Shadows
Allystaire strode into the Temple on legs he expected to go weak and wobble at any moment. That they did not, that the Goddess’s song still sang in him was worrisome, though it had receded to the back of his thoughts.
Mol sat before the altar, cradling Gideon’s slack neck in her lap. Allystaire rushed to her side and knelt. He reached up to remove his helmet, but thought better of it when he imagined it crumpling in his hands.
As carefully as he could, he extended his left hand, and gently lowered the palm onto Gideon’s bare forehead.
He felt the perfect health of the boy, and nothing else.
Allystaire pulled his hand away, gingerly, and straightened up on his knee. Too much flowed and warred within him to notice the pain the joint would ordinarily spear him with.
“Mol? Have you any insight?”
The girl, her hood pulled back to reveal her features, didn’t respond at first. Her face had lost none of the odd change that had come over it, the strange ageless quality, but some of the wisdom of her presence seemed diminished, her poise ruptured. She looked, in short, more like a girl of twelve or so years than she had since Allystaire had returned to Thornhurst.
Finally, she lifted her head and looked straight up at him, her brown eyes unblinking. “I think it was a trap, meant just for him. I…I don’t know if it worked.” She swallowed hard. “I can’t hear him, Allystaire. And I don’t know if he can hear me.” She paused a moment, then added, “I can’t hear Her, either. For the first time since the reavers.”
“Her? The Mother?” Allystaire tried to keep his voice even. “Have you always?”
“Almost always. And when I didn’t, I knew it was because there was something I needed to understand on my own. I always knew She was watching me. I could feel it. Now, the Longest Night. Gideon seemed to think it would be soon. Perhaps She is weak because of it?”
“Mol,” Allystaire said, leaning forward, reaching for the girl before he remembered the strength that lingered in his hands and dropped them to his sides. “She is still watching. Her song lingers in my mind, and Her strength fills my limbs. That means Her people are in danger, yes—but it means She has not abandoned them. She never would.”
Mol gently slid her legs from beneath Gideon’s head, lowering him carefully to the stone floor. He didn’t respond, just went on breathing slowly, almost imperceptibly. She stood and moved to Allystaire’s side, putting her arms around his neck and leaning for a moment against him. He resisted the urge to return her embrace.
“Promise me it can’t end like this,” the girl murmured as she pulled away. Her eyes were large in her face, frightened, but dry, and their gaze was steady. “We have so much work left to do.”
“So long as any strength remains in my arms, no monster, no sorcerer, no slaving Baron will have Her people uncontested,” Allystaire replied. “I will tell you what I once told Her. If the whole world arrayed itself against us, and I was left to face them alone, I would.” He stood, careful to step away from the girl and the prone boy. “Find him, Mol. Do what you must. Get Torvul if you can. We will need him if we are to see the dawn.”
He watched her kneel beside Gideon again, and lay her hand upon his forehead. He wanted to kneel beside the girl, call the boy’s name, heal him, pull his mind back from wherever it had gone. Allystaire’s hands clenched at his sides, and for a moment he was afraid to move, afraid to touch anything, for the power in his hands had still not abated.
He is as close to a son as I am likely to have, Goddess, he silently prayed. Please.
Allystaire could not finish the thought.
“We remain in danger, Mol. I have to see to the walls.”
The girl nodded, but didn’t respond. She knelt over Gideon, murmuring words Allystaire couldn’t catch. He turned and was halfway to the door when her voice rang out.
“Allystaire—did the people bring their animals inside the walls? Cattle? Dogs?”
“Some, I think,” Allystaire allowed. “Torvul put aside lumber for a cow pen to be built along the north side. Cold, he probably built it himself while he should have been sleeping. Why?” Not sure why, he thought, but did not say. This cannot last long enough for us to be slaughtering cattle.
As if she plucked the thought from his head, Mol said, “Torvul did it because I asked him to. Animals have a great value to Her people, and thus, to me.”
“As you say, Mol,” Allystaire said quietly. With a last look back at Gideon, he slipped out the door, stepping gingerly, trying not to rip it off its hinges as he went.
