The Adnacrags—Aneas Muriens
Aneas was fussing with the stump of his ear. He was vain; and it hurt more than any wound he’d ever taken, including the three broken ribs that ached like the cold grasp of death every time he took a deep breath or laughed or coughed, and the hole in his head that he couldn’t describe even to himself. He was standing in a tiny cabin in the stern that had been cleared for him; perhaps the first mate’s cabin. It was dark, lit by a scuttle to the brilliant sun outside, and he had borrowed a small mirror of Venikan silver from the captain, who seemed to be a very wealthy man.
There was a knock at the flimsy partition, and Aneas turned, ducking his head, and tapped his wounded ear hole against the overhead deck beam, and cursed.
The knock came again, more insistent.
Aneas opened the door. Gas-a-ho nodded. “May I come in?” he asked and pushed past.
Aneas frowned, at least in part because he was naked. But he wasn’t thinking well.
Gas-a-ho pushed him down on the bed and tilted his head to the light of the scuttle. He cast; there was a fringe of green light at the edge of Aneas’s consciousness.
“The wound will not heal faster if you mess with it,” the shaman said. “I need you to let me in.”
“In?” Aneas asked.
Let me in, the Outwaller shaman said as his fingers touched the wound again.
Aneas’s eyes snapped open. He retreated into his memory forest, and stood a moment under a tall maple he had known all his life, on which hung a myriad of artifacts. In the aethereal, he was not naked; he wore deerskin hose and quillwork garters and a long shirt of embroidered linen. Then he extended a hand; the other hand held a small flint knife.
Gas-a-ho was smaller in the aethereal, and had the head of an owl, which was deeply disconcerting to Aneas.
He looked around, and made a soft sound of approval.
Aneas nodded. “I do not allow many in here,” he admitted. He let the flint knife dissipate. “Something is wrong here.”
Gas-a-ho opened his beak and made a raucous noise. “Brother,” he said. “You took more than a bump on the head. You were dead. Among my people, you would take a new name and perhaps a new wife. You have been to a far country, and we need to know that the man who returned is the same.”
Aneas was looking at his tree. It was the same tree, and yet it was not; there were scars in the bark, and a shadow hung in the tops. But worst of all, there were things that should have been hanging on the tree that were gone, and other things were hanging in their stead.
“How can I be a different person?” Aneas asked.
“How can you be the same?” Gas-a-ho asked. “You were dead. I lost you, brother. You weren’t alive anymore. Irene fetched back a corpse.”
“Irene,” Aneas said softly.
“Listen to me,” Gas-a-ho said. He was looking carefully at Aneas’s tree, at the field of raspberry bramble beyond, at signs of use and signs of casting and remnants of memory, sniffing like a hunting dog. “Do you feel anything … strange … from Looks-at-Clouds?”
Aneas thought, and wisps of cloud trailed across the sun of his mind.
He was afraid.
Gas-a-ho shook his head. “I am not the gods, to play with your mind. But something here is very wrong.” He reached a human hand into the brambles and pulled out an old deerskin quiver. The thorns caught on it, but the deerskin was tough.
“That was my father’s!” Aneas said, and took the quiver. He was sure it had been hanging on the tree, and he found a broken branch close to the ground.
Gas-a-ho was poking in the brambles. “Something is very wrong with Looks-at-Clouds,” he said. “Or at least, Irene and I think so.” He found an arrow, and then another, and then a third, and Aneas, obediently, slid them into his father’s quiver.
Gas-a-ho was deep in the brambles by then.
“That should all be pine needles and rocks,” Aneas said. “There are no …”
“There’s a trail,” Gas-a-ho said.
Aneas followed the shaman. He was aware, at some remove, that what they were doing was very dangerous.
The trail was far longer than it should have been, winding in and out of the brambles and crossing a small rivulet that seemed as brown as old blood. Aneas knew that his whole memory forest was not this big, and he knew, too, that all around them was very dark. He wanted to find his clear spring and his casting stone, and they were hidden.
“I am afraid,” Aneas said. “I cannot cast.”
The shaman turned. “Yes,” he said. “That is natural. But this is the thing for which I trained: to take people on spirit journeys. You were dead. Things have changed in here. You need to find whatever the trail wants you to find.”
They walked on, and the darkness pressed in, so that Aneas feared to raise his eyes above the muddy brown trail.
The brambles kept catching on his hands, until both of them were bleeding. The blood fell on the trail. The trail was soaked in blood.
“Spirit journeys are mostly safe for the young and inexperienced,” Gas-a-ho said. “The older you are and the more you have seen, the more dangerous these places are.”
The shaman paused. “I think this is as far as I go,” he said. He smiled, and for a moment, the smile and the man’s confidence warmed Aneas.
“Whatever awaits will be horrible,” the shaman said. “This isn’t some nice name quest where you find a turtle or a hawk. But we need you back; and whatever it is, you can deal with it. That I promise. Remember it’s only you. Only you.”
The shaman stepped back. The trail had become squelchy underfoot, and the shaman’s bare feet were red in the unreal light. They were in a fetid swamp, not a marsh now; and the swamp was a swamp of blood.
Aneas stepped past him, and walked on.
It wasn’t far.
He emerged into the clearing, and it was and was not his casting sanctum. The rock was the same; the tree, which seemed miles behind them, was there, although somehow they had come upon the pool from another direction. The tree was full of lichen, and now seemed dead.
The pool couldn’t be seen, because it was full of corpses.
In the aethereal, he knew them all. They lay in the real attitudes of the dead; crushed together like baitfish, pale and unlovely. There was Ghause Muriens, his mother; and there was Wart; and there, Ta-se-ho; and there was Ricar Fitzalan and there, de la Motte and there, Anthony the stable boy, his first love; the first death he’d ever caused. And there was Gabriel’s tutor, Prudentia; there was a pair of men he’d killed to protect a secret; there was a woman who had loved him, and whom his mother had turned to ash.
Perhaps seeing her made him understand that this was a dream—a construct in his own head—just as Gas-a-ho said.
He took some deep breaths.
Gas-a-ho appeared behind him. “What do you think you should do?” he asked calmly.
Aneas made himself look at the pile of corpses. “Clear the spring, obviously.”
Gas-a-ho nodded. “We’ll smoke together when you are done,” he said. “Irene is with us now, in the real. We cannot help you, but we are here.”
“The mind is not so very complicated, is it?” Aneas said bitterly.
Gas-a-ho shrugged. “Clean the spring,” he said.
Aneas went along the last of the swampy meadow, feet squelching in the blood. It seemed unfair that there was so much blood, or that it was so fresh, but the symbolism was obvious.
He reached down. Wart, the old Jack, was atop the pile. He got his hands under the man’s shoulders. Wart’s dead weight was horribly real; his head lolled bonelessly, his teeth clacked as his jaw snapped closed.
