CHAPTER 48
Allystaire sat his saddle with one hand on Ardent’s neck and the other on a basket of light throwing spears tied to the pommel of his saddle.
A thousand of these things for my lance, he thought, then amended, For a good dozen lances. He pulled one out of the basket, hefted it, felt the light springiness of the two-foot haft, the hollow steel head. Meant to shatter, he thought, as he held it up to his eyes in the faint pre-dawn light, inspecting the mark of some unknown smithy in Barony Damarind.
Around him the Order of the Arm sat their own mounts, many of which nosed for grass in the muddy Varshyne ground. Torvul slumped on his pony, snoring gently. Gideon, surrounded by his guard of wild men who’d once been Chimera, was likewise slumped in his saddle, but for entirely different reasons.
Pinesward Watch wasn’t much more than a shape in the darkness, a jumbled heap to the west. The camp of the Braechsworn was entirely lost in the overhanging shadow of the keep. The chill early morning air was silent, tense, charged with the risk they were taking in coming so close to the enemy.
Then a huge angry cry rent the air, and a flame-wreathed giant suddenly sprang into being between them and the castle. It was man-shaped, and easily twice or three times the size of any Gravekmir.
Even to Allystaire, who knew that the boy sitting near him, his brow hunched in concentration, was projecting that image, felt like its bellow was a challenge to everything around it with ears. Come, it seemed to say wordlessly, test my strength. Test your own.
And then dark shapes, smaller than Gideon’s giant but taller than any mounted man, began, singly and in clumps, to disengage themselves from the larger shadows and run towards it, answering it with their own long rumbling yells.
“I’ll be dipped in shit,” Torvul muttered, having lifted his head when the giant unleashed its cry, “it’s working. Stones Above, I never thought it would.”
“Let us make use of it, then,” Allystaire said. “How long till the sun breaks behind us?”
Torvul sniffed at the air, turned to look to the east. “No more’n a quarter turn,” the dwarf said.
“Then let us not waste the time,” the paladin said, kicking his heels into the sides of Ardent, then laying low over the destrier’s great neck as it shot forward like a bolt loosed from a great engine.
* * *
Symod was shaken into wakefulness. For a moment he thought he was on the deck of a ship that had suddenly pitched on its side, and he scrambled out of his cot. For a terrible moment he flailed in the darkness, finding himself on hands and knees on the cold and muddy ground. Something so loud it had seemed to make the earth shake had awoken him, and he knew it could mean only one thing.
Then he stood, his head brushing the top of his tent, and smiled broadly. He stroked the gold-and-sapphire amulet that lay against his bare chest and closed his eyes in concentration, reaching out to every priest of Braech in the camp.
The paladin shows himself. It is time.
All around the Braechsworn camp, priests suddenly roused themselves, donning robes, hefting maces, hammers, and axes and heading for the center of their camp.
For his part, Symod quickly found his robes and slipped them on. Then he went to a trunk at the foot of his cot and opened it. Inside it sat a large glass bowl and a heavy jug. He lifted the jug out and uncorked it, smiling even wider as the scent of brine filled his senses, expanded into his tent.
“I have you, Allystaire,” he muttered aloud, and strode from his tent into the darkness before dawn, jug of seawater dangling from one hand, bowl tucked beneath his other arm.
* * *
With the sun coming up behind them, the Arm of the Mother, his Order, the Wit, and the Will reined up on a hill that overlooked the Braechsworn camp. Just barely within range of bowshot, he thought, if the archer was good and the bow was powerful.
Pinesward Watch, it was plain to see, would soon fall. From what Allystaire could glimpse, the defenders had abandoned the outer curtain wall and pulled back to the inner keep. He held out one hand and Torvul tossed his leather-wrapped glass tube into it. Allystaire held it to one eye and saw weary defenders with spears and crossbows trudging along the inner battlements. The front gate and barbican still held, but were no longer defended. He guessed that a pile of earth and wood and whatever was handy had been heaped up behind the gate to reinforce it even as the men who’d paid to guard it had withdrawn.
He trained the glass over the walls of the keep and found his eye drawn to one particular soldier walking the wall who seemed shorter than the others. Allystaire peered forward intently. If the soldier was indeed shorter it was because, he could see, the soldier was a boy. No older than Gideon, certainly. Perhaps twelve or thirteen summers old, clutching a spear that towered over him, wearing a chain shirt that probably covered his knees and a tabard he could, and did, trip on.
“No one that young needs to be taking up arms outside of a courtyard,” Allystaire growled. “Torvul,” he snapped, unable to keep the anger inside him from bleeding into his voice. “I need the Braechsworn to hear me.”
