dreadful, a cold sickening lump forming in his stomach as he heard it, though he did not understand what it meant.
Battle-Wights.
Allystaire turned to Torvul, knew instantly that he had heard as well, saw the wide-open eyes, the fear written in those bluff, square features. “Go,” the dwarf yelled. “We’ll drive ‘em off here. Take Chaddin and his knights with you,” the dwarf yelled. “You’ll want ‘em!”
Allystaire nodded and ran down the parapet steps, bellowing as he went. “Chaddin! An attack at the other gate. Now is the time to earn your place.” Then, gathering breath for a louder yell, he bellowed, “Ardent! To me!”
He heard an answering whinny and began running along the road, only realizing after his first few steps flew by that the Goddess’s strength had come to his limbs.
While he easily outpaced the former guard-sergeant and his men, who were slow to respond to his call, he heard the hoofbeats of his destrier on the road behind him, knew without thinking when the horse had matched his pace—for though his song-strengthened limbs propelled him faster than usual, his speed was nothing on the stallion’s. Barely slowing, he threw out a hand onto the pommel and vaulted himself into the saddle, kicking his feet into his stirrups by blind chance on the first try.
He lay flat against Ardent’s powerful neck and drew his hammer. The village flew past, with the Temple coming nearer. He rounded the bend, the big grey’s hoofbeats pounding loudly on the frozen mud of the track.
Before him, he saw what warranted Torvul’s horror.
Things, monstrosities made of bones and metal grafted horribly together, swarmed the walls, attacking its defenders. They were man-shaped, vaguely, each seeming to have two legs, two arms, and a torso topped with a skull, but the limbs more often ended in ragged blades, bitted axes, or simple iron clubs than they did hands. The ragged bones were wired together with iron and steel, and each skull seemed to be encased in a strange metal that glowed darkly.
No time to gawp, you old fool, Allystaire told himself, even as he spurred the horse that had slowed to a walk and drew back his hammer. One had been tossed off the wall by a Raven using his spear—thrust inconsequentially through its gaping ribcage, with shriveled flesh and putrid sacs that were once organs clinging to it—as leverage to take it off its feet.
The spear was pulled from the black-mailed soldier’s hand. The Raven clutched at his belt for the axe that hung there. Before he could pull it free, a blade punched through him at navel height and he screamed horridly, raggedly, till the Battle-Wight’s other hand, mace-headed, whirled down upon his skull and crushed it with horrifying strength.
Allystaire grimly set his teeth and cocked his hammer. The Battle-Wight turned for him, the spear stuck awkwardly through it and impeding it not at all, and charged.
Allystaire bent to one side in the saddle and swung the head of his hammer for the center of the thing’s mass. He hit it square, felt the impact reverberate up his arm. Like hitting steel, he thought, not bone. Still, the sheer force of it as he rode past was enough to break it into two pieces. The lower half crumbled, the spear clattered away, but as he looked back, he saw that the thing’s bladed hands were pulling it slowly but inexorably along the ground after him.
He gritted his teeth and wheeled Ardent around, feeling through the horse’s eager muscles that the destrier knew what he had in mind. Allystaire spurred, squeezed, and the horse raced forward, gathering speed and trampling straight across the half of an iron-and-steel wired corpse that remained.
Should grind the Cold-damned thing into dust, Allystaire thought, just before the impact. He thought he saw sparks fly, struck from Ardent’s hooves against the wight. The impact jolted him in the saddle, sending a shockwave through his body.
He glanced over his shoulder once more and saw that an arm had been severed, but still the thing came on. Allystaire swung out of the saddle, swatted Ardent’s rump to send the horse away, and ran towards the Battle-Wight that struggled on the ground, raising his hammer up and bringing it crashing down upon the skull, smashing it flat to the turf, splintering and shattering it.
Allystaire knew that only the Goddess’s Gift of Strength let him smash it in one blow. The resistance he felt beneath the hammer was more than mere bone could have offered. More, even, than well-worked steel.
There was a ripple of power released into the air that he could sense, though he could not have explained how. It felt wrong. It felt like life and knowledge and craft all bent together into something not simply evil, something wholly unnatural, something that was not meant to be.
