Brotherhood of the Wolf (55 page)

To placate the kaifs, the Duke called his torturer to his quarters and faked an act of mayhem. He wrapped a bloody bandage around his right arm as if the hand had been removed, then he placed his own signet ring on the finger of the guard's severed hand and gave it to the kaifs.

The deed astonished and saddened the kaifs, for they thought that surely he would marry the fair young Princess, or at least pay triple the dowry. Instead, they returned to Muttaya with nothing but a severed hand as an admission of the Duke's theft.

For two years the ruse worked. The King of Muttaya seemed to be appeased.

Until a trader from Muttaya spotted the Duke at the Courts of Tide, somehow having regrown his severed hand.

The resulting war was called the Dark Lady War, named for the dark-skinned lady of Muttaya and the dark-eyed lady of Seward.

The war raged for three hundred years, sometimes skipping a generation without much fighting, only to burst into flame anew.

A dozen times the kings of Muttaya overtook western Mystarria, and often managed to settle there. But eventually the commoners would overthrow them, or the kings of Rofehavan would unite against them.

So it was that castle after castle was built in western Mystarria, and time and again they were torn down. Sometimes the Muttayin built them, sometimes the Mystarrians built them—until the land justly earned the name The Ruins.

Then Lord Carris came along. Over a period of forty years he managed to hold the realm against the Muttayin while he gathered enough stone to build his great walled
city, which the Muttayin were never able to conquer.

Lord Carris died peacefully in his sleep at the ripe old age of a hundred and four—a feat that had no precedent in the previous three hundred years.

That had been nearly two thousand years ago, and Carris still stood, the single greatest fortress in Western Mystarria and the lynchpin that held the west together.

The walled city covered an island in Lake Donnestgree, so that most of the walls could not be breached except by boat. Since Muttaya was landlocked, the Muttayan were poor hands with boats. But even boats could not avail much when the castle walls themselves rose a hundred feet on the side, straight up from the water.

The stone walls had been covered with plaster and lime, so a man attempting an escalade could not find a toehold.

From atop the walls, commoners could shoot arrows down through the kill holes or lob stones onto any boat. It therefore did not take force soldiers with great endowments to man most of Carris's walls. Instead, those who sought to assail Carris had one of three options. They could try to infiltrate the castle and overthrow it from within, they could set a siege, or they could opt for a frontal assault, trying to win through the three barbicans into the fortress proper.

The castle had fallen only four times in history. Many castles in Rofehavan had thicker and higher walls or more artillery engines, but few castles were more strategically situated.

Roland climbed the stairs eight stories through a dank guard tower until he reached the top. There a steward with a key unlocked the heavy iron door that led upstairs to the top of the wall.

Roland had expected the fog to be so thick that he'd spend hours looking for his post. But as he neared the top of the wall, he found that the fog receded and he actually saw the last rays of the evening sun before it dropped over the western hills.

When he reached the crenellated wall he elbowed his way forward through the throng of warriors who sat ten
deep along the wall-walks. Huge stones and stacks of arrows were piled up everywhere along the walls. Commoners lay asleep in the lee of the crenellations with nothing more than thin blankets pulled over them.

Roland trudged along the wall, past tower after tower, until he reached the baker's tower. The yeasty scent of bread rose from it. The tower was so warm that men thronged to sleep atop it in the cold evening.

Roland could not tiptoe through the press, so he just walked across the men's bodies, ignoring the shouts and curses that followed him.

Past the tower, peasants were hoisting up good food—lamb roast and bread loaves and fresh-pressed cider—and dispensing them to the troops. As the men ate, Roland had to avoid knocking over their mugs and stepping on plates.

Roland continued to thread a precarious path through the crowd, grabbing a loaf of bread and slicing it open, then throwing his lamb atop it so that the bread acted as a plate. A chill wind blew here atop the wall, and gulls hovered on the wind above, eyeing his food hungrily. He wished that he'd not given his thick bearskin robe to the green woman.

He wondered where she was now, wondered if Averan would fare well tonight.

