The Dread Wyrm (Traitor Son Cycle) (75 page)

Gelfred beamed. “They are, for the most part, merely animals,” he said. “Except the wardens.”

Gabriel nodded. Gelfred touched his elbow lightly and drifted off into the dark, his black clothing already invisible, and Gabriel had time to think that Gelfred was getting as little sleep as he and perhaps less, and never seemed to show temper.

Sukey came up. Toby gave him a tisane and he drank it.

“First light,” he said.

“Might as well roust ’em now,” she said. “They’re that tired, Cap’n.”

“Yes. Get your girls cooking now so they have a big meal. Then let the girls sleep on the wagons.”

“Only got six wagons, Cap’n. Rest is ahead—”

“We’ll catch them tomorrow—Gelfred knows where they are. Yes, Sukey, this is going to be hard as hell come to earth. Just keep moving.”

“Always the girls get the short end, Cap’n.” She shrugged.

“Five silver pennies per woman, paid at next pay parade.” He looked up, his eyelids so heavy he couldn’t really look at her. “Best I can do.”

“Fair. Girls have missed sleep for less,” Sukey said. “Best get some yersel’. Want someone to warm your bed?”

Gabriel had enough energy left to laugh. “No,” he said. “Or yes, but no. I need
sleep
.”

Sukey tittered. “I thought you had the Queen’s girl all sewn up. Too prissy?”

The captain shook his head. “I did something wrong,” he admitted.
I had a command meeting over her hidden body,
he thought sleepily.

Sukey came closer. “Tom says it helps him sleep,” she said.

“I’m not proposing to share you with Tom,” he said, and regretted it. Her face closed, and she exhaled.

“Sorry, Sukey, that was crude.” He was off in his timing—another evening she’d have laughed, perhaps if Tom was there.

Too tired.

“Never you mind,” she said. “We’ll be ready at first light.” She walked off into the darkness.

“Lady Blanche walked away a few minutes ago,” Toby reported primly. “Nell tried to reason with her…”

“Never mind,” the captain said. “I’m unfit for human company. I think…”

“He just fell asleep while talking,” Toby said to Nell. They had to fetch Robin and Diccon and two other big men to pick the captain up and carry him to his camp bed, and when there he muttered once or twice, and said, “Amicia,” out loud.

All of them looked at each other.

Robin, still senior squire after two battles and anxious for knighthood, shook his head. “Bed,” he said.

In a minute, the camp was silent, except for the sigh of the wind and the movement of the rings of sentries.

North of Dorling—Ser Hartmut

The ground sucked at his horse and when he walked to rest the great beast, the ground sucked at his sabatons.

Ser Hartmut had never been anywhere that he hated quite so much as the Wild south of Ticondaga. And his anger grew with each day of chaotic movement, until on the third day after the fall of the great fortress, he forced his tired, wet horse back along the column—really, more like a storm front—to find the shambling stone-cut monster that was his ally.

Hartmut didn’t have subtlety in him. “Is this really the shortest way to Dorling?” he asked.

Thorn was blessedly free of the presence of his dark master. Hartmut would have told anyone—or even fought to the death to prove—that he was afraid of no man and no creature, but he hated being in the presence of the mocking black sprite that was Thorn’s tutor. The thing’s habit of taking the shape of children seemed to mock the whole conduct of war. It was almost worse when he couldn’t see the Satanic thing. Now that he knew, he could always sense…

Thorn stopped and leaned on the massive spear shaft that was his new staff.

“Ser Hartmut, I am as dismayed by our pace as you are. New events have driven us to different courses.”

Hartmut chewed his words as carefully as he could. He missed De La Marche—for all the man’s soft piety, he had been an excellent foil and a pleasant companion. He would have handled this better. He was seldom prone to anger.

The loss of De La Marche—and of both his good squires—had reduced the company of his peers—even near peers—to Kevin Orley, who was quite mad, Cristan de Badefol, who was coarse and vulgar and a braggart, and a dozen like them. Of his own knights, only Ser Louis Soutain was anything close to a gentleman.

But he chewed his words as well as he might. “I have not been informed of any different courses. I think that we would be better served by sharing our knowledge.”

Thorn, who had never relished being any man’s servant, balked. “My
master
,” he said with unconcealed bitterness, “wants us to have
options.
”

Hartmut shook his head. “That is very like wanting to be in a state of indecision, Lord Sorcerer. In this case, we cut the road at Dorling or we reap the consequence of facing a united foe.”

Thorn’s inscrutably stone face remained immobile.

“May I strongly suggest we turn back east and march as quickly as we may to Dorling?” he said. “And where in all the names of hell
is
your master?”