It reminded him, dimly, of the feeling of the Grip of Despair, and his heart lurched. Then it was gone.
Allystaire turned back to the wall, seizing his hammer in a two-handed grip.
A half-dozen more of the things clung like spiders to the wall, and the defenders were the worse for it. His hammer whirling in his hand, Allystaire ran into the fray.
As he sprinted, he looked for familiar figures. A shadow blurred along the wall, too fast to see distinct details. Where it appeared, the Battle-Wights fell, but not permanently. Legs were tugged out from under one; another was levered over the wall to crash against the wreckage of the wagon.
He saw Gideon standing calmly on the frozen grass in his blue robe, with one of the Wights closing fast. Allystaire pumped his legs faster, sent out a panicked thought to Idgen Marte, then saw Gideon’s hands spread apart and a staff of light appear in them, about the size of the staff Allystaire had used to teach him. With better form than he’d ever displayed in his lessons, the boy stepped forward and thrust the staff out like a spear, his hands meeting together at the end. He stepped into it perfectly.
It took the Wight straight in the skull. Allystaire felt the air grow taut against his skin. The horror began to shake and then slowly disintegrate. A cloud of dirty yellow light appeared in its place, floating in the air like grease on water. The staff vanished from Gideon’s hands and the boy thrust out a hand, palm out, pulling the energy into him.
Then, to Allystaire’s horror, Gideon dropped in a boneless heap, his head hitting the ground with an audible thud.
His heart hammering with a terror it had never known, Allystaire rushed to the boy’s side, extending his left hand and skidding to his knees at the side of the prostrate youth.
He felt the lad’s heartbeat, strong and steady. There were no wounds, no disease, no poison crowding his veins. How he knew these things he could not have said, and there wasn’t time to ponder.
Idgen Mar—
The thought was only halfway out before she leaped out of the air before him. She held a knife in each hand, though one of the blades was snapped off a few inches above the pommel. Blood flowed from a wound upon her cheek, and she favored one ankle.
Allystaire lifted Gideon in one arm and held him out to her. He didn’t bother to use words, for thinking was simply faster.
He is unhurt. I saw him kill one of the things and drop after absorbing its energy. Then, without knowing precisely how, he shared with Idgen Marte his impression of what he’d seen; the sickly, bilious yellow outline that had hung in the air for the briefest of moments. Take him to the Temple. To Mol.
He felt her angry reply. That color…the villagers. Allystaire! The same sorcerer!
“Go,” he said aloud, already running for the parapet. The Mother’s Song sang in his limbs like it never had before. In his mind he beheld a picture of a family farm turned slaughterhouse, of bodies lying gutted and quartered upon their own table, of a family’s blood splashed upon their own hearthstones.
He heard once again the weeping of the Goddess, felt it tearing at him like barbed hooks.
That sound propelled him up the stairs.
The first one he reached was struggling with a wounded Raven over the black-mailed mercenary’s spear. Allystaire gave it a contemptuous backhanded swipe with his hammer and sent it careening over the edge. He paused, hurled his hammer straight down at the Battle-Wight as it struggled to rise.
The heavy iron-and-oak maul was a blur in the air. It crashed straight through the darkly gleaming top of the monster’s head and crushed its spine.
Allystaire didn’t think for a moment about the loss of his weapon. He did not need it; his mailed fists would do.
He found himself facing a third that had crested the wall, the one Idgen Marte had thrown over. He reached out and grasped its wrists, stepping to the very edge of the wall. With his unarmored left palm he felt the unnatural hardness of the thing’s limbs.
The Arm of the Mother closed his hands into fists and squeezed, and the Battle-Wight’s steel-and-bone arms were crushed through his fingers like a handful of sand.
Allystaire seized the thing by the neck. With his other hand, he punched through its chest, shattering bones and bits of iron and steel grafted to it.
He lifted the thing off its feet, felt it struggling against him, flailing its useless arms. One of its legs kicked his chest, thudding hard against his armor, but the steel took the brunt of the blow.
Gritting his teeth from the exertion, he bent the Battle-Wight, pressing the back of its covered head towards its heels till he tore it in half. The metal shrieked; the bone splintered. He tossed the lower half over the wall, and brought the other down, helmeted skull first, atop a pointed timber on the parapet, once, twice, a third time, again, then flung it high in the air over the wall, screaming as he did.