He found his post on the south wall, and there spotted Baron Poll easily enough. Since Carris sat on a lake, and this particular wall faced the waters, no hoardings had been erected between these towers to protect the castle from bombardment. The fat Baron had climbed atop a merlon and sat with his legs dangling over, looking like some glum gargoyle.

Roland would never have dared hang from the wall like that. His fear of heights was such that it made his heart race just to watch a friend sit in that precarious position.

Wisps of fog reached right up to Baron Poll's feet.

Everywhere out around him the crows and pigeons were flapping about in the upper fog.

When Roland approached, the Baron glimpsed him from the corner of his eye, and his demeanor brightened. He
smiled joyfully. “Ah, Roland, my friend, you made it alive after all! I thought Raj Ahten's men would be using your skull for a drinking cup by now.”

“Not likely,” Roland said with a grin. “They nearly had me, till they saw that my brain was the size of a hazelnut. I guess they figured my skull couldn't hold enough to make a decent mug. They ran off and left me alone in the woods while they hunted for you.”

“Then where have you been all day?” the Baron asked in astonishment.

“Wandering down in the fog,” Roland answered.

The Baron glanced down at the mist curling just under his toes. He spat over the castle wall. “Aye, a man can't find himself to pee in this fog. I made my way to the castle well enough, but it helps that I'd lived here half of my life, and so knew the way.”

Roland stood beside the Baron, looked out at the birds

“So, we're way up here with the birds. Looks as if they don't dare find a place to roost.”

“Crows,” Baron Poll said with a wise look. He'd been right. The crows knew where to hunt for food, and they knew that a battle was coming.

Baron Poll glanced over his shoulder, up to a tower in the central keep, higher than any other except the Duke's Keep—the graak's tower. Dozens of vultures roosted there.

Roland looked out over the mist, wondering how a fog that was so low to the ground could have been so thick. He set his small shield down on a merlon, as if it were some huge curved platter, then placed his mug and his loaf with meat on it, and began to dine. He felt guilty eating such a fine meal when Averan had complained of hunger this morning. Likely the girl would go hungry again tonight. Roland's own stomach had been cramping as he walked through the fog, but suddenly he remembered that he'd picked some walnuts for Averan and then forgotten them while evading Raj Ahten's troops. He reached into his pocket and took those with his meal.

He stared across the darkening landscape. He could still
see three bluish clouds out there on the downs, but they had moved closer to Carris, and now were but five and a half miles away.

“What news have we?” Roland asked the Baron.

“Little news, much conjecture,” Baron Poll answered. “The fogs out there have been drifting around all day, never quite stopping. They're like guards marching atop a wall, except that sometimes they come right up to the edge of our own fog, and then they back away. I think that the troops keep moving just in case Lord Paldane should decide to strike.”

“If they've come up close by, isn't it possible that those mists hide nothing but flameweavers, and all of Raj Ahten's troops are a hundred yards from the castle?”

“It's possible,” the Baron answered. “I heard dogs yapping in the mist not an hour ago. I suspect that it's Raj Ahten's war dogs down there. If you hear anyone scaling the castle wall—grunting, panting—it would be wise to drop a rock on him. But I'm thinking the walls are so slick, not even Raj Ahten's Invincibles could chance an escalade.”

Roland grunted and merely ate for a while, tearing off chunks of lamb and gravy from his loaf. He saved his cider for last.

“Is it true about the Blue Tower?” Roland asked.

The Baron nodded darkly. “It's true. Not one in ten of the knights on these walls is worth a damned now.”

“And you?”

“Me? My Dedicates are safely hidden,” the Baron said. “I can still eat rocks for breakfast and crap sand for a week after.”

That was somewhat reassuring, Roland thought. Though the Baron didn't have an endowment of metabolism, and thus could not match an Invincible's speed in battle, he had the brawn and grace of a warrior. It was better to have half a warrior next to him than none at all.

“So, what are we protecting?” Roland looked down at the mist. He couldn't imagine why he'd need to sit atop
this wall. No man could have climbed up its plaster surface. Tree frogs might do it, but not men.