Get it done, Aneas thought.
He carried Wart all the way to the darkness. The darkness proved to be a cool dark of overhanging spruce trees; not nearly so terrifying, close up. Aneas laid Wart gently on the pine needles and turned and trudged all the way back to the pile of corpses. The second was Ta-se-ho; the old hunter weighed nothing, although the wound that killed him was a terrible ragged tear and a loop of his intestines came out and caught on the brambles. Aneas put the old man down and pushed the slippery stuff back into the wound, and because this was his mind, he put out his hand and closed the wound. Then he lifted the old hunter and carried him to the woods.
A little golden light fell on a patch of green grass, and there was no sign of Wart. His corpse was gone.
“Two can play at this symbolism game,” Aneas said bravely, although tears were rolling down his face, and a strange hope burned in his throat. He laid the Outwaller in the sun, and turned away, afraid even to watch.
His mother was the hardest. He didn’t even think that he felt he had killed her; hadn’t even registered such a guilt, but while he carried her slight, rotting form, stiff with rigor mortis and with the skin moving disgustingly over the hardened muscles, he thought of Orley; of his hatred for the man. Aneas was too intelligent to fail to understand himself.
He placed Ghause in the widened circle of sunlight, on what had become a mound. When he laid her down, he knelt by her awhile, and then he went back and got Fitzalan.
There was something particularly terrible about handling in death a body you had lusted for in life. Ands something disconcerting and paradoxical about the corpse; it was more decomposed than his mother’s. And the head was attached. Some of Richard’s rotting skin stuck to his; fluids leached out of his friend. The smell was so bad he choked.
He got Richard to the new meadow. He took time to lay the body out, tried to close his friend’s eyes, but that proved a bad idea. His gorge rose.
He turned with a muttered prayer and went back for Anthony.
He looked at Anthony for a while, too, wondering whether he’d loved the boy or simply wanted to strike a blow at his father. Who had certainly struck back. In the extended metaphor of his mind, Anthony looked exactly as he had looked when his father had ordered the boy killed. He was not decomposed at all.
“I knew,” Aneas said aloud. “I knew what he’d do.”
He went back and got Prudentia, and the others. All in all, there were an uncountable number of trips; some he held only as shadowy forms, others had a firm reality of decay and ordure; this, too, he understood.
The strangest was the slim figure that was clearly his own. Without a wound, and no sign of rot. He paused for a long time, trying to think if there was another message here, or some new action required, but in the end, he carried his own corpse to the new green mound in the cool green woods.
And then he was done, his task complete, and he stood in sunlight. The pool was clear; potentia bubbled from the ground under his stone, and the stone was clean except for one deep mark, as if of a footprint.
Gas-a-ho came and stood with him. The tree towered over the pool again; the brambles were gone as if they’d never been. The tree was in bud.
“Nice,” the shaman said. “Some people never manage it.”
“Are they real?” Aneas asked. “The dead people?”
Gas-a-ho looked at him, and his eyes sparkled. “That’s up to you, isn’t it?” he asked. “Only you decide if other people are real.”
He took a medicine bag from around his neck and hung it on the tree.
Aneas sat by the spring. He dipped his hands in the spring, which was ops and not water, and washed his hands and arms of all the blood and filth. Fully visible across the meadow was a mound; it stood as tall as a man, covered in beautiful green grass, brilliant in the sun.
Gas-a-ho sat cross-legged by him. “It is good that you have placed them where you can see them,” he said. “You are a strong person. Can you work the ops again?”
Aneas reached into the pool and took potentia in his hand, and formed it.
“Good,” Gas-a-ho said. “But you are changed. You know that?”
“Yes,” Aneas said. “I was dead. Who am I now?”
“Who is anyone, ever?” Gas-a-ho said, but it was said with a sort of self-mocking humour.
And then Aneas was sitting in the real. Gas-a-ho had his hand; Irene had an arm around his shoulders. Nita Qwan handed him a lit pipe and he inhaled deeply of the smoke and shuddered.
He handed the pipe to Irene, and she drew deeply at it and passed it to Gas-a-ho.
Aneas took a deep breath.
Irene looked into his eyes, and he looked into hers.
“You saved me,” he said.
“We don’t have time for your thanks just now,” Irene said. “We think Looks-at-Clouds is possessed,” she said very softly.
Firensi—Tippit
Tippit’s horse was probably the best he’d ever had in a lifetime of making war. His horse was so good he enjoyed riding it; he rose in the darkness, already thinking of the joy of a canter. He didn’t usually name horses; they tended to die faster than he could be bothered to get to know them, but the horse he’d had from the Venikans was a big gelding from Ifriquy’a, with a small, handsome head and a beautiful temperament, and the gelding loved to run.
Which was good, because in the murky dawn he was galloping along a farm road with a dozen other company archers at his back.
The farm road was in Central Etrusca, almost fifty leagues south of the fields of San Batiste. He and his party had ridden all night; they had Short Tooth from the green banda guiding them.
They saw the mill silhouetted against the dawn before they heard the river or the clack of the waterwheel. Dogs were barking at every farm; the dozen of them had made plenty of noise galloping over the plains of Firensi.
Short Tooth reined in. “That’s her, Tip.”
Tippit chewed on an end of his mustache while he looked at the big mill in the growing light. “No rest for the wicked,” he said, loosening the sword on his hip. “Where’s Long Paw?”
Short Tooth shook his head. “Not a fuckin’ clue, Tip. He were ’ere yestere’en.”
Tippit looked around. He had all veterans; of his cronies, only Smoke was missing, back with the main column. In the distance the mill made an odd sound; tick-bang. Tick-bang.
“Ready?” he asked.
“Like old times,” Simkin said.
Several of them smiled.
They rode to the very door of the mill unopposed, and dismounted. There was a big stone bridge in easy bowshot, and beyond, her towers gilded by the rising sun, was the magnificent city of Firensi—one of the richest cities in the whole of the world. A huge church was being built; even in the pale light, Tippit could see the unfinished dome.
“No Head should see that,” he said.
“Ee will, in two hours, if we do our bit,” snapped Simkin.
Flarch was busy looking for something to batter the door. Simkin slipped the latch with his dagger and pushed it open cautiously. A man shouted, a woman called, and the heavy shutter opened over their heads.
“Fuck it,” Simkin said, and rolled through the door.
Tippit was right behind him. There was a man in a nightshirt roaring in terrified Etruscan. Tippit used the pommel of his sword to sweep the man off his feet; when the man moved, Tippit kicked him, and Scrant hit him again and the man fell facedown on the brick floor.
The woman was screaming now. Tippit raced up the open wooden stairs. The mill was running; he could hear the sound of the grindstone, and something else. His feet pounded on the steps, and he shouted, “Check the mill floor!”