Thorn could not shrug, but the stone sticks of his limbs rattled and the helixes that powered his great arms and legs slipped and clicked. “He has other concerns besides us,” he said.

Hartmut’s eyes narrowed. “Pass this message on, Lord Sorcerer. I am here on a mission for my prince. For all the vast numbers of things that slither and hop and fly, I’ll note that my knights and my sailors seem to bear the brunt of the actual fighting, and from this I deduce that my services remain vital. Unless you and your master wish to continue without us, I strongly recommend we have a council, choose an objective, march
east and defeat the Emperor before he joins with all the other forces gathering out there, according to your own intelligence, sir.
” Hartmut’s voice rose as he went on—iron filled it. “Do I make myself clear?”

Thorn’s eyes were not stone. They held no anger—only what appeared to be immense weariness. “I will pass your message when my master returns,” he allowed. “As to your services—this is now the mightiest host of the Wild gathered in many years—indeed, in centuries, here, or so all my arts tell me. Perhaps my master will feel he can be rid of you. Perhaps he will choose to be rid of you himself.”

Hartmut snorted. “Yes, all your creepers and slithers will hold up so well against a charge of knights. And which of you has the experience to make a plan of campaign—aye, or alter one?” He snorted again. He bowed sketchily, and walked back to his own camp, where two of his pages had slung a sort of hammock between two dry trees over the bog.

Gilles, one of the more senior sailors, bowed and handed him wine silently.

Hartmut sipped the wine. “I think our captains are fools,” he said.

Gilles’s shock showed in his face.

Hartmut laughed, a sour laugh. “I have to talk to someone, Gilles.”

Later, in the rainy dark, Ash manifested very fitfully and agreed to allow Hartmut and Thorn to turn east against Dorling.

“I can’t even find the bitch,” Ash shouted into the darkness. “Who is she?” But then he seemed to make a full recovery and became an attractive young woman with a strange concavity—a horrible one—in her back.

“If we go to Dorling, perhaps I can force my recalcitrant kin into the light. If he fights to protect his own, I’m justified in eating him, and if he won’t…” Ash made an odd sound.

Then the manifestation was over, leaving only a struggling knot of white maggots to show the great dragon’s passage. Thorn played with the notion that his master was deliberately lowering their morale, or was perhaps quite mad. But he crossed a few hundred paces of beaver swamp effortlessly and the insects didn’t trouble him, not even the new wyvernflies as big as hummingbirds.

He found Ser Hartmut and wakened him.

“I spoke to the master,” he said, tasting the word
master
and hating it. “He agrees. Dorling.”

North of Lissen Carak—Harmodius

T
he forces pursuing the Black Mountain Pond Bears were not really an army, but more of a wave front. The Faery Knight’s army moved to engage them, and everything Harmodius knew of war was turned on its ear. War of the Wild was not like the war of men.

The Faery Knight didn’t hold a command council, or issue orders. He merely informed Mogon and the other captains where the enemy could be found—and what he intended to do. Before the sun rose shining above the tree canopy, Lissen Carak’s plains were empty, and the forces that had marched from N’gara had formed their own weather front, almost two miles long, the ends trailing away in ever thinner spreads of beings that might have stretched for two more miles into the trackless wilderness. In the centre, the boglin warriors moved with precision, holding to routes as though they were marked on the ground—but then suddenly dropping to all sixes to swarm around an obstacle in a way that made a human’s stomach churn. On the left, Redmede’s humans and their Outwaller allies moved together in a long, thin skirmish line—the Outwaller war parties kept reserves of tried warriors in their brightest paint hidden, but the Jacks put all their men and fighting women in a single line, two deep, two yards between files.

Harmodius chose to ride behind the Jacks. The boglins were too alien, and Harmodius found it difficult, almost painful, even to converse with Exrech. The irks, once they put on their war faces, became hideous creatures out of nightmare and with behaviours to match.

“You regret what we become,” Tapio said from behind him.

“I do. You give up so much beauty to be monsters,” Harmodius said.

“War hasss that effect on all the sssentient peoplesss,” Tapio said. “We merely wear it openly.”

“You do not,” Harmodius said.

“My gift. Perhaps my curse.” The Faery Knight was the very image of glory in bronze and red and bucksin and green.

In front, Fitzalan came trotting back from the direction of the enemy with a bear cub in his arms. He put the Golden Bear on the ground and suddenly the woods to their immediate front were full of bears—upright like men or on all fours, some with bags, or axes, or bits of armour. They were muddy, emaciated, and exhausted—but as they passed through the gap between the western boglins and Redmede’s Jacks, they let out a growl that might have been a cheer. An old bear galumphed to Redmede’s side and swatted him with a heavy paw—another, even older, with fur so grey he seemed to have come from snow, rose before Harmodius.