“Nothing much,” the Baron said. “The boat docks are on the other side of the castle, up north, and Raj Ahten's men could try to break in that way. But there's nothing for us here.”

Roland sat beside the Baron for a long time, neither of them speaking. A chill wind had begun to blow from the east. As it did, the magical fog around the castle blew with it, attenuating to the west, so that it stretched along the folds of lowlands like fingers searching for something in the fields.

The same wind began to blow the blue fog away from the armies of the Invincibles, and some men along the walls chattered excitedly as they saw the first signs of Raj Ahten's troops.

A pair of frowth giants, each twenty feet tall at the shoulder, paced along the front of the mist. They bore huge brass shields.

At a distance of miles, Roland could not see them well, of course. Even a giant at that distance seemed only a stick figure, and while others shouted that they could see war dogs and Invincibles against a line of trees, Roland could not see anything smaller than the giants.

They looked nothing like a man, any more than a cat or a cow could be compared to a man. Their fur was a tawny gold, shaggy along the arms. Their enormous muzzles were longer than a horse's, with sharp teeth in long rows, while their small round ears lay flat against their heads. Dark ring mail hid their stubby tails, while they wore shields in rows along their belts. Each giant carried a huge iron-bound stave as a weapon.

To Roland, they looked like some sort of giant rat or ferrin, armed and armored.

In the last light of day, the giants turned their muzzles and stared toward Castle Carris longingly. The mouth of one of them gaped open. A bit later, Roland heard the roar
carry across the distance. Roland imagined that the giants were hungry, longing for human flesh.

He finished eating, then strapped his shield over his back, letting it protect him from the bite of the chill wind. Within an hour, he felt miserably cold.

As darkness fell, he suddenly saw lights begin to glow redly through the patch of fog directly to the west. A fire burned there, a big fire.

“That's the village of Gower's Ambush, or maybe Settekim,” the Baron said uneasily. Roland wondered why Raj Ahten's troops had set the village afire, but the answer seemed obvious to everyone else. The flameweavers sacrificed it to the Power that they served. Roland did not much care. He only wished that he could be a little closer to the flames, so that they might warm his hands.

As the darkness deepened, villages off to the north and south also began to go up in flames, and off to the west dry fields burned bright.

It looked as if the flameweavers would raze the whole valley.

A blue spy balloon, shaped like a giant graak, lifted into the air on the eastern shore of Lake Donnestgree at about ten at night. It came hovering over the castle, its shape dark against the stars. The far-seers in the balloon rode the skies at least a thousand yards above the castle, so that no man could shoot them down, no matter how powerful his bow. The wind pushed them along quickly, so that the balloon landed far to the west.

Up and down the ranks, worried men kept saying, “They're planning something big. Keep your eyes open!”

Word had it from the north that Raj Ahten had let his flameweavers destroy the whole of Castle Longmot. They'd summoned fell creatures that sent a wave of flame washing over the castle, slaying thousands of men.

Such a plan wouldn't work at Carris, others ventured. Carris was protected by water, while Longmot had only had earth runes carved into it.

Still, the knowledge settled uneasily into Roland's stomach, along with the lamb and loaf.

Who knew what the flameweavers might do? Perhaps they were burning the countryside in an effort to build up some spell powerful enough so that no water wizard's ward could repel it.

Yet for hours he kept watch in the bitter cold, and nothing more happened. The fires burned across the fields and hills outside of Carris. The spy balloon flew over twice more during the night.

On the castle walls, men sat above the fog and told tall tales or sang, so that in some ways the long night's watch took on an almost festive atmosphere.

By the third time the balloon hovered over, at three in the morning, Roland was hunched down behind Baron Poll, shivering violently, wishing for a blanket because with flameweavers about, the Duke had forbidden any fires on the wall, lest the sorcerers turn the fire against its makers.

The Baron just stared up at the damned balloon. “Pshaw,” he said to Roland. “You might as well get some sleep. I'll wake you if anything happens.”