Simkin kicked another door, and hurt his foot; the doors were heavy oak. Scrant put his left hand on the latch and pulled.
Tippit reached the first floor. There was a short hall; the woman was screaming in the first room, and the door was locked. Tippit put his shoulder against it, and broke the wooden latch.
A middle-aged woman with long hair unbound was screaming out her window. Tippit’s Etruscan was virtually nonexistent but banditti came through.
He grabbed her shoulders and pulled her back into the room, cutting off her screams for a moment. “Shut up!” he roared in her face.
She collapsed onto a stool, writhed, and came at him with the stool.
He blocked it with his left hand, which hurt, and then threw her to the floor with his right arm across her throat. It was not a gentle throw and she squawked.
He put the point of his sword at her throat to cross the language divide.
She lay still.
Scrant went through the door into the main hall of the mill.
There were quite a few men. And they were big. They weren’t particularly well armed, but they looked like smiths—heavy arms, brawny chests. Several held bars of iron, or farm implements.
One had a piece of metal glowing white hot.
Scrant drew his heavy dirk off his hip left handed and threw it. It was a clumsy throw and it hit White Hot flat across his face, but he dropped the glowing metal and then screamed as it struck his foot, and then Simkin and Flarch were there, swords drawn, and the fight went out of the Etruscans. A small boy stood, round eyed.
“I thought mills ground wheat for flour,” Flarch said.
“I thought there’d be some’at to eat?” Scrant muttered.
There was a mill wheel; it was grinding away, and a pure white flour was pouring from a wooden funnel into a sack. But the main power of the great wheel went to a trip-hammer; and even though the smiths were all gathered in a corner of the room, the hammer went on tripping; tick slam, tick slam.
“I’ll go fuckin’ deaf,” shouted Simkin. “Tie ’em up.”
Tippit appeared.
“You was supposed to yell ‘all secure’ when you had the rest o’ the building,” he said.
Flarch shrugged. “All secure?” he said with his usual smile, and farted.
“Oh Jesus,” Simkin said, moving away. “Save it for the fewkin’ enemy. Anything worth stealing?”
“I ha’e all they purses,” Scrant said.
Tippit fetched the rest of his men from the road outside. He put four on the roof keeping watch, and the rest of them tore the mill apart, opening the feather mattresses, prying up flags, tossing the kitchenware on the flags.
The mill was rich, and they found a small fortune in gold and silver; the woman had jewels; the husband had a superb dagger and a matching scabbard and purse that almost led to blows.
Tippit caught Scrant heading upstairs and he grabbed the smaller man by the collar and pulled him back. “No rape. Sauce’ll have yer guts for garters.”
“Just gonna ha’e a look at her,” Scrant snapped.
“No,” Tippit said.
“Who died an’ made you God?” Scrant muttered.
“The cap’n,” Tippit said.
“TIPPIT!” came the call from the roof.
Tippit, already on the stairs, ran to the woman’s window. She was sitting on a chair; he’d tied her hands but he hadn’t gagged her. He put his head out and saw the armed men coming across toward the bridge.
“Here we go!” he yelled down the stairs. “Time to earn the loot!” He pushed Scrant ahead of him up the stairs to the roof.
Then he followed. The mill was the size of a small castle; the roof was peaked, but had a walkway all the way around, and a low wall, so that it was easily defensible; not crenellated or pierced, but still a tough nut.
The Firensi militia was still out of range. Tippit looked west along the riverbank, and there were farmsteads and towers burning as far as the eye could see; ten leagues or more, the flames like huge campfires, the columns of smoke rising straight in the still air of dawn.
His people began to emerge onto the roof, pulling their bows out of their bags and dumping livery arrows onto the roof tiles.
The Firensi knight commanding the militiamen had stopped riding and was looking back at the columns of smoke all the way along the riverbank.
Tippit grinned. He nocked an arrow.
They made two attempts on the bridge. The first was a straightforward attempt to force a passage; the archery of a dozen master archers filled the bridge with corpses, and the knight, despite his impressive armour, took an arrow to the inside of his elbow and had to be carried back.
But the Firensi militia were tough bastards, and they came on again, this time with their hardier souls crossing under the arch of the bridge and coming up the bank. But they had forgotten the millrace and they were stuck on a stony island, blocked by the pool and the wheel, and after two men died, the rest slipped back under the arch.
Then a dozen knights and men-at-arms came with a big banner; orders were shouted, and the whole body of militia and knights marched away west on the south bank. Tippit made sure that the riverbanks under the stone arches were clear and then he sent Scrant on horseback. The thin man had been gone only a handful of minutes when the bells of the great city rang in alarm.
And then Sauce was there. She rode right up to the mill doors with only a handful of knights at her back, flung her reins to her squire, and ran, in full harness, all the way from the door to the top floor of the tower. The Duchess of Venike was right behind her.
“You can’t take Firensi with two thousand light horse,” Giselle panted.
Sauce leaned over the low wall. “How d’ya do, Tippit?” she asked.
“Fair well, my lady,” he said. “Apple?” he asked, and tossed her one.
She took a bite.
“Bridge is ours,” Tippit said. “No one dead. No one hurt. Well, some o’ they. None o’ we.”
She took another bite. “Can’t storm it,” she said to Giselle. “But I can scare the fuck out of them, and make ’em pay.” Her grin was almost ear to ear. “Lovely job, Tip. Woman downstairs?”
“No one touched her,” Tippit said.
Sauce’s look was a study; a grim smile. “Good. I’d hate to end the day with a hanging.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Tippit nodded.
“Good. Mount up and join your lances.” She gave orders and a dozen of the company’s pages took over the mill. The archers were too important to be left in garrison, even to secure her retreat.
The archers came out of the mill. Tippit took the bag of coin and put it on his pack mule.
Simkin slapped his back. “I cut the boy loose and gave him a knife,” he said.
Tippit nodded and vaulted onto his horse. “You’re a good man,” Tippit said.
Simkin shrugged. “When do we split the loot?”
Tippit spat. “When we’re in camp. And rested.”
“So, never,” muttered Flarch.
Firensi—Ser Alison
Most of Sauce’s two thousand horse poured over the bridge, and the city of Firensi panicked. Half of the town’s army was caught outside the walls, another thousand guildsmen were dead in the fields of San Batiste, and here was the dreaded enemy at the very gates.
The very gates. Sauce led her column across the river and through the richest suburbs she’d ever seen. The enormous city walls rose high above the burgh. She waved the column on with the knurled oak baton that some of her knights had made for her and rode on, and in a quarter of an hour, she was at the barriers of the great gate of San Giovanni. It was closed; one knight waited at the barriers; even the postern was shut and locked.
He bowed.
Conte Simone began to dismount, but Sauce put a steel-clad hand over his reins.
“Mine,” she said.