“Then give me my glass back before you snap the Freezing thing. I haven’t got yet another, and I’ve not the time nor tools to make one or repair this one if you break it as well.” The dwarf snatched the glass away, and not a moment too soon, for Allystaire heard the faint notes of the song begin in his head. Like the ringing of silver trumpets or a harp striking clear notes before the recitation of great deeds in song, the notes tingled not only in his ears but along his body, filling his limbs with warmth.
And with a terrible strength.
He slid from the saddle, surveying the camp beneath him. Only one cluster of tents amidst hundreds of men sleeping haphazardly around cookfires.
Torvul leaned in his saddle, holding out a delicate crystal bottle. He poured a measure of it onto Allystaire’s open mouth.
Then the paladin opened his mouth and yelled, his words carrying across the distance, cutting through the wind, powerful enough to shake the bones of any man who stood in front of him and too near.
“SYYYYMMMMMODDDDDDDDDD.” He waited for the echo to roll over him before he continued. “SYMOD, YOU COWARD. COME AND FACE ME. I AM ALLYSTAIRE STILLBRIGHT, THE ARM OF THE MOTHER, AND I DO NOT FEAR YOU. CAN YOU SAY THE SAME?”
Then the paladin slipped one of the javelins from the basket, bent his arm, took a running start, and threw on his fifth step.
The weapon arced high into the air, glinting in the sun as it reached the height of its arc, then descended deadly and gracefully into the Braechsworn camp.
* * *
Brazcek Varsyhne leapt to his feet when the glass of the window behind him rattled in its casement, and a decanter fell from a nearby table. The Baron had been dozing in a chair, in his armor. He smelled of rust and sweat and fear and when the sound jerked him awake, his first thought was that the Braechsworn had somehow found the timber and the time to make engines, and now meant to pound his walls to dust.
With Herrin close on his heels he ran out onto the battlements, finding himself among men who stared gape-mouthed to at hill that overlooked the camp spread out before them, the camp full of the tormentors that had cut their numbers in half since their last struggle for the walls.
Atop that hill, something gleamed brilliantly in the rising sunlight, shone like a diamond against the brown and green of early spring. Behind the figure, too small for Brazcek to make out in detail, a blue banner unfurled in the breeze, a golden sunburst bold in its center.
Another wave of sound rolled over the men on the walls, emanating from the figure on that distant hillside.
“ARE THERE NONE AMONG YOU, BRAECHSWORN COWARDS, WHO WILL COME AND FACE THE ARM OF THE MOTHER?”
Something arced into the air from that figure on the hillside, and Brazcek Varsyhne wanted, in the sunlight of a spring morning, to fall to his knees and weep. Around him, some of his men did the very thing, while others cheered, and others roared wordlessly, their anger renewed, to the camp of enemies below them.
The paladin had come.
For the first time, Brazcek Varshyne had felt something besides despair, something besides the grim resignation of ending his life in a manner the bards would approve of.
He felt hope. If a paladin had come to them, with an army at his back, then his Barony was not at its end. Then the terrified folk huddling in a mass in the keep under his feet were not at an end.
Brazcek Varshyne felt tears in his eyes that were not, for the first time in days, shed in grief and despair.
The paladin had come.
* * *
The dozen most senior priests, Marynths and Winsars, had only just gathered around Symod’s table, and the glass bowl of seawater, when the words shouted from the hillside rolled over them in shock. Dragon Scales, including their menacing leader Jorn, gathered close behind the Choiron, snarled and howled.
For his part, the Choiron laughed.
If the gathered servants of the Sea Dragon around him noticed that the laughter had an edge of fear beneath it, none of them said as much.
Neither did any join him in mirth.
Symod gestured them back to the bowl, shouting, “To your task, servants of Braech. Fear not. All is proceeding as the Sea Dragon would have it.”
And then something fell from the air, whistling as it came. It struck a priest in the back rank, exploding against the scales of his armor. The priest fell to his knees, screaming, his arm dangling useless and mangled from the shoulder that had been struck. All around him, other priests or Islandman guards suddenly bled from torn cheeks; one placed a hand over an eyesocket that leaked blood and gore.
Even Symod paled at that, but still he called the priests around him. They raised their hands over the bowl and the Choiron leaned low over it, murmuring words no one else could hear. Images began to swim in it.
Then another missile fell from the sky, striking one of the priests who stood near the bowl, taking his raised hand off at the wrist.
A fragment of the javelin scraped across Symod’s cheek, and droplets of blood began to scatter in the bowl.
Symod bellowed and oath and snatched up the bowl, tossing the water out and bending beneath the table for the jug.