“By the Maker,” he said. “There
is
good even in men.”

Tapio made his stag rear. He waved to Bill Redmede, who nodded and raised his horn.

A dozen other men and women raised theirs, and, to the left, the Dulwar war chief raised his. To the right, Exrech was lost amid the sun-dappled leaves.

The Faery Knight raised his great green ivory oliphaunt horn and blew, and two hundred horns made their dreadful music.

The line sprang forward. But it did not move like a line of men. It moved with an organic fluidity that would have led to disintegration in an army of men, but an army of the Wild lived by a different code.

And so, too, when they sighted the enemy.

Horns blew. And then, suddenly, every creature seemed to leap at every other.

War in the Wild, Harmodius realized, was not about winning, but about being the most successful predator.

Redmede stood off the first rush—some doglike running thing that lost him three Jacks before Harmodius cleared the woods with fire and bought them the minutes they needed to find better ground, fleeing to the left until they put a muddy-ditched beaver meadow between them and their pursuers.

The northerners were overjoyed at their initial success and pushed forward. In the centre, where boglin legion slammed into boglin legion and the vicious tides of death ran together, the western boglins lost fifty yards in the first scrum and left a hundred corpses as food for their enemies. But though the northerners were bigger, heavier, and had eaten better, they also tired faster. Exrech was everywhere, and eldritch fire licked at his mandibles as he stemmed the first rout. He steadied his horde on the
south bank of a small stream and the height advantage was, for a moment, enough to stop the northerners in the water below and turn it black with their blood and ichor.

There was a hole between Redmede’s position and Exrech’s—and the foe began to flood it, pushing more and more creatures, boglins and sprites and Rukh and some shambling things Harmodius had never before seen, and they began to push forward even as Redmede’s longbows wreaked havoc across a carefully chosen beaver meadow on a larger force of shambling things and Rukh who tried—four times, with bloody persistence—to cross the sodden open ground until, led by a pair of red-crested wardens, they went
around
the meadow to the east—and into the Dulwar ambush.

There was suddenly no front and no rear.

Harmodius found himself alone facing a rush on the back of the Jacks, and he spared not, passing an ankle-high sheet of white lightning and following with five massive fire concoctions that exploded into incandescence and left only the smell of cooked meat.

The Dulwar, stung by something from their own left, crowded into a stand of ancient beech trees with the Jacks. The Dulwar war chief was old—his eyes were already haggard.

Redmede called, “Two bows behind every tree!” and the Jacks closed into a ring, covering the Dulwar and then sorting them into the circle.

Boglins struck them some time later, and they fought them off. A Dulwar warrior was carried out of the circle—and three Jacks rose, charged out, and stripped the monsters of their prey. Fitzalan had been first, and his act of reckless daring put heart into them all—the more as it had been done for an ally.

Redmede looked to Harmodius. “Never seen anything like yon,” he said. “But my sense is—if’n we sit here, we ain’t helpin’.”

Harmodius considered that bit of wisdom. “Too true,” he said. “Bill, push off to the right and find Exrech, if he’s still in the fight.”

“Where are you going?” Redmede asked.

“Hunting,” Harmodius said. “I understand this better now. I need to go hunt my own kind. That’s what predators do, in this war.”

Harmodius dismounted, sat cross-legged, and reached out into the
aethereal. It only took him a moment to find everything he wanted—there was Exrech, still spraying
ops
like a damaged cask sprays water, and there was the Faery Knight, cold and closed, waiting for something. And there—north and east, but not very far—two twin suns of green optimism and potential, burning hot.

They were his natural prey. There were other users of
potentia
and
ops
scattered for six miles through the woods in a riot of
aethereal
combat, but none of them were anywhere near his level of puissance except those two.

Harmodius
rose to his feet in the real, and began to walk north very
cautiously. He could hear the movement of large creatures ahead of him, and he climbed a tree with a little help from an enhancement, and then cursed
when in the
aethereal
, the ripples of his working rolled away towards his enemies.

They froze—slick, green figures, outlined only in their use of the forces beyond natura. He guessed them to be a pair of shamans—linked by some dark ceremony, perhaps, or merely by birth.

Two would be very powerful.

He waited, silent.

Finally they moved. He felt them—felt the heat of their green presence, felt them searching—for him, for the Faery Knight.

To the west, horns sounded, and Exrech’s desperate defence was rewarded when the Dulwar and the Jacks came out of the woods into the flank of the foe and began to kill them.

Nearly at his feet, the wardens froze—and then began to move. They were the centre of a broad line of their own kind, two deep, fully armoured—a battle-winning reserve right in the gap.

Except that Harmodius had learned that in the Wild there were no true lines, nor weak gaps, but merely the fight of the moment, the slash of the claw.