Sauce dismounted and vaulted over the barriers; in normal times, taking the barriers of a town was a great chivalric feat. Her troopers cheered.
Her sabatons clinking, she walked to the great gates. She looked up at the murder holes, wondering if her great gesture would be ruined by boiling oil.
The knight of Firensi bowed. “Is there a weapon you would prefer, sir?” he asked.
Sauce returned his bow. “I am Ser Alison Audley, captain of the grande alliance,” she said. “I can send for any weapon you name, or we can fight with swords, right now.”
The knight raised his visor. He was tall, slim, handsome, with olive skin and a long, silky mustache. “Donna,” he said, “if I defeat you, men will say I beat a woman; if you defeat me, men will say I was a man of no worth.”
Sauce shrugged. “Your problem, Ser. I’m in a bit of a hurry. I intend to sack your town.”
He bowed again. “You may have it, as far as I am concerned. I am the only one who would come out and face your barbarian hordes. The rest are apparently worthless.” He shrugged. “Of course I will fight.”
“Good,” she said, and drew her sword.
She moved forward, her sword moving steadily back and forth between a high guard and a low as she stepped. The Etruscan knight circled, but she was having none of that. She snapped a blow from her high guard and he covered; his cover told her a great deal.
She fell back a step, back in her high guard, sword held with both hands on the hilt, back over her right shoulder, left leg forward.
Her adversary stepped forward, his blade low.
Sauce changed her grip. It was a sudden, practiced move; her left hand shot forward and took the blade at the middle, and she passed forward, into the tempo of his advance. She raised her own hilt, crossing his blade strongly, and he made the error, as a big, tall man, of trying to outmuscle her at the cross. Her mid-sword grip had all the advantages the art of swordsmanship and the science of leverage could give; she pushed his sword aside and stepped deep with her right foot, inserting it behind his left, which had all his weight on it. Her pommel slammed into his visor, doing no damage but buying her a fraction of his balance, and then the pommel was past his helmet, the whole of her hilt across his armoured throat, and her foot behind his, and in one swing of her hips, she threw him to the ground.
Her people roared.
She put her sword point at his throat. “Listen,” she said, popping her visor. “If men give you any shit, send them to me and I’ll kill a few.”
“Ah, ma donna!” he said. “Beautifully struck.”
She liked him, so she let him live. She stepped back so her squires could take him, and then Dick Waster, Ser Milus’s squire, handed her the white baton of command and took her helmet.
She took her baton and slammed it into the gates. “Open!” she cried. “Come out and treat with me, or by God, I’ll blow these gates to flinders and sack your town.” She pointed at Tancreda, who had cloaked herself in smoke and fire.
It seemed insane; the high walls and the sheer size of the city dwarfed her and her horse people, but before the echoes had died away, the postern opened, and a white-faced priest in rich vestments emerged, and a man with a heavy gold chain.
Giselle vaulted the barrier behind her. “I don’t believe it,” she said, and embraced Sauce. “Watch they don’t assassinate you.” As if reading her thoughts, a dozen of Sauce’s knights came over the barriers; George Brewes first among them, his poleaxe in his hand.
“We have come to—” the priest began.
“Don’t make me storm your town,” Sauce snapped. She pointed at Tancreda. “One word from me and your walls start falling. I’ll tell you what the terms are.”
The Adnacrags—Aneas Muriens
Looks-at-Clouds was standing on the bow, watching the horizon. The ship was well handled; the sailors knew their business, and despite the density of the rocky, tree-covered islets on either hand, the ship was under sail, moving briskly upstream against the gentle current. Deadlock, the Alban ranger, sat out on the crosstree of the stubby bowsprit, watching the water.
One of the ship’s boys came and tugged at hir hand. “Captain wants you,” he said in his accented Archaic.
Looks-at-Clouds frowned, annoyed at being interrupted, but then hir face changed and s/he settled on an appearance of amicability, and s/he followed the urchin across the deck, hir mind powerfully elsewhere. S/he opened the door to the captain’s gallery and saw Irene sitting alone at the captain’s long table, and s/he smiled. S/he had a tendre for Irene. And …
S/he was very fast, but the blow caught hir by surprise. S/he started to turn hir head and saw Nita Qwan just as his open hand slammed into hir cheek, turning hir head …
Something horrible happened.
In the real, Aneas took hir, off balance, and threw hir over his outthrust leg and down to the hardwood deck. He pressed a dagger to hir throat.
S/he screamed.
Witchbane, witchbane witchbanewitchbanewitchbanewitchbanewitchbanewitchbane!
“Stay with us,” Gas-a-ho said from behind a fractal web of shield shards that spun.
Looks-at-Clouds retched, and bile came from hir mouth.
Aneas shook his head.
Irene leaned forward. “You hurt hir!” she cried. “S/he’s bleeding!”
Gas-a-ho’s voice was steady. “S/he has a witchbane thorn in hir cheek,” he said. “Shaman, we are sorry for this.”
Looks-at-Clouds felt unclean. Violated.
“Sorry?” s/he hissed. “You are sorry?”
Nita Qwan kept his hand on hir cheek, and his dagger, too, was at hir throat. “Who are you?” he asked.
The changeling could not turn hir head. “Ahhhgh,” s/he spat.
“Who are you?” Aneas asked. His voice was hard.
“I am … ssss … the changeling … Looks … at … Clouds … you bastards …” s/he spat.
Gas-a-ho shook his head. “No,” he said. “Tell us who you are, or we kill this body. Looks-at-Clouds, we are sorry. But too much is at stake.”
S/he felt the daggers. S/he spoke the language of death.
They told hir that Nita Qwan at least meant hir death. Aneas was less sure.
“Witchbane will not hold me!” s/he muttered.
“All the more reason to end you,” Nita Qwan said.
“Surrender and let me in,” Aneas said. “Or—”
“You attacked me with witchbane!” the changeling said. “You expect me to trust you?”
“Only if you want to live,” Nita Qwan said.
The being surrendered. It was sudden, and there was Aneas, standing in a vast emptiness. There was no memory palace, no field of flowers, no …
“Damn you, Muriens,” said Master Smythe. “I am only borrowing him. Her.”
“Sweet Holy Trinity,” Aneas Muriens muttered.
“Listen to me. I cannot allow Ash to know I am alive. I lack the power to … do anything. I have Looks-at-Clouds safe. And if we can take the sorcerer’s island, the Lake-on-the-Mountain, I will have the power to restore myself. I beg you, Aneas. I will not—”
“You could have just told us,” Aneas said.
Gas-a-ho appeared through his link with Aneas, emerging, owl-headed, from Aneas’s forest pool. Then he reached back, and Irene rose from the pool, wearing the rich, gold-encrusted robe of the Empress of Man, and behind her came Nita Qwan, a dark-skinned man in a nut-brown linen shirt and deerskin leggings and a fine red sash. He looked around, stunned.