* * *
“I’ve been on shit jobs before,” Nyndstir said to himself. “I’ve collected corpses and pieces of corpses, dug jakes, hauled garbage, butchered meat,” he murmured as he crawled along. “Dug graves, repaired wagons, shod horses, built pyres, burned bodies on them, built cairns, hauled water, ale, wine, mead, cheese, meat, salt, bread, fruit, tents, lumber, stone, iron, peat, and coal,” he went on, pausing to check the wall, to check his side for cover, and to think of more shit jobs. “Cleaned armor, sharpened weapons, repaired sails, portaged boats, and stood more guard duty’n half o’the soldiers in this barony put together.” On one wonderfully memorable occasion, he’d volunteered on a hunch and found he was guarding the officer’s brothel and that his silver spent there just fine despite having no badges tied around his arm. “What I wouldn’t give to be crawlin’ drunk and dazed outta that place again,” he said.
He was enumerating these things to himself because no matter how dangerous, boring, or odorous any of those tasks had been, none of them had compared to crawling around in the dark looking for pieces of those things the sorcerers had unleashed upon the town.
It didn’t help that there was at least one bastard up on the distant wall who could see him and his detail and had already put a bolt through one of the two southern lads he’d brought with him, if the southerner’s distant, wheezing cries were any clue.
If they were after real bodies in order to give them a proper grave, Nyndstir would’ve had no qualms about standing up weaponless, waving a hand, and asking for a brief truce to gather them. He’d done it a dozen times before.
Nyndstir knew that he didn’t deserve a truce for what he was doing.
Cold, he wasn’t real sure he wanted one.
So they crawled, staying behind what cover they could, and picked up bones and bits of metal, but more often things that looked like bone and felt like metal.
He shivered every time his hand closed over something like that. Him, Nyndstir Obertsun. He hadn’t shivered in the cold since he was six summers, or thereabouts, and he couldn’t remember shivering in fear.
But there was a kind of wrongness about these things that he hated, hated from deep down, and he didn’t want to be putting them in a sack and bringing them back to the sorcerers. No good would come of that.
Nyndstir gave a brief longing look at the wall that loomed in the dark in front of him. Being honest with myself, I’d rather be the other side o’that, he thought, and he found himself wondering how good his throwing arm might be with his sack of bones and bits, only to realize it was all he could to do to lift it.
Besides, you took their links. You take a man’s weight, you do the task he sets you, he told himself.
Maybe it wasn’t much of a code. It wasn’t something the bards sang or told stories about. But going against it had never done him any good.
So Nyndstir crawled and ducked and hugged the earth as tight as he could, feeling the cold seeping into his bones like an old friend—there was no cold here like island cold, anyway—and he kept finding pieces of Battle-Wight and stuffing them into his sack.
Nyndstir found himself reaching for something—a hipbone that glittered like tarnished silver despite the dark. His fingers brushed it and it was numbingly cold. It stung.
Then something whizzed out of the darkness. He felt it brush past his knuckles, drawing a burning line across them, and impact the bone he held. Sparks flew. He tried to shut his eyes but his night vision was ruined, so he pulled his arm back tight to his body and curled behind the fold in the ground that offered cover.
“Cold and salt but that hurts,” he bellowed, more in surprise than pain, really, though it did hurt, the flesh ripped open in a thin but deep cut.
Much to his surprise, a deep and powerful voice answered him from the darkness beyond. “Then don’t be skulking around outside my wall!”
“Braech’s scaled balls, man, I’m not bringing the fight to ya. I’m not even armed!” Nyndstir had to summon his wind and work to project his voice.
“I can see what you’re doing,” the voice replied. “And if you think being armed changes anythin’, you’re talkin’ to the wrong one of us!”
“Well which one am I talkin’ to?”
“You’ve got the pleasure of addressing the Wit of the Mother and the best crossbowman you’re ever likely to meet. Pull your head but half a span to the left and I’ll make sure that hand troubles you no longer,” he added with a rumbling cackle.
Cold, how can the bastard see that well at this range? Nyndstir wondered to himself.
“I already did for your men. Well—one of ‘em might be alive still, but not for long,” the voice called out. “I was aimin’ for his heart and got a lung and I’m sorry for that. The other one died fast and clean. I’d do the same for you.”
“Both of them? Now I’ve got to carry three times as much of this back t’our camp,” Nyndstir yelled. “If my man’s hangin’ on I don’t suppose you could take him in and treat him, eh?”
“I’ll check but I wouldn’t count on it. And I can’t just let ya walk away.”
Nyndstir didn’t answer. Instead, he hunkered down and began gathering himself, tensing muscles and stretching them without moving much, taking in quick lungfuls of air and pushing them back out.
