Master Of The Planes (Book 3) (77 page)

The gardens of Lavisevre in summer were a splendid creation even in that half-light before the dawn.  The trees full clothed in green leafed finery, hung heavy with the morning dew. The flowers flooded the air with their scent and hinted at the myriad colours that the rising sun would reveal. 

Hepdida hugged her shawl about her shoulders and trod the curving paths.  She had walked them with Kaylan so many months ago when the thief had first taught her knife work and drawn her in to the dark task of uncovering Lady Kychelle’s killer.

That work was long since done, the murderess not just unmasked but dead in the ruins of Listcairn castle.  Hepdida shivered in the cool pre-dawn air.  Kaylan, Sir Ambrose and Vezer Khan had seized control of the fortress town while demoralised orcs and outlanders fled west towards Morwencairn.  The thief and his allies still lingered there gathering forces for a march on the fallen capital.  The princess, however, had hurried in the opposite direction determined that Lady Giseanne should hear of Rugan’s fate from her lips alone, she owed them both that at least.  The tale should be told by one who had been there at the end. But as she rode the long avenue to the prince’s palace she found the news had outstripped even her own frantic ride. 

Giseanne had greeted her kindlily, though there were deep shadows beneath the lady’s eyes and no artifice of the beautician could hide the redness of fresh weeping, not conceal the void which lurked behind her smile of welcome. The lady had told how her husband had appeared in the grounds of the palace mortally wounded the very night that Listcairn fell, and she had asked what Hepdida knew of how the prince had come by his injuries.

Hepdida had told the tale without ornament, she had not trusted herself to say more than the bare facts.  Giseanne had thanked her in a strained voice, mumbled some gratitude that Rugan’s sacrifice had not been in vain and then excused herself claiming she had heard Andros crying though the nursery was on the other side of the palace.

The walk to the pre-dawn garden had taken the princess along long empty corridors.  The thriving city that was Listcairn had become a ghostly place.  The prince had already been laid on his funeral pyre attended by the many courtiers he had gathered round him, either because he valued their counsel or doubted their loyalty. Then Giseanne had dismissed them all and paid off half the servants who had attended upon them.  Cloths hung over the rich furnishings of a home being laid up in summer hibernation.   Its lord was gone and the pulse and beat of the palace had dulled and slowed in funereal respect.

So, waking early and finding a return to sleep elusive, Hepdida had paced the palace and its gardens for a full half an hour without seeing another soul about.  She had got so used to the solitude of her promenade that she started in shock when, on ducking through an arch of sculpted yew hedge, she found she was not alone.

Giseanne looked up from the garden seat, her eyes empty.

“I’m sorry, my lady,” Hepdida said.  “I did not think to find anyone here, I thought myself alone.”  She hesitated a moment.  “I should leave,” she said but she made no move to do so.  Giseanne blinked twice and shook her head, then patted the seat beside her.

“Come sit with me,” she said.  “Like you, I’ve searched for sleep but found none. We may as well take a break together from our fruitless hunt for rest.”

Hepdida slid onto the seat, tugging at her shawl. They sat in silence for some time before the princess found her voice again.  “I’m sorry,” she said.  “I don’t think I told you how much I knew I owed him.  Without him, Quintala would have killed me, she would have ruined everything.”

Giseanne sighed.  “She sent him back you know,” she said.  “He told me how he came to be here. In the end she used her last strength to open a gate and send my husband back to me.”  She shook her head.  “Why did she do that?”

Hepdida shrugged.  The workings of Quintala’s mind had ever been a mystery to the princess.

“She tried to kill me,” Giseanne went on.  “She killed him, and in the end she does some stupid nonsense thing for which I must be grateful.” Giseanne shook her head.  “And I am grateful, so grateful for the chance to say good bye, to know I told him how I … that I made sure he knew before…”

Hepdida reached to offer Giseanne her handerchief, but the lady was quicker pressing a sodden rag to her eyes. “And I am grateful to her and at the same time,” she gazed at the eastern horizon where a strip of pale blue heralded the imminent arrival of the sun. “At the same time I am angry with him, furious, so mad if he were still alive I could kill him.”  She coughed a hoarse laugh.  “Where is the sense in that, Hepdida?  To be grateful to her that killed and furious with him she slew. Has all the world gone insane?”