“Dragon Scales,” he bellowed as he straightened up, “to me! Jorn! Shield us as we work!”
He set the bowl back down after wiping spots of blood from it with a sleeve, set it on the table, and sloppily poured seawater back into it.
The headman of the berzerkers had called out in Islandman tongue, and more of his bare-chested, scale-gauntleted kin suddenly gathered around. They climbed atop each other’s shoulders, raising a barrier of flesh against the threat of javelins falling from the sky.
One of them who stood on the shoulders of another looked down in disbelief as a javelin sank through his collarbone and settled deep into the meat of his chest. His face frozen beatifically, he fell forward, as another ran to take his place.
“We have the paladin now,” Symod muttered, as he leaned back over the bowl, heedless of the men who fell around him, of the fragments of steel that whizzed in the air.
* * *
Rede paced nervously around the camp he’d been relegated to. Around him, knights in their many colors, red-surcoated Innadan lancers, and newly arrived, scale-clad Harlachan axemen slapped backs and shook hands. Arontis Innadan and Unseldt Harlach embraced one another, each one calling the other “Brother of Battle” and laughing.
He heard none of it.
Images blurred in his mind. Around a huge hill of sand, a mist rose. Not a mist. Steam. The anthill boiled and burned and screamed. A green tide rolled over an icy lake and could only be rolled back by those who sang in fire. Immovable stone took form and flew.
The images were suddenly driven from his mind by a blinding pain, his thin and wasted body wracked with coughing. He pressed a balled fist to his mouth, and looked on in horror as it came away speckled with blood.
* * *
Allystaire quickly ran short of javelins. Beside him, Teague raised her great bow and arced arrows into the air after each spear Allystaire threw. Norbert paced behind them in frustration, his bow useless at this range.
Torvul sat on his mount, taking sightings with his glass and calling corrections until Allystaire released his last javelin. The song still boiled in his veins, and Allystaire itched to leap into Ardent’s saddle and lift his hammer and charge amongst them.
It would be suicide, he reminded himself, and yet the men behind me would follow. If they had a fragment of my strength… He let the thought die.
“Why do they not come?”
“Some are,” the dwarf called out. “Finally getting up the gumption. Looks like a Freezing lot o’them too, maybe more than we can handle.”
Allystaire peered down into the camp and found that the dwarf spoke true, a group was detaching itself from the main body. Moving aimlessly, without lines or formations, just charging ahead, driven by the shouts and imprecations of a small group of Dragon Scales on their heels.
“A fighting retreat then,” Allystaire said. “We are everything these men are not,” he yelled, as he sprang onto Ardent’s back.
Horses snorted and armor rattled, arms were loosened and readied, leather creaked as his knights shifted in their saddles.
“Norbert, draw them after us,” Allystaire commanded. The lean knight nodded, pulled himself back into his saddle, and fitted an arrow to his bow. Gripping his mount just with his legs, he nudged the horse into a canter forward, drawing back his bowstring and loosing high, speculatively, at the oncoming Islandmen.
“Any burden,” Allystaire shouted.
“Any burden,” they answered back, Norbert too, even as he rode towards the enemy.
Allystaire drew his hammer and let Ardent trot, drawing away from the castle and its besiegers.
Ahead of them, Norbert rode quickly to within bowshot of the outermost rings of men. Expertly drawing his bow and twisting his body, he sent a high arcing shot towards their forces, then another, quickly drawing arrows from thick sheaves of them tied to his saddle.
Gideon sat bolt upright in his saddle, his eyes flying wide. “Allystaire! The Gravekmir. We are deceived!”
Allystaire quickly took Ardent to the top of a small rise, easy to find in the rolling ground, looking to the east, expecting the tall silhouettes of giants to be framed against the sun.
“Not us,” Gideon yelled. “The host! The Barons! Symod has set the Gravek on them!”
Despite the song that ran in his veins, Allystaire felt a hard cold ball form in his stomach.
Then it rose to his throat as the Braechsworn camp let loose a roar, and hundreds of Islandmen came boiling in a great mass of steel and rage towards him and his men.
Anger slid down his throat and met that knot of ice in his stomach, pushed it down, shoved it away.
“Gideon,” he snapped, “go to them, to Landen and Arontis, tell them to prepare!”
The boy nodded and slumped in his saddle again. One of Keegan’s men, bareback on a small shaggy horse, grabbed the boy’s reins.
“We fight back to the the camp and hope that Unseldt Harlach has found it. RIDE!”
The knights around him didn’t need a second command. Led by Tibult, the best horseman among them, they streamed away. He turned his head and summoned his best battlefield voice, “NORBERT,” he bellowed. “FALL BACK.”