In one fluid movement he rolled up onto his knees, heaving the sack of bones onto his back, and then levering himself upright onto his feet.
Then Nyndstir engaged in an act he typically found distasteful: he ran, a bagful of bone and Battle-Wight on his back providing cover. He hoped.
His hopes proved fruitful when he felt something punch him in the back with enough force to nearly knock him over. Thank Braech and Fortune it was nearly, because if he’d gone down he probably wasn’t getting back up. Instead, he was able to keep his feet, zig and zag between bare trees, and finally gain the cover of the more thickly wooded road.
All the while he was anticipating another punch in the back or a burst of pain at the back of the skull.
He slumped behind a thick tree trunk, slinging the bag off his shoulder and heaving for breath. He felt sweat on his forehead and cheeks cooling in the winter air, and gave a snort of disgust. “Young man’s foolishness, this,” he muttered, then spat in disgust.
“What has a young man got that I haven’t?” He stood back up, slung the heavy bag defiantly onto a shoulder. “Fewer scars, less know-how, and a smaller cock,” he muttered, answering his own question. The hike the rest of the way back to camp was easy enough, though it tried to elude his eyes again. The big boxy wagon was still there, and in the darkness he thought he could see hints of color through its doors and shaded windows. Not of torchlight, but of unearthly blue and sickening yellow.
Still outside the camp, he reasoned. Doubt the idiots on guard have seen me. Could just sod off into the woods, dump this lot into a stream, and tell them the bowshot was too strong and they had the range.
Nyndstir looked into the woods, then back at the wagon, considered the bag on his back, and spat again. Then he squared his shoulders and took an angry, stomping step towards the wagon.
“Took their weight,” he muttered as he shifted the burden he carried.
He neared the wagon, paused as he heard raised voices, two that he didn’t like hearing and a third that he didn’t recognize.
He suddenly realized there was a fully armored knight standing in front of the wagon. Cloaked in green and wearing a surcoat with the Delondeur Tower quartered with a symbol he didn’t recognize, a ship sitting atop a spearpoint, the knight was only up to his shoulder, but that was typical; Nyndstir was used to being the tallest man in sight.
Nyndstir chuckled inwardly as he studied the knight’s arms. Inlanders and their pretty pictures, he thought. As if any of ‘em know the first two things about seamanship anyway.
A shout, followed by quieter murmuring, came from inside the wagon. The knight standing at the door started to reach for it and Nyndstir cleared his throat.
“I wouldn’t. Ya don’t walk in on such as them uninvited. Trust me.”
The knight turned to him. “Mind how you address me, man. I am Landen Delondeur, Heir of the Baron and one of your employers.”
Nyndstir dropped the bag at the knight’s feet. It landed with a heavy metallic clank. Then he fixed the steel-clad youth with a hard stare, to see if he could get that visor up. Nyndstir wanted to see the knight’s cheeks pinch, his skin flush, his eyes cut away from the force of an islandman glare.
The visor did come up, but Nyndstir was the one whose skin flushed. Instead of a young knight’s affected mustache and pale cheeks, he was staring at the sharp cheeks and sea-sky grey eyes of a young woman.
Nyndstir Obertsun was ill-equipped for the series of recalculations he was forced to make in the moment. Landen Delondeur never stopped staring back at him, never moved.
So he inclined his head—not a true bow, but just enough to satisfy—without lowering his eyes.
“Beggin’ your pardon, m’lo…m’lady” he rumbled. “I’m sure the sorcerers won’t mind bein’ interrupted. By all means.”
The door of the wagon swung open, spilling blue and yellow sorcerous light across the camp. Another armored, green-cloaked fellow stomped out. Him, though, Nyndstir knew by sight. White-haired, but sizable, back straight despite the steel he wore, wearing a cloak and surcoat of fine green silk over his green and gold armor, and the sword he’d won fame with at his side.
Lionel Delondeur took in both of them with a moment’s glance. A smile creased his features, split his beard, as he clapped Nyndstir companionably on the shoulder, saying roughly, “Good to know we’ve Islandmen with us, eh Landen? Toughest men around. Tougher than Harlachan mountaineers even.”
“M’lord,” Nyndstir said, bowing a little deeper this time. “Good t’serve,” he added, thinking that if he were actually serving Lionel Delondeur—whose grip was not too diminished with age, the Islandman thought—he might have more of a stomach for all this.
