Cobweb Empire (21 page)

“Good.” Beltain paused his examination of
Jack to glance inside the cart. “My helmet, shield, gauntlets, and
the rest of my plate armor?”

“All accounted for!” Grial pointed to
several bundles. “And also a nicely hefty money-purse, with some
additional coin from her Imperial Highness, unbeknownst to His
Majesty who naturally granted it to her.”

He reached into the cart and lifted out a
long plain soldier’s battle shield of beaten iron over wood, with
no insignias. “It will do,” he said, after a brief examination. “My
own shield has been left behind at Chidair Keep, since I don’t
bother taking it on a patrol, only to battle. Unfortunately I will
have need of a shield tonight.”

“What is happening, Grial? How do we get out
of the city?” Percy asked nervously, feeling a surge of excitement
rising in her like a tidal wave. While she spoke, she watched Lord
Beltain Chidair remove his long cloak and fold it in a bundle,
attaching it to the back of the saddle. Next, she watched him pull
the rag stuffing from underneath some of his armor plates that he
had worn in the Palace for silence of movement, and toss the rags
in the cart. He tightened his armor pieces around his body, and put
on additional ones round his sides and legs, and tied several
pieces around Jack’s flanks.

“Well, pumpkin, the way you’ll be going is
rather simple actually. A few more pesky streets between here and
there have disappeared, clearing the road for you. So what you’re
left with is this—” And Grial named half a dozen street names,
making Percy repeat them twice, to make sure she remembered. “And
then, even if you forget Goldiere and Admiralty and Rowers Row, you
will still know to keep heading
thataway
—” Grial pointed in
the general direction of the southern walls.

“But how do we get out of the city? It is
fortified on the inside, and outside, the dead wait—”

“Hah!” Grial exclaimed. “It’s the same way
you escaped the Palace grounds. Even now, the insurmountable
Letheburg walls have acquired a number of very unfortunate breeches
and gaps that appeared when twilight came and stole away portions
of stone upper parapet on the battlements, and quite a few support
boulders of granite below at ground level. You can thank the
shadows for it! You can also bet that neither the dead on the
outside nor the living on the inside have noticed these anomalies
just yet, else the city would be crawling with the enemy by
now.”

“Oh, no!” Percy whispered. “Then Letheburg
might fall overnight!”

“Well, we’ll see about that!” Grial
announced cheerfully. “Now, put on this coat, which I’ve brought
for you, dumpling, else you’ll freeze off your behind—and then be
on your way south, both of you!”

“My coat!” Percy grabbed her familiar old
straw-lined wool coat and pulled it on, then replaced her shawl
over the whole affair, feeling much warmer immediately.

“And your mittens!” Grial handed her the
woolen pair.

“Oh, bless you, Grial!”

“And bless you, child! Remember, once you
move forward from this crossroads, you will only have your own
clever mind and heart to guide you. The roads all go on forever,
but you must make the effort to follow the right ones, especially
on
this
night!”

“Then,” Percy said, “we will walk with great
care!”

“No.” Beltain led Jack forward. Setting one
metal-booted foot up in the stirrup, he mounted the saddle of his
warhorse with one easy powerful motion. “We will not be walking. We
ride!”

And before Percy could say a word, the black
knight and his great warhorse were before her, and he reached down
with one gauntlet and took hold of her by the scruff of her coat,
like a kitten. With the other gauntlet he grabbed her round the
waist, and she was lifted up and deposited sideways before him in
the roomy saddle, with her back next to the fastened shield.

Percy made a small stifled sound, then
pushed with both hands against what turned out to be his metal
breastplate. She remembered the last time the world tilted in such
an exact same way, and how she had been lifted by him—

Apparently he harbored the same thought.

“This time,” he leaned forward to whisper in
her ear, his warm breath on her cheek, “no
skillet. . . .”

T
hey started out at
a measured walking pace, riding slowly down the street in order not
to draw attention to their movement.

Percy, sitting sideways in the saddle before
the knight, pressed against his cold iron breastplate, watched
Grial waving farewell to them, until the shadows and the curve of
the street took them beyond sight.