Hepdida frowned trying to remember her own feelings after the murder of her mother and her father. The weeks of ordeal which had followed had rendered grief not just impossible but irrelevant.  After Niarmit had rescued her it had been impossible to track a single thread within the tangled briar of emotions that consumed her.  Had she been angry at her dead mother?  Possibly.  But then she’d been angry at a lot of people.

“I was his fourth wife you know,” Giseanne said, sniffing back tears.  “When you marry a man who is near enough five centuries old and who has nursed three woman into old age and a respectful burial, you don’t expect to outlive him.”  She sniffed again.  “You don’t expect to be the one left alone.”

“You’re not alone,” Hepdida said automatically.  “You’ve got me.”  She threaded her arm through Giseanne’s and wished her words did not sound so stilted and clumsy. She wished she could instead conjure some silken turn of phrase which would match the depth of Giseanne’s grief and in so doing soothe her loss.  “You’ve got Niarmit too,” she added wishing also that the queen herself were there.

Giseanne said nothing.  The wet rag dabbed uselessly at her eyes, replacing as much water as it removed and at last she accepted the offer of Hepdida’s fresh handkerchief.

“Have you had any word,” Hepdida asked.  “Any news from Niarmit?”

Giseanne blew her nose; a mundane explosion of noise which, for a moment, robbed her sorrow of its dignity if not its sincerity.  “Sir Vahnce was marching west to join her. He passed some leagues to the north of here but sent a messenger for any tidings we had.”  She folded the handkerchief carefully.   “He had no news for us, and we had none for him.  That was the day before Rugan came back to me.”

A fresh flow of salt water brought the handkerchief back into play.  “I am so ashamed,” she said.

“There is nothing to be ashamed of, my lady,” Hepdida told her.  “Your husband was a brave prince, the very bravest, he saved us all.  There is no shame in mourning such a husband.”

“I wanted him to save me, to save his son, to be here with us still.” Tears fell freely from her crumpled face.  “I am so angry at him, and so ashamed for being angry.  And I miss him.  I miss him so much.” No cloth would have been equal to the task of stemming that grief. Giseanne folded against Hepdida and the princess wrapped her arms around her aunt and swept a strand of hair away from the lady’s sodden face.

The first rays of sunshine broke over the horizon, casting shadows of the treetops against the tall walls of Rugan’s palace.  Hepdida cradled the grieving widow and fretted as to when and where the sun might rise on her cousin.   She hoped she would be spared a sorrow as deep as her aunt’s.

“Well bugger me,” the one they called Stennal said.  “Where did that lot of bastards come from?”

“They all come in while you was sleeping,” Trajet replied dourly.  “They’ve been waiting patiently ‘til sun-up just so you could have a lay in.”

Kimbolt smiled.  Let the soldiers have their banter, anything that raised their spirits and vented their fear was to the good.  He had his own reasons for feeling nervous.  More than the tens of thousands of orcs, zombies and men forming up in the valley below, it was the companion at his side who made the seneschal stupidly anxious.  Kimbolt clasped his hands infront of him until he thought it must make him look like he was praying.  Then he clasped them behind his back, until he thought it made him look like a bound prisoner.     Letting them hang loosely by his sides was a pose too reminiscent of the shambling undead, so in the end he found himself stroking and scratching at his unshaven chin.

“Have you got fleas, Seneschal Kimbolt?” King Gregor asked acidly.  “A certain stillness would be more becoming at a time like this.  It is unsettling to the men to see their commander fidgeting like a boy about to walk out with a girl for the first time.”

“Just stretching the tiredness from my limbs, your Majesty,” Kimbolt insisted moving into an exaggerated yawn to support his lie.

Gregor graced him with a suspicious scowl, but there was a chuckle from the line of soldiers behind him. “See Trajet, even the chief reckons we’ve time for a bit more shut eye before the bastards come up here.”

The king gave a brisk nod as Stennal’s wit provoked an echo of laughs within the ranks.  “They’re taking their time,” he said.  “More than they did at Proginnot when that fool brother of mine charged in and nearly lost the battle.”  Gregor was quiet then.  Kimbolt knew of Proginnot. Dema had told him of the great battle she had missed, the battle where at the end Xander had killed Gregor.

“It is maddening to stand up here watching them deploy at their leisure,” Kimbolt said lightly, when the king’s silence had stretched into a long minute.