“The horses, Landen,” the Baron ordered lightly. “And round up their draft animals,” Nyndstir heard him say, as he walked off. “We need to cart our wounded over to this camp.”
Nyndstir felt a cold tightness in the muscles of his belly, looked at the sack of bones and metal at his feet, and found that his stomach for any of it had just about died.
* * *
The rest of the day had been quiet, to Allystaire’s surprise. The Goddess’s song receded but did not vanish. He saw to the wounded and the dead, silently thanking the Goddess for how few in number the latter were, then walked a circuit of the wall with Renard and Idgen Marte in silence.
As they walked, Allystaire was struck by how small the size of the ground they had chosen was. But then, Thornhurst was no true crossroads; just the space where the barony road rose towards its meeting the old High Road as it paralleled the Ash. The inner village held just over a score of buildings, closely built upon one another, where the road really began its upward sweep. There were no points within the boundary of the walls where he couldn’t see the stone oval of the Temple.
Near the end of their circuit, he stopped, faced the Temple, and took a heavy breath. Let me be equal to this, Goddess, he prayed. However it must end, let me meet it well. Let all of us.
He felt a sharp rap of Idgen Marte’s knuckled fist upon his armor, and turned to face her, finding her eyes hard and her face sharp. “Enough of that,” she muttered.
Renard, leaning upon his spear, heaved a small sigh. “That’s odd, you know. Unsettling. When any of you five start talking in your heads and answer aloud.”
Allystaire turned a quizzical eye on the bearded veteran. “You know of this?”
“’Course I do. Mol told me. Cold, she showed me once. She can speak to any of us that way. I’d wager she can speak to anyone she likes in their mind.”
“Can she hear them answer?”
“Aye,” Renard answered, nodding faintly, his coif clinking lightly against his mail coat. “Said she’d only do it at need, that most of us weren’t prepared for it, could hurt us. Only you lot could truly stand it, something about the touch of the Mother upon your minds.”
“Renard,” Allystaire said, drawing a step closer to him and raising a hand as if to clap him on the shoulder, only to see the canny old soldier back up.
Then, grinning, Renard said, “I’ll take my chances with the Delondeur troops and the patchwork monsters, but I’ve no wish to see my shoulder crushed to rubble because you got maudlin, Arm.”
Allystaire and Idgen Marte both laughed. Allystaire’s mouth quickly drew back into a line and the mirth that briefly flared in his dark blue eyes vanished altogether. “Renard, if there is a way to get some of the folk out, to escape before this draws to its end, I want you to leave with Leah. A man with a child coming has obligations greater than any other.”
“Don’t you tell me what my obligations are,” Renard said, with sudden heat creeping into his voice. “I’ll be staying right here, child or no.”
“Renard—”
“Don’t,” the man said, shaking his head sharply from side to side. “I decided to follow you those months ago—seems like more than months—regardless o’where it took me. I was puttin’ silver in my purse, but a man can’t live on silver, not and feel like a man. And when you called me out on what I was doin’ in front o’that fat man’s toybox, well, I felt shame like I never had. And I thought, well, I’m done taking that greasy silver. Decided I’d rather see where a man like you was goin’. A man with naught more than I had, arms, armor, will to use them, a better horse maybe, standing alone in front of a man with spears at his command, and a priest with a bully of a God behind him, and tellin’ ‘em no.” Renard’s gruff voice made the word somehow triumphant. He went on after a breath.
“Maybe they were petty lords, but they were men used to forcing their way, like the bastard slaver outside is, and you wouldn’t let ‘em have it.” He didn’t wait for Allystaire to nod before rolling on. “And now I know what you are, and what she is,” he said, pointing at Idgen Marte, “and Torvul, and Gideon, and Mol, well, now I’m not going anywhere. Not because I think it’s grand to be part of a story bein’ born, though mayhap I’ll look back and think it so some day. Lords and heroes alone don’t win a battle, yeah?” He paused again, wetting his lips.
“Someone else has got to do the little work, the organizin’, the shoutin’, the cursin’. Other folk, folk not blessed with Her Gifts, have got t’be willing to look at the bastards who own everything and want more still, and tell them no the way you told the fat baron and the Choiron. Maybe all I got is this,” he said, hefting his spear and butting the bottom of the shaft against the ground. “For the first time in all the years I been carryin’ it, I can know for cert I’m usin’ it on the better side o’the fight, for somethin’ more than silver. For the first time, maybe the only time, I’m fighting for my own home, my wife, my child, all things I’d not have if not for the Goddess. You don’t get to take that fight away from me, paladin or not.”
