When the Saints (13 page)

“His own, I’d ween. You’re sure you saw him with Wends at Long Valley last night?”

Wulf helped himself to more of the fish soup. “Absolutely certain.”

Justina shrugged and nibbled a dainty piece of cheese as if she were just eating to keep him company. “That I don’t understand. He’s definitely in the know. You said he had three Speakers, all related to him?”

“Vilhelmas was a distant cousin, the moronic Leonas is his son, and he presented Alojz as a nephew. His family seems to breed even more of them than mine does.”

“They breed more workadays, too. You think he had one of them murder the old count and his son?”

“Yes. I thought it was Vilhelmas, but it could have been Leonas.”

“Doesn’t matter now. Then he tried to take over the defense against the Wends, so he could claim the earldom as Castle Gallant’s savior? I can eat that. But it doesn’t explain what he was doing consorting with the Wends.”

“If they really were Wends,” Wulf said glumly. “I don’t know a Wend from a wood dove. Perhaps the whole war is a Havel invention, and he has men at both gates? Duke Wartislaw may not even know what’s being done in his name.”

“Huh?” Justina was surprised. “By Our Lady, you’re as sly as a fox, Squire Magnus! But how many men attacked the north gate this morning?”

“I was too busy to make an exact count. More than a thousand. And I think I saw that many camped down at High Meadows. Enough tents, anyway.”

“You think the bombard may be real enough, but still be back in Pomerania? I suppose it’s possible.” She sighed. Her age seemed to vary all the time, from motherly to ancient and back again. “But if Vranov’s really feinting at both gates, I don’t know how he can possibly hope to keep his treachery secret for very long. Faith, if there’s no real Wends peering over the hills at you, then I’m sure you can handle Havel Vranov and his family Speakers. When he got rid of the old count, he did not expect to run into you and your pack of brothers.”

Wulf ate in silence for a moment, relishing a sense of achievement and the old woman’s praise. He had certainly done his part. Withou k paem" alignt him Anton might have been tweaked into inviting the Pelrelmians in, or the Wends might have taken the north barbican and thrown open the gates. Terrified refugees fleeing south would have run into Havel Vranov and been slaughtered. Wulfgang Magnus had done well.

And if the “Wend” attack was a fake staged by the Hound of the Hills, then the war was over. Duke Wartislaw might absorb this morning’s losses, but a mere count certainly could not. His troops would melt away after such a mauling.

So now what? “Build on success,” Father had always said. Otto said so too.

“We’d better assume the Dragon exists until we are sure it doesn’t,” Wulf decided. “When I’ve finished this excellent meal, it might be time for me to go and look for it.”

He had not seen her truly startled before. “Gramercy! Now? In daylight?”

“Better in daylight while everyone’s busy than at night when it’s quiet and they have guards posted and I can walk into trees.”

She chuckled uneasily. “Sooth, you’re the soldier, young squire, not me. You’ll just look, though? Don’t meddle. They’ll have Speakers, and a halo shows up as bright by day as in the gloam.”

Somehow the thought of what he was planning had dispatched the rest of his appetite. Abandoning the idea of a third helping, he moved the bowl away from him. Without touching it.

“I can lift that,” he said. “Could I lift the bombard? Roll it over the cliff?”

“No. You’d outblaze the sun, and very likely damage yourself, but nothing else would happen. And you shouldn’t be talking about it, if you think that Alojz Zauber is in league with the Wends.”

Hellfire!
“I forgot that. Well, I’ll need to wear something…” He shivered as he realized where he would have to look for suitable clothes. “I’ll come back here to change, if that’s all right?”

This time he wasn’t going to ask Anton’s permission.
Anton was in the solar with Vlad and Otto. Radim, the secretary, and old seneschal Jurbarkas had been allowed to sit in the other two chairs. Dali Notivova was standing by the window. They were all listening to Vlad, who was spouting a seemingly endless list of things that had to be done, with occasional prompts from Otto. Radim was frantically writing notes.
So the military end of things was being attended to.