“Sorcerer! Coward!” he bellowed, his voice rising over the sounds of struggled and booming through the air.
“I AM ALLYSTAIRE, THE ARM OF THE MOTHER,” he screamed, his voice going raw, the skin of his throat hurting with the effort of it. “AND I DO NOT FEAR YOU. COME AND FACE ME!”
Allystaire realized then that, canny fighters as they were, the Ravens, Renard, and Keegan’s lot were doing their best to herd the remaining Battle-Wights towards him, luring them his way at risk of wounds or worse, or gathering with a mass of weapons and shoving one of the monsters, inch by inch, across the parapet towards him.
He waded into them, punching, elbowing, kicking, using his armor and the force of his anger, the Strength the Goddess had given him, to hurl them across the wall, snap pieces of them off, and send them flying.
All the while the sound of Her weeping. The blood on the hearthstones. The promise he had made.
I will tear apart the world of men to find the man who has done this thing in your sight, he had said. To find the man who has made you weep.
The Battle-Wights were not what he wanted. He wanted the sorcerer’s throat in his hands, like Bhimanzir’s, one moment to swing a mailed fist through the craven sorcerer’s face, to snuff out the bilious light that burned within. That very man, the man he had sworn to Her he would find, was out there, somewhere, sending monstrosities to do battle in his place. The Battle-Wights, horrors though they were, were only a diversion.
But for now they would do.
Then they were gone too suddenly, torn apart, thrown over the side, ripped to pieces, and he was screaming with raw and inarticulate fury. The Strength had not left him, and he searched for another enemy, peered beyond the wall at the gathering gloom hoping to see a flash of yellow, thinking for a moment of leaping the wall and running in search of him when the Shadow appeared at his side.
“Allystaire,” she said, her voice cutting through the veil of rage that fogged his features. “The wounded need you. We have won this moment.”
He took several long, ragged breaths, prepared for the Goddess’s strength to flee, gripping the wall.
Her song remained in his mind, his limbs.
“He is here, Idgen Marte. Here. And I will have him.”
“You need to see t’Gideon,” she said, shoving hard against one shoulder. “The attack is done for now.”
“The danger is not passed,” he rasped. “Her Gift has not left me.”
“Then we’ll keep an eye out, but there’s men’ll die if you don’t get down there,” she snapped. “Now.”
He took a deep breath, trying to calm the fury that called within him like a hunter’s horn. Gideon. “Aye,” he agreed, then stumbled down off the parapet with a backwards glance over the wall.
“The boy has not awoken?” He asked her the question as he carefully descended. The Strength still suffused his limbs, and as he closed his hand on the rough wooden railing, it cracked.
“Wounded first. He’s not dyin’, just gone,” Idgen Marte murmured. And indeed there were men who were closer to death than not. She paused to finger the crack that ran along the railing where he’d touched it, and added, “Mind you don’t speed ‘em on.”
There was one dead Raven, and another whose arm hung by a thread. Ivar knelt next to him, pressing a dressing to the wound which slowly and weakly pumped blood. The gap-toothed, black-mailed Raven captain leveled steely eyes at Allystaire as he approached. The paladin ignored her, laid his palm as carefully as he could on the man’s wound. The mercenary, a round-faced, broad-shouldered stump of a man named Donal, groaned weakly. His voice rose in volume and pitch as the wave of the Mother’s Healing flooded into him.
First, the bleeding stopped, then the bone righted itself with an audible snap. Donal cried out still louder, a dry scream, then sagged against his captain as new flesh sealed the wound and all trace of it, save the rent in his mail and the pallor of his cheeks, vanished.
Allystaire rose without a word, though he felt Ivar’s eyes boring into his back as he moved to Keegan’s side, who squatted low near one of his own. The archer straightened up and shook his head as the paladin approached.
Allystaire knelt by the man anyway. His shoulder was completely smashed in, his arm in tatters, and there was a flat patch of his skull where it had been nearly crushed. Either wound alone would kill a man for certain. He felt only the faintest beat of life. He tried to feed it, gently, as he might blow on a spark in a lantern.