The soldier’s defiant outburst hung in the air a moment, till Idgen Marte stepped forward and took his arm in hers. “Brother of Battle,” she said quietly, and he echoed her, a faint flush in his cheeks.
“Renard,” Allystaire said softly, “I have known dozens of knights and lords whose deeds minstrels sing of, men in glittering armor on horses whose bloodlines make Ardent look like a nag, with every manner of axe and sword and mace and hammer made to their own hands by master smiths. And there are none of them I would rather have next to me than you.”
“Fine,” Renard said, rolling his shoulders beneath his mail and shifting his eyes from one to the other of them. “Can we stop all this rot and get back t’work now?”
Allystaire and Idgen Marte laughed and resumed their walk. When they reached the north-facing gate, Renard moved off to resume his post and talk to his militiamen. Idgen Marte started to head towards the scaffold, and then paused and looked back.
“Should you be posted here in case the Battle-Wights come back?”
“No guarantee they will come back to this gate. They could attack either gate, or both. We need to get the men some cudgels, staves, maces—anything heavy. I cannot be everywhere, and if we face more than eight or ten, or they attack in two places…” He trailed off, shrugging.
“I can borrow Torvul’s head-knocker,” Idgen Marte replied. “Gather up stones and…”
“…drop them from the top of the wall? Let the fall do the work for us,” Allystaire said, nodding approvingly. “Can you get up a party for it?”
She nodded, glanced to the wall, and then back to him, resting a hand upon her hip. “We’re going t’need Gideon,” she muttered.
“I know,” Allystaire said, nodding slowly and biting the inside of his cheek. “I cannot imagine that the Goddess would let him be taken now.”
“I don’t think She’s got anything to do with it.” She toed the ground and kicked at a frosted clot of dead grass. “I like to think She has a plan, or a goal—but She told us herself that none of it is fated, none of it is destined. Whatever happens, we have to make it happen. And pay the costs.”
“Gideon cannot be the cost. Not now. Idgen Marte, She told me in the chapel, during the vigil—the order She Called us, it mattered. We are…” He grimaced, searching for the words. “I think we are the phases of light in its struggle with the darkness of night. Mol at the very fall of twilight. You, at the darkest time, when light exists only in shadows. And Gideon…”
“Is like unto the dawn,” Idgen Marte said, echoing the Goddess’s words. “I know.”
“Well, if dawn is to come then it is up to us to pass through the night. The Longest Night.”
“That’ll be in the next day or two. If I’m any judge.”
“Gideon thought so, apparently.”
“Knowing him, he’s likely right. Anyway, why haven’t you northern barbarians a decent horologist or star-gazer about to know these things for certain? And your seasons, your damned longer winter and summer. You people don’t know a proper spring here.”
“I am sure the Rhidalish kings employed one or two such men, and I am equally sure they took a good look at the start of the Succession Strife forty years ago and scarpered off back to wherever they came from.”
She waved a hand in the air dismissively. “Back to the watch with you. I’ll be listening for any word,” she added, tapping the side of her head.
Allystaire made quick work of the walk back to the other gate. Stretching his muscles gave some vent to the song that pulsed in them, but what he knew he wanted—what the song wanted, what his Gift wanted—was an enemy and room to swing.
Too soon he was back on the scaffold, and equally too soon the sun had all but vanished. Torvul was nowhere to be found, so Ivar had the wall, along with a thin scattering of Ravens. The mercenary captain kept her eyes staring off down the road, where a few burnt out farmstead buildings were visible as shadowed hulks from the glow of campfires as the Baron’s men bivouacked among them.
“Ivar, what is it that you do not approve?”
“Not my place to approve,” she said, with a shrug of her mailed shoulders. “I’m a hired spear only.”
“Nonsense. We have too much history to—”
“History you’ve forgotten,” Ivar said, lofting a gob of spit over the wall. “The Allystaire Coldbourne I followed never would’ve cornered himself at bad odds. Never would’ve chosen t’believe fool notions of goddesses and defendin’ peasants,” she added, heat rising in her voice.