“I’ll help you.” Sybilla slunk in seductively from nowhere.

“What do you want?” Wulf demanded.

“Well, I’ll help you change if you want k if>

“Can you ride?”

She tossed her head. “Of course. I’m a Speaker. You think a dumb brute could throw me off?”

“She rides,” Justina said, frowning.

“Then come and be welcome,” Wulf said. He didn’t care what happened to the little flibbertigibbet. Only Madlenka mattered.

She was leaning over a blood-soaked table, steadying a wounded man, her hands caked in dried blood. The patient was little more than a boy, but he had taken a longbow arrow in the upper part of his chest. Descending steeply, it had probably lodged against his shoulder blade, for otherwise it would either have gone right through him or she would have tried to push it through. The burly young surgeon had cut off the excess arrow and was inserting a set of tongs, like two pointed spoons on a pivot, hoping to grip the arrowhead and crush the barbs so he could pull it out. The patient, thanks be to God, was unconscious. If his lung had been damaged or was about to be, he would probably never wake up.

Wulf could go there and heal him with a touch. But the first commandment would not allow that, nor let him heal any of the many other injured likely to die within the week. There must be quite enough whispers already about the mysterious squire who had cured Anton, who came and went so inexplicably.

He had never imagined Madlenka calmly assisting in such butchery. Her courage must be as solid as the castle walls. Although he loved her to distraction, he really did not know her very well. In fact, he did not know women very well.

Sybilla was still smirking.

He told her, “I’ll come back here. If you want to come to Long Valley with me, you’d better make yourself less conspicuous.”

And then he opened a gate into limbo.

CHAPTER
10

He went back to the little bartizan, trusting that it would be unoccupied, and that from there he would have a clear view of the northern approach. The first thing he saw was Madlenka’s footprints. The thin snow on the floor had been trampled and had mostly melted, but only her prints showed on the steps outside. He gazed at them sadly. Anton’s wife!

But there was a war to fight. Who knew what prize the winner might claim?

He had come to the bartizan to view the Silver Road north of the castle. At the far end, where it turned the corner into the gorge, the Wends had put up blindings to hide what they were doing, but it wasn’t hard to guess that they were excavating a gun emplacement for the bombard, a nest for the Dragon.

A party of eight or ten horsemen was heading down to the castle, with a herald in front—obviously a flag of truce seeking leave to recover their dead, plus their wounded, if any had not been killed by the victorious defenders. Wulf could see scores of bodies all over the road, and even then his view of the area directly in front of the gate was blocked by the corner of the barbican. That was where the building stones had been dropped, so corpses would be lying in heaps there. The attackers had been sent in across a well-designed killing ground, and even the undermanned garrison had managed to put it to good use.

The truce would be granted, of course, because otherwise the Cardicians would have to dispose of the carrion themselves. The Wends’ main task would be to identify the nobly born among their fallen, which would not be easy after the Castle Gallant scavengers had stripped the corpses. The missing nobles would be tallied by now, and close aides sent along to identify them. A few more bodies might be selected on the basis of calluses on the inside of the knee from riding, better nourishment, old wounds, and so on. Those might be taken back to the Pomeranian camp in the hope that some friend or relative would recognize and name them. The commoners would be tossed over the edge while a priest chanted a prayer and sprinkled holy water. Ravens or the Ruzena River could do the rest. Naked we enter the world, and equal we shall stand before the Throne at the last day.

It was the charnel ground at the bottom of the cliff that interested Wulf. The rocky shelf on which Gallant stood jutted out from the side of the Hogback at a sharp angle, and the corner was cut off by the bend of the Ruzena. In places the softer rock below the shelf had even been undercut, but that corner sheltered a triangle of dead ground, like an armpit, a rocky slope sheltered from the wind and inaccessible to firewood hunters, so that vegetation had survived.

The ladders had snapped when they fell, with the top parts taking their burdens over the cliff. The ghouls would not have had time, and probably not much inclination, to scavenge down there. Wulf chose a large, fairly flat boulder close to the water and opened a gate to it.