“This is the … magik place?” he asked.
“And this is the dragon,” Aneas said.
“The other dragon,” Gas-a-ho said. “Master Smythe.”
The slim, black-bearded man bowed. “You are the shaman Gas-a-ho?” he asked. “I believe we have met.”
“And this,” Aneas said, “is Irene, Princess of Empire. And Nita Qwan, war leader of the Sossag.”
“I know Irene,” the dragon said. “Why have you brought these people? Who have no powers?”
“To judge you,” Gas-a-ho said.
“You will judge me?” Smythe spat.
“Show us Looks-at-Clouds,” Aneas said.
“I cannot,” Master Smythe said. “If I release her, she will retake this body, and I will be no more.”
“I think you are lying,” Aneas said. “My brother shared a body with Harmodius. For months.”
Master Smythe looked back and forth. In the aethereal, his frustration was evident. “Listen, you fools!” he began.
Gas-a-ho laughed. He produced a fine bear pelt from the air, shook it out, and sat on it. “Calling us fools will not help you,” he said calmly. “There is no hurry. Convince us. Otherwise, we kill your body.”
“And doom the alliance!” Master Smythe spat. “The Odine are rising! Even now I can smell them. Him. It. Even now, Ash is turning his powers on the Army of the Alliance. Everything is in the balance.”
Aneas sat beside Gas-a-ho, on the endless, infinite plain. The bear fur was comfortable under him. “Perhaps everything is always in the balance,” he said.
Gas-a-ho gave him a nod.
Master Smythe pursed his lips. “Listen,” he said.
Gas-a-ho nodded. “We are here to listen. We did not kill you outright. Not least because Irene guessed that it must be you. And not, for example, Kevin Orley.”
Smythe took an aethereal breath.
“Very well. We near the climax. Ash has the force to take Lissen Carak; whether he can manage it before the gates are ready for him is open to doubt. The Odine are rising; their rise will be swift. The will is strong. If Ash had not attacked us at Forked Lake, I would have been with the army, facing Ash with the help of all the magisters. Instead I am here. But we can still strike a mighty blow! We can take the island. I can make myself whole and restore this person to the body s/he requires. And then we will be stronger than ever.”
“Why not just tell us?” Irene asked.
“A habit of secrecy,” Smythe admitted. “And … you are so vulnerable. If Ash finds the time to come after you again … We are easily distracted; I know how his mind works, because it is a mirror of my own, if older. Every second, he must dismiss thousands of thoughts as wasteful, if only to avoid madness. Ash is not omniscient; he trusts his control of Orley to be sufficient to his purpose. But if there was a hint of my presence here …”
“Because you two are rivals for the gate?” Gas-a-ho asked.
“No. I represent the party of fewer negative outcomes. We want the gates closed; ideally, forever.” Master Smythe shrugged.
“You have never said as much before,” Aneas said.
Smythe sighed. “I am reduced to a kernel of my true self, and you threaten me with death. Shall I beg? Killing me will doom every human, in fact, every sentient, in this circle of creation.”
Gas-a-ho sat back and raised an eyebrow. “Really?” he asked. “Aren’t you a little worried that we’ll just do it all ourselves, without your party? I was listening to the Red Knight and to Irene, Master Dragon. Harmodius wants you all dead. I could do some of his work right here.”
Smythe’s eyes narrowed. “I made the Red Knight,” he spat.
Aneas laughed. “I doubt he’d appreciate hearing that,” he said. “But Ash made Thorn, and look what happened to him.”
Irene leaned forward. “You made Gabriel? Do tell.”
Smythe shook his head. “Why won’t you trust me?”
Irene looked around. “It is all about trust, isn’t it?” she said. “You can’t trust us, but you’d like us to trust you. But I see two possible outcomes you have not mentioned. First, if we allow you access to the well of power at Lake-on-the-Mountain, we will have no reins on you at all. You will return to your full powers, and we will be a mere party of rangers. Second, a lifetime in throne rooms has accustomed me to listen to what men do not say. I have listened to you, and I have not yet heard you say that your party intends the destruction of Ash. Do you intend to make him your ally against the Odine?”
Aneas looked at Irene with new respect. Dressed as a great queen, in that hour she seemed one.
Master Smythe turned his head to her, and his unnaturally beautiful face had a wry smile. “If I was Ash,” he said, “I would now wish that I’d ordered you killed, instead of merely suggesting it. Very well, Irene. You wish to be treated as my peer? There is no force with which I will not ally to save this world, to save the bears and the forests and the earthworms and the wyverns and even Man and Woman. There, ’tis said. We do not love Man. But we have allied with Man in this war. Is that too honest?”
Irene smiled. “Trust comes from honesty,” she said. “I have learned that recently.”
“So,” Gas-a-ho said. “You wish us to allow you to go forward, wearing Looks-at-Clouds. We trust you to behave well when we storm the island, even though we will be utterly at your mercy.”
“Worse than that,” Master Smythe said. “The island is defended.”
“Why do you refuse to produce Looks-at-Clouds?” Nita Qwan asked.
“Both Irene and Aneas are in love with him/her,” Smythe said. “I cannot have a hope of their rational minds overcoming their lust. I know humans all too well.”
Irene’s voice dripped contempt. “I think that is the most patronizing, most foolish thing I have ever heard a dragon say,” she sneered. “You ask us to trust you. You do not trust us, or even think of us as peers. More like pets.”
“The witchbane is wearing off,” Gas-a-ho said. “We must choose.”
Nita Qwan raised a hand. “I have a proposal,” he said. “A compromise.”
Smythe looked from one to another. “You know that I could just pass through your avatars to attack your minds,” he said. “If I take any of you, I am free of the witchbane.”
Gas-a-ho shook his head. “You will find that we all came through Aneas, not directly into you,” he said. “Aneas’s palace is heavily guarded. If you try, I guarantee our verdict. The real trumps the aethereal. You will be dead.”
For the first time, Master Smythe’s inhuman face registered fear. But he managed a smile. “Well do the dragons fear Man,” he said.
“Tell us your proposal,” Aneas said to the Sossag leader.
“Let Master Smythe relinquish control to Looks-at-Clouds,” he said. “Let us see hir in control of this body. Then, if s/he agrees, we allow him to regain control at the island, or before. But he must let the changeling go, and s/he must be allowed a vote. It is hir body.”
“S/he will never agree,” Smythe said.
Gas-a-ho nodded. “You will be a great sachem, if only we live long enough to plant corn again,” he said to Nita Qwan. “I agree that this is good.”
Smythe’s face was blank.
Irene waved a hand. “He considers desperation. Master Smythe, I appeal to you as one exile to another. Trust us. Trust Looks-at-Clouds, as you ought to have trusted from the first.”