“The man you followed is dead, Ivar,” Allystaire said, his voice calm and even. “There is no more Allystaire Coldbourne.”
“Oh, and don’t I freezin’ know it,” the woman replied with a vicious laugh.
“You took my sister’s weight and agreed to serve.”
“I know Cold-damned well what we signed on to. We just didn’t know who we were signin’ with. We’ll stay here and die for our silver ‘cause that’s what we’re expected to do, aye? That’s what we were always expected to do, even in the old days when you didn’t take airs you weren’t born to.”
“I cannot make you believe and I will force no man to profess my faith. If what you have seen with your own eyes cannot convince you, nothing I say will. I know you are not a coward or a traitor, Ivar, so I will not warn you against it.” He took a deep breath and went on. “If we are to die here, at least I know I am not doing it for silver.”
“I don’t want t’die here at all,” Ivar said. “Not in Delondeur. In Oyrwyn, maybe. Innadan if I must. But here?” She spat again, shaking her head all the while. Then she grabbed her spear and walked off down the scaffold, turning her back to Allystaire.
Allystaire sighed and looked out over the walls towards the distant camp, but only for a moment, as he heard the tramp of Torvul’s heavy boots behind him.
“They sent men t’ collect the parts of those monsters y’destroyed,” Torvul grumbled. He leaned, sagged really. His eyes closed. Then he pulled himself upright and took in a deep breath of air. “I got two o’them,” he said, patting the crossbow that was slung across his barrel chest. “Third got away. Talkative sort. Things were different, seemed like he might not be a bad man.”
“He is on the wrong side of the wall till he surrenders,” Allystaire said. “How much did he get away with—and what can they do with it?”
“A right heavy bagful, and I’m not certain. Make more of their Wights, I s’spose.”
“You know of these things?”
“Have read about, never seen,” Torvul replied. “It’s a practical thing, I guess, if awful.”
“What do you mean?”
“What are two things no battlefield is ever going to run short of? Corpses and broken bits of metal,” he said, answering his own question. “You make the one remember what it was to be a man and the other what it was to be a weapon and then you fuse ‘em together into one awful whole.”
“Any thoughts on how to fight them?”
“Funnel ‘em your way?” Torvul stopped a moment, cocked his head to one side as if listening to some distant voice. “I…no. Not just now I don’t. There was a time when my folk contended with sorcerers, or so the lore is sung. I’ve not the weapons or the knowledge. I’m sorry.”
“Not just now? Meaning you did once, or you might?”
“I told you that’s how the lore is sung. Ya remember anything I’ve told ya about my people, ya’d know some of what that means. My magic, such as it is, the craft of it—it is nothing to what my folk could once do. I would be among the meanest of apprentices to the truly gifted. They were artists to give sorcerers pause,” the dwarf said wistfully, his eyes drifting off towards the distant camp.
“Artists?”
“If something is worth doing it ought to be done beautifully,” Torvul said, then waved a dismissive, frustrated hand. “Enough, Allystaire. I haven’t the time to try to explain. Unless I were very lucky and came upon him unawares, I don’t think I have what’s needed t’fight a sorcerer on my own.”
“Then we need Gideon.”
“Aye. I went to see the boy while you were walking the interior. I’ve got no potions that’ll touch him, I fear. If Mol can’t reach him…”
“He is not dead, and he is not gone. Not forever.”
Torvul didn’t answer. He lifted his crossbow and flipped up one of the crystals, sighting down it. “Looks quiet for now. Think it’ll keep?”
“Not all night. No reason you cannot grab some rest.”
“There’s every reason. A moment spent asleep right now is a moment wasted.”
“Fine,” Allystaire said, dropping his voice. “We need to prepare a fallback position, and get all the folk inside the walls ready to move into it.”
“The Temple,” Torvul said. “It’s the only building they’ll all fit in. Not likely they can get a fire hot enough to burn the stone. Might be the sorcerers could.”
“What can we do to shore it up?”
The dwarf sighed heavily. “Makeshift barricades, I suppose. I can do some work on the doors, bless them—”
“Bless them?”
“Are you going daft on me again? Didn’t I just say that?”
“What good will blessing them do?”
“You’ve got your Gifts, boy, and I’ve got mine. I’ll explain when I have to.”
“Fine. Get up a working party. I have the wall.”