The man’s life steadied, and held on, but that spark did not catch. Allystaire tried to pour the Goddess’s Gift into the man, but found his flesh already dying around him. Not knowing how, he could feel the man’s panic, could sense the spirit within him flailing blindly in fear.
Her words, heard so long ago, came to his mind then. Comfort the dying, she had said.
Allystaire thought, for a brief moment, of the men he had seen die on the battlefield, or after it. Thought of his own father, the hardest of a hard lot of men, dying with a leg lost, the way he’d been reduced from an invincible giant to a shriveled man gone old before his time, and he seized upon those moments, those memories, tried to imagine what it was like for those men who were facing a final battle they couldn’t win, and the vast unknown that lay beyond.
Those memories made a bridge to the man Allystaire knew he couldn’t heal, and he reached out to the dying spirit that quailed and raged in its fear and pain. And he remembered then that this man had spent time—months? years?—as a Chimera, a pitiful half-man, half-animal, mad with the rage of the senile God of the Caves.
Calm, Jeorg, he thought, not knowing how he knew the man’s name. You need not fear. The Mother waits for you.
Jeorg, the man’s weakening spirit answered. That…that is my name. I am a man. I am a man and not a beast. Allystaire had impressions of the man’s life all in a flash: a peasant in Barony Innadan working the vineyards gone for a soldier. A soldier who broke, one day, and ran, with no more choice in it than breathing. A deserter, yes, but not a coward.
Yes, Allystaire reassured him. You were a man, and you died a man, and if you look for Her in the next world, the Mother will ease the pain of your passing and soothe the suffering of your life.
Jeorg. Died a man.
The thought was so faint Allystaire barely understood it, but he felt the fear melt away, the panic dissipate, replaced with the impression of warm sunlight on acres of vines, of a tidy cottage, of sand-rimmed Innadan lakes. Allystaire sensed a distant brightness hovering beyond the man, and then his spirit faded as well.
Allystaire stood, popping quickly to his feet. “I am sorry, Keegan. He was beyond the Mother’s Gift of healing. I could only comfort him on his way.”
Keegan nodded faintly and sighed. “He hadn’t spoken since ya saved us. None of us knew him from before. He spent a long time as a beast—maybe the longest of any of us. Not sure he understood why he was fightin’.”
“His name was Jeorg,” Allystaire said. “And he was much the same as the rest of you, and I mean that as no insult. He remembered who he had been.”
Keegan nodded, then tried to clasp Allystaire’s forearm. The paladin shook his head. “I dare not, Keegan. And again I mean no insult. Her Strength fills my limbs. I might break your arm.”
The rangy man grunted, scratching at the side of his head. “If ya say so. I’m happy t’be yer man in this fight, Allystaire, or Lord Coldbourne or Arm or Lord Stillbright or what’er yer name is now. I’d rather not die in it, though, all the same.”
“I do not want anyone to die in this fight, Keegan,” Allystaire replied, before turning to go. He stopped then and looked back. “Stillbright?”
The man shrugged. “Just somethin’ goin’ round last night after that first skirmish. I didn’t pay it much mind.”
Allystaire turned towards Renard and his militia, but the bearded man waved him off. “None bad enough hurt here. Go’and see t’yer boy. We’re gonna need him before this is done.”
He looked over the militiamen. As Renard had said, none of their wounds seemed all that threatening. The wounds of their flesh didn’t, at any rate. Allystaire had long since come to know when fear threatened to overwhelm a man’s good sense, and he saw it in the wide whites of their eyes, in the skittish movement of their feet and hands.
Luckily for him, Renard saw it too and turned, bellowing orders. “Right. Enough standing around for you lot. Back up on the wall and a weather eye for those things. The Arm’s got better things t’do than stand around nursemaiding the Mother’s own fighting men, eh? He’s not the only one around here can kill some manky corpse, right? Let’s prove it.”
Despite himself, despite the battle and the rage, Allystaire grinned as he listened to Renard work. The man is an artist, he thought, as he set off for the Temple, feeling the Goddess’s strength flooding his limbs with every step, turning over the battle and thinking on the army beyond his walls as he walked.