Underneath them, Jack’s monstrous great body
was a moving mountain, and she could feel the swaying power of his
muscles with each measured step, and the soft jangle of metal plate
on the flanks.

The moon appeared and slid away again into
the clouds. Percy watched the streets and alleys recede on both
sides, and tried with all her being not to think, not to sense the
iron-clad body of the man pressing against
her. . . .

The black knight’s upper arms, clad in armor
rerebraces, then vambraces on the lower parts, ending in great
gauntlets, surrounded her, because in order to manage the reins he
had to keep her in a kind of metal embrace which did not constrict
but created a strange illusion of being pressed in on all sides.
Beltain wore his helmet but his visor was up, and when she briefly
looked at his face, she could see the angled shadows of his
cheekbones and stubble-covered jaw and the liquid sparkle of the
moon’s glow reflect coldly in his eyes.

They were so black, his
eyes . . . so strangely black in the night, with not
a trace of the blue that was their real color.

“Watch the streets,” he said suddenly,
speaking so close to her ear that Percy could hear the baritone of
his voice reverberate in her bones.

“I am,” she retorted, looking pointedly away
from his face. “There is Cane Street, there, right past that alley,
see the shingle sign, we turn to the right—”

In answer, he snapped the reins and Jack
responded with a sharp lunge forward.

And in the next breath, they were
flying. . . .

Percy stifled a small sound, as the world
tilted suddenly, fell away from her in a burst of vertigo. Then the
shadows sped on both sides, while underneath, the horse that was a
mountain sank and rose like a tall ship on monster swells of a
black ocean with each great leap and
bound. . . .

She had no idea that the heavy charger could
move so fast!

Letheburg, with its streets and snow-clad
rooftops, was a blur of buildings and alleys, occasional bright
golden dots of lampposts, corners and crossroads.

Somewhere out there, getting closer with
each galloping stride they made, was the overwhelming
pull
of the thousands of the dead. . . .

Percy held on with her mittened fingers gone
numb, one hand on the saddlehorn, the other, she realized, was
clutching the knight’s iron vambrace on his lower arm. “We’re going
too fast,” she whispered through gritted teeth, the side of her
shawl-wrapped face pressed hard against the metal of his chest,
while the preternatural
sense
of the infinite dead pushed
upon her mind. “I can’t see the streets! Was that Rowers Row?”

“It doesn’t matter, we’re nearly
there. . . .” His voice in her ear mingled with the
ice wind. “Look! The walls are just
ahead. . . .”

In the dark of the moon, they had come out
to the final section of buildings that ended before a wide strip of
pomoerium, the clearing turned into a roadway that lay parallel to
the great outer walls and circled the city like an inner moat.
Here, there were no gates, and the walls themselves rose massive
and fifty-foot tall all the way to the battlements. A few soldiers
with pikes and muskets patrolled the battlements overhead. More
pikemen paced on the roadway below, while a slow overloaded cart
with lanterns attached in the front on both sides of the driver to
illuminate the way was moving along the rutted snowy ground,
carrying munitions to the walls closest the gates.

They burst into the roadway and Beltain made
Jack take a left turn, and ride swiftly past the company of pikemen
alongside the walls. The soldiers gave them casual glances, but did
not hail yet another knight on horseback.

“What now?” Percy asked, turning her face
away from the sudden wind that blew freely in the open here, and
still clutching his arm.

“We look for gaps in the
wall. . . .”

And they did not have to search for long. A
few hundred feet later they came into a ghostly place, where the
shadows from turrets and parapets above created a zone of darkness
below. It was hard to tell what lay before them, but in the next
breath, the moon shone silver through the overcast, and they could
see it, a place of pure vacant darkness where there should be
massive stone, a spectral gap of
nothing
.

“There!” Beltain uttered, his breath coming
in a burst of warmth against her right cheek. He pulled up Jack
just before the opening, and the warhorse almost reared with an
angry snarl, but paused obediently. “Now, I will need the use of my
arm, so put this hand on my waist instead, hold on by the faulds,
yes, the iron rings here next to the belt.” And with those words he
gently disengaged her hand in its mitten from his vambrace-clad arm
and she instead took hold of the ringed armor pieces at the side of
his belt.