“This’sll help with watching the night.” The dwarf reached into a pouch and removed a familiar potion bottle, motioning to Allystaire to hold out his hand. “The other one,” Torvul groaned, when Allystaire held out his right hand. The dwarf carefully squeezed a few drops onto Allystaire’s bare palm, dipped a finger into them, and motioned again, indicating that Allystaire should bend down.
The drops were carefully massaged into the skin around Allystaire’s eyes. When he opened them, the night was already growing lighter and clearer.
“Lady be with you,” Torvul said, and then trudged off. His first two steps were taken wearily, slowly, but as he descended the ladder he seemed to gain strength and speed, and Allystaire heard his voice booming as he moved on, calling out names.
Allystaire narrowed his eyes as he looked in the direction of the Delondeur camp. He felt weariness creeping into his limbs, and a yawn cracking wide his jaw. He looked to the sky; it was heavily clouded, with little star or moonlight. For a moment he thought he saw a shadow passing across it, but it was just as quickly gone.
He lowered his head and closed his eyes, trying to push his thoughts into the world surrounding him. Gideon? The thought was aimed nowhere, everywhere.
There was no answer, not even a ghost of one, not even a sign that he’d been heard. We’re going to need you, Gideon. We cannot do this without you. It will take the five of us, together, to do the work the Mother set us.
He tilted his head to the sky, slowly opening his eyes. It was brighter yet than it had been, but shadows teased at the corners of his vision.
He let his eyes slowly unfocus as he lowered them to the ground.
Then, much too close to the wall, he saw shadows, man-shaped shadows, flitting among the bare trees.
He stared a moment, and his vision focused and brightened even further. Wearing dark grey cloaks and carrying ropes with hooks tied to the end, a party of men, perhaps a dozen, moved with careful swiftness on the walls. They didn’t make a sound that wasn’t covered by the normal sounds of the night, the wind, horses picketed nearby.
His first instinct was to raise an alarm, and he was filling his lungs with a deep breath to do just that, when he suddenly went silent, tried to look calm, dragged his eyes away from the surreptitious forms.
Idgen Marte. Check your frontage. A dozen men are advancing on this gate with rope and hook, trying to go unseen.
And you saw them? He could feel the mockery even in her thoughts, and smiled at the sense of relieved mirth it brought him.
Torvul’s potion helped.
Our frontage is clear. Renard has lanterns out, and men patrolling the walls in pairs with Torvul’s flare bottles. I’m coming to you.
Ideas?
Allow me to show them what Shadows mean to the Mother.
* * *
Moments later, Idgen Marte was crouching at the farthest end of the scaffolding in a pool of darkness so impenetrable that even with Torvul’s potion, Allystaire could only feel her there, not see her.
He’d sent off the half dozen men upon the wall as if for a regular change of watch, and started walking it alone, a shining beacon of a target. His shoulder blades had started itching before he’d made his first turn.
The whistle of a thrown rope, the slight metallic clink as a hook, expertly aimed, clinched into the wood not much more than an arm’s length from him. The rapid, biting thud of boots with climbing studs ascending the wall. These men, he had the time to note, are professionals. Then the crown of a man’s head, hooded in dark green over a thin helm, appeared. He felt Idgen Marte dash into action farther down the wall.
Allystaire darted for the man nearest him, grabbing him by the arm he’d just thrown over the timbers of the parapet. The knife he held—its blade blacked to keep from betraying its wielder—clattered away as Allystaire broke the wrist with a simple squeeze. Then he raised the man high and tossed him over the back railing of the scaffold. The man let out a shout of pain, cut off as he hit the ground with a thud.
Beneath the scaffold, Allystaire heard the men he’d ordered off the wall rush to their fallen enemy, and winced despite himself at the sound of fists and feet thudding into him.
The rest of the interlopers had made the wall by then. Blades were drawn, and the Arm of the Mother moved to meet them with hammer and fist, while at the other end of the scaffold, the Shadow worked towards him with knives and speed.
It did not take them long. By the time the first three lay dead, leaving eight still upon the scaffold, Allystaire simply backhanded the next he came to across the face. He felt the jaw shatter, saw and heard a meaningless babbling moan of pain and blood coming from the ruined mouth, when one in the middle suddenly threw down a short sword.