No one would see him appear out of nowhere, because branches shielded him from the castle above. Behind him the river swirled, fast and dark and deadly, speckled with flecks of rabid foam. Much of the rock must have fallen as waste when the road was carved out and the town site leveled, for it was a jagged nightmare, nothing like a river’s tidy shingle. From where he stood, he saw no bodies; hunting through that nightmare of shattered rock and thorns and spindly conifers was going to be a slow and dangerous process. Then he spotted a weathered skull grinning at him from among the rocks and realized that today’s Wends would not be the first dead to be abandoned here. It was an evil place, a backdoor to hell.

He used talent to move to another perch, and then another, heading up the slope. He found his first fresh body, a gruesome heap of steel and cloth and dried blood, with birds and insects already at work on it. Perhaps he had miscalculated, and all the corpses would be so mangled by their fall that none of them would serve his purpose.

For what felt like a dangerously long time he hunted without success. Bodies were hard to find among the jagged boulders, ev s boify">

He heard a shout and caught a glimpse of a man descending the cliff, walking backward on the end of a rope. Because the distraction had made him look upward, Wulf also saw a red cloak caught in a tree. He found the owner at its roots, eyes staring glassily as flies walked on them. An absence of blood suggested that the tree had broken his fall enough to save him from being pulped inside his armor, but not enough to save his life. His helmet lay beside him, and it was a nobleman’s casque, vizorless and bearing a crest of two stags. The same emblem showed on his surcoat. He was of higher rank than Wulf had hoped for, but he would have to do. He even had blond hair, although not as pale as Wulf’s, and had been little older. At a distance, the imposture might pass.

The Pomeranian surcoat was what he really wanted, but the armor looked as if it would fit him well enough, so he might as well take it also. Murmuring a prayer for the dead man’s soul, Wulf retrieved the cloak from the tree and spread it out. He laid the helmet on it. Then he stripped vambraces and rerebraces from the man’s arms—he wore no gauntlets, perhaps because they would make ladder climbing too tricky. More shouts indicated that more Wends were coming down the cliff. He unbuckled the dead man’s cuirass and added it to the loot. He would need a sword, but there was none in sight, and it might take hours to find one here. Whispering another prayer for the man he had slain and now plundered, he gathered up the bundle and took it back to the little vineyard at Avlona.

*   *   *

His brothers had finished dinner and were still at table, reminiscing over childhood memories. Madlenka was still in the infirmary. Havel was urging on a team of men and oxen hauling guns up the hill from High Meadows.
So the Hound was going to make a serious assault on Castle Gallant? Damn.… No, Wulf decided not to damn him, because he didn’t know what his curses might do now, even at a distance.

He spread out the cloak on the stone table and surveyed his loot. Yes, to be convincing he must get another sword to replace the one he had left on the barbican roof. Not surprisingly, Sybilla appeared. She would have been watching him all this time.

“Robbing the dead?”

“Disguise,” he said. “You’re going to be conspicuous.”

She had changed into a long riding skirt and a scarlet cloak with a matching hat that sported a tall plume. She looked more respectable, but was respectability needed? Every seedet army included a lesser army of loose women, and he had been expecting her to dress more like one of those. But nobles and captains brought along their highborn wives; he should have guessed that Sybilla’s ideas would run more to gentry.

“And you won’t be? In that helmet? You’re a lord, I’m your lady. You
want
me to be conspicuous. You want other men to lust after me. Don’t you?”

There was a double meaning in that question, which he ignored, but he did risk a smile of surrender. Sybilla was no delicate damsel in need of coddling. She could look after herself better than he could.

“Well, in the absence of my squire, you can assist me in donning my mail, my lady.” He tried on the helmet with the twin-stag crest. Even with the padding still inside it, it was tight on his ears, but it would suffice. He put it down and inspected the cuirass. The back plate had suffered some dents where it had hit some tree branches, but was still wearable. He hoisted the breastplate into place. It was a snug fit.