He found the link between them. As they passed him, he reached out in the
aethereal
—and severed it.

Two twin minds, together since birth, snapped back in agony and bereavement, and he entrapped one, casting a quick working that left the nearest trapped in a wall of its own dark imaginings while Harmodius turned on the other. Suggestion, binding, ward and thrust—he flung them all in carefully selected order, undermining his opponent with the false knowledge of his twin’s humiliating death, binding his legs in a simple and confusing physik that caused the larger caster to collapse, warding the counter attack—powerful, over-slow and grandiose.

Harmodius stepped out of his ward of shadow and plunged a spear of lightning into his prone opponent, so close he could have used a dagger, and his prey spasmed and triggered a cascade of stored workings—

Harmodius turned them on a mirror and let them strike his horrified twin, just a horse-length away, and then stripped aside his working and his suggestion so that each could recognize the other in terror—flinch in horror—

Harmodius finished the nearer with a needle-tight bolt of
ops
.

The first victim slammed a heavy working that must have come from an artifact—like a fall of rock, it struck Harmodius’s wards and blew through them.

He fell—and only the sheer and wasted rage of his adversary saved him.

It screamed, leapt forward to finish him—

Too slow. Harmodius triggered a fire ball the size of a man’s head. Most of it caught in the creature’s wards, but some went through, and then they
were pounding each other with
ops
—some raw, flung like children will fling water. It was the deadliest kind of hermetical combat—too close to parry effectively—

Harmodius was aware, too, that the woods around him were hostile. But something was happening in the real—and he could only cast, work, drink
ops
, make
potentia
and loose again, parry what he could on ever smaller shields and wards as his own workings drew too much—

And then his adversary ran out. One moment, he was a growing tower of puissance, his shields arcing into the trees, and the next he was a burning corpse. He stood for a moment, as if surprised.

Harmodius leapt forward and
subsumed
his essence like the predator he had become, drinking the alien creature’s soul and all his powers.

The charred corpse collapsed.

Harmodius came back into the real to find the wardens fleeing. In the direction from which he’d come, there were irkish knights on stags—but behind him there was a line of Outwallers, killing wardens and taking trophies. The wardens—daemons—were trapped.

The Outwallers began to shoot them down, calling out to them, mocking them.

Harmodius saw them flinch away and gather for a last charge, and then Mogon, her blue crest towering over their red ones, burst from the underbrush with twenty of her household at her back, and the forest floor shook.

The Outwallers fell back before the great duchess. She made an odd scent as she passed them, and Harmodius went forward with her, safe, or so he felt, at her tail. The red-crested daemons were in a cluster, perhaps as many as fifty—certainly the heart of the enemy force.

They were defiant, until Mogon addressed them. Harmodius had no idea what she said, but they flinched, and then let their weapons drop. One, a young female, said something in response.

Mogon nodded, and the young female came forward out of the knot of beaten wardens—one of her great taloned fists entwined with that of a young male, but at last he let her go. She went, her crest high, and raised her small, strong arms as she knelt to Mogon.

With one casual swipe of her razor-sharp bronze axe, Mogon swept her head off her body so that her inlaid beak bit into the leaf mould almost between Harmodius’s feet. Mogon subsumed her, ripping her essence from her body.

All the red crests flinched.

Mogon turned away. “That is done,” she said. Behind her, the red crests were picking up their weapons and slinking away into the bog.

Mogon made a sign. “Here is seed that has borne a fine fruit,” she said, and waved to the Outwallers who had trapped the wardens. “My Sossag.”

Nita Qwan stepped forward and bent his knee to the great duchess, whose axe still slowly dripped gore.

“I declare you and yours free of my holds forever, owing none but the duty of hearth and home and hospitality,” Mogon intoned. “This is a great deed you have done.”

Ta-se-ho spoke up boldly. “We’ll take our reward in food, Duchess. Ten days we’ve lain cold and followed this band over every lake and mountain.”

Mogon reached to her belt. “Here—eat mine own.” She flung him a deerskin pouch of marvellous work, porcupine quill and gold beads together. Then she turned, and one of her people flung her great cloak of feathers—heron, and bluejay, and eagle—over her shoulders and she motioned to Harmodius.

“Today, we have won a petty victory. Now we see what we see.”

And when they had joined the Faery Knight, his long lance of crystal all besmattered with gore, Harmodius asked, “Where is the enemy? Will we pursue?”

The Faery Knight frowned. “Mogon let a few of her own people live. The ressst,” he said, “are dinner.” Harmodius flinched, and the Faery Knight showed his fangs.

“Thisss isss the Wild,” he said. “The losssersss don’t walk away. They’re food.”