As she did thus, Beltain gathered the reins
in one hand and reached to the side with his free right hand and
drew forth his long sword. It glinted once in the moon pallor of
the night.

Percy felt her breath catching in her
throat. And now, oh how the
pull
was building in her mind,
calling her. . . .

“Are you ready?”

Percy nodded wordlessly.

“Hold on tight!”

Some instinct made her draw even closer
against him—press against his metal breastplate until it pushed
painfully against her cheeks, shoulder, and ribs—and close her
eyes.

Because she could really feel
them
now. Just out of reach. Just beyond the wall, on all sides, an
infinite sea of the dead, stretching out for leagues in all
directions.

“Oh, God in Heaven . . .”
Percy barely mouthed the words on her breath, as they plunged
forward into the dark place of nothing, and she squeezed her
eyelids shut in sudden overwhelming terror.

T
hey were out
through the ghostly breach in the walls of Letheburg and emerged
outside the city.

The moon cast its pallor upon a wide
snow-covered plain with remote settlements and sparsely forested
hillocks in the distance. However, in the closest vicinity there
was nothing but thick churning darkness of human shapes—some
upright, others hunched over, many of them swaying like ebony
stalks of wheat to maintain a strange mechanical balance and remain
standing. They were unnaturally quiet; not a human word, not a
breath, only the constant creaking of stiff limbs, the clanging of
metal and striking of wooden parts like grotesque wind chimes.

And their death shadows—oh, they were a
quavering boundless sea, filling the plain to the
horizon. . . .

The moment Percy and Beltain emerged through
the opening, she felt them blast at her mind with their
need.
And in the same instant, they felt
her
.

Percy whimpered, unable to hold back the
sound, stunned by the sheer force of the onslaught of so much
negative power, an
anti-force
that sucked at her, pulled,
clawed at her.

“Don’t be afraid, girl . . .”
the black knight’s baritone sounded in her ear, close and hard and
ringing, and it momentarily distracted her enough to clear her
mind.

“Not afraid . . .” she said,
opening her eyes. “It’s just too many—too much!”

But she was lying. The panic and terror
redoubled, coming at her from all directions, because the dead had
seen her and they all turned to her, like one.

A wail arose, low and humming on the
wind.

Beltain raised his sword arm before him at
chest level, blade pointed to the side, ready to sweep. With his
other hand he unfastened the long shield, and placed his gauntlet
through the grip, holding it in a protective position at Percy’s
back.

The dead were
coming. . . .

The closest ones to them were only a few
feet away—close enough to reveal their broken shapes and frozen
eyes, sunken and fixed in their sockets. Faces stilled in a rictus
grin of death, gaping wounds, flesh revealing pale bone, gleaming
ivory in the moonlight. They all started moving, a wave of swaying
limbs, holding upright halberds and pikes, brandishing wicked
spiked morning stars and studded maces, their own bodies bristling
with lengths of metal permanently lodged in torsos. Everywhere one
looked there was something stained with black dried blood—blood,
frozen and frosted over at the ragged edges of wounds with a
perverse beauty of crystalline symmetry made iridescent by the
moon. . . . Meanwhile, on the metaphysical plane,
their death shadows rose in smoke-stacks, writhing, spiraling in a
morass of darkness throughout the plain. . . .

“Go!” Percy exclaimed in mindless panic.

And the black knight spurred his charger,
bursting forward.

Thus again they flew.

It was different, this time. Beltain had to
cut a path before them, and he swung his great sword widely,
putting his immense force into each sweep, and letting forth a
battle roar, while using the shield to punch and block.

In that instant that his berserker voice
sounded, many feet behind them now, on top of the city battlements,
someone must have heard him. Percy saw, in a hasty backward glance,
that torches started to flicker on top of the walls, and there was
the sound of soldiers on alert running, and barked command yells.
What did they think was happening outside Letheburg walls, just
below? No doubt they assumed the enemy was on the
move. . . . Or have they discovered the gap in the
wall?