“This from you, patricide?” Smythe said.
Irene nodded. “Yes,” she said. “Precisely. This from me. You may be thousands of years old, but I have learned this in the last four weeks. Trust is what makes us great. Not deception.”
Smythe’s black eyes met hers. “You have grown wise,” he said.
And then he was gone.
In his place stood a slim man, or a strong woman, with short white-gold hair and slanted green eyes. S/he blinked, and the plain around them became a forest, deep and green, full of forest smells, and the smell of lavender and spruce over all.
S/he wore a shapeless white shirt and hose, and in hir hand was a red crystal that flashed like the beating of a heart.
S/he looked at Aneas. “How foolish can a mortal be?” s/he said. “I drew him into me. I knew what I was doing. Those who play for power are doomed to be fools perhaps.”
“You are unhurt?” Irene asked. The woods were magnificent; the trees ancient and hale. Aneas’s distant spring looked pale, its trees insignificant by comparison.
“Only my sense of self, a little,” the changeling said. “I think he has hurt my … feelings. But by all the spirits of wood and water, I have learned … I have learned!”
S/he bent and kissed them one by one. “Welcome to my woods,” s/he said. “I vote that he be allowed to return. When he harms us, it will only be by his indifference.”
“Is this prophecy?” Nita Qwan asked.
“Yes,” the changeling said.
“And you will allow him to take you anyway?” Gas-a-ho asked.
“Yes,” the changeling said.
Aneas nodded. “Really, yours is the only vote that counts,” he said.
East of Firensi—Long Paw
Twenty leagues east of Firensi, Long Paw could see the columns of smoke in the dawn.
“War without fire is like sausage without mustard,” he said with an easy smile to the Etruscan woman who’d followed Brown.
“That is a horrible thing to say,” she snapped. “Those are people’s homes.”
Long Paw shrugged. “Aye,” he said. “Sì.”
Brown emerged from the cottage wiping his hands on a woman’s apron. “He was here,” he said.
M’bub Ali was using an amulet; he held it aloft in the door of the cot and watched the white cabochon jewel. It sparked.
“There is potentia here,” he said. “I can see it. Ahhh. I can track it.”
Brown’s lips didn’t twitch. “Let’s go,” he said.
Lucca nodded. He had his mask on, which made him inhuman.
They all mounted.
“You should stay here,” Long Paw said to Donna Beatrice. “This will be ugly.”
She shrugged. “I am with you now,” she said. She had a knife, and she loosened it in its sheath.
Long Paw nodded. “I guess you are,” he said. “Stay close to me if it’s fighting. Can you fight?”
She thought for a moment and then shrugged. “Probably,” she said. “Is it different from killing pigs?”
Then they were all mounted, and moving.
Sauce was just approaching the gates of Firensi below them, and the air smelled of smoke. There were storm clouds rolling in from the south, heavy with rain.
They unrolled hoods and kept riding into the hills. They stopped at one cottage and then the next, using M’bub Ali’s amulet.
At the third, a crossbow bolt greeted them, killing a horse. Lucca fired the thatch with a word, and the cottage burned. When the smoke filled the place, a man came out; M’bub Ali shook his head, and the man was shot down by his archers. Then another man screamed and tried to come out the back where the roof had fallen in.
Brown disarmed him and stood on his burned arms for three questions, and then after a nod from M’bub Ali, Brown simply walked away, leaving the man with his burns and a broken arm.
“This morning,” Brown said.
“If he has the art, he knows we’re here,” Lucca said. He had the distant look that casters got when they were preparing.
Brown shrugged. And mounted.
“Stay with me,” Long Paw said to Donna Beatrice. She shrugged.
“Do I have a choice?” she asked. There was no bitterness in her tone, just a sort of peasant fatalism.
Long Paw nodded. “Sì, ma donna. You could just ride away.”
She shook her head. “And do what? Whore? Cleaning lady?” She looked at the dark sky to the south. “I’m too old for the first and too bored for the second. Maybe I will be a killer.”
San Batiste—The Patriarch of Rhum
Ali-Mohamed was asleep, and the Patriarch woke him with a sibilant hiss.
“The enemy is close,” the man said.
Ali-Mohamed was still unsure whether the Patriarch was in fact so deeply locked in terror that he created things of which to be afraid, or whether he actually had arcane knowledge, but his eyes had a terrible green light in them, and Ali-Mohamed had to assume the latter.
“I’ll get the horses,” the former mamluk said, getting his feet on the floor.
“No,” the Patriarch said. “You keep them from following me. I need an hour or so. I should have done this days ago.”
Ali-Mohamed was about to protest when a slender talon, like the thorn on a rose, burst from the tip of the Patriarch’s reaching finger, and scratched his cheek.
He ceased to have his own volition.
East of Firensi—Long Paw
“Here,” M’bub Ali said.
They dismounted. There were a round dozen of them: Long Paw and Lucca, Brown and the woman, M’bub Ali and seven of his horse boys.
“We’ll hold the horses,” Long Paw said.
Brown nodded.
He was watching the stone cottage high on the hillside above them. It was a little after noon, and thunder rolled in the valley below, and the Council of Firensi had just agreed to give Sauce forty thousand ducats in gold and three hundred heavy wagons of grain to march away.
“We’ll wait for the rain,” Brown said.
“He’s casting,” Lucca said. His face went a little slack. “Christ risen, he’s a strange one. Never seen …”
There was a burst of colour from the stone cottage.
Lucca’s ruddy gold shield sprang up, but the bright red working didn’t come near them.
And then the storm front hit.
Thunder rolled again, and lightning flashed. The Etruscan woman went down on her knees in the gravel of the road and began to pray.
The sky was a very odd colour.
The rain came down like a waterfall unleashed. It fell so hard that it drowned sound; it almost covered thought. Brown made a hand motion; he and Lucca moved off along one of the stone walls that defined fields. M’bub Ali gave Long Paw a soaking-wet smile. “You have the best job, I think,” he said, and slipped over another wall into the olive grove. One by one, his people followed him.
Long Paw collected the reins of all the horses, and staked them with a pair of picket pins in the rising wind. He was already soaked through; his hands ached, but the loss of their horses here would kill them as thoroughly as arrows or sorceries.
The rain was unnatural. Long Paw got Donna Beatrice under her arm, raised her out of the road, which was now something like a stream, and hauled her to the relative shelter of the wall of the olive grove.
Then he slipped over the wall and opened the gate. Watching back toward the cottage all the time; but there was nothing to be seen but the grey curtain of rain. The valley was gone, the city of Firensi invisible, and even the next mountain was gone.
Long Paw went back out into the road, got the woman, and by gestures, explained what he wanted to do. Then each of them took out one of the picket pins, and with twenty horses between them, all spooked by lightning, they moved the picket and the line into the olive grove. It seemed to take forever, but the woman was good with horses. It gave them something to do, and when the horses were inside the walls, Long Paw closed the gate.