He turned Ardent yet again and let the huge grey run towards the first oncoming branch of the enemy, and where he’d last seen Norbert loosing arrows.
The archer-knight stood tall in the stirrups of his horse, loosing arrows still at the forward rushing Islandmen. He had let his horse range far ahead, halfway down the hill they crested to show themselves. Even Allystaire watched, no longer could he simply arc arrows into the crowd. He was close enough to pick targets, which he did.
“NORBERT,” Allystaire yelled again, as Torvul, Gideon, and the knights distanced themselves, “FALL BACK.”
Norbert looked back briefly, nodding, but continued to fire as he nudged his horse in a tight turn, twisting in his saddle, one way and then the other, drawing and firing faster and more smoothly than Allystaire would ever have guessed he could. Finally, with the nearest Islandmen able to haphazardly fling an axe at him, he spurred his horse and rode off, one errant missile striking the mud just a few paces behind him.
The mud. Norbert’s mount’s hooves churned through it, kicking it up in flecks. It wasn’t good footing for fast riding. Allystaire had known that when they’d ridden out in the morning, but as he had learned, and had told many a man worried about his horse, If you wait for the perfect ground, you will wait forever.
Still, some part of him was surprised when Norbert’s mount floundered and threw him forward out of the saddle. He landed with a heavy sound, and Allystaire knew that the breath had been driven from him. His bow was still in his hand, tightly clutched, but the arrows were on his saddle, which were on his horse, which was screaming in pain, an awful and inhuman sound, and trying to run on three legs, its left foreleg held off the ground.
Allystaire spurred Ardent forward, knowing he could heal the horse, or failing that, the destrier could bear him and Norbert both.
But he knew even as he charged forward, hammer in hand, that he wasn’t going to reach his knight before the Islandmen did. Ardent was fast, but he and Allystaire were dozens of yards away, and the Islandmen had all the momentum. Seeing their tormentor down upon the ground seemed to put more speed into their limbs. Two particularly fleet, or particularly eager men, axes in hand, were only steps away as it was.
Norbert came to his feet, wrapping both hands around the bottom of his bowstave. He squared his shoulders, roared wordlessly at the oncoming men, and hefted the bow like a club. He swung it forward as the first one reached him, cracking him so hard across the jaw that the wood of the stave snapped and the Islandman whipped around, flopping lifelessly into the dirt. Norbert scrambled for the axe the man dropped and came up swinging it, putting down the second with a wild blow to his midsection, even as the knight curled away from the Islandman’s clumsy swing.
A small trickle of Braechsworn diverted from the main group heading for Norbert, putting themselves between him and Allystaire. The paladin saw his knight overwhelmed, saw the casual butchery of the battlefield as one man took the time to run for Norbert’s horse, hacking with wild, amateur abandon at the wounded animal’s flanks and finally, mercifully, its neck.
Allystaire swung his hammer with unthinking savagery at the men around him. Islandman heads exploded, showering their companions in blood and bone. Upraised limbs were smashed to bloody pulp. Allystaire, swinging the hammer Torvul had made for him for the first time with the Mother’s Strength upon him, felt the way the steel of the haft gave and bent, ever so slightly, with each swing.
Ardent was a weapon unto himself, rearing up to strike with steel-shod hooves and all his weight and strength, or rocking forward in order to rear out with a rear leg, striking forward with his teeth, or simply bowling men over with his hundred-and-fifty-stone weight of muscle.
The men who came for the paladin died, and Allystaire was able to spare a glance for Norbert. The Islandmen had swarmed over him, but they hadn’t killed him. Instead they had pummeled him with fist and flat of blade, with axe-handles and sword-pommels, and snatched up his still-struggling form. One of the two Dragon Scales leapt forward, brought his gauntleted fist down on the back of Norbert’s head, then seized his limp body and sprang away.
Allystaire turned Ardent towards them. The destrier reared, its front hooves kicking at the air, and the paladin raised his hammer. The Islandmen didn’t come on; they closed ranks into a line, raising their weapons. Behind them, the remaining Dragon Scale spread his arms and howled.
The paladin drew back his arm, aiming his hammer to throw. But he saw behind them the great mass of the Islandmen lurching forward.
His arm tensed.
Then he heard Gideon’s voice in his head, not panicked, but urgent. Allystaire! We need you.
Letting loose a roar, he turned Ardent and let the destrier run with all his strength. The huge grey gained the hillside in a few steps, and Allystaire shut his eyes tight as he left Norbert behind, guided towards Gideon and Torvul by their beaconing presence in his mind.
* * *
Symod laughed as he studied the bowl, laughed as his camp emptied of Islandmen, but for the gathered bulk of the Dragon Scales.