“Yield,” he said. “We yield! Lay down your arms,” he yelled to his men. “We are beaten!” Knives and swords and a hand axe or two thunked to the scaffold. One man still waved a knife vaguely in the air at a patch of shadow in front of him, till Idgen Marte appeared behind him, twisted the knife out of his grasp, kicked savagely at the back of each of his knees, and threw him down upon the narrow boards.
“Your captain told you to yield. I’d take that order,” she said, bending down and resting the point of a knife against the nape of the man’s neck.
Allystaire pushed his way along the scaffolding towards the leader. He seized him around the collar and lifted him easily off the ground.
The man struggled, to no benefit. He was taller than Allystaire, with broad shoulders and a lean build, a closely cut brown beard, and a finish to his gear that suggested family weight, if not title.
“Your rank, your company, and your mission,” Allystaire said, looking up into the man’s eyes.
“Captain. The Long Knives. And…havoc,” he replied.
“What do you mean, havoc?” Allystaire asked, though he knew full well the answer.
The man swallowed. “I yielded. You may ask me no questions about our plans! It is not done!”
“It is now,” Allystaire roared, lifting the man higher. “Now tell me—what is meant by havoc! You cannot resist my question. Do not try.”
The man twisted feebly in Allystaire’s grasp, kicked out at the paladin’s knee, but without any way to leverage his weight properly, the blow simply glanced off the armor.
“Set fires,” he finally said, his voice thin and strangled. “Slit throats. Kill animals. Note the layout, and then slip back over the wall.”
There was a pause, till Allystaire suddenly lowered the man back to the scaffolding, but did not release him. “Whose throats?”
“Any,” the man said, his voice very thin and harder to hear now.
“Did you have any specific targets?”
There was more struggle, the man twisting in Allystaire’s grasp. Ravens and militiamen had started to filter back to the top of the scaffold, gathering the fallen weapons and taking rough hold of the surrendered warband.
Finally, the captain’s resistance broke again under the assault of Allystaire’s Gift, even as the paladin stood silent and unmoving.
“The girl-priestess,” he finally said, choking on the words. “The boy, too.”
Allystaire stepped back, releasing his hold of the captain, who instantly began massaging his neck.
“You come on a mission to murder children of less than thirteen years,” Allystaire muttered quietly, icily. “And yet you would lecture me on the niceties of battle and the rules of treating prisoners.”
“They’re peasants. I’m a brother of battle, captain of a warband with friends and family who’d ransom me handsomely.”
“Pick up your sword,” Allystaire said, retreating a step and lowering his hammer to the planks of the scaffold, letting it sit upon its head with the handle straight upwards.
“What?”
“Pick. Up. Your. Sword.” Allystaire’s voice was probably quieter than it had been since the battle had been joined the night before, yet the silence around made it deafening. Though the men around him couldn’t have seen his face, many took an unconscious half-step away.
“I yielded,” the man protested, backing away. “You all heard it.”
“Pick it up, or die unarmed. It makes no difference to me. Will it make a difference to you?”
The man hesitated a moment, then fell to his knees, extending his hands away from him.
“You all see this,” he yelled. “Your paladin! Your holy knight of song, prepared to murder a man who has yielded.”
Allystaire. Idgen Marte’s voice was sharp and reproachful in his mind. You cannot.
I shouldn’t. But I can.
No. He could feel Idgen Marte tensing, ready to leap between him and the captain if need be. He turned to her.
The captain saw Allystaire was distracted. The paladin heard only the flit of steel against leather and by the time he looked back to the captain of the Long Knives, the man had slim blades in each hand and was lunging him.
Allystaire felt one of the blades slip through his greaves and into his left knee. The other was foiled by his armor when the man tried to slice it up into his armpit.
The paladin reared back and brought the crown of his helm straight down onto the top of the man’s skull.
There was a tremendous and unmistakable crack.
The captain of the Long Knives was dead, Allystaire was sure, before he hit the ground, though he twitched for a long while. He pulled the knives free, the one from his flesh and the other from his steel. He took a moment to heal himself, pressing his left palm to his neck, then raised one knife in his right hand, held it out towards the gathered remnants of the warband, and crushed it by closing his fist.
“If any of you would-be murderers opens your mouths without a question put to him, goes for a weapon, refuses a request, or attempts to hide information from me when I ask it, you will get the same. Who will tell me what they know, be it rumor, order, or speculation, about the rest of your Baron’s plans?”
The top of the scaffold was suddenly abuzz with eager volunteers.