Then the two of them huddled in the corner of the wall—a good shelter, if two walls and no roof make a house. Long Paw went and fetched his heavy riding cloak off his saddle and threw it over the corner, and then they could think; the rain fell outside the little shelter, although the cloak filled with water in very little time and had to be dumped.
“I am so cold,” said the woman.
An alarm was hammering in Long Paw’s head. He’d done all these things to pass the time. We’ve been here an hour, he thought.
And the light was changing. The storm was passing them, but the light was failing.
“Stay here,” he told the woman, and he went out into the rain. He grabbed Lucca’s heavy riding cloak off the back of his saddle and put it around Donna Beatrice, and she smiled. Then he hauled himself up onto the wall.
Too old for this crap.
He could see the cottage.
He could see a body outside it.
Brown moved very, very slowly toward the back of the stone cottage. The rain would cover most of his movement, but he was a cautious man who’d lived a long time in a dangerous business, and he had no intention of showing himself. He crawled a long time, and then he waited while Lucca moved.
He was crawling through some sort of gorse: green and brown, unpleasant to the touch, growing over very stony ground. He found a shallow depression, maybe only two or three hand-spans deep, but he clung to it, moving parallel to the house.
There was a bright red flash; he didn’t raise his head, but he smelled the burning meat.
He waited.
He heard Lucca move behind him, despite the rain. Eventually the man came up almost level.
Brown made some hand signals.
Lucca nodded.
He was very cold.
Someone loosed an arrow from higher up the hillside.
A pair of arrows flew from inside the cottage. And another from the hillside.
Lucca held a thumb up.
Brown nodded, and they both moved, crawling on their bellies as fast as their elbows and thighs would allow them. Brown raised his head when he made the pigsty, and there, twenty paces away at the other end of the farm wall, was M’bub Ali, and they didn’t kill each other.
It was a particularly unpleasant patch of mud on which to lie.
M’bub Ali raised two fingers, pointed at the house, then raised three.
Brown shook his head.
The rain came down harder.
M’bub Ali reached into his pack and produced a black, pitch-encrusted bottle. He held it up.
Brown shook his head, having no idea what it was.
M’bub Ali shrugged. Then he took out a tinder kit, and, in the pouring rain, tried to get a light.
There was another exchange of arrows.
M’bub Ali made a face.
More time passed.
One of the horse boys appeared behind M’bub Ali. In one pass he got the char cloth lit.
Brown’s eyes narrowed.
M’bub Ali lit the stub of a candle despite the wind, and then lit a tab on the end of his black bottle. The tab flared.
M’bub Ali leaned and threw the bottle straight through the window of the cottage and took an arrow through his arm in return.
The bottle burst with a whoosh, and all hell broke loose.
A line of red fire emerged from the maelstrom and struck the horse boy with the tinder kit, and he was flayed, his skin burned off his muscle, eyeballs melting. He screamed. But not for long.
Lucca’s shields snapped into place.
A red line went through the shields, attenuating as it went, and Lucca was hit. By luck, his leather mask caught most of the leakage, but his shields went down as he lost concentration.
A third red dart struck M’bub Ali’s amulet, and it burst. He grunted and drew a long knife.
Brown was already moving for the cottage wall.
A figure of flame came to the door; the mamluk, Ali-Mohamed, all his cotton clothes alight; he didn’t scream from the pain, and his lacquered bow loosed an arrow that struck M’bub Ali in the body and stuck in his ribs.
Brown didn’t question that the big mamluk was still fighting. He shot with his ballestrino from three strides out, and the burning man was hit and seemed to burst, scattering burning tatters of man everywhere.
Brown dropped his precious weapon in the mud and threw himself against the wall as flames roared out of the door and another figure emerged, also afire. Lucca hit it with something, perhaps hermetically summoned water; M’bub Ali’s saber severed a reaching hand in one blow, and Brown was rolling around the corner. Everything in his head was screaming that this was a deception; the flaming men at the back were covering something at the front.
He made it to the corner and threw himself flat in the mud, to look around the corner at ankle height.
There was a corpse in front of the door, lying headless in the rain. The fire was not as strong at the front of the house; Brown rolled back, trying to sort what he had just seen.
The front door was open.
Brown made himself go around the corner. He knew he couldn’t delay; he was already afraid for the horses and the woman.
Smoke poured from the low windows. Any moment, the front rooms would ignite.
He kept going.
Something was moving, very rapidly, in the gorse of the hillside. Something that seemed to smoke as it moved, and held a long sword in a clawed hand.
Brown cursed; he’d dropped his only ranged weapon; he had no idea where Lucca was.
He paused and knelt by the corpse.
The body wore a silk robe and there was a heavy gold cross on a solid gold chain twisted around the neck and hanging down the back. There was an incredible amount of blood, as if the man had exploded, and the head …
Brown heard the scream from below on the hillside and paused only to curse.
Lucca staggered around the corner of the cottage.
“No fucking idea,” spat Brown. “Someone has to cover the cottage. There could be more.”
He turned and ran down the hill.
Long Paw saw the bursts of red light, and then the cottage caught fire; a flash of light in the grey, and then smoke. Smoke out the front door …
Something moved on the hillside. The rain was tapering off; he could see the mountain peak beyond the cottage and the flash of a weapon reflecting light.
The truly abnormal is easy to see. It doesn’t match the patterns that people build so carefully in their minds; it is alien. The thing he saw was wrong: the size of a small deer or a large dog, dark red or black, moving at speed through the gorse. It was not like anything he’d ever seen.
He dropped back into the olive grove.
“Move away from the wall,” he shouted at Donna Beatrice, and when she didn’t respond, he caught her wrist and pulled her along until they were in among the horses. Long Paw watched their heads come up.
“That’s right, ladies,” he said aloud. “Something wicked. Just give it a kick, eh?” He drew his sword and took his buckler off his hip.
“Stay close,” he said in his best Etruscan.
The woman whimpered.
“I couldn’t agree more,” he said quietly.
The horses were spooked, right enough. Every head was up; eyes were rolling, and tails lashing.
Something red-black flashed over the wall.
M’bub Ali’s stallion screamed and reared.
And then the thing came over the back of the horses. Long Paw had time to be afraid; the face like a suckerfish, the body too thin to be real.
It had talons as long as daggers, wicked as stilettos, and a long, glowing sword in its right hand.
Brown’s mare kicked at it; one of M’bub’s horses landed a bite and slowed it.
Long Paw’s blade dropped under his buckler, and his left foot slid forward.
As it crossed the back of the horses, it went from saddle to saddle, and the horses panicked, and where it stepped on a bare back, the talons ripped flesh from the packhorse, but the stallion and two of the mares stood their ground.
