| |
Black birds glared down from the battlements, and everyone remembered the birds’ attack on the village Olheim.
“Do we ride into them, my lord?” Marshal Gaulter scowled at the prospect, and the men muttered. The archers reached for their crossbows. Snorting the dry air, the horses caught their unease and stomped the bone-strewn sand.
“They flew all around while I worked in my garden,” Inkeri offered. “You said that their attack at Olheim happened in the night.”
The baron straightened in his saddle and rose in the stirrups, as if those few inches would give him a better view of the battlements high above. “Do you think they only attack at night?”
Inkeri cringed inwardly at the question, for it cast her as an authority. “I do not know. You told me of the attack. I can only suspect what they will do.”
He resettled on his horse. “We have to reach the citadel. That’s where Captain Walsing would have taken the troop.”
A ramp climbed from the desert flat to a thin bridge which arced over a precipice before gaining the tower gate. Centuries ago, the marvel of Fae power had constructed the bridge, during the age of Dragon Dark. Then the citadel became an outpost keeping watch on the dragons banished into the Wastes.
“Don’t like it, my lord,” Gaulter muttered. “There’s bones there.” He pointed to the debris on either side of the ramp and beneath the bridge.
“Our men?” someone asked, and the mutters started. After the bones they’d found when first they saw the citadel, these additional bones increased the troop’s unease.
The caravan bones had lain uncovered on the windswept flat. Only desert predators had disturbed them, scattering the bones as they fed. Bright cloth and bronze bangles, colored beads and sandals had identified the remains as merchants and their families, not soldiers.
“I don’t think those bones are recent. They look bleached by the sun, and look,” Inkeri’s hand swept wide, “sand has drifted over them.”
“Hessel,” Baron Rhodren said.
The man urged his horse forward. “Aye, my lord.”
He needed no other command but guided his horse to the starting ramp. Ravens croaked. Crows and jackdaws lifted and fluttered above the crenellated wall then returned to their perches. Hessel kept his horse at a walk as he surveyed the ground beside the ramp. He dismounted and walked a few steps, the intense sun burnishing the red hair of his desert heritage. Then he knelt, turning over bones, before he returned to his horse and slowly rode back to them. He didn’t look over his shoulder at the high walls and attendant black birds.
He stopped before the baron. “I’d say old bones, my lord.” He held out a tatter. “Cloth, faded and rotten. Leather bits looked dry and brittle. Pieces of armor and weapons, all broken, none of it new, but like we carry.”
“Then old bones it is and not our men.” Rhodren raised his voice. “Keep your weapons ready. Don’t lift a blade against the birds unless they attack.”
Inkeri agreed with the order. Not once on the journey across the Ahdreide had the baron and his men faced mundane opponents. Birds and panthers attacked before they crossed onto the desert plain, and snakes and lizards had struck next. They had adapted each time, fighting with arrows against the sorceress and her magical blasts, fueled by forbidden blood magic.
What awaits us in the citadel? She didn’t know what to fear. More mundane creatures in unnatural attacks? The shapeshifting wyres who guarded sorcerers?
A Kyrgy had to await them, somewhere in that vast citadel. A Dark Fae, who had opened the veil for the sorceress to travel miles with only a few steps. Half-Fae herself, Inkeri didn’t wield that kind of power. She worried that she couldn’t match the Dark Fae’s elemental magic. She wielded only Water. Those Fae that she’d encountered in the past had wielded two elements, sometimes three.
She prayed another sorcerer didn’t lurk in the citadel, waiting to spring a trap.
As they climbed the ramp, Inkeri had a growing sense that other eyes watched them, the birds and something else, something more, something—alien, something that set her nerves crawling.
“We are watched,” Rhodren muttered.
“The birds.”
“More than that. It ... prickles.”
Prickles? But that was the word for the sensation, a spiny sticky presence over her nape. A presence that hid in dark corners, waiting, preparing.
“Do you know what it is?”
“No. No.”
He nodded at the gate. “I’m going to feel trapped.”