Behind him, he could feel Jorn fuming. Symod turned to face the berzerker headman, whose features composed themselves as soon as the Choiron’s gaze passed over him.
“Do you question my judgment, Jorn?”
“Battle is at hand. We should all be fighting it.”
Symod shook his head slowly. “No. This will be a great blow, but it will not finish the paladin, nor his heresy. For that, you and your brothers will be needed.”
“It would be the blow if we ran to the fight now.”
“It would not,” Symod said, summoning the authority to his voice that ended the berzerker’s questions.
Another of them came bounding forward, pushing through the mob of priests, bearing a limp form on his back.
The berzerker—taller, less muscle-bound than the rest, but with the requisite ink scrawled over his bare chest, the clawed gauntlets over his hands—threw the body down on the ground, which was when Symod realized it was not a body, as the man coughed and started weakly to his feet. The Dragon Scale who’d deposited him launched a kick into his ribs. Symod heard the snap of bone and the man, a tall and leanly-muscled, curled his arms around himself.
“Enough, Eyvindr,” Symod yelled as the berzerker made to kick the downed man again. The Choiron swept around the table where he stood, priests parting for him, and went to the side of the prone captive, looking down at him.
Blood from a scalp wound had flowed freely over his face, and on one cheek there was a prominent scar.
“Tell me your name,” the Choiron said, letting a trickle of power flow into his voice, directing it towards the will of the man curled up at his feet.
“Norbert,” he replied through gritted teeth.
“Stand, Norbert,” Symod said. “Simply gaining your feet will not draw you more pain.”
Slowly, carefully, the young man drew himself up, first going to all fours, then to his feet. He kept one hand pressed against his cracked ribs. Even with the slight stoop in his pain, Norbert nearly looked Symod in the eye.
“What are you to the paladin, Norbert?” Symod let another trickle of his will into his voice.
“I am of the Order of the Arm.”
Symod resisted the urge to laugh. Such grand names they give themselves, he thought. Aloud, he said, “Then you are in the paladin’s confidence, yes? Tell me of his plans and your pain will be eased.”
The Choiron felt his trickle of power, that should’ve bent the will of any injured and nearly broken man, rebound back upon him.
The grim youth across from him lowered his eyes, shook his head, and mumbled a few words.
“What was that?” Symod took a half-step closer, bringing his will to bear on the man before him again.
“I said,” Norbert replied, whipping his head back up and meeting Symod’s gaze eye to eye, “that I will bear any burden for the Mother.”
Symod bent more of his will upon the boy, but only felt it rebounding back upon him yet again. He had felt that only once before this day, a long time ago in a town he had since destroyed for its ruler’s insolence.
Fury rose up in the Choiron, and he nearly drove a balled up fist into the defiant boy’s broken rib before his control reasserted itself.
Symod smiled coldly. “If it is burdens you wish to bear, boy, then burdens you will have. Someone find a beam!” The Choiron elevated his voice just enough for that to be an order, and he didn’t even look up as he heard someone scurry to the task.
He shoved Norbert backwards with one outstretched hand, into the arms of Eyvindr, who seized his neck in one gauntleted claw.
“Secure the beam to his arms,” Symod said, “and put him in the center of the camp. Every day, add a stone to it. Give Norbert of the Order of the Arm all the burden he cares to bear. When he is ready to speak to us, he will. Or he will die, crushed under his own heresy.”
The berzerker began dragging him off, which the youth didn’t seem to want to fight, his body practically gone limp.
But they quickly realized he was just gathering himself.
Broken rib and all, Norbert had some fight left in him. He pried his arms away from Eyvindr with a quick twist of his elbows and came for Symod. The Choiron froze in shock as the knight broke free. Norbert was long and lean and covered a surprising distance in one lunge.
Norbert put one hand around Symod’s throat and started to squeeze before Jorn and Eyvindr both pounced upon him. The combined strength of two Dragon Scales, neither of whom treated him lightly, was too much.
Still, Symod had felt a surprising strength as he stumbled away from the attack. He only just stopped himself from reaching for his throat, half-expecting to find the impressions of Norbert’s fingers there.
“Start with two stones,” Symod bellowed. “Take him from my sight until he is ready to talk.”
“The next time I see you,” Norbert shouted as they dragged him away, his heels digging furrows in the soft ground, “will be in the next world, because Allystaire will have killed you.”
“Allystaire will fall before I do,” Symod shouted back, losing his composure, raising his fisted hands, cheeks turning red with rage. “Braech will grant me that. Braech will grant me victory. I have SEEN it in the waters. I have SEEN IT.”