Long Paw watched it for a little more than one beat of his heart. And then it was all training.
It was so fast that Long Paw had to start his rising cut, left to right, while the thing was still coming over the back of the last mare, four paces away.
The red-black thing loosed a scarlet bolt as it leapt. The steel and wood buckler in Long Paw’s left hand took the bolt, and became slag, and heat burned Long Paw’s hand right through the steel gauntlet under the buckler, burning two fingers off his hand and scorching the rest.
His cut severed a reaching, taloned hand and his point went unerringly into the thing’s sucker face even as its sword cut the last four inches off his own … a late parry with a magical sword. His blade went right through it—no shock of bone—and the whole weight of the thing slammed him off his feet.
He fell back, and hit his head. He didn’t go out, but the burning hot, rubbery weight of it pushed him to action—talons screamed across his thigh, and he felt the poison hit him.
His volition started to leak out of him.
Donna Beatrice slammed her dagger into its whipcord-thin back. She’d killed chickens and she’d killed sheep and her arm was sure; even facing something that defied reason, her hand did its task. She severed its spinal cord. She was screaming like a banshee, but her knife was sure. Its sword clattered to the ground.
Long Paw felt it go, because for almost a full second, it had been him. It was a terrible emptying; one moment he burned with power, and the next he was an empty vessel.
Long Paw lay in the mud, staring up at the rain-laden sky.
Donna Beatrice continued to stab the dead thing for quite some time. Her blows landed with meaty sounds. She was still screaming at the top of her lungs.
The horses were racing around the inside of the walls as if the little orchard were a race course.
Long Paw wasn’t sure who he was. And then he was a little sure, and then a little more.
Brown vaulted the wall of the enclosure and almost died under the hooves of M’bub Ali’s stallion. Brown rolled and then leaped and managed to get clear of a wild-eyed mare.
He looked for a moment at the thing. The Etruscan woman was kneeling by Long Paw, and she was thrusting, dagger reversed in both hands, over and over into the thing’s back.
Long Paw’s sword was through its head.
And as fast as Donna Beatrice stabbed it, the wounds healed. He had thought her maddened, but she was merely panicked, and nonetheless doing what she could; the talons were hacked away.
Brown reached into his shirt, leaned down, and plunged ten inches of witchbane into the creature.
It spasmed.
He left it there.
The wounds stopped closing.
The woman looked at him. She was covered in blood like an actor at the end of a tragedy. She was also burned all over her body, her clothes full of holes as if she’d been attacked by deadly moths.
Brown grabbed the corpse. It was hot to the touch, and it felt wrong, and he used his revulsion to hurl it as far as he could. It didn’t weigh much.
Long Paw’s eyes fluttered open.
Brown’s dagger hand was steady and the point of the dagger was at Long Paw’s throat.
“Who are you?” he asked.
Long Paw’s eyes met his. “What the fuck was that?” he asked.
Four hours had passed, and they were in the mill at the side of a river. Long Paw was sensible enough to know it when they got him off his horse; the rain was lighter, but he was cold, soaked through, and none of them looked good. M’bub Ali was badly wounded; one of his horse boys was dead and two more wounded. All of them stank of mud; all were cold and wet.
Sauce was there in person with the duchess. Long Paw smiled at her; he knew her; his head was coming back together, although there were odd flashes in the corner of his eyes and things were not right in his head; Donna Beatrice had him under one shoulder and Lucca under the other.
“Lay him down. There’s beds. Magistera Tancreda is here and ready to work. And our doctors. Thank God we had no casualties today.” Sauce shook her head. “Paw, you look like shit.”
They pushed Long Paw down.
“Talk when you are better,” she said. “Who is this?”
“Donna Beatrice,” Long Paw said. “Put her on the rolls. She killed the fucking thing.”
The Duchess of Venike was right behind his commander, but her eyes went unerringly to Brown. “Did you get him?” she asked.
Brown shook his head. “It’s a fairly complex matter,” he said. “But the Patriarch is inarguably dead.”
Sauce waited until the two company doctors and Tancreda were clearly at work, and then she went up the mill steps with the duchess, Brown, Donna Beatrice, and Daniel Favour.
“Who are they?” she asked from the landing.
Brown followed her finger. “Captain, that’s M’bub Ali. He is … hmm. An officer of the Sultan.”
The duchess nodded. “Alison, they helped us at Mitla; seems like years ago. They were here to scout the Darkness.”
“Spies,” Alison said.
“Allies,” Giselle said.
“Good allies,” Brown muttered. He handed over a long bundle. “Fell Sword. It had it.”
Sauce raised an eyebrow. But she shrugged and continued up the steps to the room that had once been occupied by the mill’s owners. There her body squire poured wine and Brown slumped into a chair.
“Not used to all these people,” he muttered.
Giselle smiled. “But the Patriarch is dead.”
Brown told the story, drinking his wine. He told it sparely but professionally, and they asked him questions, and then they asked Donna Beatrice questions, and then they ate a light meal, and by then Long Paw was awake and more himself.
“What was it, Paw?” Sauce asked.
Long Paw shook his head. “Never seen anything like it,” he said.
Tancreda had all her patients treated; her healing skills were minimal, but with two doctors to support her, she had stabilized M’bub Ali and saved both of his men, and Long Paw’s poison was wearing off of its own accord, hurried along by wine. She joined them on the first floor and sipped some sweet white wine herself. She listened to Long Paw’s description and then, with his help, drew a picture of a sucker-faced greyhound with hands instead of paws and long, thorny talons.
“Eeeuuuwww,” she said in disgust.
Donna Beatrice shuddered. “I will see it until I die,” she said in Etruscan.
Tancreda copied out their description of it, alive, and went downstairs with her wine to the blood-soaked bag that contained the thing’s mortal remains.
“Oh, sweet Christ,” she muttered. She summoned the others so that they could see that the thing had rotted almost to nothing—foul slime and a heavy hide and some bones, like something a month in the ground.
Brown shrugged. “It was in the Patriarch,” he said. “When I think about it, I have to wonder if there was one in the Duke of Mitla.”
“Blessed Virgin,” Sauce spat. “Worms and fire dogs.”
“Salamanders,” Long Paw said. “That’s what they are.”
Sauce read over Tancreda’s coded dispatch. She wrote Salamander in her own hand under the sketch. And then, in her own code, she wrote, I think we’ve found Kronmir’s fourth player. She looked up, sighed for a lost opportunity, and wrote, I’ll be marching north tomorrow.
Then she took the sword from the old cloak in which it was wrapped and handed it to Tancreda.
“Oh my God,” she said. The sword was fine, but the blade was a rainbow of colours unlike normal steel, and set in it in letters of gold, it said, Durandala.
Sauce smiled. “Always wanted a magic sword,” she said.