The bridge’s ancient wooden boards had silvered, altered by time and Fae magic. The thin crossing was the citadel’s great strength and great weakness. The only way in was the only way out. Though she knew little of wartime strategy, Inkeri shared his feeling.
The thud of the horses’ hooves on the magicked boards echoed off the stony walls of the citadel, built into the very rock of the Saet’Idros Archais. With the battlements looming overhead, the mountainous bulk of Madriger Head no longer dominated the sky. Only the lower flanks of the striated rock of Helmed Forsis stood to the north, rising out of the shimmering sand flats.
Across the bridge they reached their first obstacle, the closed gate of the Archais.
Tall and broad, the gate glistened with the bridge’s silvered magic. A swirling design covered the boards, but black marks defaced the design. Three black marks slashed downward, like the claws of a three-toed monster. The lines looked like paint, though, not scored into the wood by viciously sharp talons.
Gaulter dismounted. Handing his reins to Hessel, he drew his sword and approached the gate.
As soon as his gauntleted hand touched the gate, the birds cawed and croaked. With a rush of wings they lifted from the battlements. The troop hunched and raised their blades, anticipating the attack they’d faced at Olheim. The great flock spiraled once, twice, then swooped past the riders on the bridge. They dove to the desert, skimmed across the sand. Dividing into three arrows, they sped across the flats, spreading wider and wider, like a tattered blanket.
Then they were gone, winging far away, their cries too faint to hear.
Gaulter pushed against one panel of the gate. The wide door creaked as it opened. He swung it back to reveal a dark passage. He started in, and Hessel followed, leading the marshal’s horse. Rhodren entered third, and Inkeri kept her sturdy gelding on his left.
The passage smelled of dank soil and—Inkeri shuddered and refused to identify the lingering odor. Misery pressed around her, but it was old, echoing faintly, more imagination than a sense, battles fought and lives lost long and long ago. She knew the Archais’ history, drilled into her by her Fae father Rossik before he forsook wife and daughter to return to Faeron.
Rossik had served the citadel for decades, a century and more, and he knew of battles fought in the last days of Dragon Dark, the renegade years of the war-filled Great Peace, and the forgotten years when the Naughts ignored their pacts and abandoned the outposts. Then, even the Fae forsook the old citadels and retreated to their realm.
The sorcerers of Frost Clime used those long years to rebuild strength. No one remained to warn of any growing danger.
Sunlight blinded when Gaulter pushed open the second door. They emerged into a great court beyond the rampart.
Here were the dead they’d expected, soldiers cut down and left to rot. Grey and stiff in their dying positions—but the bloat and stench of death had passed days and days ago.
The men fell mute. Only the stomp of horses, the jingle of bridle bits, and the creak of leather broke the silence.
The marshal knelt beside the nearest man. He dragged off his gauntlet. For a fraction of time, his hand hovered over the man. The birds had pecked out the man’s eyes. He rose and bent over another man then another then more, rapid scans until he stood in the midst of the dead. Then he turned in a slow circle until he faced his baron. “These aren’t our men.”
Relief was a palpable wave rolling over the men.
Rhodren leaned over his pommel. “The Bois Verte troop?”
“At a guess.” The marshal again scanned the dead. “Might could find the troop captain, to be sure.”
“No,” and Gaulter’s shoulders lost their wary hunch at Rhodren’s answer. “No, he and the king knew that the troop was lost. We need only report that we gave honor to the bodies we found.”
Hessel looked around. “Bury `em where, my lord? This place is all stone.”
“Now that’s a good question.”
“The furnace is below,” Inkeri offered then wished she hadn’t contributed that scrap of knowledge when the men looked her way.
But none asked how she knew of any place in this citadel. Rhodren merely nodded. “We still need to find our own men. I want to know what killed them. I see no weapons out and ready.”
“Whatever got `em, took `em by surprise,” Hessel said.
“How could they be surprised when the caravan’s dead are in the desert below?”
“Our men would have been wary,” the marshal judged. “They fought a hundred battles and more in the late war. They came here to investigate the disappearance of the caravan and the Verte troop.”