“Well we can hardly go charging down there, Seneschal,” Gregor snapped. “It would be rank stupidity to abandon a strong position and plunge into a mire where their numbers, however disordered they may be, will still overwhelm us.”

“I know your Majesty,” Kimbolt said testily, irked that his attempt at companionable talk should have been confused with tactical naiveté.

They fell once more to still and silent watching.

Pietrsen stood up in his stirrups, though the extra few inches of height added little to the sweep of his vantage point.  The crest of the ridge, looking over their own lines into the valley below already gave the best panoramic view of the unfolding battle.  “They’re starting to make their move, your Majesty,” he said.

Niarmit’s horse stamped its feet restlessly.  Bred for war its patience had been tried by the long hour of inactivity as the full force of the enemy were deployed in good order on the plain.  She might at most have let the archers try their luck, but the range was too extreme to do much more than waste arrows and reveal where Niarmit had concentrated the bulk of her bowmen.

“See,” Pietrsen pointed. “Orc wolf riders.”

Niarmit nodded.  She had noted the movement before Pietrsen had, the lines of enemy infantry parting so that the baying lupine cavalry could form up along the northern wing of Maelgrum’s army.

“He means to test the Salicia troops,” the Master of Horse added.

“That is to be expected,” Niarmit kept her voice level.  “It is where the ridge is lowest and the approach to our lines shallowest.”   She did not add that it was Kimbolt’s division, or the place where her father had chosen to place himself, though those facts pre-occupied her thoughts.

She felt the tug of Eadran’s will from within the Helm, impatient to turn her head so he could view the whole scope the battlefield through her eyes.  She let him scan slowly from left to right across the crowded valley floor. 

Thirty thousand orc infantry were drawn up in six tribal divisions, two each to face off against the three distinct corps which Niarmit had arraigned on the ridge under Kimbolt, Torsden and Vahnce’s commands.  The lumbering orcs presented a well disciplined front.  Niarmit mused at the impressive feat of having wrought such ordered unity from a fundamentally unstable species.  Eadran interrupted her thought with an observation, “it is fear that binds them girl and fear alone, fear of Maelgrum.  If we can lay him low, then the orcs will as soon fight each other as anyone else.”

Niarmit’s eyes scanned back and forth at Eadran’s bidding.  “Where is he?” the Vanquisher hissed.  “Where is he hiding?”

Behind the orcs an equal number of the stumbling undead swayed in the rays of the morning sun. The zombies were confined in a crude formation of five great squares by the will of a net of robed necromancers.  Even though the nearest square was a full mile from the hill top, the reek of decay was still strong enough to catch at the back of Niarmit’s throat. But there was no obvious sign of a central focus where the Dark Lord might have pitched his command post. 

The orc charge at Kimbolt’s battle division was to be a wholly mounted affair.  Wolfriders had been drawn from every tribe into a force of five or six thousand cavalry.   Eadran and Niarmit’s gaze settled on the gargantuan loping pack as the wolf riders walked the first few hundred yards between the lines. 

There was a dreadful menace in the slow deliberation of their advance. “All you need for a charge is enough distance to build up to full speed,” Eadran growled in her head.

“I know.” From Pietrsen’s puzzled expression, Niarmit realised her snapped retort had been accidentally uttered aloud.  She tried to reassure the Master of Horse with a small smile.

“They are within a quarter mile of the chateau, your Majesty.”  Pietrsen said. The wolves paused to bay a great collective howl at the midpoint of their walk across the no-man’s land between the battle lines.  The sound carried on the wind filling the air   “That’s within bowshot,” the Master of Horse added when Niarmit did not take his heavy handed hint.  “Shall I give the signal for them to engage?”

Niarmit squinted at the chateau standing tall and elegant at the extreme northern edge of the battle lines. It lay slightly closer to Kimbolt’s force than Maelgrum’s.  In the initial manouverings the Dark Lord had paid it little more attention than sending a few scouts sniffing close to the mansion’s ornamental walls. The light probing had drawn forth a couple of arrows.  Enough to let Maelgrum know it was held, but for the moment he was content for his orcs to ride past its unknown defences and attack the soldiers in plain sight on the ridge.

Niarmit shook her head.  “We give no orders to the Chateau, Lord Pietrsen,” she said.  “Captain Tordil will know when it will be most timely to act. He needs no instruction from us.”

“But…” Pietrsen began.

Niarmit curtly waved him silent, or perhaps it was Eadran’s impulse to so imperiously urge the man to be quiet.  Sometimes she could not tell the difference. “I have faith in the powers of Seneschal Kimbolt and the troops from Salicia,” she said.  “We must husband our resources and our surprises, for we have few enough of either to fling at the enemy.”

The walking wolves had come within effective range of the contingent of archers who stood in loose order on the slope behind Kimbolt.  The wolves’ pace accelerated as a swarm of arrows arched over the intervening infantry towards them.  In seconds the cavalry were at full tilt. 

Further missiles were launched into their flank from the archers of Torsden’s division, to the south. A few wolves stumbled, their riders swept under paw by the tide of baying cavalry.  Still the Northern Lord dare not send his infantry into the wolfriders’ vulnerable side.  There were too many orcish troops waiting to pounce upon him, should he once descend from the protection of the steep high position he occupied.      For the time being a flanking fire of arrows was all he could offer in support of Kimbolt’s division.

Wolves were stumbling, riders tumbling as they caught limbs in the carefully laid pits and caltrops placd overnight.  The charge’s momentum slackened as wolves and riders tried to navigate a safe path through the hidden hazards.

Niarmit clenched her hands white knuckle tight.  “Breathe, girl,” Eadran murmured in her head. “Breathe.”  She had not realised she’d been holding her breath.

The sunlight glinted on the speartips of Kimbolt’s front rank. The lead riders still charged, though at a more cautious pace, more a canter than a gallop. When they were little more than a score of yards away, there were sudden bursts of arcane light erupting from half a dozen points along the line.  Here a blue arc of lightning which carved a jagged path through the attackers.  There a plume of flame that turned riders into randomly charging bonfires.  To the north a fan of deadly glowing lights which shot out and felled orcs dead in their tracks.  In the centre a white blast of ice tore a shattering hole in the faltering advance.

“These are, er … impressive pyrotechnics, your Majesty.” Pietrsen may have taken pleasure in the destruction of the enemy but the blatant and illegal human use of magic seemed to have constrained his joy.

In the Helm Eadran snorted contemptuously.  “Time was when every warrior and king aspired to cast a spell as well as he swung a sword.  Such skills won empires.”  His tone mellowed as he observed, “mind my granddaughter has a way with ice.”

The shock of the sudden magical assault from within a line of simple spearmen had spoilt the last vestige of coherence in the orcish charge.  They broke upon the men of Salicia like a great wave shrunk to a mere ripple by its charge up a beach.  The shouts and thunder of battle carried across to Niarmit’s high position.  Lupine howls of fury or of pain or maybe both, filled the air.  The high clear ring of blade on blade mingled with the duller thwacks of axe striking deep into wooden shields.

Yet the spearmen held, while more fire and ice burst from the monarchs embedded within the battle lines.  On the orcs southern flank, Torsden’s archers had moved closer to pour deadly volleys of arrows into the unengaged orcs behind the main line.  The torment drove a few hundred orcs to break free of the assault on Kimbolt’s division and instead charge down the impertinent archers.

Torsden’s troops, like the Northern Lord himself, reacted with a surprising turn of speed and agility.  The archers fell back through columns opening in his own lines.  Then the spearman stepped lightly back into position presenting a front of spearpoints. The breakaway charge faded to nothing two score yards short of closing with the foe.

And then it was over.  A thin stream became a flood as wolfriders broke away heading back west down the slope away from the ruinous spears arrows and spells.  The beaten but not routed riders gathered just beyond arrowshot.  They faced their enemy and flashed various parts of orcish anatomy that were better left hidden at the seneschal’s soldiers still in command of the ridge.  It was a lewd challenge which laid some claim to a victory.  However, the hundreds of orc and wolf corpses and the equal numbers of injured crawling past the dead gave clear testimony as to which side had won the opening round. As if in emphasis a great shout rang out from the troops of Salicia, a cry so loud its refrain reached Niarmit’s position.

“Why your Majesty, I do believe they are calling out ‘for the Goddess and the queen’,” Pietrsen said.

“I heard,” she replied.

“They got them in the wrong order,” Eadran snarled. “I never had much truck with the Goddess.”