“And the Verte troop wasn’t wary?” Rhodren shook his head. “They fought beside us. They found the caravan dead, just as we did. They enter a long-abandoned outpost. Surely they would have been wary.”
“Swords are still in their scabbards,” Gaulter said. “They didn’t expect trouble.”
“Unless—.” The words rushed out before Inkeri could stop them. “Could they have been here a while, safe, thinking no danger would confront them? I mean, they arrive and search for a danger. Finding none, they sheath their weapons, and then the danger—like a sorcerer—then he strikes.”
Rhodren turned in his saddle to give her a nod. “Lured to their deaths. That explains the lack of horses. Gaulter, how did they die? Sword? Magic?”
“Not in a swordfight, my lord. I see no battle wounds.”
“In pain, though,” Timote spoke up, and Astran added, “and fast.”
“Not melted away like our lady did to that sorceress,” Simins offered.
Inkeri ducked her head.
“No offense, Lady,” the braw man added. “It’s power we need.”
“No offense taken,” she murmured, for that was how she had defeated the sorceress.
“Simins,” Gaulter snapped, and the man shut his mouth.
“Was it sorcery?” Hessel asked. “Only, they don’t look like our men that the sorceress killed. Blasted them apart, she did. She deserved to die like that, Lady,” and several others agreed.
Rhodren again turned in his saddle. “Inkeri, was it sorcery?”
“I don’t sense sorcery. I don’t sense any kind of magic, sorcery or wizardry, certainly not elemental power. It could be poison, but—.” She didn’t want to examine the dead, but she dismounted and approached the man Gaulter had first examined. He came to stand beside her.
Grey skin and hollow eyes, mouth agape to reveal half-rotten teeth—the dead man looked more terrified than in actual pain. She sorrowed for him, for those who waited for him, expecting his return, husband, father, son, lover.
Standing over him, she held her hands two feet above his corpse, close enough to sense any emanation of power, not close enough to attract a remnant to her. She still caught no reek of sorcery, but a faint emanation of—What is that? It lurked, faint and flickering, a ghostly tendril that teased on the edge of sensing. Is it from the netherworld? She poked around it. The emanation pulsed. It was like a fading heartbeat. It needed a little strengthening, only a little strengthening. Give a little power to it—.
Inkeri drew back. That last thought wasn’t hers. The man was long dead, and she knew better than to mess with those who had passed through the gate to Neotheora.
Frustration seeped into that flicker.
She dropped her hands and jolted back. “I sense nothing.”
Gaulter gave her a quick look, and she remembered that the baron had once remarked that his marshal’s mother was a wise woman.
“What do you sense?” she hissed.
“A trap,” he ground.
“Oh aye, there’s that.”
“It’s still here, waiting to lure us to Neotheora,” he whispered. “Where is it?”
She looked around. Tall buildings lined the side of the street across from the tower gate. The ramparts filled the other side.
“Are we watched?” Rhodren asked, his question only loud enough to reach her and Gaulter.
His marshal turned. “My lord, whatever killed them is still here in the citadel.”
“Close by?”
“That I do not know.”
“Then we keep vigilant watch. Men, expect anything. More snakes or lizards, another sorcerer, maybe with the wolfen reputed to serve them. Anything. Timote, Naklon, take the vanguard.”
Crossbows loaded and held ready, the two archers rode to the front. “Stay alert,” Timote said, “you might get a chance to gain a number against me. I’m three ahead.
“One,” Naklon retorted. “Only one.”
“Because you missed a constrictor.”
“I never miss.”
“There’s always a first time. That’s put you far behind.”
“Men,” Gaulter snapped. “Stay wary.”
“Aye, Marshal,” they chorused.
The argument had washed over Inkeri as she gathered up her reins to mount. The implications froze her. Rhodren noticed her statue-still by the gelding. “Inkeri, what is it?”
Her gaze tracked slowly over that court of death. “This isn’t enough men for a whole troop.”
He counted. She thought he counted a second time. She knew the men around them were matching the numbers to their own troop, even cut in size by their losses as they crossed the Ahdreide.
“Half the troop,” he finally said. “Where are the others? And where are their horses?”
